Dave Gilson

Senior Editor

San Francisco native, word wrangler, data cruncher, chart drawer, pun maker. Recent areas of interest: campaign finance, income inequality, prison riots.

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Dave Gilson has worked at Mother Jones since 2003. Previously, he worked for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Northern California bureau of the New York Times.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

By Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin. $26.95.

—By Dave Gilson

| January/February 2005 Issue

In his latest book, Adam Hochschild -- a founding editor of Mother Jones -- chronicles the unlikely success of the British antislavery movement. In just 50 years a band of idealists and iconoclasts managed to shut down an institution that had fueled the expansion of the British Empire for nearly three centuries. As detailed in an excerpt published in Mother Jones (“Against All Odds,” January/February 2004), they did it by forging many of the tools of modern activism, from newsletters to petitions to consumer boycotts. Bury the Chains’ protagonists prevailed by doing what even the most media-savvy modern organizer must do to win -- stirring public passion against an injustice, no matter how deeply ingrained.

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Oil Slick

The Obiang regime tries to spin the Riggs scandal.

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Dec. 20, 2004 1:00 AM PST

So far, the Senate investigation that revealed Teodoro Obiang’s questionable dealings with the Riggs Bank and American oil companies has caused relatively little fallout for his regime. It has moved its money to accounts outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators, and it continues to do business with the same firms that made millions of dollars worth of unorthodox payments to Obiang’s family and associates.

Yet Equatorial Guinea’s strongman did not completely brush off last summer’s brief P.R. hit. In September, his government issued a statement condemning the investigation and its findings. As detailed in its indignant 82-point rebuttal, the Equatoguinean government claimed the Senate investigators not only got their facts horribly wrong, but that they did so with the “clear intention of denigrating” its image.

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Torture and Truth

Tracing the origins?and the aftermath?of what happened at Abu Ghraib

—By Dave Gilson

| Tue Dec. 7, 2004 1:00 AM PST

When the Abu Ghraib scandal boiled over last spring, it looked, briefly, as if it would cause a major shakeup -- if not in how the Bush administration was fighting the war in Iraq, then at least within the administration itself. But soon enough, election season arrived, and the issue all but faded into the background. That doesn’t mean we’ve heard the last of Abu Ghraib. Far from it, says journalist Mark Danner. “I don’t think this thing is over by any means.”

In his new book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War On Terror, Danner explores the origins and aftermath of the administration’s post-9/11 decision to “take the gloves off.” The book collects several articles written for the New York Review of Books over the past year, offering a mix of reportage -- Danner was one of the first reporters to arrive on the scene of the bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad in October 2003 -- and a close reading of the nearly 500 pages of official documents related to the Abu Ghraib scandal that make up its bulk. The documents, some of which are published for the first time in Torture and Truth, make for gripping, if disturbing, reading. Danner admits that most Americans are unlikely to delve into these papers with the seriousness they did another official account of terror-fighting gone wrong, the best-selling 9/11 Commission report. “These are difficult issues,” says Danner. “They make people uncomfortable.”

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How to Talk Like a Conservative (If You Must)

The left?s linguistics guru says liberals have to watch their language.

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Oct. 18, 2004 12:00 AM PDT

Last Thursday evening, about 150 people packed into the back of a Berkeley bookstore to watch the third and final presidential debate. As Kerry smacked Bush around onscreen, they munched on baguettes and brie and issued an occasional collective groan. But the night’s main attraction was the post-debate commentator, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff. Lakoff, a professor at the University of California --Berkeley and a founder of the Rockridge Institute, has emerged as the left’s message guru, the go-to guy for anyone interested in understanding why conservatives are winning the language wars and how liberals can retool their message. Sure, Kerry won a debate or two, but as Lakoff reminds his fellow liberals, “We have to get ourselves together.”

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Deep Water

Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment. By Jacques Leslie. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. $25.

—By Dave Gilson

| September/October 2005 Issue

For the past 70 years, the world has been on a dam-building spree, putting up 45,000 large dams at a cost of $2 trillion. Despite the awe they've inspired, the electricity generated, the deserts irrigated, most dams have come with huge environmental and human costs. In Deep Water, Jacques Leslie takes a thoughtful look at the ambivalent legacy of the rush to plug the world's rivers and asks whether there can be such a thing as a "good dam."

Leslie surveys dam projects from Australia to Zambia in a piece of meticulously researched globe-trotting. In his most compelling episode, he profiles Medha Patkar, an activist fighting India's plan to build 30 large dams along the Narmada River. When Leslie meets her, Patkar has just tried unsuccessfully—again—to drown herself in the rising res-ervoir waters. Though such tactics illustrate how maddeningly futile it can be to stop a dam's construction once it's under way, Leslie credits anti-dam activists with slowing the pace of dam building. Even the World Bank, which has rarely met a dam it didn't like, is starting to realize that not all dams are cost-effective or necessary.

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