Tag Archives: media

Trump Repeatedly Ducks Questions About Alleged Campaign Contacts With Russia

by ClaudioMoffat38 Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

In a wide-ranging and at-times erratic press conference that lasted more than an hour Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump said he had “nothing to do” with any possible contacts between his campaign associates and Russia during last year’s election. But he repeatedly declined to assure reporters that no such contacts took place.

“Well I had nothing to do with it,” Trump said when pressed on whether his campaign aides had conversations with Russian intelligence. “I have nothing to do with Russia. I have no deals there.”

At another point during the press conference, he said “nobody that I know of” from his campaign had contacts with Russia during the election.

The press conference took place two days after the New York Times reported that according to current and former US officials, intercepted phone calls showed that “members of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” On Thursday, Trump referred to that story as “a joke.” He decried “fake news put out by the media,” which he claimed was spread by “people, probably from the Obama administration, because they’re there, because we have our new people going in place, right now.”

On Monday night, Lt. General Mike Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser following a Washington Post story revealing that Flynn had discussed US sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador after the election but before Trump took office—despite denials to Vice President Mike Pence, among others.

Trump said Thursday that Flynn’s talks with the Russian ambassador weren’t the problem; rather he fired Flynn for lying to Pence: “He didn’t tell the vice president of the United States the facts, and then he didn’t remember, and that just wasn’t acceptable to me,” Trump said.

Trump denied ordering Flynn to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador, adding that Flynn was “doing his job.”

“Flynn was calling other countries and his counterparts,” said Trump. “So it certainly would have been okay with me if he did it. I would have directed him to do it if I thought he wasn’t doing it. I didn’t direct him, but I would have directed him because that’s his job.”

Trump characterized the various stories about Russia as “ruse” used to distract from Hillary Clinton’s election loss. “You can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats, and the press plays right into it,” he said.

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Trump Repeatedly Ducks Questions About Alleged Campaign Contacts With Russia

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Donald Trump Rants and Raves At Press

by EmmaJyylkepeom Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

President Donald Trump intensified his attack on the media in a wild press conference Thursday, once again characterizing the press as “dishonest” in response to recent reports that have depicted an administration increasingly in turmoil. He also defended Michael Flynn, who resigned Monday as national security adviser, amid mounting evidence that he misled administration officials about his phone calls to the Russian ambassador.

“If anything, he did something right,” Trump said of Flynn. While he denied ordering Flynn to discuss easing American sanctions against Russia, he said that doing so would have been acceptable.

“Mike was doing his job, he was calling countries and his counterparts,” he said. “So it certainly would have been okay with me if he did it. I didn’t direct him, but I would have directed him because that’s his job.”

Asked repeatedly if his campaign aides were in contact with Russian officials during the 2016 election campaign, Trump dodged the questions, saying only, “I had nothing to do with it.”

Trump began the press conference by announcing his second pick for labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, following Andrew Puzder’s decision to withdraw his nomination yesterday. Trump dedicated only a brief moment to discussing Acosta before he turned to his main message for the afternoon: his grievances with the press. “Many of our nation’s reporters and folks will not tell you the truth,” Trump said in his attacks against the media and the ongoing leaks. “We have to find out what’s going on because the press is honestly out of control.”

Trump complained of the “mess” he inherited from the past administration and disputed reports that the White House is in disarray. “It is the exact opposite,” he said. “This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”

Asked how he could simultaneously complain about leaks by government officials and claim that the news reports based on them were false, Trump said, “The leaks are real. The leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”

Trump went on to complain about how he has been covered by the media, predicating that:

the media will say, “Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.” I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you. You know, you’re dishonest people. But — but I’m not ranting and raving. I love this. I’m having a good time doing it. But tomorrow, the headlines are going to be, “Donald Trump rants and raves.” I’m not ranting and raving. Go ahead.

Watch the whole press conference below:

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Donald Trump Rants and Raves At Press

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These Photos of Botswanan Metalheads Are Pretty Mind-Blowing

by GayAbdullah Posted on February 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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In December 2015, Spanish photographer and filmmaker Pep Bonet, who has documented the aftermath of war in Sierra Leone and the global ravages of HIV/AIDS, set out for Botswana, in pursuit of a more positive Africa story.

