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.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @michaelmechanic

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.

Are High-Fructose Corn Syrup Makers in Denial?

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Nov. 1, 2012 1:31 PM PDT

Whoa! Did the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) seriously just put out a press release using our just-published exposé, "Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies," as a cudgel in its court battle royale with the sugar industry? Why yes, it did. And I quote:

In court documents filed yesterday, attorneys for the U.S. sugar industry tried to deny that The Sugar Association is deceiving consumers into believing that processed table sugar is safer and more healthful than high fructose corn syrup, even as several recent media stories revealed they are funding secretive campaigns to attack HFCS and other sweeteners.

In the newest issue of Mother Jones, the cover story "Sweet Little Lies" chronicles the sugar industry's decades-long use of paid-for allies to mislead the news media, public and regulators through front groups and questionable science. Just weeks ago, a Bloomberg investigative reporter revealed that The Sugar Association has recently paid $300,000 to the phony consumer group, Citizens for Health, to launch petitions and other sponsored activities to stir-up baseless consumer concerns about high fructose corn syrup.

Wow, okay then.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Watch: Gary Taubes Reveals the Sugar Industry's Secrets

—By Michael Mechanic and Brett Brownell

| Wed Oct. 31, 2012 3:03 AM PDT

Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies

A Timeline of Sugar Spin

How a Former Dentist Drilled Big Sugar

WATCH: Q&A With Author Gary Taubes

Secret Sugar Documents Revealed

10 Classic Sugar Ads

Charts: How Our Sodas Got So Huge

Mother Jones multimedia producer Brett Brownell and senior editor Michael Mechanic paid a visit to the home of science journalist and best-selling author Gary Taubes to talk about his new article "Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies." In the piece, Taubes and coauthor Cristen Kearns Couzens use a trove of internal documents to show how the sugar industry set out to counter scientific evidence suggesting that their product may play a role in deadly chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. The documents also reveal how the industry influenced agencies such as the FDA and the USDA—whose advisory panels included industry-friendly scientists, and whose conclusions about the safety of sugar leaned heavily on industry-funded studies. Click on the screen prompts in the video to view key documents and read the piece, which is featured in our November/December print issue. (A quick footnote: One question in the video about sugar consumption references the USDA's speculative new figures, while the chart you'll see shows the older "availability" figures, hence the difference.)

What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind

In the 1950s, university researchers put volunteers in tiny rooms and deprived them of sensory input. The results were shocking.

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Oct. 18, 2012 1:09 AM PDT

A 2008 BBC reenactment of Donald Hebb's isolation experiments

The experiences of prisoners held in solitary confinement—the despair, the disorientation, the hallucinations—are well documented, but laboratory observations of isolated human subjects and the profound effects of extreme confinement are exceedingly rare, in part because such experiments might have trouble getting past institutional review boards these days. But that wasn't the case during the '50s, when Donald O. Hebb, a professor of psychology at Montreal's McGill University, set out to study how sensory isolation affects human cognition.

Hebb had previously examined the effects of visual deprivation in rats as a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. In 1951, he secured a $10,000 grant from the Canadian Defence Research Board to expand his research to human subjects. The results were dramatic. Depriving a man of sensory input, he soon discovered, will break him in a matter of days.

Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons.

Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell

What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind

Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary

Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State

VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

Hebb's experiments went well beyond the level of isolation prisoners typically experience in solitary. He offered male graduate students $20 a day—excellent pay for the time—to stay in small chambers containing little more than a bed. "It would be a bit more than a meter wide and a couple of meters long, probably enough for a table or something," recalls Peter Milner, one of Hebb's former graduate students who is now an emeritus psychology professor at McGill.

At the time, Milner was working on another project for Hebb, but he saw the sensory deprivation rooms firsthand. "They were given food by human beings, and also when they needed to use the washrooms and things they would be escorted there by other human beings. So they weren't completely alone," Milner says. He recalls watching as the subjects were led down the hall to the bathroom clad in frosted-over goggles. "They wore goggles and earphones and [there was] some sort of noise, just white noise, from a loudspeaker," he says.

[Read the full article]

WATCH: Mitt Romney's Bain Employees Gone Wild!

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Sep. 27, 2012 11:07 AM PDT

Our own David Corn had yet another video scoop today: Footage from a CD-ROM created to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Bain Consulting in which a young Mitt Romney speaks of "harvesting" companies for profit—with, of course, nary a mention of job creation. But buried way down in Corn's post was this gem featuring company employees getting wild onstage at Bain parties. Enjoy!

Michael Chabon's Vinyl Draft

The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist on race, procrastination, and his new book, "Telegraph Avenue."

—By Michael Mechanic

| September/October 2012 Issue

Illustration by Joe CiardielloCraving Ethiopian, the novelist Michael Chabon—plaid shirt and jeans, man purse made from upcycled inner tubes, signature locks cropped to where he might pass for some mere literary mortal and not the author of a half-dozen bestsellers—strolls up a sidewalk not far from the Oakland-Berkeley border, where he lives with his wife, author Ayelet Waldman, and their four kids. This scruffy stretch is the setting of Chabon's new book, Telegraph Avenue, a Tarantinoesque romp following the struggles of two families, one black, one white, as a megastore threatens the husbands' vintage-vinyl shop, Brokeland Records, and a clash with an arrogant doctor lands the wives' midwifery practice in jeopardy.

Chabon was only 24 when he published his first hit novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, followed some years later by a second best-seller, Wonder Boys, which was later made into a movie starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire. Over the next 15 years or so, Chabon cemented his rep as a genre-busting—mystery, sci-fi, young adult, comics—master of language and crafter of metaphor, winning a Pulitzer prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and creating an alternate Jewish homeland in Alaska for his fabulously unique novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. His swashbuckling Gentlemen of the Road (working title: Jews With Swords) is set in 10th-century Khazaria while Summerland, intended for younger readers, sends us leaping among baseball-obsessed parallel worlds under threat from a dark character called Coyote. Back in Oakland, between mouthfuls of doro wat, the author tells me of his presumed kinship with Harriet Tubman, his "big internet problem," and why he considers himself a failure. No, really.