Mother Jones Magazine Cover : July + August 2013

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  • Cover Story
  • Gagged by Big Ag

    Hidden cameras have been exposing horrific conditions at factory farms. Big Meat’s solution? Throw whistleblowers in jail.

  • FEATURES
  • Under Water

    Flood, rebuild, repeat: Why we pretend the next big storm won’t happen—and flush billions in disaster relief down the drain

    PLUS: A Sandy every other year?

  • Merchants of Meth

    Merchants of Meth

    With big profits on the line, the drug industry is pulling out campaign-style dirty tricks to keep selling the meds that cooks turn into crank.

  • Happy Microbes, Skinny Jeans

    Happy Microbes, Skinny Jeans

    The trillions of bacteria inside you could be the key to everything from defeating allergies to losing weight.

  • Outfront
  • How I built an AK-47

    Forget 3-D-printed guns. At a “build party,” anyone can make a rifle no cop will ever know about.

  • Semi-auto stats

  • The vanishing newsroom

    My father spent his life in this newsroom. Now I’m witness to how the business has forever changed.

  • Anonymous’ anti-rape vendetta

    Since Steubenville, the hacktivist collective has found an ethically dicey new role: seeking justice for rape victims.

  • Is the Mormon church done dissing gay marriage?

    All they had to do, really, was get out of the way.

  • MLB’s SOBs

    MoJo’s guide to the national pastime’s deepest pockets and reviled personas.

  • Capitol Hill cliques

    Paul Ryan vs. Rosa Delauro. Kegs vs. kombucha. Bowhunting vs. bow ties. Meet the Hill’s frattiest and funkiest members.

  • FOOD + HEALTH
  • Dial “L” for Landfill

    Making it harder to unlock your device works out great for phone companies. Not so much for the planet.

  • Sows in Solitary

    Imagine spending your entire pregnancy in an airline coach seat. That’s what we do with breeding sows.


Contributors

Before trying gun building (“Some Assembly Required“), Bryan Schatz’s arms-making experience included forging a rimu-wood-hilted knife during a bike tour of New Zealand.

When he was a kid, Will Steacy (“Stop the Presses“), ran through the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom while visiting his father, an editor there.

Up to four government minders at once shadowed 1 Kate Sheppard (“Under Water“), while she reported on sea level rise in Vietnam; after Hurricane Sandy, illustrator Yuko Shimizu hosted friends who had lost power in her New York City apartment.

2 Jonah Engle (“Merchants of Meth“), has covered narcotics for Foreign Policy, WNYC, and Deutsche Welle; photographer 3 Stacy Kranitz spent much of the last three years camping and sleeping in Walmart parking lots while documenting Appalachia.

Nebraska’s own 4 Ted Genoways (“Gagged by Big Ag“), is at work on a book about the meat industry in the great recession; the art is by 5 Tim O’Brien, who has drawn 13 Mother Jones covers since 2003—including this issue’s.

6 Moises Velasquez-Manoff (“Happy Microbes, Skinny Jeans“), is the author of An Epidemic of Absence, a book exploring how bacteria and parasites affect health; his reporting has deepened his understanding of his own allergies, asthma, and alopecia.

Kate Sheppard Jonah Engle
Stacy Kranitz
Ted Genoways Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Tim O'Brien