When he was 7, Sam Myers’ eyesight was limited by cataracts that shaped his childhood and adulthood but never limited his music tours and ascension in the blues world—as a pioneering singer, harmonica player, and drummer. He became one of the most decorated and vibrant blues giants, jamming with Elmore James in the 1950s and Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter.

In his 70 years, Myers spent two decades recording at bars, restaurants, and clubs in creative friendship with, among many supporters, the chef and producer Jack Chaplin, who’s familiar to Recharge readers as the versatile, acclaimed host of Daddy Jack’s Cooking With the Blues. The long-anticipated album, Sam Myers & the South Dallas Shoan-Nufferz: My Pal Sam, is a thrill of uptempo jams—a studio compilation of never-before-heard tracks available through Chaplin’s Patreon page. 

Chaplin deserves a ton of credit for getting Myers into the studio again and into Chaplin’s spaces—in Dallas and now New London, Connecticut—along with the blues great Lucky Peterson. Chaplin has helped to keep the blues at bay by cooking for families and community members during the pandemic, with all the creative tips we’ve come to enjoy from his personalized channel Cooking With the Blues.

There’s a lot of blues coming in the news ahead; here’s some strength to meet it with. Share your Myers and Chaplin shoutouts at recharge@motherjones.com, and get with Chaplin’s Patreon if you haven’t yet.

Each week, we take a look at our archives for boosts to propel you into the weekend.

In January 1992, Frances Fox Piven and Barbara Ehrenreich sat in on a forum hosted by the Nation to hear Jerry Brown—then running for the Democratic presidential nomination against third-way Democrat Bill Clinton. “Strikingly,” Ehrenreich noted in her essay for us on that campaign, “he was talking about class.” Piven and Ehrenreich nudged each other, raised eyebrows, and watched as “nearly five hundred hard-nosed New York leftists clapped till their hands were calloused.”

It’s a tiny moment. But I spoke to Piven for an article earlier this year, and Ehrenreich is a hero—so it is one of those small, fascinating, and accidental scenes that gives one a jolt. Whoa! They’re friends! I’ve found that happening often in the archives, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. You recognize the names (Gingrich, Clinton, Trump), but they come up in different contexts. I was speaking recently to a friend about how these decades almost feel further away. The fall of the utopian ’60s to the overdrive ’80s consumerism is well-trod territory; I can chat about the 1930s and 1940s with any white man over the age of 60, as it is law they must be obsessed with either World War II or socialism. But chatter about the Iraq War and Clinton’s business-friendly Democratic Party is relegated to broader strokes. (That’s my narrow experience, at least.)

Reading Ehrenreich’s larger analysis of the 1992 campaign, I was surprised by the details; I was surprised to see her framing of Clinton’s rise generally. The press loved his white male fighting spirit, she writes. They enjoyed the gladiatorial nature of his quest. It was, she felt though, almost meaningless. It was a PR stunt and a sideshow. She remembers George H. W. Bush canceling a trip to Brazil on government business because he was too busy running for reelection. And it dawned on her: “Today, being president is really no different from running for president.”

That sounds almost trite. But whereas we may fix that to political jostling or reality TV or 24-hour news, Ehrenreich has, I think, a better explanation.

She notes there is no “tangible product” for many when they look at the government. We are glimpsing, in the constant election cycle, “that emptiness at the center of things.” The business of government has been completely subsumed by the act of electioneering because the business of government is, well, gone: erased by Reagan and then adopted by Democrats.

“It is government-as-spectacle,” she writes, “and much of it has been a sorry spectacle indeed.” Before, “words like ‘policy’ and ‘programs’ meant something even to ordinary people, of the kind who do not reside in think tanks.” Think of “Medicare, Medicaid, Title VII, Title IX, OEO, OSHA…”

If you’re looking for the start of the never-ending campaign, she posits, why not locate it in when the government stopped having anything else to do. Ehrenreich, in those early days, did see hope in the Brown campaign: a smattering of burnout kids, workers, union nurses, and Allen Ginsberg.

She decided to root for him when she saw Brown joust with Clinton in a debate, and upon being prodded on how his health care plan would have the audacity to harm the bottom line of rich doctors, Brown said, with a grin, “I can’t wait.”

The longtime California politician is an odd figure. The son of a previous governor, prone to late-night working, and a figure associated with the 1960s left despite being in Yale Law School at the time; his penchant for a certain spirituality (he was called Gov. Moonbeam, famously), and also for strict Catholic rules, caught many off guard. Gary Wills in a 1976 essay for the New York Review of Books compared him to Thoreau (unfavorably!).

In vying for Brown, Ehrenreich predicted the new leftist turn a bit too early. She thought Brown’s ideas were simmering into a Democratic party less interested in cutting and gutting and more invested in a class-based approach. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. But it might be happening now. (Might, I stress.) For all the vapidity of the constant electioneering, policies and programs do matter to people again: Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, Social Security.

