In addition to blogging, I've written a number of long-form magazine pieces over the years. Most, but not all of them were for Mother Jones. This page contains links to about a dozen of my best.
Lead and Crime
This is by far the best and most important piece I've ever written. In a nutshell, it turns out that after World War II we poisoned an entire generation of children with the lead exhaust from our growing fleet of automobiles. Gasoline lead impaired the brain development of infants and toddlers in such a way that 15 years later, when they had grown up, they were far more prone to lead a life of violent crime. This is why we experienced a huge crime wave starting in the mid-60s through the early 90s.
We finally banned leaded gasoline in 1975 and 15 years later violent crime started to decline. It continued to decline through 2010 and is now at its lowest level in more than half a century.
The fact that lead is a neurotoxin and can poison infant brains has been well known for many decades. In particular, it lowers IQ and damages school performance. Starting in the early 2000s, however, additional evidence suggested that it also had an impact on aggression, impulse control, and emotional regulation, which are precisely the things that might make a person more crime prone.
I first wrote about this in detail in 2013, after the evidence had piled up enough that it could no longer be ignored. In 2018 I wrote a roundup of all the new research since 2013. There's a lot of it, and it all confirms the original hypothesis.
Unions
In 1950, more than a third of American workers belonged to a private-sector union. Unions were big, rowdy, working class, and not always supporters of progressive politics. Nonetheless, they provided one thing that nothing else could: a countervailing power against the business class.
Today, only about 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union. There is no countervailing power to take their place, which is a big reason why business profits have increased and middle-class wages have stagnated. The story of union decline is also the story of middle class decline. This is the story I tell here.
Predictions for 2024
In 2012, Democracy asked a group of writers to put down their political predictions for 2024. I focused mainly on racial trends, generational trends, climate change, and artificial intelligence. Read the whole thing to see how I'm doing so far!
Climate Change R&D
There's no reasonable question that climate change is a catastrophe of the first order. However, a vast amount of evidence also suggests that even believers aren't willing to sacrifice very much to stop it. And it's even worse in developing countries, which are unwilling to seriously rein in their carbon output before they reach Western living standards.
I believe the only plausible answer, then, is a massive R&D effort. We should be funding R&D in every possible direction, including old stalwarts like solar and wind, and longer shots like nuclear, biofuels, carbon capture, fusion, and more. The successful results should be made available free of charge to every country in the world. This is the only approach likely to succeed given that we're faced with a global problem and a public unwilling to sacrifice much.
Artificial Intelligence
I'm a firm believer that human-level artificial intelligence will become a reality in the 2030s and 2040s. This has explosive implications for work and society, none of which we're prepared to deal with. That's the topic of this multi-part series. I wrote Part 1 in 2013 and Part 2 in late 2017. I intend to finish the trilogy in 2023 or so.
- Part 1: Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?
- Part 2: You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think
Assisted Suicide
In late 2014 I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. By an odd coincidence, my father-in-law had also contracted multiple myeloma a decade earlier and eventually took his own life. This prompted me to write a cover story for Mother Jones about assisted suicide—both its history and its personal meaning for me.
In 2015 California passed an assisted suicide law. If you're within six months of death you can ask your doctor for a prescription that you can then use—or not—as you please. Will I ever exercise this option? As I said in the article, "I don’t know. I suspect that taking your own life requires a certain amount of courage, and I don’t know if I have it. Probably none of us do until we’re faced with it head-on."
Defunding the Left
The Republican Party has been engaged in a decades-long effort to defund the left. This article tells the story, from tort reform in the '90s to voter ID laws to public-sector union bashing. All of them have a single goal: to cut off the biggest sources of funding of the Democratic Party.
Voter fraud
Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election by crying "voter fraud!" is nothing new. He just took it to a new level. Republicans have been claiming that Democrats engage in massive voter fraud for decades, inevitably with no evidence whatsoever. And it all started in Missouri.
Finance Lobby
This story was written in 2010, but not much has changed since then. Even after an epic financial meltdown that exposed Wall Street for the malign influence it was, the finance lobby is still immensely powerful.
In a nutshell, the finance industry managed to convince everyone that the success of the financial sector should be measured not by how well it provides financial services to actual consumers and corporations, but by how effectively financial firms make money for themselves. It sounds crazy, but for decades we all bought into it: "Unlike most industries, which everyone recognizes are merely lobbying in their own self-interest, the finance industry successfully convinced everyone that deregulating finance was not only safe, but self-evidently good for the entire economy, Wall Street and Main Street alike. It’s what Simon Johnson, an MIT economics professor and former chief economist for the IMF, calls 'intellectual capture.' Considering what’s happened over the past couple of years, we might better call it Stockholm syndrome."
The Republican Tax Cut of 2017
Before they passed their $1.7 trillion tax cut in 2017, Republicans made a lot of promises. GDP would go up. Employment would increase. Wages would skyrocket. Two years later I went back to look at what had happened. It turned out that not one single promise had been met. Not a single one.
Well, there was one. But it was one that was never uttered publicly: corporate profits went up immediately after the tax cut and stayed high after that. And that was, after all, the whole point of the tax cut in the first place.
The Source of Political Rage in the United States
Liberals and conservatives have fought each other since the start of the Republic. But only in a few eras has that turned into rage so powerful that it threatens the foundations of our political system. We are in one of those eras now.
But why? In concrete terms, the country is doing pretty well. And the distance between left and right isn't really any greater than it usually is.
There are several possible answers to this, but for various reasons none of them fits the bill. Some might make things a little worse (like social media) and others might keep the gullible on board (conspiracy theories) but they aren't the source of political rage. The real source, it turns out, is simple: Fox News. Their growth corresponds precisely with the growth of rage, and that's by design. What makes Fox News unique isn't that they're more right wing than other outlets—they aren't—but that they traffic very deliberately in rage against liberals. They have convinced a generation of conservatives that liberals are deliberately trying to destroy America, and it makes sense that if you believe that you will fight back with every bit of energy you have.
Fox News is responsible for turning liberals into such loathsome anti-Americans that tens of millions of conservatives are scared to death of them. Not just opposed to them, but afraid for their very future if liberals are put in charge.
Read more about it here.