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.

Work, Then Party

Who's more conservative, plastic surgeons or brain surgeons? We tabulated presidential giving to see whether a donor's occupation can predict which party will get the money.

—By Michael Mechanic

| May/June 2008 Issue

STATED OCCUPATION

TOTAL GIVEN

GOP SHARE DEM SHARE

IF YOU CAN'T DO, TEACH

Musician

$351,273

21%

79%

Music Teacher

$50,501

40%

60%

[Read the full article]

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Power Q&A: Amory Lovins

The energy-efficiency guru who cofounded the Rocky Mountain Institute advocates feebates, negawatts, and letting the little guys play.

—By Michael Mechanic

| May/June 2008 Issue

Mother Jones: What will it take for renewables to go mainstream?

Amory Lovins: They already have in many places. The U.S. lags badly; only 4 percent of our power comes from micropower—cogeneration, wind, sun, small hydro, geothermal, biomass, and waste fuel. The reason the U.S. lags so badly is that we have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants. It's the very opposite of a competitive market. So a good dose of conservative economic principles would get us even further than trying to give technologies we like subsidies as big as the ones we don't like are already getting. Of course, desubsidizing the whole energy sector would be a wonderful advance. Remember, the subsidies that renewables get are an attempt to catch up with much larger and ever-increasing subsidies that fossil and nuclear already enjoy. And those are permanent, whereas the renewable ones tend to be temporary, doled out a year or two at a time. The U.S. wind industry has been crashed at least three times, quite deliberately, by Congress messing with the tax credits from year to year and in a stop-and-go fashion. You can't run an industry that way and develop the capacity and the jobs. That's why we import most of our wind turbines.

[Read the full article]

Power Q&A: Joe Romm

The author of The Hype About Hydrogen on the absurdity of electric pencil sharpeners, why concentrated solar thermal is promising, and which stocks he'd invest a million dollars in

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Apr. 21, 2008 12:00 AM PDT

Mother Jones: What's the biggest impediment to the development of new energy sources?

Joseph Romm: The failure to price all the externalities: air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, what it costs this country to import 60 percent of our oil from unstable regions. We're enriching countries in the Middle East and Russia and Nigeria and Venezuela, and sending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas, and we build a military to defend ourselves in the Persian Gulf. None of that is valued in energy. We have a shortsighted approach to energy economics, whereas what you need to do is look at lifecycle costs.

[Read the full article]

The Crazy Things Americans Do for Money

If it involves prizes, beer, or bragging rights, the answer is almost anything.

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Mar. 14, 2008 12:00 AM PDT

Pass the hot dogs — They call him "The Locust." At 63, Rich LeFevre of Henderson, Nevada, is the oldest member of an elite community of speed eaters that make up leagues such as MLE (Major League Eating) and the International Federation of Competitive Eating, whose crest includes a soft-serve ice cream cone and winged lions devouring a hot dog from both ends. According to EatFeats.com, the five-foot-six, 130-pound retired accountant scarfed the following in last year's competitions: 3.24 pounds of ham in 8 minutes, 3.39 pounds of turkey in 8 minutes, 2.74 pounds of chicken wings in 8 minutes, 104 burgers in two 8-minute contests, 120 Jalapeño peppers in 6.5 minutes, 51 tamales in 12 min, 4.3 pounds of ribs in 12 minutes (in which he lost a tooth), 34 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in 10 minutes, 5.05 additional pounds of pork ribs in 12 minutes (see video), 4.19 pounds of chili cheese fries in 10 minutes, and a total of 131 hot dogs during four 12-minute qualifiers for Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. The Locust ranked ninth overall among his gluttonous rivals in 2007, with winnings of $6,725. Alka-Seltzer anyone?

[Read the full article]

The Fascination With Isolation

In real-life experiments, mental collapse comes quickly.

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Mar. 14, 2008 12:00 AM PDT

In 2004, when Andrew Golder and Lincoln Hiatt first proposed Solitary, a reality TV show about solitary confinement, they were met with the sort of polite humoring one might reserve for a delusional person. "The basic response," Golder recalls, "was 'No, that's too crazy.'"

Indeed, the initial idea was a far cry from the show they ultimately produced, in which an omniscient computer-voiced host named Val prods isolated contestants through a series of mental and physical challenges. In the beginning, Golder and Hiatt had wanted to put contestants in underground cells—with no books, music, television, phones, or stimulation of any kind—and keep them there until they chose to quit. This was to be true isolation, a purely psychological challenge observed through hidden cameras. Even the producers weren't convinced it would play. "How do you drive story?" Hiatt asks. And then, what if players managed to hold out for a long time? "We can't afford to shoot for 365 days and put people in the ground and just sort of let them quit one at a time. We don't have the budget for it."

[Read the full article]