A largely white genre, heavy-metal music has been gaining popularity in countries like South Africa and Kenya, Bonet says, but Botswana is the “pioneer.” At the heart of the scene is the band Overthrust­, fronted by a singing, bass-playing cop named Tshomarelo Mosaka. “They don’t mind about color or race,” Bonet told me. “They believe heavy metal unites people.”

Lacking access to store-bought fashions, these local “hellbangers” create their own—embellishing leatherware with rivets, chains, and animal bones. (“Desert Super Power,” below, makes money crafting outfits for fellow metalheads.) “They look very similar, many of them, to the Ace of Spades album cover,” notes Bonet, a big metal fan himself, who is also known for his extensive work with the British band Motörhead. “It’s definitely a lifestyle. They live for this!”

“Hardcore Series” and “Dignified Queen” Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux

“Blade” told Bonet: “I used to see music videos for Hammer Fall, and I liked the way they were looking onstage, dressed in leather pants and nice boots. I started buying metal attire and that’s how I became a rocker.” Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux

“Hardcore Series” enjoys custom handwear. Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux

“Desert Super Power” designs clothes for the scene. Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux

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These Photos of Botswanan Metalheads Are Pretty Mind-Blowing

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George Saunders Has Written a Weird and Brilliant Novel

by HopeUJXWtwmhw Posted on February 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chloe Aftel

George Saunders used to be a short-fiction guy. A creative-writing instructor at Syracuse University, he was a 2013 National Book Award finalist for Tenth of December, his fourth story collection. But seeds for a novel were planted years earlier during a visit to Washington, when a relative pointed out Willie Lincoln’s crypt. The third child of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln died of typhoid in the winter of 1862, and the president was said to have sneaked out of the White House alone several times to visit his son’s corpse. “I imagined Lincoln with the body across his knees, like a mash-up of the Pietà and the Lincoln Memorial, and it just kind of stuck in my head,” Saunders says.

Much of the dialogue in his haunting debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, out February 14, is relayed by the bickering spirits of the cemetery in the days after Willie’s death—”bardo” is a Buddhist version of purgatory. Saunders spent much of 2016 in a purgatory of a different sort, attending campaign rallies for a deep-dive New Yorker piece on the psychology of Donald Trump’s supporters. I caught up with him a few weeks after the election to talk about ghosts, inspiring authors, and just what the heck is happening to America.

Mother Jones: Why write a novel after all these years?

George Saunders: I was trying like hell not to! This idea had been around for like 20 years, and about 5 years ago I gave myself permission just to fart around with it a little bit, and it kind of caught on.

MJ: Your book has no narrator. It’s really an extended dialogue among the characters—a few living, but most dead.

GS: Lincoln in the graveyard is pretty hard to dramatize because it’s just one guy. I thought, “Well, I need some witnesses.” And since it was at night, the idea of ghosts came up. I couldn’t figure out a way to tell that story in a more conventional format. In a lot of ways, these questions we refer to as structure or form or style are really just evasions. You’re trying to evade suckiness, and by maximally evading suckiness you might come up with something original.

MJ: Tell me about your research process.

GS: I’ve got hundreds of books on Lincoln from the Syracuse library and that I bought. When I wasn’t writing, I’d be just poring through. I got so addicted, it was almost like the contemporary world wasn’t so interesting and only 1862 was cool. But one of the focusing things about this is it’s just one night. I had to remind myself early and often that it’s not a biography of Lincoln. It’s not even about Lincoln!

The Lincoln family in 1861, from left: Mary, Willie, Robert, ‘Tad,’ and Abe. Library of Congress

MJ: Are you a Civil War buff?

GS: I never really was, but nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that’s going on now in the country, that it’s always been chaos—people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It’s the scale that’s amazing, and also the proximity to our own time. I remember at one point seeing a photograph of basically a slave store in Atlanta. It’s where you’d go if you needed a slave. And you think, “Wow! That was not a long time ago.”

MJ: You dedicate this book to your kids. What was it like, as a parent, to spend so much time thinking about the death of a child?

