The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”: The cell I am standing in is one of eight in a ‘pod,’ a large concrete room with cells along one side and only one exit, which leads […]
Mother Jones
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Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level: By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just […]
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The story of an immigrant student, Maria, and how one “failing” San Francisco high school is helping her get ahead: Maria’s middle-school experience all but ensured she’d join the 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos who drop out of high school. She graduated from eighth grade without learning to speak English. She had a hard time […]
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The blue-collar temp industry is booming, which doesn’t bode well for people searching for long-term, full-time jobs. A look at Labor Ready, which wants to be “the McDonalds of the temp industry”: In the two weeks that I spend working out of Oakland’s Labor Ready branch, my ‘honest pay’ tops out at $8.75 an hour. […]
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Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending. For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently […]
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A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina: It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for […]
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A writer goes undercover at a shipping warehouse in Mississippi—and wonders whether Americans will ever demand higher standards for how their Internet purchases are being fulfilled: We will be fired if we say we just can’t or won’t get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate […]
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Exploring the social etiquette of Couchsurfing.org—and how its rapid growth is challenging the community’s expectations of safety and mutual respect: Orange Acres takes all kinds, provided you follow a few simple rules: • No alcoholics, crackheads, or members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, or PETA • ‘[O]n the subject of hippies and rainbow people,’ please […]
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Scientist Tyrone B. Hayes discovered a link between the herbicide atrazine and male frogs developing female body parts. His work led to a bizarre battle with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta, in which the two taunted each other over email: When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. […]
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Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. “I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of.” Ruby sat down, stood up. […]