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The Top 14 MoJo Longreads of 2014

by GenevieHirsch Posted on December 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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While conventional wisdom suggests that people won’t read lengthy magazine stories online, MoJo readers have regularly proven otherwise. Many of our top traffic-generating stories are heavily researched investigations and deeply reported narratives—stories which our readers stick to till the bitter end. So here, for your holiday enjoyment, is a selection of 14 of our best-loved longreads from 2014. (Click here for last year’s list, here for our 2012 list, and finally here for our 2011 list).

The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men
And how to reform our bigoted brains.
By Chris Mooney

The Making of the Warrior Cop: Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry that Turned Local Cops into SEAL Team Six
Do police really need grenade launchers?
By Shane Bauer

The Great Frack Forward: A Journey to the Heart of China’s Gas Boom

US Companies are salivating over the biggest shale gas resources in the world. What could go wrong?
By Jaeah Lee and James West

The NRA’s Murder Mystery
Was the NRA’s top lawyer railroaded—or a “bad guy with a gun”?
By Dave Gilson

Inside the Wild, Shadowy, and Highly Lucrative Bail Industry
How $550 and a five-day class gets you the right to stalk, arrest, and shoot people.
By Shane Bauer

We Can Code it: Why Computer Literacy is Key to Winning the 21st Century
Why American schools need to train a generation of hackers.
By Tasneem Raja

70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?
Officials have been stunned by a “surge” of unaccompanied children crossing into the US.
By Ian Gordon

Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America’s Most Powerful Family
Before the brothers went to war against Obama, they almost destroyed each other.
By Daniel Schulman

Is New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez the Next Sarah Palin?
Petty. Vindictive. Weak on policy. And yet she is being hailed as the Republican Party’s great new hope.
By Andy Kroll

Who’s Behind Newsweek?
The magazine’s owners are anxious to hide their ties to an enigmatic religious figure. Why?
By Ben Dooley

Kidnapped By Iran: 780 Days of Isolation, Two Dozen Interrogations, One Marriage Proposal
How we survived two years of hell as hostages in Tehran.
By Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal, and Sarah Shourd

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics
And the Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury it.
By Mariah Blake

Inside the Mammoth Backlash to Common Core
How a bipartisan education reform effort became the biggest conservative bogeyman since Obamacare.
By Tim Murphy

This American Refused to Become an FBI Informant. Then the Government Made His Family’s Life Hell.
Plus, secret recordings reveal FBI threats.
By Nick Baumann

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The Top 14 MoJo Longreads of 2014

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When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

by Lazaro7386 Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

The United States might not have much leverage over North Korea, but China does. Virtually all of North Korea’s external trade is with China, and Chinese support is pretty much all that keeps North Korea from collapsing. This means that when the United States wants to pressure Pyongyang, it has limited options as long as Chinese support of the regime remains strong. But how long will that support last? Over the weekend, Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that it might finally be faltering:

When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.

….The parlous state of the relationship between North Korea and China was on display again Wednesday when Pyongyang commemorated the third anniversary of the death of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, and failed to invite a senior Chinese official.

The last time a Chinese leader visited North Korea was in July 2013 when Vice President Li Yuanchao tried to patch up relations, and pressed North Korea, after its third nuclear test in February 2013, to slow down its nuclear weapons program. Mr. Li failed in that quest….After the vice president’s visit, relations plummeted further, entering the icebox last December when China’s main conduit within the North Korean government, Jang Song-thaek, a senior official and the uncle of Kim Jong-un, was executed in a purge. In July, President Xi Jinping snubbed North Korea, visiting South Korea instead. Mr. Xi has yet to visit North Korea, and is said to have been infuriated by a third nuclear test by North Korea in February 2013, soon after Kim Jong-un came to power.

So does this mean that China might help us out in our current dispute with North Korea over the Sony hack? Probably not—or not much, anyway. North Korea’s very weakness is also its greatest strength: if it collapses, two things would probably happen. First, there would be a flood of refugees trying to cross the border into China. Second, the Korean peninsula would likely become unified and China would find itself with a US ally right smack on its border. Given the current state of Sino-American relations, that’s simply not something China is willing to risk.

Not yet, anyway. But who knows? There are worse things in the world than a refugee crisis, and relations with the US have the potential to warm up in the future. One of these days North Korea may simply become too large a liability for China to protect. If that ever happens, North Korea’s lifespan can probably be measured in years or months.

