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Self-taught activist Linda Stout doesn’t cast herself as a modern-day working-class heroine in Bridging the Class Divide: And Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), but she emerges as one anyway. Stout tells how she went from being the daughter of a poor tenant farmer to becoming the founder of North Carolina’s Piedmont Peace Project, a diverse grassroots social justice organization made up mostly of poor people. Her life and work provide a model for her argument that social change movements, traditionally headed by middle-class leaders, need the language and energy of working-class people to succeed.

“Making Peace” (St. Paul, Minn.: Independent Television Service), a four-part documentary airing on PBS in early February, profiles regular people pressed into action by the effects of violence on their lives. Clementine Barfield took her grief over her son’s murder and channeled it into founding a national support group, Save Our Sons and Daughters. After successfully prosecuting her abusive husband, Pam Butler now helps other women find ways out of domestic violence. Check your local PBS listings for airdates.

With clarity and wit, David Quammen prowls the globe in The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (New York: Scribner, 1996). In the Komodo dragon and the lemurs of Madagascar, he witnesses the way biologists struggle to avert these doomed species’ almost certain extinction; in the ghosts of the Tasmanian wolf and the dodo, he offers us a look at doom itself. Quammen explains how island species, cut off from the larger ecosystem, are easily driven to extinctionÑand shows how human beings, having hacked the world into “islands” of wilderness in a sea of farmland and pavement, have triggered mass disappearances.

“You can’t have development without somebody getting hurt,” says a former World Bank executive in Catherine Caufield’s Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). But the history of the bank’s development aid offers shockingly little of the former, and plenty of the latter. A morbid fascination develops as Caufield describes how the brightest economic thinkers of the day came up with plans to help the world’s poorest countries — only to plunge them further into poverty. Rich reporting from the sites of some of the World Bank’s most outlandish projects, along with an accessible economic analysis, makes for a compelling and important read.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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