I could be falling into the same hopeful trap here too.

Ehrenreich ends on the right beat. We just don’t know:

But the other great lesson of the last calendar year is: You never know. What began in a frenzy of jingoism ended in bitterness and economic collapse. Today’s defeat may be tomorrow’s opportunity, and opportunities evaporate even as they come into view. There is a wild churning force at work in our media-driven culture, driving us from “crisis” to “crisis,” from one mad, collective mood swing on to the next. Those who would win must learn how to ride along with this force, disdaining defeat, grasping every favorable current and eddy, trying and trying, getting the joke. There will be a next time, and this we know for sure: Next time is bound to be different.

After 38 years of secret donations, a billionaire many times over has, at 89, given away all $8 billion to schools, charities, and foundations. Chuck Feeney of San Francisco has walked the walk after amassing his fortune as a co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, following through on a pledge to empty his pockets for a clearer conscience. (His name became public only after the duty-free stores were sold and a lawsuit over the sale would’ve revealed his anonymous donations.)

As my colleague Mark Helenowski visualized in a must-watch video revealing the staggering wealth accumulated by a tiny few during the pandemic, this period of crisis has been a payout for billionaires. Almost 650 of them have grown their collective wealth by an estimated $685 billion since March. Watch his animated video and take stock in—uh, take into account (uh, take into consideration)—the fact that while many superwealthy get superwealthier, at least one has taken steps to change course.

I can hear your begrudging applause. I too am inclined not to applaud too loudly because Recharge’s coffers have not been lined with Feeney’s billions. If any billionaires get in touch at recharge@motherjones.com, I’d be amenable to putting you in contact with my colleagues in our giving department.

Goodness in the world:

Double win. Actors Ron and Jasmine Cephas Jones have become the first father-daughter pair to win Emmys at the same time. Well done.

Marching on. This Saturday is the fourth annual March for Black Women, held virtually to keep marchers socially distanced. Speakers include Rep. Ilhan Omar, Gina Belafonte (daughter of Harry Belafonte), and Opal Tometi, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

Soaring. Teenage trumpeters Maglyn Bertrand and Tatjana Lightbourn are the new Louis Armstrong House Museum fellows and they’re planning virtual tours and blogs to highlight Armstrong’s home and legacy.

Screening. The LA Asian Pacific Film Festival is showing Francis Wong: Chinatown Revolutionary, a look at the pioneering San Francisco–based saxophonist and activist who co-founded Asian Improv aRTS with Jon Jang—who, together, merge their depth of music with historical narratives and a commitment to justice. Catch my interview with Jang.

If you have a Recharge story or just want a direct word of recognition, let us know at recharge@motherjones.com.

The outpouring of remembrances of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reveals the depth of her impact; her legacy brings our country and all women living here closer to the aspiration for equality under the law. Ginsburg was a critical member of the collective of women fighting for equal rights, and the fight enters a new phase of urgency and intensity.

In the days before Notorious RBG’s death, reporters investigated allegations that ICE detainees were subjected to unwanted hysterectomies. Even as the story unfolded, I was outraged by my lack of surprise at the claims. As history repeatedly demonstrates, women with uteruses are one of mankind’s greatest threats.

I don’t find my uterus threatening at all; just the opposite. I like getting my period. Sure it’s messy, a bit painful, sometimes inconvenient, but my period reminds me that beneath my layers of chosen duty—as a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and community builder—I’m connected to what Audre Lorde calls The Erotic in her 1984 Sister Outsider. In literature there is light, and Lorde shines so much of it:

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.

For me, the end state of my body shedding my uterine lining is my connection to a life force so joyous and rapturous that it overrides and threatens everything about our social order. It is our connection to this power that drives violence and fear. The brutal oppression inflicted upon women of color is one of the consistent throughlines in America’s story.

Women with uteruses can decide for ourselves to have children or not. I can decide whether to populate the country with just one more brown American citizen. Or not. At least for now.

And no matter how hard many try, scores of white men and complicit white women are unable to stop us from being born and deciding what to do with our uteruses. No matter how much entitlement and evil manifests in the effort to control our bodies, people cannot sever our access to feminine power. They may be able to make me forget I have power, but they cannot eliminate its source.

Wherever we find it—in literature, news, poetry, coalition building, running organizations, or strengthening and supporting those who do—The Erotic is there and it’s ours. Isn’t that glorious? It’s the ultimate charge.

—Venu Gupta is Mother Jones’ Midwest regional development director. Share your stories with her at recharge@motherjones.com.

As grieving continues and mobilizing begins in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death after a profound and pathbreaking life, so too does memorializing, and the sharing of her life’s lessons. Mother Jones readers are sending us glimpses of how you hear her legacy and where you find a recharge in her memory. Below is a selection. Keep your messages coming, in the form embedded in this week’s column by MoJo’s Monika Bauerlein, or by emailing us at recharge@motherjones.com.

