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.

Khaled Hosseini, Kabul's Splendid Son

The best-selling novelist on homecomings and Taliban-censored flamingos.

—By Michael Mechanic

| May/June 2009

Read the extended version of this interview here.

Khaled Hosseini's fortunes have risen as his native Afghanistan's have sunk. His 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, an engrossing tale of friendship, betrayal, and redemption, sold more than 6 million copies and was turned into a feature film. His second Afghan-centric best-seller, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is also headed to the silver screen. But the 44-year-old novelist's greatest stroke of luck came decades ago. When he was 11, he moved to Paris, where his diplomat father had been posted. Two years later, in 1978, communists assassinated Afghanistan's president, triggering a cycle of war and upheaval that continues today. Hosseini's family eventually settled in California, where he became a doctor. Now a full-time writer and goodwill envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he is skeptical that sending more US troops can bring his homeland back from the brink. "We're not going to win this war with bullets and guns," he says. "There has to be a broader plan." Read an extended interview here.

[Read the full article]

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The Only Birth Control Method Conservatives Like

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Apr. 30, 2009 10:00 AM PDT

Courtesy Harvard Medical LibraryAn exhibit at the Center for the History of Medicine doesn't sound like a good date night, but this piece in Harvard Magazine turned me on to one Dr. John C. Rock, the longtime Harvard Medical School gynecologist who pioneered hormonal birth control in the early 1950s and pushed for the FDA to approve the Pill in 1960—a development that did make for some good date nights.

Prior to that, the article notes, Rock would have given patients at his Rhythm Clinic the "scientific prediction dial" or, later, the Rythmeter (above). Back then, the rhythm method was the only legal form of contraception in Massachusetts. (Feb. 2012 update: Now, apparently, it's the only method religious conservatives want your health insurance to cover.)

Mainly, I just liked this gizmo. Probably required a Ph.D. to use the damn thing.

MoJo Podcast: 5 Questions for Author Khaled Hosseini

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Apr. 24, 2009 4:25 PM PDT

Length: 13:22 minutes (12.23 MB)

Khaled Hosseini's fortunes have risen as his native Afghanistan's have sunk. His debut novel The Kite Runner sold 6 million copies and was turned into a feature film. His second, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is also headed to the silver screen.

Download Audio

Wal-Mart's CFL Paradox

Home Depot recycles compact fluorescents. Why not Wal-Mart?

—By Michael Mechanic

| May/June 2009

CONSUMER RETORTS

Wal-Mart's CFL Paradox

Home Depot recycles compact fluorescents. Why not Wal-Mart?

WAL-MART has taken the lead (and the credit) in promoting compact fluorescent lightbulbs. More than 260 million have flown off its shelves since November 2006. But what about taking back used bulbs, which contain enough mercury to qualify as hazardous waste? Home Depot lets customers hand over spent CFLs at the returns desk, while IKEA has on-site disposal bins. For its part, Wal-Mart has invited customers to bring in their old bulbs just once—on a single day in 2007. Its website doesn't mention that the bulbs require special disposal or that they contain a neurotoxin that escapes if they break, say, in your kitchen trash. Spokesman Greg Rossiter says there are no collection plans in the works, "but if someone did have a bulb to recycle, we could direct them to a local location." The company notes that it's made suppliers cut the mercury in their bulbs by as much as a third. It also says its goal is to "create zero waste"—so why not start here?

HAVE A PROBLEM? Oh yes, you do. Go to motherjones.com/consumer-retorts to vent about annoying products and corporate policies. Selected entries will get MoJo swag

Could Pakistan Dissolve Altogether?

Interview: Afghanistan scholar Thomas Barfield on Pashtun rebels, a nuclear Punjab, and how Islamabad played Americans for suckers.

—By Michael Mechanic

| May/June 2009

Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield has been publishing relentlessly ever since the mid-1970s, when he wandered northern Afghanistan doing doctoral fieldwork. He has since emerged as one of America's foremost experts on the region, focusing on political development, provincial-state relations, and customary law. In 2006, Barfield, now president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his upcoming book on the changing concepts of political legitimacy in Afghanistan. I caught up with the professor to discuss the P-word—Pakistan—and its role in our current predicament. At the time of our interview, Pakistan's government had not yet signed its agreement with the Taliban that allowed for the imposition of strict Islamic law in six northwestern regions, including Swat.

Mother Jones: To what degree does future Afghan stability depend on reconciliation between India and Pakistan?

Thomas Barfield: The India/Pakistan relationship is probably central. Pakistan has from its inception defined itself in opposition to India, and that makes it difficult. But Kashmir needs to be reconciled. Pakistan could also dissolve: The four provinces have very little holding them together.

[Read the full article]