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- Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong
- Attendance: up. Dropout rates: way down. College enrollment: through the roof. What I learned from a year inside a “low-performing” school.
- Unbreakable
- An Iraqi rocket took her legs, but that didn’t stop Tammy Duckworth. And now a tea party incumbent thinks he can break her stride?
- Show Me the Money
- Karl Rove and the Kochs are spending millions to take down Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill. One problem: Their covert cash is now her rallying cry.
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Cowboy Up
With the Senate majority at stake, an ex-cashmere-goat-rancher and a purple-barley farmer face off over who’s more Montana.
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Bob Kerrey Doesn’t Need This
He’s gone to war, run for president, and wrestled his past. Now he wants Nebraska to send him back to DC?
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Can Harold Ickes Make It Rain?
He brought in the big checks for Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Hillary. His toughest assignment: ending Obama’s donor drought.
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Harper Reed’s Machine Can’t Read Your Mind—Yet
Meet Obama’s microtargeting brain trust.
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The Lying Game
What are political fact-checkers good for, anyway?
As a public service, Mother Jones, which is a nonprofit magazine, will release the full contents of this issue online over the next several weeks. If you’d like your Mother Jones sooner—and you want to support independent investigative journalism—please subscribe now.
Departments
Outfront
Building a “post-Roe” nation; Live free or dive: libertarians at sea; Will black churches help stop gay marriage?; How our sodas got too big to gulp
Mixed Media
Michael Chabon on his “big internet problem”; “BahamaMamasLoveObamasLlamas”; Girl meets Freud: novelist Lidia Yuknavitch; It’s okay to be George Takei.; plus book, film, and music reviews
Food + Health
- Got E. Coli?
- Raw milk: Got pasteurization?
- The Fishy Truth About Your Meat
- Your pork chop is made of sardines.
Cover: Illustration by Dale Stephanos
Contributors
Tammy Duckworth (“Unbreakable“) told Mother Jones‘ national security reporter and fellow vet Adam Weinstein he’d been lucky to fly in a copter with a leaky transmission; that’s how pilots know there’s any fluid at all.
Like Nebraska’s ex-governor (“Bob Kerrey Doesn’t Need This“), six-time National Magazine Award winner 1 Ted Genoways recently moved back to the state—though no one has called him a carpetbagger.
2 Danny Wilcox Frazier put 3,000 miles on his Toyota 4×4 chasing candidates with his camera.
Staff reporter 3 Tim Murphy cyberstalked Obama’s top geek (“Harper Reed’s Machine Can’t Read Your Mind—Yet”) because the campaign wouldn’t talk; his colleague 4 Adam Serwer (“‘You Can’t Equate Your Sin With My Skin’“) watched Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. sermonize without missing a music cue.
Our resident dark-money expert, Andy Kroll, was floored by a veteran fundraiser’s foul mouth (“Can Harold Ickes Make It Rain?“)
5 Kristina Rizga is writing a book about her time at San Francisco’s Mission High (“Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong“) art for that story is by Bay Area photographers Winni Wintermeyer and Lianne Milton and illustrator 6 Jon Krause, who can boast of having drawn for both Playboy and Government Executive.