“CAN YOU TELL the court a little bit about what she was like as a baby?” It was December 2018, and Robyn Bradshaw sat on the witness stand in the Hennepin County Juvenile Justice Center in Minneapolis, fighting for custody of her granddaughter. The n

Jackie Flynn Mogensen THE NORTH ATLANTIC RIGHT WHALE isn’t doing well. Fewer than 350 of these stocky creatures are thought to remain—and their numbers are shrinking. In the last six years, vessel strikes, entanglements in fishing gear, and unknown c

CHRISTIAN GROUPS HAVE jumped into the Brackeen v. Haaland fray, arguing that ICWA discriminates against Native children by prioritizing potential caretakers’ Native heritage over their ability to provide for a child. Yet critics see that argument as

LAST OCTOBER, Kanye West appeared on the popular podcast Drink Champs, a free-flowing interview show hosted by the rapper N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN—think The Joe Rogan Experience for rappers. In the interview, Ye said he’d been “screwed by the Jewish media

IN OCTOBER 2021, Nick Fuentes launched his own streaming platform, Cozy.tv. After being kicked off every major communications service, from YouTube to Twitter, he promised it would be censorship-free—and explicitly bigoted. “We are anti-gay, anti-wom

THE CUTS HAVE come even for the word itself. “Austerity” is a cornerstone of conservatism—a catch-all term for limiting government spending to promote capitalist growth—and yet the expression seems to have disappeared from deficit hawks’ speeches. “I

ADVERTISING USED TO BE what paid for journalism in America. Car dealerships and movie theaters brought us local newspapers and TVs; clubs and restaurants underwrote the alternative weeklies where I got my start; classified ads paid to send a reporter

Ali Breland MOST WEBSITES AREN'T KNOWN for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiw

IN HIS 6.5-BY-14-FOOT CELL, Leo Hylton keeps an unopened cherry-flavored Hint seltzer. Since March 2022, he’s held on to the bottle as a prized possession, a “touchstone” that he says helps remind him of “the visceral feel” of the first day he spent

IN 1993, A GROUP of activists rented a warehouse in suburban Westchester County, New York. It was smaller than they’d hoped and had limited ventilation, but the two other locations they’d tried to rent belonged to universities and required jumping th

Tim Murphy IN THE SUMMER of 2011, as Washington deadlocked over the once-routine task of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy, then the House GOP whip, decided to mix things up. At a caucus meeting, the California Republican screened a c

BRACKEEN V. HAALAND did not organically evolve from a local custody fight to a Supreme Court case. Rather, it is the result of a yearslong effort by a small group of right-wing organizations to overturn ICWA. Among them are the Goldwater Institute, a

EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE the white nationalist figure Nicholas J. Fuentes ignited a political firestorm by dining with Kanye West and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he strode out onstage to a crowd of what he claimed were 1,000 followers, chanting “America F

WHEN I VISITED my cousin Beija in Munich last summer, her boyfriend, Julius, told me he was in his second year of surgery residency, and I was surprised by how well rested he looked. He and Beija had just returned from a boozy wedding over a long wee

RACHEL SWEET CAN’T PINPOINT a specific moment or life experience that inspired her to pursue a career fighting for reproductive rights. As a 31-year-old woman, she had always had the right to choose. She grew up in a Kansas City, Missouri, suburb, as

FOR THREE AND a half years, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ veto pen was the only thing keeping his state’s Republican legislators from getting everything on their anti-abortion wish list. When they tried to ban abortion based on fetal anomalies, Evers wa

IN HIS NEW BOOK, Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen, graphic designer (and MoJo alum) George McCalman pays homage to Black Americans beyond those normally remembered each February. The book pairs biographical essays with sp

ON A MUGGY EVENING early in the pandemic, Jervis Middleton, an off-duty police officer in Lexington, Kentucky, sat in his cruiser typing determinedly on his phone. The city was tense. One week earlier, a video of white Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin s

IN 2021, on San Francisco's wettest October day on record, an “atmospheric river” dumped a stunning 4.02 inches of rain downtown, causing highways and neighborhoods in the area to flood. Cars were stranded in standing water. And the city’s sewers, wh

AS I WAS watching the new Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel, Conversations With Friends, I kept waiting for something to happen that was never going to happen. The show follows two young women in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi, who become roman

FANS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY had good cause to celebrate in November, when many election deniers and extremists were sent packing, and predictions of violence and chaos at the polls did not come to pass. Democrats were the beneficiaries, holding the Se

FOR THE FIRST two years of the pandemic, there was such a thing as a free lunch—for public school kids, at least. To blunt a spike in hunger caused by job losses and school closures, the federal government made school meals free, even available as “g

YURII AND DARINA Yurii Sikan, 59, and Darina Mikhailishina, 51, returned to their Irpin home with their cats two months after they fled. “They are very confused,” says Darina. “They know the door should be here and a window there, but it’s all gone.”

AMERICAN POLICE speak in a peculiar lexicon. When an officer guns somebody down, it is an “officer-involved shooting.” When a department spokesperson speaks of “the use of force,” police violence is reduced to basic physics. “Fatality” dulls a plaine

ON NOVEMBER 14, shortly before the networks called the Arizona governor’s race for Democrat Katie Hobbs, Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old conservative activist, asked a guest on his YouTube livestream what Republicans had missed. Since moving to the sta

THE TWO GIRLS at the sleepover huddled together on the bed, passing the cellphone back and forth. They took turns glancing at the screen, fascinated and unsettled by what they saw but unable to look away. Their other friend wanted no part of what was

Our coverage of November’s colorful, surreal midterms called for equally colorful and surreal art. The perfect artist was London-based ANDREW RAE, whose cover brings to life Washington’s weirdest weirdos and wingiest wingnuts. MoJo is named after a h

IT WAS SIX WEEKS before the November election, and in his snug campaign office in suburban Milwaukee, located in a shopping plaza between a dentist and an acupuncturist, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers scanned the brightly colored maps that hung on the wal

WHEN HE WAS 8 years old, Michael Wang decided he wanted to go to Harvard. “I don’t know if it’s the Asian stereotype,” he told me, “but I saw it as an avenue to social mobility.” Though he wouldn’t have thought of it in these terms when he was 8, Mic

ON JANUARY 11, 2021, five days after Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, CNN published an article titled “Experts Warn That Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Will Outlast His Presidency.” It quoted Timothy Snyder, a historian who wrote the 2017 bestseller