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.

Marjane Satrapi: Superman is Boring, Batman is Hot, Dictators Are Clueless

The creator of "Persepolis" on her new film, "Chicken With Plums," and just about everything else.

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Aug. 13, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Opening Friday, the live-action film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Chicken With Plums tells the story of Nasser-Ali Khan, a master violinist so heartbroken by his unattainable love, Irane, that he decides to stay in bed and wait for death to come and claim him. Codirected by Satrapi and French comic artist Vincent Paronnaud, it's an artfully rendered romanti-tragic fantasy full of dark humor and surreal tangents—think Woody Allen and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie, The City of Lost Children). But the story doubles as an allegory of lost homeland for Satrapi, whose debut, Persepolis, told of her upbringing in (and eventual flight to Paris from) Iran and its increasingly repressive regimes. During 2010's post-election uprising in Tehran, she says, "I was just in front of my computer crying day in and day out"—over the flight of democracy from Iran and her distant hope that it might one day return. During a rare break between cigarettes at her San Francisco hotel suite, the multitalented Satrapi ruminated on everything from the futility of war to Janet Jackson's "cute" nipple. Watch the trailer below, and then we'll proceed to the interview.

Mother Jones: Persepolis was mostly autobiographical. Chicken with Plums is mostly fictional. Which story was harder to tell?

Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis. I had to remember many things that were extremely painful. Seeing my grandmother, who is dead, even in animation, walking—it's really something. So from a psychological point of view it was much more difficult to make Persepolis. And it takes much longer. You have to be resistant.

MJ: In Chicken With Plums, the unattainable love of Nasser-Ali, your protagonist, is named Irane. Is that a reflection of your feelings toward your homeland?

[Read the full article]

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Watch: Reason's Nick Gillespie Questions James Ridgeway About Solitary Confinement

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Jul. 6, 2012 11:36 AM PDT

A mock solitary cell erected for a recent Senate hearing on the subject.

Fans of James Ridgeway, our stalwart senior correspondent, already know of his deep interest in a topic that most Americans prefer not to think about: America's routine use of long-term solitary confinement in its jails and prisons. An estimated 80,000 Americans are held in some form of solitary, he reports, despite evidence that it has profound negative physical and psychological effects on people and does nothing to make prisons safer—one of the primary rationales for its continuing use.

Among Ridgeway's Mother Jones articles and posts on the topic is the story of Troy Anderson, a mentally ill prisoner who has spent years in solitary with no end in sight; this recent check-in on the two remaining members of the so-called Angola 3—men who have spent 40 years in solitary because Burl Cain, Angola Prison's notorious leader (whom Ridgeway profiles in "God's Own Warden"), was angered by their political rabble-rousing; and a Q&A with Sarah Shourd, one of three American hikers who were captured by Iranian soldiers in 2008, accused of spying, and put in solitary for 14 months. You can browse all of Jim's articles on his author page.

In this clip, Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.com and Reason.TV speaks with Ridgeway about his reporting for us and for the specialty blog Solitary Watch.

The Book Big Tobacco Doesn't Want You to Read

With "Golden Holocaust," historian Robert Proctor deconstructs an industry that still kills more than 400,000 Americans a year.

—By Michael Mechanic

| May/June 2012 Issue

Proctor shows off his collection of tobacco paraphernalia.

Amid the impressive collection of cactuses outside his modern two-story abode on the Stanford University campus, science historian Robert Proctor points to a few sad-looking tobacco plants that he's growing just for the hell of it. "They're not thriving here," he tells me offhandedly.

They obviously know their enemy. "I like to write about the history of the unseen and the untold," he explains. "Of controversy, but also of evil. Of abuse of science. Of science used for horrific purposes." Proctor's wide-ranging scholarly interests include Charles Darwin, the politics of gemstones, and Nazi doctors. But his magnum opus is Golden Holocaust, a devastating new compendium of the tobacco industry's sins that lays out in head-shaking detail how a handful of companies painstakingly designed, produced, and mass-marketed the most lethal product on the planet.

[Read the full article]

"F*ck Cranbrook!": Eminem on Romney's Elite High School (Video)

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri May. 11, 2012 11:27 AM PDT

Remember this scene from 8-Mile? To dis' his nemesis in a rap battle, Eminem has learned in advance that the guy is a wannabe gangsta who is secretly named Clarence and attends Mitt Romney's elite private high school—where Romney's past "pranks" have been the subject of so much debate this week. Yeah, well, "Fuck Cranbrook!" says the rapper. Watch:

Video Exclusive: Ani DiFranco's "Which Side Are You On?"

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Apr. 30, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Ani DiFranco

"Which Side Are You On," the haunting 1931 labor classic by Florence Reece, the wife of a union organizer, has been covered by Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Natalie Merchant, and Dropkick Murphys, to name just a few. In January, with the release of her album of the same title, the inimitable Ani DiFranco added her name to the list. Actually, it's always been pretty damn clear which side DiFranco is on. (In this 1999 interview, we spoke at some length about her collaboration with labor organizer and rabble-rousing storyteller Utah Phillips.) DiFranco's reworked version updates Reece's sparse union-versus-management call to action to focus on the contemporary political machine. This exclusive video below, seen here for the first time, combines DiFranco's update with a montage of images submitted by her fans who were inspired by the song—you can find plenty more here. You can also download a free MP3 of the song here. And if this makes you want to hit the barricades, well, it just so happens that the Occupy and labor movements have big plans for tomorrow, so check back, because we'll be covering the protests as they happen.