These especially ring true for many of us (and we also heard from those who wished she’d retired under President Obama, but that’s for another post):

I was born in 1949 and RBG changed my life. Before she helped change the laws dealing with women’s rights, I couldn’t get a credit card in my name. In the want ads, jobs for men were listed separately from jobs for women & I wasn’t allowed to apply for any job listed for men. The laws were crazy & discriminated against women in many ways. Ruth changed that & I will be eternally grateful.
—A reader who wishes to remain anonymous

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is all that I ever hoped to be. A strong, intelligent woman who fought the good fight. Who protected the rights of the people who could not protect themselves. She shaped the lives of generations of women. She showed them that they could have control of their lives, their bodies, their family size, their futures. She gave generations of women (and men) hope. And self-determination. She did not allow old white men to control her or us. We cannot let her legacy die. We must fight on in her memory. I own my body. As does every Woman. And man. And I will not ever accept the chains that others wish to reapply. I, for one, will always love RBG and the justice she stood for. And the freedoms she fought for.
—Roma Johnson-Egea
Westerville, Ohio

RBG was such a tower of strength, civility, and compassion in this seriously messed-up country. At least RBG was there to steady the judiciary. It comforts me to hold the memory of her courage and grace.
—Margo Pearce
Boston, Massachusetts

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has inspired generations and made life fairer for all. Tzadik exemplifies her. I know that her reasoning has had an incredible impact the world over and that her dissents will pave the way for progress, as they already have in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg lived with courage, dignity, humility, and love. There could be no better example of a life well-lived in the service of others.
—Linda
Hyattsville, Maryland

Strength, fortitude, intelligence, calm, wisdom. Bonus: She’s from Brooklyn.
—Gregory
Brooklyn, New York

Thinking of RBG reminds me of “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou.
—Dee
Concord, California

At Dee’s suggestion, Maya Angelou’s “When Great Trees Fall”:

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

Send us your RBG recharges here or by emailing recharge@motherjones.com. And if you’re looking for a continuing boost, our Recharge blog awaits.

A jumpstart to the week, and a big one to celebrate and contemplate: In its 11th year running, the Root 100 was just published, the annual list of “the most influential African Americans, ages 25 to 45,” selected by The Root’s editorial staff. It’s a powerful lineup.

Go check. It’s here! Share it. Argue over it! Use exclamation marks! Tweet about it! Agree or disagree with the selections, and once you’re done sharing and debating it, learn from it. Discover or rediscover the 100 people honored by the site’s editors, writers, and producers. The team, led by Editor-in-Chief Danielle Belton and Managing Editor Genetta Adams, considered hundreds of publicly submitted nominees and, with the help of a custom-built algorithm, weighed influence by reach—the audiences touched across digital platforms and social media—and substance—the overall impact of work on communities, culture, and society. Winners were picked from the finalists pool by a committee of award-winning, National Association of Black Journalists–honored contributors.

“This year is more important than ever to highlight those making strides to stand up against social injustices, no matter how large or small,” Belton says.

While you’re browsing the list and learning about people on it—and sweating why you yourself, or influencers you cherish, didn’t make it—be sure to follow The Root’s editorial crew for continuing analysis and insight in the runup to the election. Follow Belton, Adams, Michael Harriot, Anne Branigin, Felice León, Terrell Jermaine Starr, and many other staffers, past and present, including, of recent Root glory, Danielle Young and Ashley Velez, two of the premier voices in video journalism and narrative storytelling.

Here’s the full The Root 100. Congrats to the honorees, and the staff behind it.

Each week, we take a look at our archives for boosts to propel you into the weekend.

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Brother in Vietnam,” which we excerpted in 1980, the main character is simply “the brother.”

It is the Vietnam era. The draft looms. He, “the brother,” does not have a religion, a wife, a physical disability, or a desire to go to war—he has only a job teaching high school in California. So “the brother” does that, at first; he teaches. The brother waits to be called up to the war. He hopes not to be. He spouts a bit of anti-capitalism to his students in the meantime. Kingston writes:

During Current Events, [the brother] told his class some atrocities to convince them about the wrongness of war. They looked at the pictures of napalmed children and said, “Sure, war is hell.” Where had they learned that acceptance? He told them the worst torture he knew: the Vikings used to cleave a prisoner of war’s back on either side of the spine, and pull the lungs out, which fluttered like wings when the man breathed. This torture was called the Burning Eagle. The brother felt that it was self-evident that we ought to do anything to stop war. But he was learning that, upon hearing terrible things, there are people who are, instead, filled with a crazy patriotism…

He explained how water, electricity, gas and oil originally belonged to nobody and everybody. Like the air. “But the corporations that control electricity sell it to the rest of us.” “Well, of course they do,” said the student; “I’d sell the air if I had discovered it.” “What if some people can’t afford to buy it?” “Whoever discovered it deserves to be paid for it,” said the stubborn boy. “It’s Communist not to let him make all the money he can.” Although the students could not read or follow logic, they blocked him with their anti-Communism, which seemed to come naturally to them, without effort or study.

