Michael Mechanic

Senior Editor

Michael landed at MoJo after six years as an award-winning features 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 usually 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 or so 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 from Harvard University, and another one in journalism from UC-Berkeley. 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 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.

How to Make a Deadly Pandemic Virus

Should a scientist's truly frightening experiments be published?

—By Michael Mechanic

| Sat Dec. 3, 2011 4:00 AM PST

In science, the unwritten rule has always been to publish your results first and worry about the fallout later. More knowledge is always good, right? Information wants to be free.

But what if the thing you want to publish is truly frightening? Millions dead kind of frightening.

This isn't a rhetorical question, in light of some experiments now in the pipeline for publication. H5N1 influenza viruses—a.k.a Avian flu—are efficient killers that have wiped out some poultry flocks and a few hundred hapless people who were in close contact with the birds. (New Scientist reports that 565 people are known to have caught the bird flu and 331 died.) But at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, virologist Ron Fouchier has created an Avian flu that, unlike other H5N1 strains, easily spreads between ferrets—which have so far proven a reliable model for determining transmissibility in humans. What's more, his breakthrough, funded by the National Institutes of Health, involved relatively low-tech methods.

[Read the full article]

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Mitt Romney: "Stuff the Ice Chest"

—By Michael Mechanic

| Thu Dec. 1, 2011 4:30 PM PST

This fun-with-Mitt Romney video is, hands down, the funniest thing I've watched in the past month. Enjoy:

VIDEOS: Mitt Romney's Campaign Finance Flip-Flop

—By Michael Mechanic

| Tue Nov. 22, 2011 3:10 PM PST

Shortly after I tweeted something rather impolite, though not inaccurate, about Mitt Romney's appallingly dishonest new anti-Obama ad, I received a direct tweet from ex-congressman and former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer. The conservative Democrat turned Republican presidential candidate (although you'd hardly know it, given that Roemer was excluded from the GOP debates) wanted to point my attention to a couple of video clips showing Romney's er, evolving views on campaign-finance reform.

The first one is pretty boilerplate: a young Senate candidate Romney taking swipes at Teddy Kennedy while calling big-money influence-peddling "wrong." But the second clip, wherein he tries to explain (or avoid explaining) to an old lady how it's okay that his PAC took $1 million from a shadowy shell company that was subsequently dissolved—well, it's just fun to watch Romney squirm. Have a look.

Here's Romney campaigning in Massachusetts in 1994:

And more recently, presumably in New England:

Oh, and if you're needing a laugh, here's a little holiday gift from ThinkProgress...

Book Review: Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

—By Michael Mechanic

| Fri Oct. 21, 2011 3:30 AM PDT

Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

Edited by Matt McAllester

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

If breaking bread is key to our humanity, it is doubly so in a conflict zone. In this riveting collection, correspondents share war stories through the lens of food and drink. The fare ranges from pagan sheep sacrifice in war-torn Ossetia (the ear tastes "burned, hairy, cartilaginous") to the overindulgences of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il ($120-a-bite rice cakes). Under fire in Afghanistan, US soldiers fetishize MREs, while, amid Rwanda's horrors, the tea tastes like death due to corpses clogging the waterways. One author trains to withstand excessive drinking, a prerequisite for broaching the Irish Republican Army's inner circle. Another one concludes his profile of Benazir Bhutto with a recipe for burfi, a sugary sweet that Pakistan's former leader gobbles compulsively during their visit—only days before her assassination. In the end, the food rituals become a vehicle for tales of greed and pettiness, but also friendship and human dignity.

Watch: MoJo's Josh Harkinson Occupies Olbermann Show

—By Michael Mechanic

| Mon Oct. 17, 2011 5:42 PM PDT

A couple of weeks ago, SF-based Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson was en route to East Coast fracking country when we diverted him to NYC to spend a few days covering the growing Occupy Wall Street protests. Now we can't get the guy home, fer Chrissakes!

Harkinson has been out there tweeting the latest #OWS developments long after most of his media colleagues have gone home to bed. He barely escaped arrest on Saturday while covering protesters' standoff with police in Washington Square Park. You can watch that video here. Check out his Monday appearance on Keith Olbermann's show below, and by all means follow Josh on Twitter.