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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
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
The trillions of bacteria inside you could be the key to everything from defeating allergies to losing weight.
- EDITOR’S NOTE
Pardon Our Humblebragging
So many honors, so little shelf space
- 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.
- MIXED MEDIA
BioShock’s creator on politics by video game
Video game visionary Ken Levine on the nerd mainstream, screen violence, and mining the past for narrative.
Designer drones
A Pakistani artist reimagines America’s death machines.
Choire Sicha on writing the gay guy’s Girls
The Awl cofounder says his novel, which follows a group of struggling millenial New Yorkers, is “like ‘Girls’ meets Philip K. Dick.”
A humor website that’s more than it’s Cracked up to be
How a moribund adolescent magazine found new life as one of the internet’s hottest humor sites.
- 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.
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