Adam Weinstein

Engagement Editor

I'm Mother Jones' engagement editor and Tumblrizer, specializing in explanatory journalism and new-media reporting. As a Navy vet and ex-Iraq contractor, I'm also committed to articulating all things martial—good, bad, and weird—to new audiences.

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Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' engagement editor, having previously served the magazine as its national security reporter and copy editor. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the Tallahassee Democrat. He's written for the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, and Newsweek. A Navy veteran, two-day Jeopardy champion and ex-political scientist, he also did a recession-fueled stint as a military contractor in Iraq. For more about Adam and his writing, click here.

Columbia to Citi CEO: Drop Dead

—By Adam Weinstein

| Tue Apr. 20, 2010 4:45 PM PDT

Students and alumni of Columbia University in the City of New York® are raving mad today over the university's selection of Citigroup CEO/recession profiteer/irrational optimist Vikram Pandit to speak at its upcoming School of International and Public Affairs commencement. Turns out the school's budding diplomats, civil servants, and aid workers were less than pleased to be sent off into a bleak job market by one of America's worst captains of industry (if, by "industry," one means "that steaming load of worthless mortgage-backed derivatives that sent 401(k)'s and hiring levels off a jagged cliff").

"I certainly did not spend two years of my life at this school to sit for hours at my own graduation ceremony applauding a multi-millionaire bank executive while he lectures myself and my peers about a future to which he and the industry he represents caused grave damage," one unnamed student wrote on a Facebook bulletin board for the members-only group "We Don't Want a Bank Executive to Speak at Our Commencement," according to a student blog. The creator of that Facebook group, Daniel Safron-Hon, praised a series of campus protests staged by his classmates after Pandit's selection was announced Friday afternoon. "We are not in an attack mode," he said. "I believe this can be resolved. But the ball is now on the dean's side. If the school ignores the protests, it's hard to know what will happen."

Not that anyone at Columbia (full disclosure: I went there) should be shocked, shocked! to find Citigroup traipsing around the Morningside Heights campus. Pandit—who holds four Columbia degrees—sits on the university's board of trustees. One of his predecessors, Charles O. Prince, is a trustee of the university's Teachers College. A scan of the bank's current executive ranks turns up a number of benefactors to the university, alumni, and professors.

It's hard to deny that the university has a special relationship with Citigroup: Its ATMs (and only its ATMs) are on campus...where your student ID can double as a Citi bank card, if you enrolled for a student account during orientation...which makes it a lot easier to receive your student loans when they're disbursed by...who else? Citigroup. In fact, Citi (full disclosure: I borrowed from them, grudgingly) has historically been one of the university's "preferred lenders," even after Columbia was forced in 2008 to fire a financial aid administrator who'd been on the dole of one of those same lenders. (In a related investigation, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo forced Citigroup to donate millions to a lending-education fund to atone for its student-loan sins.) I knew a lot of classmates who, once graduated, took jobs with Citi or its peer institutions on Wall Street to pay off massive student debts that originated with a Citibank lending arm.

So, bully for the students of SIPA, biting the hand that starves them. Unless, of course, Citigroup starts hiring again. In which case Pandit's likely to be welcomed with open arms and desperately laser-printed business cards.

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US Hands Base Over to Taliban

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Apr. 19, 2010 4:33 PM PDT

Al-Jazeera English released chilling footage Sunday of Taliban fighters overrunning a former US outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, capturing the drama, the melodrama, and the dilemmas that attend counterinsurgency against an ideological foe.

The base—which was always small in comparison to most of the military's forward operating bases (FOBs) in Iraq and Afghanistan—was abandoned last week by its Army residents as part of a larger strategy by the US commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It wasn't the first such outpost that the Army has ditched, and it's unlikely to be the last, as US forces change tack and focus on larger, less-remote urban areas of the country. "The area was once very operationally important, but appropriate to the new strategy, we are focusing our efforts on population centres," the Army said in a press statement. In that sense, the loss of Korengal Outpost isn't a defeat, but part of a larger advance.

