Michael Mechanic

Senior Editor

Michael landed at MoJo after six years as an award-winning feature editor at the alt-weekly East Bay Express. He's written for numerous publications, including The Industry Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired. Father of two mostly charming kids and a striped cat named Phelps (okay, not the father), he lives in Oakland, California, where he raises four chickens, plays his guitar, and is lately attempting to teach himself fiddle and mandolin.

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Michael landed at MoJo after six years as an award-winning feature editor at the alt-weekly East Bay Express. He's written for numerous publications, including The Industry Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired. He set out to be a scientist, and as an undergrad spent a year in an organic chemistry lab at UC Berkeley trying to synthesize natural poisons found in the skin of certain tropical frogs. He later earned a masters degree in cellular and developmental biology, and another in journalism. In 2009, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for public service, as one of five writers in MoJo's "Torture Hits Home" package. The father of two usually charming kids and a striped cat named Phelps, Michael lives in Oakland, California, where, after years of classical piano and raucous punk-rock drumming (and putting out more than a dozen CDs on his former DIY label, Bad Monkey Records), he has retired to old-time and traditional American music, blues-guitar fingerpicking, and lately, teaching himself to play fiddle and mandolin. His family's chickens are named Lucia, Podge, Cat, and Weed-Whacker. The goldfish have no names, because the family plans to eat them someday.

The Things We Google

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Oct. 27, 2010 3:37 AM PDT

It's great when new readers find their way to our website, no matter how they do it. And thanks to a program called Mint, we actually get to see which search terms brought them our way. It's pretty fascinating to scroll through looking at stuff like that when you should be working. In any case, here's a selection of a dozen searches conducted over the past 10 minutes or so—with links to the articles these searchers found...

(Hey, we never claimed that all of our readers are classy.)

1. women who put items in their vaginas

2. schizophrenic obama

3. sex fiji

4. sex in American

5. Yoda of the Rumsfeld Defense Department

6. you tube gay

7. dumping toxic waste on a body of water

8. sarah palin just shut up

9. how old is Gloria Steinem

10. ku klux klan robes

11. all about pandas

And finally, the gift that keeps on giving...

12. cats

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Check Out My Daughter's Sexist Homework

—By Michael Mechanic

| Tue Oct. 26, 2010 12:03 PM PDT

One day last week, our five-year-old brought home the evening's first-grade homework—"decodables" books 29 and 30 from the Open Court Reading series—and my wife and I were like, huh?

Had the textbook publishers failed to make progress on gender roles since the Dick and Jane books of our childhood? Open Court is a phonics program published by SRA/McGraw-Hill and used to teach reading in elementary schools across America, including California, where we send our kids to the Oakland public schools.

To be fair, it's possible we may encounter instances of women in the workplace and men doing housework elsewhere in the series. But having these two books come home simultaneously brought me back to the days of feathered hair, puka shells, and John Travolta in a white disco suit.

Just look at these pages from "Best Mom" and "Jeff's Job."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

How MoJo Exposed David J. Stern and Launched a National Investigation

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Oct. 20, 2010 12:48 PM PDT

In November 2009, MoJo reporter Andy Kroll received a tip about a little-known yet powerful firm, the Law Offices of David J. Stern, which handled staggering numbers of foreclosures in southeastern Florida—the throbbing heart of nation's housing crisis. Among the allegations, the tipster had it from insiders that Stern employees were routinely falsifying legal paperwork in an effort to push borrowers out of their homes as quickly—and profitably—as possible.

Intrigued, Kroll started tracking down and interviewing people who'd worked for Stern. He pulled every public record he could find related to Stern's operation, and he called every foreclosure-defense attorney within the lawyer's Sunshine State empire. Taken together, the stories they told seemed unbelievable. Falsified evidence? Contests to see which employee could push a foreclosure case through the courts fastest? Court documents rubber stamped by rookie attorneys who hadn't even read them? Judges so swamped that they overlooked missing court filings? Foreclosures initiated on homeowners who had paid their mortgage bills on time? Lewd shenanigans by the boss? Each person Kroll contacted "gave me some new awful detail I hadn't heard yet," he says. "It just got worse and worse."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

This is Greil Marcus' Brain on "Shuffle"

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Oct. 18, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

Author and critic's critic Greil Marcus takes a scholarly approach to writing about pop music. He's covered all the greats of rock 'n' roll for a variety of publications over the years, including Rolling Stone, where he was the magazine's first reviews editor. Among the 18 or so books he's written or edited is 1975's acclaimed Mystery Train, in which he hones in on a handful of musicians in his quest to cement rock 'n' roll within a larger American cultural context. Marcus has paid special attention to the likes of Elvis Presley, Van Morrison—the subject of a book earlier this year—and particularly Bob Dylan. His new collection, out this month, is called Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. I reached out to Marcus with a few questions on his current and all-time music faves, new surprises, and, of course, His Royal Bobness.

Mother Jones: What's your favorite new release this year within your usual realm?

Greil Marcus: Carolina Chocolate Drops, Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch). Very educated people who somehow get inside the blackface minstrel music of 150 years ago, and come out the other side.

[Read more in the Riff blog]

Music Appreciation With Rancid's Matt Freeman

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Oct. 18, 2010 3:51 AM PDT

Matt Freeman has played bass in some ridiculous number of rock 'n' roll outfits over the years. One of my old bandmates introduced me to him way back when outside Berkeley's famed punk clubhouse 924 Gilman Street. That was in the pre-Rancid days, and I'd recently scored a fun little 7-inch vinyl record of Freeman playing bass with Kamala and the Karnivores. (I still have it somewhere.) He'd also played in the Dance Hall Crashers, Downfall, and various other acts he helped put together. But his real street cred came with his "former" status in Operation Ivy, a band on the Gilman scene that was the first to combine ska and punk rock into a high-intensity sound that spawned thousands of imitators. Even after the band split up, the now-defunct Lookout Records sold enough copies of Energy, Op Ivy's one and only full-length, that its members were able to quit their day jobs.

Rancid—formed a few years later by Freeman and Op Ivy guitarist Tim "Lint" Armstrong, and joined by guitarist Lars Fredericksen and lefty drummer Brett Reed—picked up where Op Ivy had left off. They recorded a series of successful albums on Epitaph records and toured relentlessly, indulging in various side projects when they grew restless. During a Rancid hiatus in 2004, Freeman also did a temporary stint with the seminal Southern California punk band Social Distortion. The boys have since grown into middle-aged men, but Rancid plays on, and Freeman has a new album out with Devil's Brigade, his psychobilly side project with Armstrong and drummer DJ Bonebrake from X—one of my favorite bands of all time. Last month, just prior to the CD's release on Epitaph, Freeman was kind enough to reply to a few questions about his own listening preferences, aging gracefully, and the TV series Breaking Bad.

[Read more in the Riff blog]