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.

Books: The Spiders of Allah

James Hider's atheist romp on the front lines of holy war.

—By Michael Mechanic

July/August 2009 Issue

It's a bloody miracle James Hider isn't dead. But then, Hider, the Middle East bureau chief for the Times of London, doesn't believe in divine intervention. Dumb luck has helped the atheist escape all manner of potentially fatal binds: cowering in a Gaza terrorist compound as Israeli warplanes buzz by, fleeing furious Iraqi mobs, and taking shrapnel with an American unit in Fallujah.

This romp through the cradle of civilization—think Hunter S. Thompson meets Christopher Hitchens—takes Hider from suicide bombers' lairs and hardcore Zionist settlements to a mosque in Mosul, where a 7-foot-tall Sufi sheikh insists the British reporter impale himself with a metal skewer. (He's kidding.)

[Read the full article]

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Chart Wars: Media Watchdog vs GOP

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Jul. 17, 2009 2:39 PM PDT

In an attempt to scare the public regarding the Dem's health reform bill, Republican leaders have been pushing this chart. (That's not all they've released. Oh, and remember Harry and Louse? They're baaaack!)

Liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America struck back yesterday with this attempt to scare the public regarding the GOP's easy media manipulation.

So who wins? Gotta say, my money is on the GOP. It's easy to sit back and do nothing except scare people about changing our current healthcare system, which, by god, is the thing people need to be scared of.

As far as the media is concerned, well, I'd say the public is already pretty jaded.

Follow Michael Mechanic on Twitter.

CIA Seeks a Few Good Doctors

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Jul. 16, 2009 1:52 PM PDT

Verbatim from the "Careers" section of the CIA website (but the links are ours):

Medical Officer
Work Schedule: Full Time
Salary: $124,526
Location: Washington, DC metropolitan area

Join us on the world stage. As a premier agency responsible for intelligence about the ever-changing global political, social, economic, technological and military environment, the CIA has never offered more exciting and challenging opportunities for new employees. Are you up to the challenge? The Office of Medical Services is hiring individuals with medical degrees and broad [sic: board] certification in primary care specialties to provide medical care and advice to Agency employees, dependents and assets. Positions are available for overseas assignments.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Re: Bing, Drum, Ford, & Jacko

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Jul. 13, 2009 10:23 AM PDT

Our intrepid political blogger Kevin Drum posted last Thursday on whether anyone is actually using Bing, Microsoft's newly revamped, rebranded search engine. So I just had to share some fun stuff I read in Business Week last month about how Bing—already targeted by bloggywags as an acronym for "But It's Not Google!"—got its name. (I can't say I use Bing, but I have tried it: The home page is prettier than its rival's, but after searching it for "Michael Jackson," and looking at the list of results, I got to thinking that the Gates Posse should have called it Biig: "But It Imitates Google!")

Big companies just can't come up with clever names the way we at Mother Jones brainstorm clever headlines—that is, in a brief, frenzied series of internal emails. These days they feel compelled to outsource. According to the June 15 story by Bizweek marketing editor Burt Helm (the issue caught my attention because my birthday is June 16) Microsoft hired a firm called Interbrand, which set eight of its employees to brainstorming around themes like "speed" and "relevance." In six weeks, the team came up with 2,000 names, then nixed the lamest—somehow overlooking Bing—and whittled the list to 600.

[Read more in the Riff blog]

House GOP: Forget Parenting; Give 'Em Baby Einstein

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Jul. 13, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

"Trillions in Spending, Billions for Babysitters? Nancy's 'Nanny-State' Enshrined in Legislation"—thus begins a policy document quietly released by the House Republican Conference (HRC) as the House Democrats introduced their big health reform package a couple of weeks ago.

The provision of the House megabill singled out for ridicule used to be a separate bill, HR2667, with one lonely GOP backer, Rep. Todd Russell Platts of Pennsylvania. As the HRC notes in its one-page brief, this provision would give states $1.75 billion in dedicated federal funds over five years to "improve the well-being, health, and development of children" via home visitation programs. It's intended to help teach low-income parents how kids develop, their age-appropriate behaviors and health issues, and "activities designed to help parents become full partners in the education of their children."

In short: babysitting.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]