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.

Artist Drives Mass Consumption Home

—By Michael Mechanic

| Tue Jan. 8, 2008 4:31 PM PST

A picture is worth 1,000 words. Chris Jordan's photo illustrations are worth 200,000 cigarette packs, 170,000 disposable batteries, eight million toothpicks, two million plastic beverage bottles, and 426,000 discarded cell phones. (Not that you can tell from the tiny reproduction, but the image accompanying this item contains 29,569 handguns.) In his humbling exhibit titled "Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait" the accomplished Seattle-based artist uses these subjects and others to depict our consumer culture's troubling stats. The smoke-packs illustrate the number of Americans that die every six months from smoking-related illnesses; the batteries represent fifteen minutes worth of Energizer's product output; the toothpicks show the number of trees harvested annually to create mail-order catalogs. You get the picture. So rather than blather on for another thousand words about these fascinating images, perhaps I'd better just send you to look at them.

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The Verdict Is In: Our Voting System Is a Loser

Author William Poundstone on why a balloting method used to rate people's "hotness" beats the one we use.

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Jan. 2, 2008 1:00 AM PST

Editor's note: Other than the names of the politicians, this interview hasn't aged much since it first appeared. Our methods for electing our leaders are still problematic at best—and that's not even counting stuff like e-voting, voter ID laws, or the Electoral College.

It's heartening to know, as primary season begins, that ours may be the worst of all the voting systems in common use. That's the takeaway from Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It), one of a dozen books penned by William Poundstone, a professional skeptic who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he began pumping out nonfiction in 1982. Poundstone is particularly fascinated with how scientific ideas—mathematics in this case—play out in everyday life. His 2005 book Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street was hailed by the New York Times as perhaps "the world's first history book, gambling primer, mathematics text, economics manual, personal finance guide and joke book in a single volume."

The author became interested in voting theory after reading about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, the work of economist Kenneth Arrow, now a professor emeritus at Stanford University. Arrow identified what he perceived as a fundamental flaw in our democracy: Put simply, he argued that devising a perfectly fair voting system is mathematically impossible.

[Read the full article]

Clean Up the Coal Plants, Then Clean Out the Fridge

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Nov. 28, 2007 5:38 PM PST

While the filthy coal industry touts its far-off "clean coal" technology to help keep federal subsidies flowing, perhaps there's a simpler solution to the emissions and toxins these plants belch. A Texas company called Skyonic has developed a process it claims can reduce smokestack carbon by up to 90 percent by transforming the C02 into solid NaHCO3, better known by the brand name Arm & Hammer. Hey, baking soda from coal waste! Great idea, especially if—as the company claims—the stuff comes out food-grade clean. (Even so, I think I'll just use mine to eliminate fridge odors.)

The process, which is now being tested on a pilot scale in Texas, is driven by heat from the waste gases. It involves an input of sodium hydroxide (lye), which is produced on-site, and produces as byproducts hydrogen and chlorine gases, which could be sold at a profit along with the baking soda, the company says.

Skyonic CEO Joe David Jones told ZDNET, where you can read more on this, that his company's "SkyMine" technology also eliminates 97 percent of the heavy metals and most of the acids and nitrogen compounds, which would eliminate the need for pricey smokestack scrubbers. The company is working on a full-scale system it hopes to install in 2009 that would, it says, absorb the waste output of a large (500MW) plant—which includes about 338,000 tons of carbon annually.

Sounds almost too good to be true; pie-in-the-SkyMine, you might say. Still, if it pans out, there'll be plenty of baking soda for that pie, and one less reason to hate the coal industry. 'Course, there is a little matter of blowing the tops off mountains. ...

Clean Up the Coal Plants, Then Clean Out the Fridge

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Nov. 28, 2007 4:46 PM PST

Meet the New, Old Newt Gingrich

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 2:13 PM PST

What to make of the former gentleman from Georgia? Newt Gingrich devolved from being an outspoken member of the Sierra Club to helming a House of Representatives renowned for its hostility toward the environment. Now Gingrich has coauthored, with conservation professor and former zoo CEO Terry Maple, A Contract with the Earth, a tome released this month that calls for an era of environmental stewardship, albeit one driven by markets, science and technology. The chapter headings quote Emerson, Jacques Cousteau, John Muir and others, including revered Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who wrote the book's foreward.

Is Gingrich jumping on the hottest (no pun intended) national trend to keep himself in the game? Or is he merely bouncing back to his old views now that he's unencumbered by intense political pressures? To wit, Gingrich's voting record on conservation and pro-environment measures deteriorated fairly steadily during his years in Congress, according to the annual voting scorecards of the League of Conservation Voters. When he was a newbie in 1979-80 (tail end of the Carter era), the League gave him a 44.5 percent score--pretty darn good for a Republican. Gingrich fared nearly as well during the Reagan years (1981-1988), with an average score of 39 percent.

But then something happened: His LCV scores from 1988 (Bush I) through 1994 (Clinton mid-term) fell to a dismal 11 percent on average. In '94, the year Gingrich rode his Contract with America to the speakership of the House, he was awarded a big fat zero. ...

[Read more in the MoJo blog]