Clara Jeffery

Editor in Chief

Since taking the editorial helm at Mother Jones in late 2006, Clara and her co-editor, Monika Bauerlein, have won two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, relaunched MotherJones.com, founded an nine-person Washington bureau, given birth, and forgotten what it's like to sleep. It probably doesn't help she's on Twitter so much.

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Clara Jeffery is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Monika Bauerlein, she has spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by the addition of an eight-person Washington bureau, an overhaul of the organization's digital strategy and a corresponding tripling of traffic, and the winning of two National Magazine Awards for general excellence. Before joining the staff of Mother Jones, she was a senior editor of Harper's magazine. Ten pieces that she personally edited have been finalists for National Magazine Awards, in the categories of essay, profile, reporting, public interest, feature, and fiction. Works she edited have also been selected to appear in various editions of Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Science Writing. Clara cut her journalistic teeth at Washington City Paper, where she wrote and edited political, investigative, and narrative features, and was a columnist. Jeffery is a graduate of Carleton College and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Born in Baltimore and raised in Arlington, Virginia, she now resides in the Mission District of San Francisco with her partner Chris Baum and their three-year-old son, Milo. Their burrito joint of choice is El Metate.

War of the Wires

Can the FDA keep up with all the new medical devices now arriving on the market?

—By Clara Jeffery

| November 2005 Issue

As doctors and medical device manufacturers embrace the brave new world of using implanted stimulators to regulate organs, mood, and appetite, critics charge that the Food and Drug Administration is failing to guarantee that such implants work as advertised. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who led the investigations into the FDA's monitoring of Vioxx and other drugs, is currently exploring the agency's oversight of implants and other medical devices.

Even relatively noncontroversial implants like heart defibrillators are under fire. Since 2000, their use has tripled, and recent changes to Medicare reimbursement rules have further expanded the pool of potential patients. Critics charge that defibrillators are already being implanted in patients either too healthy or too sick to be good candidates. Meanwhile, it was recently revealed that Guidant Corporation failed for three years to disclose that its Ventak Prizm 2 defibrillator had a defect that could cause it to short-circuit. Only when the New York Times was about to expose the problem and related deaths did Guidant issue an alert to doctors and patients. It has since recalled more than 20 models of pacemakers. Asked to provide defibrillator failure reports, the FDA sent out heavily redacted documents, calling the censored data a corporate "trade secret."

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Shoving the Elderly Overboard

Once, retirees could count on three financial lifelines: personal savings, pension plans,and Social Security. But as the workforce ages and benefits disappear, will the elderly face a bitter end?

—By Clara Jeffery

| September/October 2005 Issue

There's been a lot of talk about cutting Social Security and Medicare. But without such social insurance what would happen to the elderly? We consulted a list of statistics we compiled in 2005. Most trend lines have only gotten worse since.

1/3 of the U.S. workforce has no savings set aside specifically for retirement.

Americans save only 1% of their disposable income a year. Germans and Italians save 11%.

72% of the private sector has no long-term disability insurance.

Twice as many workers and dependents are on federal disability as in 1990.

Only 21% of the private-sector workforce is covered by traditional pensions. That's a 23% decline since 1988.

60% of private pensions are underfunded -- to the tune of $450 billion.

Only 20% of the underfunding is at companies considered to be "financially weak."

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The Road to Nowhere

A nation of workaholics sings the summertime blues.

—By Clara Jeffery

| July/August 2005 Issue

Editor's note: Back in 2005, MoJo examined Americans' vacation habits (or lack thereof). Below, some timeless findings on W.'s days off pre-9/11, "presenteeism" problems, and how much sex vacationers really have.

In 2004, Americans forfeited an average of 3 paid vacation days—415 million days total—a 50% increase over 2003.

The average American needs 3 vacation days before feeling relaxed.

43% return feeling overwhelmed by the work they have to do.

32% of paid vacation time is spent doing nonvacation activities.

30% of employees do office work during vacation.

25% of Americans cited "not enough time" as a major barrier to travel.

17% said it would interrupt their careers.

In March, when France ended the mandatory 35-hour workweek and allowed employers to offer overtime, 1 million people went on strike.

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Sprawling Toward Bethlehem

Dolores Hayden examines the omnipresence of sprawl.

—By Clara Jeffery

| July/August 2004 Issue

In The Crying of Lot 49—Thomas Pynchon's 1966 satire of suburbia and its discontents—Oedipa Maas looks down "onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop" and is reminded of her first peek inside a transistor radio. "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had." Sprawl was a relatively limited phenomenon then; today it is omnipresent, and epiphanies about it are hard to come by. Nevertheless, Yale professor Dolores Hayden has, with a pinch of Pynchon, written A Field Guide to Sprawl in hopes of prompting a re-examination of what freeway subsidies, commercial-property-tax waivers, and exclusionary developments have wrought. By pairing the aerial photography of Jim Wark with her own devil's dictionary of 51 terms—from "alligator" (a failed subdivision) to "zoomburb" (think Sun City, Arizona)—Hayden makes an often depressing and wonkish subject lively and provocative. Some of her terms are clever, like "privatopia" (gated community), while others feel a bit tired, but no matter. In the end, it is Wark's bird's-eye view that allows one to see anew what has been festering all around us. By book's end, the reader, much like Ms. Maas, cannot help but imagine that sprawl is no accident, but a vast conspiracy of banality.

Combat Rock

Whether it is to psych themselves up or break prisoners down, American troops and law-enforcement agents have a somewhat discordant record of deploying music for martial ends.

—By Clara Jeffery

| September/October 2003 Issue

Whether it is to psych themselves up or break prisoners down, American troops and law-enforcement agents have a somewhat discordant record of deploying music for martial ends.

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