GS: It was touchy. I honestly couldn’t have done it when they were Willie’s age, little kids. It sounds kind of corny, but we seem programmed to love each other and to have our special attachments to people, and certainly our kids. And those are so raw and so powerful, you can’t even turn your mind in a direction of that kind of a loss. When you’re talking about Abe Lincoln, you’re like, “Okay, now he’s got to dust himself off and go win the war.” That’s not how that works. The historical accounts indicate that he never recovered. And he didn’t live that much longer.

Willie Lincoln died in 1862. He was 12. Wikipedia Commons

MJ: Do you believe in ghosts?

GS: Do you?

MJ: From time to time.

GS: I definitely believe in them dramatically. For example, I’m standing here in front of this 1920s bungalow in LA. If you just describe the physicality of the place, you’re only getting a fraction of the truth, which is that if you went back to 1946 there was some dude standing here in a fedora who’s now dead. That’s as true as the fact that there’s a lawn chair sitting here in front of me. To give a story broader shoulders, you have to sometimes push off into the supernatural or the sci-fi, not as a way of avoiding reality, but of accommodating it correctly. I actually do believe in life after death. In the book, I tried to make it funny and weird enough that it didn’t resemble an afterlife that we had seen somewhere else. When you die you don‘t go, “Oh, it’s just like I read about.” It’s more like, “Oh shit, what is this?”

MJ: Your New Yorker piece nicely captures our cultural divide—is it surmountable?

GS: I got so many letters from Trump supporters on that piece, and they start off really rough. I try to engage each person somewhat deeply, and I can point to the moment in the exchanges when it goes from that mode to a personal mode. Suddenly all their decency comes out. But in the public sphere: At a rally it’s bad; on the internet it’s 10 times worse. We’ve got a real problem with social media that we didn’t know we were going to have. It’s almost like the demons have gotten out of the box. I’m thinking I’m going to stay off the internet as much as possible and try to change my data mix so that more of it is coming from firsthand experience and interactions.

MJ: Your data mix?

GS: I’m repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it’s doing to our mental process. It’s one thing if the two of us are sitting at a table talking about something charged, and I know you and you’re a friend and we have a history, but a great deal is coming into our heads that’s agenda-laced and written quickly from someone you have no connection with. Human beings are not necessarily designed for a high level of that kind of data.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can’t tell you how many times a conversation went like this: “We’ve got to stop these immigrants, because it’s terrible.” I’d say, “Okay, what personally have you observed about this?” And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I’d say, “Where’d you get your information?” thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, “Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources.” Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

MJ: What do you read to take your mind off the world?

GS: I read more to put my mind back on it. I have a pretty active work and travel life, and several days will go by when I haven’t had a deep feeling—I’ve just been kind of checking off the boxes. So I read to make myself feel awake. Zadie Smith has a new book called call Swing Time and I just had a beautiful experience with that where, suddenly, you know that feeling where you read something and then you walk out on the street and suddenly everything is three- or four-dimensional again? Everything smells more. The light is brighter.

MJ: So what’s your next dream project?

GS: That’s exactly what I’m asking myself. I’m turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don’t have an infinite number of years left and if there’s anything you want to say or represent, it’s time to try it. I’m a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans. Up until now, my work has always been kind of empowered by constraint. You say, “Okay, I’m writing a six-page story. It’s set in a theme park.” I’ve been almost like a piranha—I’ll dart off and take a little bite of a little side and come out. I’d like to try to take on the whole thing.

MJ: Who inspires you to write?

GS: Hemingway was a big influence early—In Our Time and those books. And Tobias Wolff is a huge hero of mine. Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Stuart Dybek. I’m a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

MJ: That’s an ironic name for a wordsmith.

GS: He was a cool dude, a Jew who traveled with the Cossacks. He was killed by Stalin. Babel was like, “I’m going to talk to everybody, honor everybody’s viewpoints, and then I’m going to present it in this really complicated stew that feels almost insanely true.” It’s violent and it’s contradictory and people are beautiful and savage in the same paragraph. It might have a particular relevance for right now. We’ve been very fortunate the last X number of years to have our political fights in roped-off spheres, very safe. Now we’re starting to see how nasty it can get. I just got a text from a friend in Missouri. He’s driving in his BMW and this guy pulls up alongside him, pulls a .350 Magnum, and says, “Why don’t you buy a fucking American car, motherfucker?”