Some have written that “the brother” is likely Kingston’s own brother. Her work often swirls into an autofiction, as Hua Hsu wrote in a profile this year in the New Yorker. This roots Kingston’s story in a tangible haze of guilt. Perhaps one we all recognize today.

Hsu’s article begins where most do with Kingston: her iconic The Woman Warrior, which “changed American culture.” He describes the process of her writing the book—she burned out on Berkeley counterculture, moved to Hawaii, and, on vacation in Lāna’i, Kingston in 1973 began writing by moving a desk to face the wall.

But it is his description of her process of writing her second book—China Men, a series of stories about immigrant men published in 1980, which includes “The Brother in Vietnam”—that caught me, and made our excerpt make more sense. He writes: 

When she completed “China Men,” she and [her partner] flew to New York. After reading the manuscript, [her editor] told her that she had failed. “You don’t understand men,” she remembers him saying. “They’re lonelier than this.”

Devastated, Kingston got on a bus uptown to her friend Lilah Kan’s apartment, where she and Earll were staying. “I just felt terrible,” she said. She was met by [friends] who greeted her with champagne and pot to celebrate her big meeting. They went ahead with the party, as she retreated into the corner with her Selectric typewriter and wrote a scene based on her father’s time in New York. So much of the immigrant story is joyless hard work. America is so free that you are even free to work through the holidays, Kingston wrote. She wanted to give the immigrant workers a day off. Her father enjoys a night out on the town, ending up at a tearoom, where Chinese men could buy dances with white women. Her father fox-trots with as many blondes as he desires, then returns home alone, wondering if his wife will ever make it to America.

This work follows a similarly sly trajectory. Unsure what to do, Kingston’s “brother” actually enlists in the Navy. “He arrived at his decision by reasoning like this,” she writes. “In a country that operates on a war economy, there isn’t much difference between being in the Navy and being a civilian.” If every microwave purchase fuels the bombs what point is there?

Yet the brother cannot fully give up his hatred of the Vietnam War. As much as he tries to give in, Kingston finds that the brother keeps fighting: in small, subtle ways. It is the “sadness” of men that her editor wanted. But the strength too.

The brother cannot fully go limp, cynical, and evil. He is complicit, yes, in war, but never wages it fully. In Vietnam, as part of the Navy, he refuses to kill. And he refuses to die.

There’s a shrewd lesson there. Sometimes we must just survive.

Check out Hsu’s profile, and pick up a copy of any of Kingston’s books.

As wildfires ravage the West Coast and continue to engulf lives, livelihoods, and homes, spreading the worst air quality in the world, it’s hard to imagine live music going strong. It does, remotely and safely, and just in time. One of the most thrilling this month comes from California, a powerhouse performance on September 26 by Zakir Hussain, Charles Lloyd, and Julian Lage, any one of whom is must-watch. This is the first time they’re performing as a trio.

Healdsburg Jazz is impressively unfazed by the heavy extra work of safely producing shows during the pandemic and fires, and they’re pulling in deep ones. Watch Hussain on tabla, Lloyd on saxophone, and Lage on guitar, and let us know at recharge@motherjones.com how you hear each and how you imagine their collective pulse to sound.

If you need a pulse check around the clock, our Recharge blog awaits. And mark the date.

As my colleague Molly Schwartz neatly sums up, the lies, obfuscations, and dizzying talking points of Fox News are bad. Exposing them is good. We’ve known this forever, but it is freshly necessary to corroborate, investigate, and understand the big picture and the small, to see how we got here. In case you missed the steady skewering that Fox and Trump took last week by CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, in conversation with Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, catch it here. With Jeffery’s pinpoint questions, he assesses whether Fox explains Trump or Trump explains Fox, or each explains the other in a dance of propaganda and power trading. He dishes on what Fox insiders told him for his book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. It’s all laid out, the horror and the humor, the madness and the bleakly fascinating details.

“You say that Hoax is essentially about the Foxification of Trump and the Trumpification of Fox,” the conversation begins. “Who leads this dance, the president or the network?” The answer is good. (Back to good-good news tomorrow. Today we welcome, for a midweek lift, good-bad news.) Reach us with personal stories and good-good recharges at recharge@motherjones.com.

Here’s a post office puzzle that isn’t about the scapegoating of workers or the sabotaging of the universal delivery mandate by a corrupt president and an inept postmaster general. This one’s good; read the whole tale, an epic about a 1920 postcard that took its time reaching its mailbox this month, with a come-from-behind win thanks to the dedication of postal workers. Kudos to the Washington Post’s Sydney Page for piecing it together. Highlights:

—“Dear cousins,” the postcard starts. “We are quite well but mother has awful lame knees. It is awful cold here.”

