Monika Bauerlein

Editor in Chief

Since taking the helm at Mother Jones in 2006, Monika and her co-editor, Clara Jeffery, have won two National Magazine Awards, launched a nine-person Washington bureau, relaunched the website, given birth, and forgotten what it’s like to sleep.

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Monika Bauerlein is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Clara Jeffery, she spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, the addition of a seven-person Washington Bureau, and an overhaul of the organization’s digital strategy that tripled MotherJones.com's traffic. Previously she was Mother Jones' investigative editor, focusing on long-form projects marrying in-depth reportage, document sleuthing, and narrative appeal. She has also worked as an alternative-weekly editor (at Minneapolis/St. Paul’s City Pages), a correspondent for US and European publications in Washington, D.C. and at the United Nations, an AP stringer, corporate trainer, translator, sausage slinger and fishing-line packager. She lives in Oakland.

Can't We Just Have a Moment of Silence?

—By Monika Bauerlein

| Tue Jun. 20, 2006 1:39 PM PDT

This is awful. And doesn't it seem... unseemly somehow to jump on the deaths as instant debate fodder?

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Faster, Pussycat! Drill! Drill!

—By Monika Bauerlein

| Tue Jun. 13, 2006 3:54 PM PDT

A while back, Mother Jones' Osha Gray Davidson exposed the environmental m.o. of the Bush administration in a piece focusing on the under-the-radar nature of policymaking in the age of Rove:

"What makes this administration different is the fact that it is filled with anti-regulatory zealots deep into its rank and file...The result is an administration uniquely effective at implementing its ambitious pro-industry agenda-with a minimum of public notice."

Now comes the LA Times with a terrific story illustrating just how this works. In a nutshell, way back when, the Clinton administration came up with a rule that would have forced oil drillers to do more to keep gunk out of the groundwater. The drillers were not happy, and in 2002--when the EPA was still working on implementing the restrictions--a Texas oilman who happens to have been the mayor of Midland and also happened to have once run Reagan's Texas campaign, wrote to his friend Karl Rove to "openly express doubt as to the merit of electing Republicans when we wind up with this type of stupidity."

You know the rest; the rule is history, thanks in part to the folks over at the Office of Management and Budget, who made sure those EPA bureaucrats toed the line. Write the LAT's Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten,

Environmentalists pointed to the Rove correspondence as evidence that the Bush White House, more than others, has mixed politics with policy decisions that are traditionally left to scientists and career regulators.

Ya think?

Next villain, please

—By Monika Bauerlein

| Tue Jun. 13, 2006 3:13 PM PDT

Riverbend, the girl blogger on the Tigris, has a bitter (how would you not be bitter in Baghdad?) take on Zarqawi:

"To hell with Zarqawi (or Zayrkawi as Bush calls him). He was an American creation -- he came along with them -- they don't need him anymore, apparently. His influence was greatly exaggerated but he was the justification for every single family they killed through military strikes and troops. It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now?"

Indeed, whom, or what, will we blame now? Killing Zarqawi was probably the only thing the administration could have done in Iraq that was guaranteed to generate positive spin--and the spin won't last. Someone, somewhere, must be thinking about how to follow this act between now and November.

Scorched Earth

In Darfur, the survivors of genocide at the hands of the janjaweed militias are corralled in desperate refugee camps--which is just how the Sudanese government likes it.

—By Monika Bauerlein

| September/October 2005 Issue

This text accompanies a photo essay by Oliver Jobard/Sipa in the September/October 2005 issue of Mother Jones.

THERE ARE 10 MILLION REFUGEES IN THE WORLD -- or many, many more, depending on how you slice the statistics and whom you count. That's more than the populations of New Jersey and Maine combined fleeing war, torture, disaster, hunger; 10 million evicted from their homes, displaced, ethnically cleansed.

Which means that we've seen these photos before. We've seen them, and we're familiar with the feelings -- the anger, pity, and guilt toward a world where horror is doled out wholesale and at random: Why should that five-year-old have been raped and not my daughter? Why must that family march through the desert for two weeks without food and not mine? Why must we keep seeing these images? We hate the questions because there are no answers.

[Read the full article]

The Business of Poaching

It's brutal, secretive, and fully globalized.

—By Monika Bauerlein

| July/August 2005 Issue

[Note: this text accompanies a photo essay by Patrick Brown in the July/August 2005 print issue of Mother Jones.]

PATRICK BROWN remembers when the magnitude of it all hit him, in a dark, flashbulb-illuminated room at Bangkok International Airport. Brown’s phone had rung at 3:30 a.m.; his contact at the Thai Royal Forestry Department was calling to announce a seizure of wildlife contraband. Brown, who for the past two years has been documenting the international trade in animals, had no idea what to expect—a package of tiger teeth on their way to China? Some rhino horns, popular as biological Viagra?

[Read the full article]