Still. Forty-two US servicemembers lost their lives within those walls in five years of fighting over what's been dubbed "the Valley of Death." And Al-Jazeera's video shows that the Taliban isn't afraid to use some empty ammo cans and sandbags as part of a massive PR coup. "There's a lot of ammunition left behind," claims Anwar, one of the local Talibs. "Mortars, rockets, missiles. This, God willing, we will use against them." His claims to possess US munitions and petrol are probably lying bravado. But perceived defeats in this kind of war have a wicked way of becoming more concrete.

Video and full analysis follow the jump.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Molly Ringwald's Still Pretty in Pink

The Breakfast Club star talks Bristol Palin and what it's like to go from '80s teen heartthrob to mother of three.

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Apr. 19, 2010 10:28 AM PDT

From teen heartthrob in the John Hughes movies of the '80s to mother of a pregnant teen in the TV series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, actress Molly Ringwald has come full circle. The Pretty in Pink icon, a mother of three, has also authored her first book, Getting the Pretty Back (HarperCollins) due out April 27. It's a splashy, servicey manual of confessions and advice for women approaching their 40s and trying to get comfortable in their own skin. Ringwald took time from her family and work schedules to tell Mother Jones about the book, her greatest film roles, the passing of her movie mentor, parenthood, and a tad of politics.

Mother Jones: 2010 marks the 25^th anniversary of the release of The Breakfast Club. How do you think it holds up?

Molly Ringwald: Judging from the way people respond to it now, I think it holds up incredibly well. Much more than I ever imagined when we actually did it. I loved the script and I loved making it, but I never dreamed that it would have the sort of longevity that it has. I think a lot of the themes that are explored in the movie are really totally relevant today. And there’s never been a movie really like it at all, so there’s been nothing to sort of knock it down off its pedestal.

[Read the full article]

Books: Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease

—By Adam Weinstein

| Fri Apr. 9, 2010 6:00 AM PDT

May/June 2010 Issue

In the hands of Big Pharma, medicating melancholy translates to cold cash. But for Greenberg, a psychotherapist, it goes deeper than that: The overselling of chemical cures has left our Prozac nation unable to distinguish between run-of-the-mill sadness (which doesn't need a pill) and genuine illness (which may need more than just meds). Even so, "I'm not worried that antidepressants will turn us into mind-numbed, smiley-faced zombies entirely," he writes. "The drugs aren't that effective, at least not yet."

"God Hates Fags" Son Speaks [VIDEO]

—By Adam Weinstein

| Tue Apr. 6, 2010 3:58 PM PDT

If you know Mother Jones, you know the Reverend Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps. In just the past week, we've carried two stories touching on the Kansas hatemonger and the extended family that comprise his Westboro Baptist Church—a "crew of sign-carrying flat-earthers, whose shtick involves loudly thanking God for smiting gay-loving, libertine America and its sworn defenders." They crisscross the nation, spreading their "God is hate" gospel at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; at grade schools; and anywhere else they can score a permit and a TV crew.

Never let it be said that Phelps doesn't practice what he preaches. He's had 13 children, and a few of them—the ones who rubbed a few extraneous brain cells together and found Daddy's command of theology wanting—have found themselves on the outs with the family. After copious beatings, that is.

One of those children, Nate Phelps, quietly slipped into the ether, working as a cabbie in Cranbrook, British Columbia. But a chance encounter with a journalism student in his taxi led to a riveting news article...which led to a speaking engagement at an American Atheists convention...which led to this. Last week, Phelps sat down for an extended TV interview with reporter Peter Klein of The Standard, Canada's 60 Minutes. This is no prodigal son; he ain't ever going back. But the story of where he's been and what he's seen is absolutely amazing, from the stories of abuse to his father's drug dependency. Watch the full video and read selected quotes after the jump.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]