—“Don’t forget to write us,” the note ends, followed by a question about whether ol’ Roy got his pants fixed yet.

—There’s a Halloween illustration on the front, with the words “Witch would you rather be, a goose or a pumpkin-head?”

—The one-cent George Washington stamp is legibly marked October 29, 1920.

—The 30-year-old who received it has pledged to help find members of the original family. “I was shocked,” she said. “At first I didn’t think much of it, other than that it’s old and interesting, but then I took a closer look.”

—A local librarian is pitching in to complete the puzzle; he has turned, in part, to the 1920 census. (If you’re a census neglecter, get on it.)

—The Facebook group Positively Belding is on the case.

—The letter is signed by one Flossie Burgess.

If you’re related to a Flossie Burgess, let Page know, or drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com. We hope Roy got his pants fixed.

If you live in Texas or know someone who does, look twice—or have them look twice—before reaching for that jar of peanut butter or can of soup, cranberries, or ground coffee. And definitely that tin of Spam, container of salt, and jar of mayo. A San Antonio artist has been sneaking around to supermarkets and relabeling food in an act of creative consumer disobedience. Jars and containers are popping up on shelves with parody labels bearing call-to-action political messages, and the labels are virtually indistinguishable from the originals. You’d be forgiven for mistaking them until you get home, when your astute, label-reading housemate makes the fool of you.

A few more: pic.twitter.com/jhULlU7Avh

— Alex Zielinski (@alex_zee) September 11, 2020

“One of my San Antonio friends has been using his graphic design skillz to re-label grocery store cans with facts about local/national police issues,” tweeted the artist’s friend, who hasn’t named the artist, but the friend, with permission, has made the labels available as PDFs: “Want to bring this revolution to your grocery aisle? He’s made the label files public.”

See the photos here and here. Enjoy your Ocean Spray Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce, or, if you’re looking, Priorities San Antonio Just Added $8.1 Million to the Police Budget Cranberry Sauce.

In August 1976, before Ron Chernow wrote his famous biographies—of Grant, Hamilton, and Washington—he was a freelance magazine writer in New York with a story in Mother Jones. It was our cover that month: a gripping profile of the fight by domestic workers, primarily Black women, to form a union. Chernow writes that they’re “the last frontier of labor organizing.” (It goes without saying these were earlier times, before the Reagan era, when one could think of labor as having a “last” frontier.)

Most of the piece focuses on Carolyn Reed, a worker in New York who on her midday break goes to other apartments, getting to know each door worker to organize them. You can read more about her here, from Yes magazine, which excerpted a portion of Premilla Nadasen’s book Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. And much of our own piece can be found here, with Google Books. It includes vivid scenes in which Reed stands up to Republican legislators in the New York state Assembly. When probed by them on the role of helping the elderly who want to be treated like family by their workers, she is forthright:

“Can I just make a comment on the companion thing,” she says gently. “I don’t like to take the companionship thing and make it an excuse for someone being underpaid. Basically this is what happens. For too long, we have been addressed as ‘one of the family.’ The basic thing is to be paid and have the right kind of coverage.”

It works. The legislators are convinced to vote in Reed’s favor (though she worries it’s only appeasement for bigger battles down the road). Reading about wins like this is not only gratifying; it also helps make sense of how workers have continued to organize. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is relatively new, forming in 2007, but has gained and grown from the hard work by Reed and others—and it has amassed increasing power. You can read about the long history of this work in a timeline we created, too.

But, for a moment back to Reed. There is a gem of a moment in this article in how she came to organizing work.

It is 1963, she is working in a home and wants to join marchers in Washington, DC. Her employer says no. They want her to work a dinner party at their home that evening instead:

In protest, [Reed] kept the television set blaring throughout the day, pouring out speeches from the Lincoln Memorial. At the dinner table, one pompous doctor wondered aloud, “What do these people want?” He answered his own question: “What they need is an education.”

“That galled me so,” says Reed, “that I said in the kitchen, ‘What the hell do you think they’re marching for?’ So I went into the dining room and I passed the beans. When I got him, I just—choomph!—right in his lap. ‘Excuse me so much,’ I said, ‘I really should be educated as to how to serve beans.'”

She then retired to her room and nobody dare bother her that night. Her employers still retained her.

Incredible! If you have any stories of activism spurred by or involving beans, please let us know at recharge@motherjones.com. I imagine it will be hard to beat this one though.

I have never looked so hard for ways to recharge myself and come up short. Forget feeling recharged—I would take a day without anguish and despair.

The fabric of our country is giving way; threads pulled and seams undone. Whether we actually had a more perfect union before the 2016 election or I just saw it that way by selectively focusing on the potential around us, I’m not sure. Either way there’s no chance that I can unsee, and many of us can unsee, America’s sins and separateness.

