Mother Jones July/August 2022

ON THE COVER We felt we must respond to Justice Alito’s leaked draft with a cover package, but illustrating abortion can be tricky. Chiara Ghigliazza's bold visual metaphor for the attacks on bodily autonomy perfectly captures our dire situation. This issue has a summer reading list. What do you like to do this time of year? After a hectic academic year, summer allows the space to exhale, focus on writing, and travel with my family. —Dorothy E. Roberts (“Torn Apart”) I mulled over how to respond to this question for a few days. My answer: Two scoops of coffee ice cream on a cake cone. —illustrator Vanessa Saba (“The Mother Trap”) Summer is my favorite season. I like to have salty hair. I watch Jaws. Sometimes, I combine the two in a single day. But…

This is about minority rule. And it always has been. That’s what I found myself thinking as news of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade broke back in May. I thought about the pregnancies that my loved ones, my friends, and I have ended, and about what it would have been like to be forced by the state to carry them to term. I thought about a future of state-enforced pregnancies for my children. I reread the searing 2004 essay in which Mother Jones contributor Eleanor Cooney recalled her terrifying pre-Roe journey when, as a scared 17-year-old, she was told she was “too far gone” for an abortion, and was sexually assaulted by the doctors she’d come to for help. But most of all, I thought about how…

As a 28-year-old art student, Thomas Gokey convinced the Federal Reserve to give him bags of shredded currency worth $49,983, the exact amount of his ballooning student loan debt. He pulped the scraps, turned the paste into four enormous sheets of paper, and began offering piecemeal sales—$4.22 a square inch. In 2011, when the artwork was accepted in an annual competition—“the American Idol of art,” as Gokey describes it—that had been founded by the son of billionaire heir (and future Education Secretary) Betsy DeVos, he saw another shot at paying off the debt. Buyers had been scarce, but his project sparked conversations with other debtors. Anthropologist David Graeber had just published his opus on the topic; Gokey found it “a secret decoder ring” unveiling how debt enshrined divides of gender, race,…

It's the day before spring, but in Naples, Florida, a summer-strength sun is searing a regional park as flags flap and music pounds. The event is Patriot Fest 2022, a country concert, county fair, and far-right rally rolled into one. Some 400 people in “Let’s talk Covid” shirts and MAGA hats have paid up to $150 to attend, lured by promised headliner Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who never materializes. But for now, warmed up by conservative rocker Ted Nugent, the crowd welcomes the event’s next speaker: Francis Alfred Oakes III. Widely known as Alfie, the local farm and grocery magnate is 53, with broad shoulders and touches of gray in his close-cropped hair. Alfie is often clad in a short-sleeved polo shirt, the near-uniform of the region. Today’s version is emblazoned…

On a chilly overcast afternoon in early March, a dozen riled-up parents gathered outside a Fairfax County, Virginia, school board meeting, holding “Stop Asian Hate” and “UnFairfax” signs. They were protesting a controversial reworking of admissions policies that had dramatically changed the racial composition of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the country’s top magnet schools. Heading the rally, clad in a snake print dress and black boots, was Asra Nomani, a 5-foot-tall, Indian-born Muslim mother of a 19-year-old TJ alum. Nomani is the co-founder of Coalition for TJ, a parent-led organization that sued the board over its admissions overhaul, which lowered the Asian population of the incoming freshman class from 73 percent in 2020 to 54 percent in 2021. “How many of you came here for…

An evisceration of a federally protected right to end a pregnancy. That was what abortion rights defenders feared when a third Trump-appointed judge ascended to the highest court in the land. And Justice Samuel Alito’s contemptuous leaked draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization lived up to their fears, and then some. It includes more than 75 citations from legal scholars and experts, only four of whom are women. It rests a chunk of its argument on a 17th-century British cleric who had a side hustle convicting women of witchcraft. It strikes at the heart of the 14th Amendment’s privacy provisions, which other rights—gay marriage and use of contraception among them—rest on. It is fuel for other conservative attacks on bodily autonomy, including the persecution of anyone who…