How the GOP uses redistricting to maintain power in the purple state of North Carolina. Originally published in The Nation. JEFF JACKSON WAS A YOUNG PROSECUTOR living in Charlotte, North Carolina, when a seat in the State Senate unexpectedly opened up in 2014. To Jackson, politics seemed like an antidote to the daily frustration of […]
Fall of a True Believer
How Jack Abramoff gained the whole world and lost just about everything. Originally published in Mother Jones. ON THE FIRST MORNING of the Republican National Convention, the stocky former weightlifter waited nervously for his turn to speak. Just 25 years old, he was impeccably dressed in a dark gray suit and red tie. But he had slipped […]
Bush’s Bagmen
Meet the Pioneers and Rangers, the president’s A-team for campaign cash. Originally published in Rolling Stone. CAROLE BIONDA DARTED THROUGH THE HALLS of the Capital Hilton, armed with a red-white-and-blue tote bag bulging with checks made out to Bush-Cheney ’04. Three hundred executives from the nation’s most influential construction firms were meeting at the hotel last June, […]
Is the U.S. government making children fat?
Originally published in Nieman Reports. WHEN I AGREED TO WRITE about school lunches for the magazine Mother Jones, conventional wisdom tying junk food to childhood obesity was so rampant that I could have produced a serviceable story with very little research. Reading newspapers and talking with food professionals and government officials, I repeatedly heard that the nation’s biggest nutrition […]
Unhappy Meals
School lunches are loaded with fat—and the beef and dairy industries are making sure it stays that way. Originally published in Mother Jones. EVERY WEEKDAY AT LUNCH, courtesy of the federal government, more than 27 million schoolchildren sit down to the nation’s largest mass feeding. If we took a giant snapshot of their trays on a typical […]
Holy Spirit
Carrie Bolton preaches a freedom message—and not just inside her church. Originally published in Indy Week. HENRY HUNTER WAS STILL A YOUNG MAN the day he learned Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. With a presidential penstroke, the world suddenly seemed too big for Hunter to stay on the farm where his family lived. “I’ve […]
Highway Robbery
In 1992, The Independent Weekly (now Indy Week) and the Institute for Southern Studies collaborated on an investigative series called “Highway Robbery,” which examined how campaign contributions influenced North Carolina’s $1.6 billion transportation budget. The series spawned a grassroots reform movement and won two major awards: The Green Eyeshade (the South’s top journalism prize, from the Society for Professional Journalists) and […]