MJ: Oh wow.

GS: So Babel is a good writer for now because he was the darling of the Soviets and then one day he wasn’t. They beat all these confessions out of him, and then he recovered enough to ask them to please retract those—and they shot him.

The DC crypt where Willie Lincoln’s body rested prior to his funeral. Flickr/Tim Evanson

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George Saunders Has Written a Weird and Brilliant Novel

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Mother Jones Wins “Best Picture Award for the Magazine Industry”

by MerissaPresler7 Posted on February 7, 2017

Mother Jones

It’s been an extraordinary few months for Mother Jones—from publishing a massive investigation on private prisons to breaking the story of a veteran spy’s allegations that Russia had sought to compromise Donald Trump, to launching a new model for investigative reporting on a foundation of reader support. Today, those breakthroughs and more were honored with the most prestigious award in the magazine industry, the 2017 Magazine of the Year award from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). MoJo also took home the award for Best Reporting for Shane Bauer’s “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” and we were a finalist in the General Excellence category.

This was the first year Mother Jones was nominated for Magazine of the Year—our industry’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar—alongside The New Yorker, New York, Cosmopolitan, and California Sunday. Judges recognized our work on the most important political stories of the year, including Trump’s conflicts of interest, his ties to white nationalism, and the Russia memos, along with myriad investigative and immersive narratives, dramatically increased traffic and visibility, and a widely acclaimed redesign of our website and print magazine.

“Holy shit,” as our editor-in-chief, Clara Jeffery, put it in accepting the award, adding that she was “super proud of our entire team.” The recognition comes at an especially important time, she said, when “the media is under attack. Whether we are magazines that specialize in news and politics, or whether we are magazines that delight and distract, we are going to need both. I really hope we all stick together in the time to come.”

(Needless to say, at MoJo we plan to double down against attacks on freedom of the press and democracy as a whole. If you’d like to help support unrelenting investigative reporting, subscribe here or donate here.) And if you already do—or if you’re part of the MoJo community in other ways, as a frequent reader, sharer, or cheerleader, or as someone who uses our journalism to change the world: THANK YOU. MoJo is unique because we rely on users, not advertisers or deep-pocketed interests, to make our work possible. This award belongs to you.

Here’s what it looked like when Clara and the MoJo delegation learned the news at the awards ceremony:

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Mother Jones Wins “Best Picture Award for the Magazine Industry”

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Lyrical Genius John Darnielle Has a Scary New Novel

by LoriePercy Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Cult indie-folk band the Mountain Goats is known for having fans that are rabidly devoted—and you’d almost have to be like that just to keep up. Led by John Darnielle—a charmingly nerdy 49-year-old songwriter whose professed admirers include Stephen Colbert, and whom Rolling Stone recently dubbed rock’s “best storyteller”—the Goats have put out 15 albums since 1994, using simple chord structures as a framework for Darnielle’s complex lyrical narratives. Fans have even petitioned to make him America’s Poet Laureate, so maybe it’s no surprise that Darnielle recently stumbled into literary success as well.

His debut novel, Wolf in White Van, about a reclusive, disfigured game designer who seeks refuge in a role-playing game, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Out February 7, Darnielle’s latest, an enchanting horror mystery called Universal Harvester, follows a video store clerk in small-town Iowa whose customers begin complaining of disturbing footage spliced into their rented VHS tapes. (The paperback review copy came sheathed in a plastic VHS clamshell.) When he’s not writing something, Darnielle, raised in a progressive activist household, is out fighting for reproductive justice—serving, for instance, on the board of the National Abortion Rights Action League and performing in support of Planned Parenthood.

Mother Jones: So you’re this celebrated songwriter and touring musician, and one morning you wake up as a novelist?