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When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

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Sean Penn on Sony Pulling "The Interview": This Sends ISIS an "Invitation"

by RolandoRoland Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Actor and activist Sean Penn, no surprise, has some thoughts about the Sony hacking and the movie studio’s decision to pull The Interview after cyber-saboteurs linked (by the FBI) to North Korea threatened moviegoers and theaters. Here’s a statement Penn sent me:

It’s not the first time culture has been threatened by foreign interests and corporate caution. See then Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, when Disney was dealing with pressure from China about Martin Scorcese’s Tibet film, Kundun. Eisner said, “we do not take, as a company, a position either in human rights or not in human rights. We are a movie company. We’re an entertainment company.” That was a pretty shocking statement. (Disney, which was looking to expand its ventures in China, did end up distributing the film, but distribution was limited and the advertising budget was low—and despite these concessions, Disney was largely frozen out of the Chinese markets for years.) This week, the distributors who wouldn’t show The Interview and Sony have sent ISIS a commanding invitation. I believe ISIS will accept the invitation. Pandora’s box is officially open.

The damage we do to ourselves typically outweighs the harm caused by outside threats or actions. Then by caving to the outside threat, we make our nightmares real. The decision to pull The Interview is historic. It’s a case of putting short term interests ahead of the long term. If we don’t get the world on board to see that this is a game changer, if this hacking doesn’t frighten the Chinese and the Russians, we’re in for a very different world, a very different country, community, and a very different culture.

I’m not sure the world has come to terms with all the implications of the hacking. I was in Liberia and Sierra Leone right at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak in April. It did seem to those of us there that the response was neither coming swiftly or with a true sense of urgency. This feels the same. This matter should be before the UN Security Council today.

Taken from – 

Sean Penn on Sony Pulling "The Interview": This Sends ISIS an "Invitation"

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The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

by ChristiCass Posted on December 9, 2014

3 Degrees of Devastation

The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

By on 9 Dec 2014commentsShare

Depending on your frame of mind, this might be good news or bad news. Ready?

A new projection unveiled at the Lima climate talks finds that the world is on track to warm by 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

“But wait,” you, well-versed as you are in international climate policy, might say. “Didn’t international governments agree back in 2009 to not allow the world to warm by more than 2 degrees Celsius, thereby averting some of the worst effects of climate change? How is this good news?”

Here’s how: This study has come out every year since 2009, but this year’s projection of 3 degrees is the lowest it has ever come up with.

So, in short: We’re on track for more warming than we want, but less warming than we feared: Research had been indicating that we could be looking at something more in the range of 4 degrees, and possibly even as much as 5.4 degrees. That would be terrifying indeed.

The official goal in the U.N. climate talks is still to keep warming below 2 degrees, but even U.N. climate change chief Christiana Figueres has said that this current round of negotiations in Lima and the one next year in Paris would be unlikely to meet that goal. “We already know, because we have a pretty good sense of what countries will be able to do in the short run, that the sum total of efforts [in Paris] will not be able to put us on the path for two degrees,” she told Reuters.

But fixating on the 2-degree target during these negotiations misses the point, some argue. “What is key for success at COP-20 in Lima is not the achievement of some specific temperature (or GHG concentration) target, but rather building a sound foundation for meaningful long-term action,” Robert Stavins, director of Harvard’s environmental economics program, told Grist.

And this new projection from the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) project is encouraging because it indicates that countries may have started to lay that foundation. According to a policy brief put out by the project, the main reason that CAT is projecting less warming this year than it was last year is because China, the U.S., and the European Union have new, post-2020 emission-reduction plans.

(Click to embiggen)

Climate Action Tracker

The big caveat: According to the policy brief, “There is still a substantial gap between what governments have promised to do and the total level of actions they have undertaken to date.” If promises are kept, we might top out at 3 degrees of warming. If they’re not, we’re headed for 4. Furthermore, the CAT folks remind us, 3 degrees of warming by 2100 isn’t what we want — it would actually be pretty awful.

Ultimately, as Stavins points out, “such a projection, more than 80 years out, has value only as a benchmark, not as a forecast.”

So don’t pop the champagne yet: This climate-stabilizing work isn’t close to being done. But the CAT study shows that progress is gradually being made. And that’s a tiny bit of good news for a community of climate-watchers who could use some.

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The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

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Yak Dung Is Making Climate Change Worse

by TorstenBobbitt Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It gets pretty cold this time of year in Tibet. For centuries, the solution to this problem was a win-win: just burn that huge pile of yak dung that’s been accumulating all summer.

For millions of nomadic Tibetans, it’s a system that works. But that system comes at a hefty cost. Tibetan homes have some of the worst indoor air pollution in the world, and the soot the dung fires release is a big contributor to climate change.

