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Next City •

America’s Libraries Have a New Job: Keeping People Alive in the Heat

As heat waves grow longer and deadlier, public libraries are stepping up as cooling centers and shelters – often without dedicated funding.This is your first of three free stories this month. Become a free or sustaining member to read unlimited articles, webinars and ebooks.Every summer, librarians prepare for activities like summer reading contests and family movie nights. Increasingly, they are also preparing for extended hours, coordinating with their local emergency management department, an...
Script Health •

How extreme weather affects trans health

In 2022, Hurricane Ian hit Florida, crashing through the state’s west coast near Fort Myers. It was one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the United States, causing more than 150 deaths and over $150 billion in damage. In the years that have followed, researchers have confirmed that human-caused climate change worsened the storm; rainfall increased by 18 percent.While it raged, Jasmine McKenzie was outside of the storm path in another part of Florida. But as soon as the hurricane was over,...
Mother Jones •

Polling has an AI respondent problem

Imagine you’re doing market research to advise a soda company on which flavor to emphasize in its next advertising campaign: regular cola or cherry? You might aim to find and survey a wide variety of potential customers online. But now there’s a quicker, cheaper alternative: Polling mainstays like Qualtrics and newer firms like Synthetic Users are proffering “silicon” respondents—large language models (LLMs) that will pretend to be lots of different people and answer questions based on how the m...
Mother Jones •

The battle over solar on farms

“Tell me that is a gorgeous country.” Dave Rogers, an Oregon farmer, points across an expanse of green ryegrass fields. “My goodness, look at that.” 


We’re walking along a stretch of land that is under contract for solar development by Hanwha Qcells, a Seoul-based firm known for opening the United States’ largest solar manufacturing facility in 2023. Rogers describes the new project, dubbed Muddy Creek Energy Park, as a “huge amount of construction, three miles of solar panels, a football fie...
Mother Jones •

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown

Colleagues call Gordon Guyatt the “godfather” of evidence-based medicine.


Guyatt, a distinguished professor of medicine at McMaster University in Canada, has had sweeping influence on medical research: GRADE, the framework he helped pioneer to assess the evidence behind clinical recommendations, is a standard at more than 100 medical organizations, including the WHO. Before Guyatt, medicine relied much more on the judgment calls of senior clinicians; today, standardized research is increasing...
Mother Jones •

Puerto Rico's transition care ban is driving trans kids into exile

“People are scared out of their minds,” Dr. Miguel Vázquez Rivera tells me.

The psychologist and executive director of the True Self Foundation, an LGBTQ advocacy nonprofit in Puerto Rico, says that he has seen a rise in clinical “anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation” in transgender people across the island after Puerto Rico’s total ban in July of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), puberty blockers, and gender-affirming surgery for transgender people 21 and younger.

The ban, Senate Bill...
Mother Jones •

Senate version of "beautiful" bill will "kill" America's clean energy sector, experts say

Update, July 3: In an eleventh-hour deal, Senate Republicans removed the tax on renewables from President Trump’s budget bill. Experts still maintain that its other provisions will harm the industry and the planet.

The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” unveiled to the public at Midnight on Friday, went even further than the House version in its hostility toward the nation’s burgeoning renewable energy sector. The House version merely seeks to end the Inflation...
Mother Jones •

Trump's onslaught hits staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Department of Energy division that guides public and private research and development involving renewable energy and energy efficiency, were blindsided with a round of layoffs on Monday morning.

Three lab sources told Mother Jones the cuts affect several NREL departments, including communications, wind, water, and community energy. Remote and in-person staffers are both affected, as are non-probationary employees—those who have worke...
Mother Jones •

Government cancels disinformation grants in disinformation-filled statement

Lisa Fazio expected her National Science Foundation grant to be cancelled. The associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University had watched, with apprehension, the GOP targeting disinformation in a series of legislative attacks.

She only grew more certain when, on April 18, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out a statement on how grants would henceforth be evaluated for funding. In addition to limiting the inclusion of underrepresented groups, the stateme...
Mother Jones •

"We're going to do whatever it takes to keep her safe"

On Susan’s birthday five years ago, her 10-year-old slid a note under her door. Today, she can recite it from memory: “Hey Mom, I wanted to ask, when you talk about me in the future, if you could use he/him or they/them pronouns because she/her pronouns make me really uncomfortable.” Then, “Happy Birthday.”


Susan, the mother of two kids in Connecticut, remembers letting out a deep breath. She had been deeply worried about Kai, her youngest, who had been severely depressed and struggling with...
Quanta Magazine •

The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World

Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.
Hadronization is different. It’s the process by which elementary particles called quarks and gluons join together to form protons and...
Washington Blade •

LGBTQ youth love TikTok. Does TikTok love them back?

When Jocelyn was stuck inside during most of 2020, they did what any high school senior would do: scrolled through TikTok. They found themself on the hashtag #tiktokmademegay a lot. (To protect privacy, the Blade is opting to only use Jocelyn’s first name).


“At the time, I didn’t give it a lot of thought,” they say, acknowledging that most users viewed it as “more of a joke.” 


Now a senior in college, where Jocelyn will graduate with a degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and C...
News Is Out •

How data helps — and hurts — LGBTQ+ communities

When Scotland voted to add questions about sexuality and transgender status to its census, and clarified the definition of “sex,” it was so controversial it led to a court case.

It got so heated that the director of Fair Play for Women, a gender-critical organization, argued: “Extreme gender ideology is deeply embedded within the Scottish Government, and promoted at the highest levels including the First Minister.”

Data, like the census, “is often presented as being objective, being quantitati...
Mother Jones •

First they tried to "cure" gayness. Now they're fixated on "healing" trans people.