John Darnielle: It was much slower than that! An editor from Continuum asked me how come I hadn’t pitched to “33 1/3” a series of books about individual LPs. I pitched Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. He liked it, so I wrote it. The critique was housed in this fictional narrative, the longest long-form narrative I’d ever attempted—at least since I wrote a very long poem cycle in the late ’80s. An album you write a bunch of songs and put them together, but with this, the focus it required was exhilarating. I submitted the manuscript, and while waiting to hear back I just started writing something else—I ended up writing what became the last chapter of Wolf in White Van. It was just something to do. A lot of good work sort of starts in idleness and becomes labor. Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.

MJ: And you got a National Book Award nomination straight out of the gate!

JD: I’m still kind of processing that. I thought that people wouldn’t hate it, but really, I was in shock. That happened two days after it got published! My editor calls me, “Hey, you’re not gonna believe this.” Laughs.

MJ: So, many successful first-time authors struggle with their second novel.

JD: It’s both easier and harder. The easier part is you know you can do it, whereas at a certain point on Wolf in White Van I’m sitting on the floor in the hallway with the manuscript all over the place, cutting up with scissors, trying to figure out what went where. There was a point where I was like, “This is going to be a mess. I’ll never put it get it back together.” If I hadn’t done it out in physical space, it would’ve never gotten finished. The second one, you know well enough to be planning ahead. A lot of the time with Wolf, I would find out what was going to happen as I wrote the sentence: click click click click…Oh! He went to a hospital! You can ad-lib a song. A novel is a performance you have to plan.

MJ: In the new book, as we often see in your music, there’s this horror motif.

JD: When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on. You’d get, you know, Poe and Lovecraft. So there was this zine called Whispers. They would publish things by Robert Aikman, Manly Wade Wellmann, and Dennis Etchison, big names in a very small pond. Whispers was very hard to find, but it was really cool. Aikman would write horror stories that weren’t gore, they weren’t slashers, and they weren’t monster stories either. He called them ghost stories. The main thing about them was the vibe. It was really disquieting. He wanted to sketch the scene so that you could see it and know the characters and get a feel for the motion—and then ask yourself why and not get a final answer. Leave something that itches. I loved that! Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn’t realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

MJ: So what scares you most?

JD: The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything’s about to go wrong in a way that’s not controllable or knowable. What’s scary is the unknown, the stuff you can’t put your finger on. Hauntings are also scary—the notion that there are things from the past that render, that you can’t wash out, that you can’t be free of. The notion of the mark—the mark of Cain—is scary. Stuff clinging to you is scary.

MJ: Did you ever work in a video store?

JD: I worked the AV counter at the Roland Heights public library in the ’80s.

MJ: Did people ever record weird stuff on the tapes?

JD: No, I made that up. My best story from the library was the time a couple asked for a recommendation, and I recommended Raising Arizona and they absolutely hated it. They came back hungry for blood. I was on my lunch break and my boss came out and said, “Hey kid, you need to come talk to these people. They totally hate Arizona.” And he said, “Arizona‘s a dog; nobody gets that movie.” I said, “What’re you talking about! All my friends love that movie.” Laughs.

MJ: Was it your idea to package the book in a VHS case?

JD: No. This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I’m honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with. I do a few things pretty well. I write good songs, I hope I write good books, and I’m a pretty bitchin’ performer, I will say—you come to a Mountain Goats show and you’re gonna have a good time. But I consider myself a prep cook. The stuff I do is indispensable to the meal, but it’s not the whole meal.

MJ: You write so many songs. Do you ever get bored of it?

JD: Nah. People don’t tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there’s been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff. I still write in 4/4 time. Maybe not the next hurdle, but one I want to meet in a couple years, is writing something in three or in six.

MJ: Wait, you’re going to turn the Mountain Goats into math rock?

JD: Well, six is not that complicated, but 13—I’d like to write something in 13!

MJ: You officially retired your song “Going to Georgia.” Have you retired others?

JD: Yeah, I think that’s pretty natural. I suspect by the time the Beatles were writing the White Album, they didn’t go, “‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’ I wanna play that!” It’s like if somebody asked you to put on the clothes you wore in high school. Well, no. No!

MJ: What was it like growing up in this intensely pro-choice household?

JD: It was exciting, insofar as I was thinking about things that few of my peers were. Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they’re on the right side of things.

MJ: In recent years, abortion rights have come under serious assault.

