During the vice presidential debate in early October, Kamala Harris was asked if she’d take a coronavirus vaccine. If it had the blessing of public health officials, Harris said, she would be the first in line. “But if Donald Trump tells us we should

"This is the day that the Lord has made. We have come to rejoice and be glad in it,” proclaims the Reverend Raphael Warnock during his October 4 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church. It’s a normal Sunday, with Warnock’s usual opening line, but it’s not

When the major media outlets finally called the presidential election for Joe Biden, huge numbers of people around the country took to the streets to celebrate. But as they popped champagne, danced alongside their neighbors, and cried tears of joy, t

If Nikema Williams knew November 13, 2018, would end the way it did, she says she would’ve worn a different outfit. That morning, donning a printed dress, red jacket, heeled boots, and a multistrand pearl set, the Georgia state senator said goodbye t

One chilly afternoon in November 2019, a process server stepped through the gold-rimmed doors of Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue to deliver a copy of an explosive lawsuit and a court summons to President Donald Trump. In those papers, E. Jean

On the night of March 10, Joe Biden’s campaign staff gathered in the foyer of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center to celebrate the three primary victories that had all but confirmed their boss would be the Democratic presidential nominee. As

Joe Biden could be the first president in more than three decades to enter office without both houses of Congress under his party’s control. Given Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s history of opposing any and all Democratic initiatives, that m

At four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, the lobby of Dragonfly Wellness is almost completely full. Clients perch expectantly on the sofas, waiting to be buzzed through the locked door marked PATIENTS ONLY. This might not be an unusual scene elsewher

It was still dark when Veronica Perez arrived at Primex Farms, a nut-packing facility in California’s Kern County. Crickets murmured in the almond and pistachio groves stretching for acres in all directions. Once inside the building’s mirrored doors,

When Kristen Alden moved to Thousand Oaks, California, two years ago, she joined the local moms’ Facebook group, Moms of Conejo Valley. She figured it’d be a good place to find out about activities for her 7-year-old, and she looked forward to unload

The first military challenge coins, one story goes, were handed out in 1969 by a US Army colonel to build camaraderie in his Special Forces unit. He took the idea from a National Guardsman who had required his troops to always keep a sixpence coin on

Let's do a little experiment. I’m going to tell you two stories, and at the end of this article, we’ll come back to them. Here’s the first story: Last year, millions of children in the United States received the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubell

Before the coronavirus hit in early 2020, a quieter epidemic was already taking its toll across the United States: the near-universal prevalence of diet-related maladies. More than half of the calories Americans consume come from “ultraprocessed” foo

Hi, I'm Jahna Berry. I’ve never started a story like that before, because I spent 15 years as a reporter with the mantra that you never make yourself the story. But today I’m writing to you as Mother Jones’ chief operating officer. I joined the leade

"You'll see the signs :)," Megan Bartlett had texted me as I looked for her house in Geneva, Illinois, a 20,000-person town about an hour west of Chicago. The note seemed vague to the point of useless until I arrived. In a maze of massive greige colo

Heading into the November election, Texas Democrats sounded more bullish than they had in decades, and it wasn’t because of Joe Biden. A burgeoning partisan realignment in the state’s sprawling suburbs over the last four years had brought them to the

The Lobby of the Four Ambassadors condo building in Miami wouldn’t look out of place in a Trump property. There are marble floors, fountains, chandeliers, and views of an outdoor pool facing the water. On a Friday evening in September, I passed throu

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, James Comey, Christopher Steele, John Bolton, a Time journalist, flag burners—this is just a partial list of the people Donald Trump has wanted to see imprisoned during his ignominious presidency. Yet the mom

On November 3, 76 million Americans said no to Donald Trump and his effort to steer American democracy toward autocracy. As a candidate and as president, Trump had prompted concerns about the fate of democracy within the United States. He had questio

Before there was a United States of America, there was a postal system. Revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson hatched their plans using underground postal networks known as committees of correspondence. In 1775, a year before the Dec

As a girl, Carroll Fife never quite knew what her grandfather James did for a living, but she knew he was a somebody. He was a factory worker, like most everybody else in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, but it was the way people gravitated toward him tha

Eighty-year-old Dennise Whitley was born and raised and still lives in Norway, a 5,000-person town in southwestern Maine where her family has resided for more than 100 years. Her grandfather and father worked in its once-thriving shoe manufacturing i

You need a story. That’s what they say, anyway. You need sympathetic characters, a villain, some violence, maybe a dramatic escape. That’s what it takes to gain asylum in the United States. You need lots of other things, too—a principled Border Patro

In November 2017, Emily Isaac packed her belongings and flew to Texas. More specifically, to the 21st Congressional District, gerrymandered to include half of San Antonio, a scoop of Austin, and a large rectangle of Texas hill country, where a Bernie

Clipboard in hand, Magda Morales politely approaches people waiting for the bus in downtown Tucson to ask if they’ve signed up to vote. The city’s sweltering transit hub is decidedly less bustling than it was pre-pandemic, but still noisy enough that

One winter night in Oakland nine years before a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, Raheim Brown and his friend Timesha Stewart, both 20, were smoking weed in a Honda, hazard lights blinking. It was 9 p.m., and two cops who had been patrolli

When the phone rang at 7 a.m. on a January morning in 2010, Eric Butler learned that his sister had just been murdered. He had four sisters—“I’m the only boy in a sea of girls”—and 29-year-old Lanell was eight years younger than him. She’d also fled

Thalia Tringo, a real estate agent in the Boston area, faces a dilemma whenever a homebuyer asks her if the local schools are any good. This can be a dicey topic because buyers’ perceptions of schools are often closely associated with the racial make