I have found a bit of solace and relief in knitting. For days on end during the protests, I shuffled around my house, jittery and nervous not for my safety but for our country’s, and for its future. With each story of militarized assault on free speech and assembly, and with each act of solidarity and strength by protesters, my urge to knit grew stronger. The healing power of knitting—to steadily build—is akin to the power of storytelling, if only in the privacy of my hands and my home. Each day I resisted my urge to knit because I don’t usually knit in the summer—too hot in Chicago, all that wool in my lap. Then one day I relented. As the protests grew, I was moved to take out my needles and yarn.

Knitting has surged in popularity during the pandemic, with knitting sites and chatrooms growing. I want our country remade and repaired; I want people who’ve suffered for generations to be made whole; I want that line “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all” to mean those last two words. Yet I can’t stand the process that change demands, the upheaval required of uprising, when it feels and hurts like nails on a chalkboard. Uncertainty to me feels like nails on 10 chalkboards. But I know the sound is of something better to come, that we have to take apart what’s loose and weak to make it tighter and stronger. And start again.

I began the Muhuroosa Blanket pattern a year and a half ago—a year and a half ago!—giddy to create something beautiful and useful. I restarted 10 times—180 stitches, 90 knits, and 90 purls, multiplied by 10. I guess I didn’t have to start fresh, but the blanket would’ve been f’ed if I hadn’t. Even with a good foundation of knits and purls, it’s bound to be a mess. I’m one-third of the way through.

One stitch after another, back and forth, fixing some mistakes but not all, reminds me that change and creation are slow but possible—and then fast. Seams can be reinforced and threads placed in the right way. But we’ll have to pay vigilant attention as it goes, or we’ll have to start again.

Venu Gupta is Mother Jones’ Midwest regional development director. Share your stories with her at recharge@motherjones.com.

To the long list of groups formally opposed to Donald Trump’s reelection, we can now add Writers Against Trump. The coalition formed a few weeks ago to mobilize the literary community in opposition to “the racist, destructive, incompetent, corrupt, and fascist regime of Donald Trump, and to give our language, thought, and time to his defeat in November.” The group joins the growing ranks of Against Trumpers, from Republican Voters Against Trump to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, Christians Against Trump, Jews Against Trump, American Muslims Against Trump, Atheists Against Trump, Hairdressers Against Trump, and Cute Animals Against Trump, which tweets @damncutebunnies. The literary group is collecting video and written testimonies from authors “at all stages in their careers” to assess the stakes in the election and add their voices on Instagram, Facebook, and its website.

The coalition’s organizers include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, as well as Carolyn Forché and Natasha Trethewey. And one John Turturro has come out swinging in the group’s support with a video of his own.

Unsurprising for a group of literary giants, they get to the core of the candidate and the essence of the moment: “The brutal and criminal regime called an ‘administration’ may remain in power a while longer, spewing disinformation, exacerbating ill health, earth-hatred, obscene inequality, race- and woman-hatred, and encouraging violence, but as an unintended consequence, we are coming together to resist. We hope you’ll join us, and bring us your good ideas and your energy.”

Writers everywhere are welcome. More than 1,300 have joined so far. Auster’s, Hustvadt’s, Forché’s, and Turturro’s videos are here.

The scope of good news that makes Recharge is expansive, from stories of justice achieved to the brightening, heartening, surprising boosts from the archives, like Dorothea Lange’s photos getting digitized, Satchel Paige’s life advice revisited (from our second-ever magazine), and Pharoahe Monch’s truth-telling returned to. Then there’s the genre of good that is essentially bad interrupted, or atrocity halted; when injustice is intervened on late, like wrongly prosecuted people no longer prosecuted, decades after irreversible harm accumulates.

My colleague Venu Gupta messaged me with a story of exactly this kind. An innocent man, Curtis Flowers, tried six times on murder changes and incarcerated for 23 years before the case was dropped. “How have we come to a point where we caused so much pain to someone and feel like the end of that pain is a celebration?” Venu asked. What does it say about the world “that a man who was not guilty and spent decades in jail after six trials was then found not guilty”?

Read the full story by Mother Jones and by the Mississippi Center for Justice’s tireless, heroic leaders (here and here), and share more goodness like it, and all forms of recharges, at recharge@motherjones.com. Also share the Recharge blog at motherjones.com/recharge with one person who might want or need it today.

When shelter-in-place orders swept the country in March, Ashima Yadava’s first thought was not just to rush home safely to California from New York, but to find ways to make more visible—and help alleviate—a threat indoors. Domestic violence had been her photography’s focus for eight years. She knew right away that isolation in unsafe homes amplified risks for millions of survivors, including people she advocates for. She’d been documenting survivors’ stories in portraits, and she saw immediately that “not all shelters are equal and safe to shelter in,” she tells me.