JD: If you’re working at the very local level and there are nine of you and six of the other people, you can strong-arm them. The anti-choice forces stole that tactic from the left! They’ve learned that if you act locally, you can get stuff on the books that will take forever to undo. It’s the same with redistricting. It’s hard to get people from far away to give a shit. That’s the issue! It’s easy to follow national politics and weigh in on social media, but if I’m tweeting stuff about Chatham County, no one cares. All you can do is wait until they make a move that’s unconstitutional, and then you have to sue, and you appeal—that’s how it works.

MJ: You’re based in Durham, North Carolina, these days?

JD: Yessir. We’re actually right next door to Wade County, where the first targeted regulation of abortion provider (TRAP) laws were enacted. They can’t outlaw abortion, so they say, “Well, you can have an abortion, but the operating table has to be a Möbius strip, and the public restroom has to be 1,000 yards from the operating table.” It’s so playground! It’s: “Cross this line and I’m gonna punch you in the face,” and then they draw the line in back of you.

MJ: North Carolina recently has been on the vanguard of being against trans rights and eroding voting rights and so on.

JD: North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for those things, and that’s why we’re seeing this pushback. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down. Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power—almost dynastic—dating back many years. Our former governor Pat McCrory was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

MJ: The Black Lives Matter movement in Charlotte seems pretty robust.

JD: Durham was gonna vote Democrat regardless of whether the Republicans nominated this madman—it’s a very blue county. Charlotte—things are a little different. But over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians. The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they’re not! They’re hotbeds of progressivism that have been legislated against and redistricted out of existence. The fighting spirit remains in the voice of the people down here.

MJ: Are you tempted to infuse your songs and books with your politics?

JD: No. I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I’ve always enjoyed being able to be free—to live in worlds that you don’t have to be thinking about that all the time. I don’t see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain—or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That’s my calling. There are real teachers out there; I don’t pretend to have their mantle.

MJ: Are there any writers you’ve tried to emulate?

JD: There are stylists I really love. I’m a huge Joan Didion fan—if I wrote something that she might like, then I’d feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly, but I want the effect to be a little more velvety—simple language that has lush effects.

MJ: Had you ever written fiction prior to Wolf?

JD: I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren’t any good and I kinda knew it. I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality. I did a lot of music criticism. I don’t think much of it was any good. I think I wanted to show off a lot when I was younger. Now I just want people to enjoy the story. If it were possible to publish anonymously, that would be awesome.

MJ: A lot of your fans seem to know your entire catalog. They sing along at shows and shout out constant requests. What does that feel like?

JD: It’s a a huge honor. I try not to dwell on it, because anything that might lead to me being too egocentric is not healthy. I’ll look at them and try to have a moment with them, but I hope it’s more of a shared experience than a didactic one.

MJ: Do the requests get annoying?

JD: Generally no. A good show—and this is on the band as much as on the audience—people will get a sense of the rhythm, so they won’t yell out a request after some song where everyone has gotten real sad together. That would be unkind. But I don’t really have any position to complain about my job. Yeah, every job has its moments like, “Ah, you know, it’s Wednesday.” But I’m blessed. I love my work.

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Lyrical Genius John Darnielle Has a Scary New Novel

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Check Out Kellyanne Conway’s Version of an Apology

by ThomasEwald Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Just to follow up on last night, here is Kellyanne Conway’s apology for telling the nation about the “Bowling Green massacre” on prime time TV last night. It’s a masterpiece:

Just an honest mistake! What she meant to say, apparently, was this:

Two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green terrorists.

This makes no sense, of course. The two Iraqis were the masterminds behind the two Iraqis? Please. So here’s Conway’s version of a mea culpa:

Tell a tall tale about what she meant to say.
Link to a four-year-old story which—if you actually read it—says only that the FBI is conducting “dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations.”
Mount a grievance against a reporter who quoted her correctly on the Today show.
Compliment herself for her class and grace because she chooses not to bring down her slavering hordes on an editor who did nothing wrong.
Pretend that the White House didn’t spend days upon endless days moaning and bellyaching about the MLK Jr. bust story—a story that was corrected in less than half an hour.