The conversion therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to arms to the 20-some people in attendance. “In our current culture, in which children are being indoctrinated with transgender belief from the moment they’re out of the womb, if we are confronted with a gender-confused child, you must help,” declared...
Mother Jones •

The future of natural history is here, and it’s open-source

It’s 1963. You’re an African spiny mouse in Egypt. You mostly eat dates, but you’re known to consume the dried flesh of local mummies; your species was here long before they were.

In another 60 years, it’ll be discovered that your fur hides regenerative, bony scales called osteoderms—an incredible adaptation long thought exclusive to armadillos and reptiles. The finding is pure accident: a herpetologist on an unrelated project, Dr. Edward Stanley, happens to scan you and catch “something strang...
Mother Jones •

An epic battle over 1 mile of land in Wisconsin is tearing environmentalists apart

Judge William M. Conley watched as the Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line inched toward the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge—a 240,000-acre bird sanctuary through which the fully funded power project lacked the permits to pass. By January 2022, he’d seen enough. It “amounts to little more than an orchestrated trainwreck,” Conley, an Obama-appointed federal judge from the Western District of Wisconsin, wrote in a scathing 23-page opinion that delayed construction.

More than...
Washington Blade •

From LGBTQ book bans to internet bans: A bipartisan attack on knowledge

“They had LGBTQ-inclusive books in every single classroom and school library,” Maxx Fenning says of his high school experience. “They were even working on LGBTQ-specific course codes to get approved by the state,” he said, describing courses on queer studies and LGBTQ Black history.

No, Fenning didn’t grow up in Portland or a Boston suburb. Fenning graduated from a South Florida high school in 2020. Florida’s transformation from mostly affirming to “Don’t Say Gay” has been swift, he says. “It feels like a parallel universe.”
Mother Jones •

Are these $2,000 water bills racist?

When Tyrone Pettway saw his water bill in October 2021, he thought it was a typo. The bill was for $2,384.51, some $2,300 more than what he usually owed the Prichard, Alabama, water board every month.

The document claimed Pettway, his wife, and their five kids had used 167,000 gallons of water over the course of the 34-day billing period, amounting to nearly 5,000 gallons a day. But Pettway was sure they had used no more water that month than they normally did: 3,700 gallons total, or about 18
Mother Jones •

What the fight over one small amphibian in Nevada says about the future of green energy.

The Endangered Species Act has been one of the country’s most valuable environmental tools, but it faces new threats. As the law turns 50, we’re asking whether this “pit bull” of an environmental law, as one expert described it, can survive the challenges of our time—from political attacks to climate shocks. You can read all the stories here.
Almost as quickly as the Dixie Valley toad was discovered, it became apparent the toad could be lost.
Richard Tracy, a biology professor at the University...
5280 Magazine •

More Exciting Than Watching Grass Grow: Restoring Colorado’s Prairie Could Help Fight Climate Change

At first look, the shortgrass prairie is not exceptional. Located east of Denver, the expanse of green and golden stalks stretches to the horizon with only the occasional muted shrub and forb adding texture to the landscape. “It’s called the plains because it’s pretty plain,” says Fendi Despres, natural resource specialist with the City of Aurora. “The prairie is boring for most people.”
But even if the North American Plains aren’t marked by towering trees or flashy flowers, like in tropical rai...

Selected Producing

Selected Fact-Checking

Mother Jones •

Overturning Roe didn’t just cut off access. It sabotaged science, too.

In early May 2022, reproductive health researcher Liz Mosley was at a dinner celebrating her first day as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when the news broke: A leaked draft of the Dobbs decision revealed the Supreme Court’s plan to gut abortion rights in the United States—the “worst-case scenario,” as one dinner guest put it.

Mosley also worried the ruling would upend her work as a scientist. She and her colleagues were in the process of conducting a s...
Mother Jones •

A new police force chased a 17-year-old boy to his death. Then it vanished.

Cruising south down a two-lane highway in Montana, Braven Glenn looked out onto the open road, the evening sky chilly and dark. It was November 24, 2020—half a year into the pandemic and three months after his 17th birthday. He was a good student, on his way to pick up his girlfriend, a basketball player like him, at her house on the Crow Indian Reservation.
Most days, Braven took his time while driving; his friends sometimes teased him for staying below the speed limit. But lately he hadn’t bee...
Mother Jones •

Can Maine lead the way to a future without forever chemicals?

Dostie Farm, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm’s milk: Tests had found that it contained three times the state’s allowable level of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, one of the class of “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
“We called bullshit,” Dostie remembers. PFAS contamination had recently been found at two other Maine dairy farms. But those fa...
Mother Jones •

Elon Musk’s Texas takeover

When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here.
On the morning of Apri...
Mother Jones •

Hunting for America’s vanishing Venus flytraps

The Endangered Species Act has been one of the country’s most valuable environmental tools, but it faces new threats. As the law turns 50, we’re asking whether this “pit bull” of an environmental law, as one expert described it, can survive the challenges of our time—from political attacks to climate shocks. You can read all the stories here.
There’s something unsettling about the Venus flytrap. When it eats, it behaves more like an animal than a plant, ensnaring unsuspecting insects in its frag...
Mother Jones •

Donald Trump freed a convicted Medicare fraudster. The Justice Department wants him back.

On a Thursday in September 2019, Philip Esformes arrived for his sentencing at the federal courthouse in downtown Miami looking pale and gaunt. The previous April, after an eight-week trial, Esformes, heir to a large, successful chain of nursing homes, had been convicted of fraud, kickback and money laundering crimes, and obstruction of justice. Citing more than $1 billion in false reimbursement claims, prosecutors described him as the linchpin of the “largest single criminal health care fraud c...