But she vowed to continue advocating. “The project closest to my heart is If Hands Could Speak, about domestic violence in the South Asian community in the Bay Area. I had to find a visual grammar to tell their stories without compelling them to relive their trauma. So I started to photograph their hands.”

If Hands Could Speak is a vivid, powerful portfolio of images, each answering the title’s question. Gesture, touch, texture, expression, and so many aspects of hands tell a story of how trauma goes unseen—and how, in creative forms, it is seen. In one image, two hands hold a third supportively; in another, fingers are bent back. As Yadava tells me, “Not all bruises are visible. Perpetrators often resort to hurting without leaving physical evidence of bruising, and twisting fingers is manipulative, intimidating, and deliberate because, in many ways, it signifies the possibility of more violence.”

In another image, hands drape across a chest in self-embrace or guardedness, or both. Each person decides for themselves if and how to participate, pose, reimagine, and share their stories, with Yadava’s support:

A drawing adorns the hand of one of the people photographed in Ashima Yadava’s If Hands Could Speak series.

The power of Yadava’s approach is not in documenting harm. It’s in reframing what survival and support look like; in finding a language to share and respect bodies’ experiences while protecting identities. She began If Hands Could Speak as an artist-advocate with Maitri, a nonprofit that launched in 1991 when a group of women created a confidential helpline for South Asian survivors of violence in the Bay Area.

Yadava speaks about herself and her work reflectively, choosing her words as deliberately as she chooses her themes and subjects—but “subjects” is not a word she uses. “I’m very conscious about the language of photography because we’ve known for a long time that photography is a power tool. How it oppresses. ‘Shooting people,’ ‘my subjects.’ They’re not. They’re not my subjects—they’re people.”

She calls up Sustan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others as a foundational work to illustrate a photographer’s role, and Teju Cole’s essay about the camera as a weapon of imperialism. She also mentions Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind as a reminder of how civilizations progress by collaborating. “Stories are never one-sided,” she says. “I need to keep sharing my power with the people I photograph.”

She accomplishes that brilliantly in Front Yard, a pandemic series that portrays families in their yards. After developing large-format slides, she prints them in black and white, inviting each family to color as they like:

A selection of images from Ashima Yadava’s Front Yard series

“This is your story. Do what you want!” she tells them. “Write on it, paint, embellish.” Some faces are pensive and quiet; others are bursting with joy. “Homes are places of love, comfort, fears, and so much more. I see how each family deals with the pandemic differently.”

Yadava keeps the 6-foot distance. “I miss the tactility of interaction. I wasn’t able to hug them, but the exchange of sharing the print and seeing the art they made of it added a bit of cheer.”

In her latest work, a 40-page zine that’s a photographic representation of “Black Lives Matter” in American Sign Language, Yadava returns to the theme of hands. “The use of ASL not only speaks to this idea of pervasive silence on racism, but also deploys hands as powerful metaphors,” she says. “Hands are in equal part tools of oppression and agents of resilience and revolutionary change.” With the zine, she’s raising funds for grassroots organizations in their fight for racial justice.

“At the core of my work, I’m trying to answer some difficult questions and add to conversations around issues that matter,” she says. “I want to be a creative channel through which these stories are told. Because I have this skill, and if I can use it to amplify these voices, that’s what I’d like to do.”

For more of Yadava’s work, visit AshimaYadava.com. Art inputs in the Front Yard series are by Hamida Banu Chopra, Molly Brennan, Mia Villa, Krish and Mayura Iyer, Shriya Manchanda, Nitya and Arvind Kansal, and the Shade family.

Maitri is at maitri.org and 1-888-8MAITRI (1-888-862-4874). The National Domestic Violence Hotline takes calls 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), or 1-800-799-7233 for TTY. If you’re unable to speak safely, visit thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522. The Department of Health and Human Services has compiled a list of organizations by state.

Each Friday, I’ve been doing a bit of archive digging, looking back at old issues of Mother Jones to bring you the good stuff. So, let’s go back to our second-ever issue. It is from April 1976, replete with our usual strong reporting.

We covered a rent strike in the Bronx’s Co-Op City (the high-rise heavy apartment megaplex brought to you by Robert Moses on the former site of an amusement park called Freedomland). We told the story of a worker-owned mine in Vermont. We looked at the presidential race (or, at least, listed musician endorsements: Pat Boone for Ronald Reagan; Linda Ronstadt for Mo Udall; the Allman Brothers for Jimmy Carter). We had a Der Spiegel reporter write from Vietnam.

Also, we covered baseball.

The issue had two short pieces on baseball. One was significantly harder-hitting than the other: a report of a canceled trip by US baseball to Cuba, derailed by Henry Kissinger (over, the State Department said, Cuban relations with Angola):

And the other is the best advice you’ll ever get in your life, from Leroy “Satchel” Paige, a pitcher who played until 59 years old both in the Negro Leagues and for Major League Baseball:

Here are the six pieces of wisdom from Paige, taken from his book Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever:

1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.