Mission accomplished! Millions of people have now heard about the Bowling Green massacre. Conway has, technically, admitted she was wrong, so the media won’t bother following up and virtually no one will hear that no such massacre took place. You’d think that would be victory enough, but just for good measure she then attacked a reporter and told the world what a wonderful, gracious person she is. What a pro.

View the original here – 

Check Out Kellyanne Conway’s Version of an Apology

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The New Yorker’s Next Cover Features Lady Liberty with Her Light Snuffed Out

by DavidHbuuzadmk Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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The New Yorker has revealed the cover for its upcoming issue which will feature an image of Lady Liberty with her flame extinguished, a powerful illustration that comes amid the continued fallout from President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugee resettlement and travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The image also marks a break with the magazine’s longstanding tradition of putting a version of its mascot Eustace Tilley on the cover of its anniversary issue. Françoise Mouly, the magazine’s art director, wrote in a blog post on Friday:

This year, as a response to the opening weeks of the Trump Administration, particularly the executive order on immigration, we feature John W. Tomac’s dark, unwelcoming image, “Liberty’s Flameout.”

“It used to be that the Statue of Liberty, and her shining torch, was the vision that welcomed new immigrants. And, at the same time, it was the symbol of American values,” Tomac says. “Now it seems that we are turning off the light.”

On Friday, the magazine also announced it was canceling its annual party for the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

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The New Yorker’s Next Cover Features Lady Liberty with Her Light Snuffed Out

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Beyoncé Will Bless Our Cruel World with Two Beautiful Babies

by JaclynBrunskill Posted on February 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Beyoncé is having twins, y’all.

We would like to share our love and happiness. We have been blessed two times over. We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two, and we thank you for your well wishes. – The Carters

A photo posted by Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Feb 1, 2017 at 10:39am PST

The musical superstar posted this photo to Instagram on Wednesday morning to announce her pregnancy.

And Twitter promptly lost its shit.

Continued here – 

Beyoncé Will Bless Our Cruel World with Two Beautiful Babies

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How to Process the Tide of Trump News

by melaniezqm Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Late last Friday, when social media was full of post-inauguration tea-leaf-reading, a few of us at the MoJo office found ourselves drawn into a rabbit hole of tweets about photos of Trump in the Oval Office. Wow, he had installed golden drapes! How…Versaillean. And what about that painting of a flag-bedecked street on the wall? It was Fifth Avenue in the Rain, created by the impressionist Childe Hassam amid intense nationalist fervor just as the United States was about to enter World War I. We mentally started composing tweets with ominously succinct openers: “Pay attention.” “Important.”

Then we splashed some cold water in our faces. Did we actually know that any of this was significant? We poked around a little more and found Obama photographed in front of some gold Oval Office drapes (as well as a rainbow of others). And that painting? Right there next to Obama, too.

You might have found yourself similarly tumbling through freak-outs big and small this first week of the Trump administration—and for good reason. It felt as if every minute brought more head-spinning news. The White House website overhauled; a passel of radical executive orders; National Park Service Twitter accounts seemingly going rogue, then retreating; a boundless obsession with crowd photos; leaks, drama, more tweets, more drama.

And all of it was a BFD. All of it got people hitting ALL CAPS, deploying expletives, ominously quoting Hannah Arendt and Solshenitsyn, and demanding outrage.

But not every single thing that happened this week was in the OMG SHOCKER UNPRECEDENTED category. And that’s important to remember—because people who care about democracy have never needed clear heads more than now. We need to retain the ability to pick out signal from noise, Defcon One from Defcon Five.

We saw three kinds of developments this week—let’s call them normal, normalesque, and definitely not normal. The first kind is simply part of the shift in power to another president and party: changes that could just as easily happen with (just for the sake of argument) a President Warren replacing Trump in 2021. Overhauling the White House website, freezing regulations, and even telling federal workers not to tweet fall, sort of, into this category.