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Yak Dung Is Making Climate Change Worse

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No, the Garner Case Doesn’t Show That Body Cameras Are Useless

by HeleneScorfield Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Very quick note: ever since last night, a lot of people have been making the point that Eric Garner’s killing produced no grand jury indictment even though the whole incident was captured on video. So maybe the whole idea of body cameras on police officers is pointless.

This is ridiculous. There are pros and cons to body cameras, but only in the rarest cases will they capture a cop killing someone. Even if, arguendo, they make no difference in these cases, they can very much make a difference in the other 99.9 percent of the cases where they’re used. The grand jury’s decision in the Garner case means a lot of things, but one thing it doesn’t mean is that body cameras are useless.

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No, the Garner Case Doesn’t Show That Body Cameras Are Useless

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Can We Please Kill Off the Kabuki in the Press Room?

by QuinnHeavener Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Things are a bit slow this morning, so I want to replay for you a Twitter conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper. The subject is Jonathan Karl of ABC News, who harassed press secretary Josh Earnest earlier this week over President Obama’s picks as ambassadors to Argentina and Hungary. Neither one has any special diplomatic experience, and one of them is a former producer for a soap opera:

Jake Tapper: meant to give props to @jonkarl for his Bold and Beautiful ambassador questions to @PressSec the other day

Kevin Drum: Why? Is anything really gained by this daily kabuki in the press room?

JT: why what? why is it worth challenging people in power about questionable decisions?

KD: It’s kabuki. Everyone knows the answer. It’s happened forever. Earnest wasn’t going to answer. Why waste the time?

JT: i guess i dont think trying to hold those in power accountable is a “waste of time.” have a great day

Tapper’s point is pretty easy to understand, and my colleague Nick Baumann agrees with him. There’s a long tradition of rewarding big campaign contributors with cushy ambassadorial posts in spite their fairly visible lack of qualification. There’s not much excuse for this, so why not demand to know why Obama is doing it?

But here’s my point. This is yet another example of a bad habit that the White House press corps engages in constantly: faux confrontation over trivia that gets them camera time and kudos from late-night comedians, but is, in reality, completely pointless. Jonathan Karl knows perfectly well why these two folks were appointed. They raised lots of money for Obama. Josh Earnest knows it too. This stuff has been going on forever. But Karl knows something else: Earnest is a spokesman. He’s flatly not allowed to fess up to political stuff like this, and he’s just going to dance around it.

This is why I called it kabuki. If this were actually an important topic where there was some uncertainty about the answer, then confrontation would be great. I’d like to see more of it for truly important stuff. But is Karl’s investigative reputation really enhanced by an inane kindergarten round of “let’s pretend” with whatever poor schmoe happens to be at the press room podium? Is this truly an example of “holding those in power accountable”?

I really don’t see it. Then again, maybe Karl is working on a whole segment about the ridiculous practice of rewarding supporters with cushy diplomatic posts in fashionable countries. Or maybe even a segment asking why countries even bother having ambassadors in high-profile capitals where they serve precious little purpose anymore. If that’s the case, then maybe the questions made sense.

But purely as confrontation? Please. Dignifying this silliness as “challenging people in power” is like calling a mud fort an infrastructure project. It really doesn’t deserve any props.

UPDATE: Hmmm. Apparently Tapper and some others interpreted my initial tweet as referring to the entire concept of the press briefing. So to some extent, this is a misunderstanding. Obviously I don’t object to the general practice of holding briefings (though I wish reporters would boycott all the “background” briefings). I just object to the habit of peppering White House flacks with questions about trivial topics that everyone knows the answer to. It seems more designed to get YouTube kudos than to truly challenge anyone in power.

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Can We Please Kill Off the Kabuki in the Press Room?

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Quote of the Day: What Mysterious Force is Preventing Passage of a Roads Bill?

by PollyGandy Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, at a meeting of the Business Roundtable with President Obama:

Why not, before the Congress goes home for December, just pass a bill that takes the two bipartisan bills that I just mentioned, up, and solves the problem?

Smith is referring to a couple of bills that would restore the gasoline tax to its old level and increase funding for transportation projects. He raises a good question. I suppose there could be several reasons it’s hard to pass either of these bills:

Democrats are in thrall to labor unions, who are opposed to funding more infrastructure projects.
All our roads and bridges are in pretty good shape and we don’t really need more money for them.
As a socialist, President Obama opposes these bills because they would increase the profits of billionaire construction company CEOs.
Vladimir Putin has threatened to invade Nova Scotia if we pass these bills.
Santa Claus is coming to town and we’re all hoping we’ve been good enough to get the bridge repairs we asked him for.

