Let’s Grow America

• Spoiled

  By Paul Roberts
  Organic and local is so 2008: the real future of food

• Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner

  By Clara Jeffery
  Michael Pollan on feeding everyone (not just foodies)

• Veg-O-Might

  By Jon Mooallem
  Can you get ripped without meat?

• This Little Piggy Goes Home

  By Bonnie Azab Powell
  California’s traveling slaughterman

• Slash and Burn

  By Heather Rogers
  Why biofuels are the rainforest’s worst enemy

• Trouble on the Limpopo

  By Adam Welz
  Ethanol’s African landgrab

• Tray Chic

  By Josh Harkinson
  From fro-yo to frisée: upgrading the college cafeteria

FEATURES

Trading Up
By Kevin Drum
How Obama can fix the climate, give clean tech a boost, and send you a fat check

Gold Member
By Josh Harkinson
Why does Senate majority leader Harry Reid let the mining industry get the gold while taxpayers get the shaft?

Meet the Parents
By Scott Carney
A Midwestern kid’s family believes his birth parents put him up for adoption. An Indian couple claim he was kidnapped from them and sold. Who’s right?

Out of Mind, Out of Sight
Photographs and text by Eugene Richards
Inside the psychiatric hospitals the world forgot

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DEPARTMENTS

• Editors’ Note
• Masthead
• Contributors
• Backtalk

OUTFRONT

Old Newt’s new tricks; Obama: hypnotist in chief?; Thrilla in Manila, Part 2; Taser: Don’t sue me, bro; rites of spring vs. righteous spring; Blackwater goes to Africa; wake up and smell the arbitration clause

EXHIBIT

The Trickle-Up Economy

By Dave Gilson
Schumer, squirrels, interns, debutantes: who wins and who loses in the bailout economy

MEDIA JONES

Kathryn Joyce on the popular author who teaches that meek wives are blessed, plus more book( Blank Spots, The Lottery Wars, Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, Brush Cat ), film( Food, Inc. ), and music( Habeas Corpus, It’s Not Me, It’s You, Goodnight Oslo, Welcome to Mali ) reviews

MOJO INTERVIEW

Straight Outta Mogadishu

By Eamon Kircher-Allen
Somali-born rapper K’naan talks about pirates, thugs, and kids with guns

The Studs Factor

By Justine Sharrock
Dave Eggers’ oral fixation

Best Case Scenario

By Kiera Butler
New Pornographer Neko Case

PRACTICAL VALUES

Foodie, Beware

By Daniel Duane
Is your farmers market a farce?

Cover illustration by Nick Dewar
Photograph of Newt Gingrich by Gary Boas/AdMedia/Newscom