The second category are policy changes more radical than what we would have seen from other GOP presidents, because today’s GOP is more radical. Those changes will in many cases mobilize shock and opposition—even from some in the Republican Party itself. Announcing the border wall, expanding the “global gag rule,” repealing Obamacare, banning immigrants for their nationality alone, even nominating cabinet members who disagree with the mission of the agencies they will lead are in this category. They will get, and deserve, a bitter fight on policy grounds, but they are still on the (far end of) the spectrum of what we can expect in a democracy at a time of tectonic political shifts. They are normalesque.

But then there is a third category—the actions of a man with a temperament and behavior we haven’t seen in the White House in modern times, if ever. Trump personally, as near as we can tell, believes in few things except himself; his actions are often precipitated by rumors and stuff on TV that makes him mad; and most significantly he, along with many of his closest advisers, is inclined toward authoritarianism and a retrograde sort of nationalism. The actions that flow from these qualities are the ones that transcend normalcy entirely. Insisting that the constitution doesn’t apply when you don’t want it to; chastising the press for reporting obvious facts and calling it “the opposition party”; perpetuating a massive smear against the electoral system by claiming that millions voted illegally: Those things are not even at the outside edges of normal. Those things draw from another playbook—not that of democracy.

So. What to do?

One of the most important things at a turbulent moment like this is to step back: to sift signal from noise and consider which developments rattle the foundations of democracy and which are simply the fallout from a change election.

But stepping back is hard for many reasons—not least of them the fact that many media outlets are incentivized to keep us at Defcon One. The 2016 campaign turned “fake news” into a household word, but outright manufactured smears aren’t the only problem: Weak news—decontextualized, unverified, sensationalized bits of outrage-bait—is just as much of a danger. And here, we can’t just blame Macedonian teenagers or Russian bots. Weak news is what happens when media are under pressure to grab eyeballs by appealing to our fears and preconceptions: SEE? TOLD YOU!! YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THEY JUST DID.

That’s a frame of mind many who oppose Trump are in now, for good reason, and predators and hucksters are going to see a big opportunity. They are going to want to gin up falsehoods to hook you. They will send emails demanding that you FORWARD THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, tweets begging you to RT IF YOU AGREE. Some of them will be mercenaries looking for ad dollars. Some will be aiming to deluge you with fake petitions. Some will even be earnestly pushing stories they believe prove the worst (but that actually get well out past what’s known). All of them will be creating a fog of outrage and anger that obfuscates a reality very much in need of focused vigilance.

Here at Mother Jones, we hope we can be part of helping you sort weak and fake news from real, and outrage-bait from true outrage. We’ve been going after difficult, dangerous stories for more than 40 years, and we know that our research has to be solid, because people will want to impugn all of our work for the slightest error. We check and recheck sources and context; our bigger investigations go through many weeks of painstaking fact-checking. (One of our former researchers describes the process here.) We publish facts, not rumors.

Case in point: Before the election, we learned that a veteran intelligence professional had compiled allegations that Russia long sought to infiltrate Trump’s team and put together compromising information about him. We didn’t publish the specific allegations because we could not independently verify them. But the fact that a credible intelligence professional was worried enough to pass them along to the FBI was newsworthy, and we reported on that. (Last weekend, the New York Times‘ public editor, Liz Spayd, noted that Mother Jones‘ story “offered a model” of what the Times—which had the information, too, but sat on it—could have done.)

We could get lots of attention and web traffic by breathlessly passing along every sensational bit floating around the internet. But we won’t, and we don’t have to—because there aren’t shareholders or owners pressuring us to maximize profit (or, for that matter, warning us against interfering with powerful interests). We are in business because readers choose to invest in real research and reporting, and because you want it to reach a wide audience.

So here’s one way to both push back against fake news and weak news, and reduce the noise in your feed or inbox: Sign up for our free email newsletters (the sign-up form is below), and we’ll send you hand-picked, accurate reporting four times a week. (Or you can pick which of our newsletters—on politics, environment, food, and weekly highlights—you want.) If you do, let us know what you think—and share it with your circles.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, says the press should “keep its mouth shut.” No. Here at MoJo, we’re doubling down on the stories that matter the most, and getting them out to people who don’t intend to shut up. When the administration labels the press as the “opposition party” and talks about “alternative facts,” they want you to believe there is no such thing as truth. They will fail.

Link to article:

How to Process the Tide of Trump News

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