Or, of course, it could be because Republicans are less afraid of letting our roads crumble into dust than they are of Grover Norquist saying mean things about them if they were to maintain the gasoline tax at historical levels. Because, you know, taxes.

Nah. That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the Putin thing.

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Quote of the Day: What Mysterious Force is Preventing Passage of a Roads Bill?

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Sure, Why Shouldn’t Obama Normalize Relations With Cuba?

by AXIJacinto Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jay Nordlinger is worried:

Many years ago, I wrote a piece called “Who Cares about Cuba?” When I raised this issue with Jeane Kirkpatrick, she said that indifference to Cuba is “both a puzzling and a profoundly painful phenomenon of our times.”

Worse than indifference, of course, is support for the regime, or excuses for it.

President Obama has been flexing his executive muscles, as in his unilateral amnesty. “I just took an action to change the law,” he boasted. Some think that his next action will be the normalization of relations with the Castros’ dictatorship. Our Left is egging him on. He can do a lot of damage in his remaining two years, in multifarious ways. And, like Clinton, I believe, he will keep the pedal to the metal until noon on Inauguration Day.

This hadn’t even occurred to me, and I guess that “some think” isn’t exactly a compelling turn of phrase, is it? Still, I’d turn Nordlinger’s question around: Why shouldn’t we normalize relations with Cuba? It’s unquestionably an authoritarian state with plenty of unsavory practices, but that hardly makes it unique. Should we also cut off relations with Russia? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Zimbabwe? They’re all terrible countries in their own way—I’m pretty sure I’d rate them all worse than Cuba—and it’s unclear to me why Cuba alone among them should have diplomatic pariah status.

I’m being faux naive here, of course. I understand perfectly well why Cuba is unique. But it’s been more than half a century since we broke off relations, and let’s at least be honest about what happened: a bunch of big American companies got pissed off when a brutal leftist dictator displaced the brutal right-wing dictator they favored. President Eisenhower made an uncharacteristic mistake in response, and the rest is history. Not an especially attractive chapter of history, but history nonetheless.

But maybe it’s time to bring it to a close. Either normalize relations with Cuba or else cut off relations with every other country that’s equally bad. I’d opt for the former. Aside from the fact that it would anger a large voting bloc in an important swing state, I’ve never really heard a great argument for continuing our Cuba obsession.

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Sure, Why Shouldn’t Obama Normalize Relations With Cuba?

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

by GeorgiannaChewi Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Politically, the primary challenge facing Iraq’s new Shiite leaders is forging a government that includes significant participation from the Sunni minority and slowly regains their trust in a unified state. It’s been Job 1 from the start. That said, building a political accommodation with the northern Kurds is a close second, and today brought some good news on that front:

In a far-reaching deal with the potential to unite Iraq in the face of a Sunni insurgency, the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi agreed on Tuesday to a long-term pact with the autonomous Kurdish region over how to divide the country’s oil wealth and cooperate on fighting Islamic State extremists.

The deal unites Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital in the north, over the issue of oil revenues and budget payments, and is likely to halt a drive — at least in the short term — by the Kurds for an independent state. It includes payments from the central government for the salaries of Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, and also will allow the flow of weapons to the Kurds from the United States, with the government in Baghdad as intermediary.

….The reconciliation between Baghdad and the Kurdish region also appeared to validate one element of President Obama’s strategy in confronting the Islamic State: pushing for a new, more inclusive leader of Iraq. When the extremists swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, Mr. Obama decided that Mr. Maliki had to go before the United States would ramp up its military efforts against the Islamic State.

A deal with the Kurds was always going to be easier than regaining the participation of the Sunnis. Kurdistan has long had de facto autonomy from Baghdad, and negotiating over oil wealth is a fairly straightforward bit of dealmaking. An accommodation has been possible all along whenever Baghdad was willing to compromise—and the ISIS threat gave the new government there plenty of motivation to do just that.

The same can’t be said of accommodation with the Sunnis. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Arab regions of Iraq is deeper and more fundamental, and there’s no single, well-defined Sunni region with established leadership and relatively clear demands that can be negotiated with cleanly. There are just years—or decades or centuries, depending on how you want to count—of mistrust and bad blood. Combine that with nearly a decade of rampant corruption and tribal jingoism under Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government and you don’t have a problem that can be solved either quickly or easily.

Still, the Kurdish deal suggests that Haider al-Abadi may be genuinely willing to do the work necessary to rein in tensions and provide the Sunni minority with the representation and influence it wants. Maybe. As always, it’s not wise to read too much into this. But it’s a good sign.

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

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