2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

4. Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.

5. Avoid running at all times.

6. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

Great stuff. Overall, I’d say Mother Jones was looking to be a top-flight magazine. But you can’t please everyone. One reader had picked up our inaugural issue. He wrote to us:

Dear Editors,

As a newspaperman of some 25 years’ experience, I might agree with your letter that there is a question where American society is headed. I must say I did not have quite such a question 25 years ago, but the reaction of people like yourself to the problems of the world, make me wonder.

No, I don’t think I want to read your magazine. There’s room for an honest publication that tells it as it really is—but that wouldn’t be trendy enough to sell well, would it?

Gordon E. White

ALEXANDRIA, VA.

Author, MSNBC analyst, Time editor, no fan of plutocracy, and possessor of one of the most stylishly written, justice-driven Twitter accounts Anand Giridharadas is inviting you to dinner. Join him tomorrow, Friday, for food and drinks. It’s part of Busboys and Poets’ weekly virtual dinner series; register for free. If you haven’t read Giridharadas on money and power and corporate consolidation, catch his latest at The.Ink or his bestseller Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Spin his interview with podcaster and broadcaster Nelufar Hedayat, and watch his rundown of the challenges and conceptual solutions to capitalism’s economic arrangements.

If you pull up a seat, get him going on the engines and excesses of growth; the widening wealth gap; and the illusions many of us uphold about corporate powers that are unaccountable to public oversight. He and Elizabeth Warren spoke last year about the case for a Big Tech breakup, and Giridharadas has intoned one of the most memorable truths of modern life: “Plutocrats are going to plute.”

Tomorrow’s dinner is hosted by the series’ founder, Andy Shallal, who brings together artists, activists, and writers to eat and learn out loud. One imagines what a world would look like in which these collective acts, and changing our minds publicly, were more encouraged.

If you haven’t heard, everything is solved: the pandemic, presidential corruption, climate armageddon, raging wildfires, assaults on human rights. All set. Pack it up. We did it! But if you still need a creative fix, turn to chef Latif of Latif’s Inspired. His unscripted, must-watch videos lead us into the kitchens of family-run restaurants (including his own); he shares recipes alongside his mother and sister; and he welcomes friends and family from the UK, Bangladesh, and worldwide.

Also huddle around the fire with Anita Lo, whose Cooking Without Borders is creative beyond category; it’s no less extraordinary than her recent Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One. And get down with Jack Chaplin of the popular Daddy Jack’s Cooking With the Blues, running for 12 years. He shares blues history, restaurant secrets, and home cooking tips, with phenomenal camerawork by Lakisha and relentless circling by their dog Axel. “It’s a wonderful thing to see people assist each other” through the pain of the pandemic, he told me when cities locked down as he continued to cook safely at a distance for those in need. He launched a Patreon page to support the effort, and he’s about to release an album of live blues from his years organizing shows—including with the legend Lucky Peterson, his old friend, who’d played with Etta James and Otis Rush.

Latif’s Inspired is here, Lo here, and Chaplin here. If you have pandemic tips and Recharge recipes to share, email us at recharge@motherjones.com.

Last Friday in Igiugig, a village on the Kvichak River in Alaska, residents of the town (population 70) drove at least 20 vehicles to the airport to cast light on the runway as a medevac plane circled above.

A child needed to be airlifted to a hospital. But the lights of the state-operated airport weren’t operating properly. The vehicles guided the plane down.

The story was reported by the local station KTOO and by the New York Times. One of the leaders of the group that helped the plane was Ida Nelson. Here’s a bit more about how she gathered people to help. It involves, of all things, a late-night steam bath:

Ida Nelson had just climbed out of a steam bath and was getting dressed when she heard the LifeMed plane fly over her village…

“Anytime there’s any type of planes flying after dark, you always assume it’s going to be something urgent and an emergency,” she said. 

She can see the airport from her steam bath. And when she looked to see what was going on—the runway lights weren’t on.

“Normally if you push the button like 10 or 15 times the lights will just light up,” she said. “But they didn’t and so the medevac plane flew over the village.”

She hopped onto her four-wheeler and sped the few hundred yards to the runway. Her neighbor jumped in to help too.

This is very moving, and concerning (fix those lights!). But it’s also a good example of how civic engineering undergirds our entire lives. (See the fact that the United States has two measurements of feet for no reason, and the havoc it causes.)

There’s one way of thinking of these kinds of events—one-off moments of humanity peeking through. But it’s actually a civic mindset we’re reminded of. This isn’t the first time Nelson has been profiled for what seems to be her regular practice of helping her neighbors. She’s featured in an article in Hakai Magazine that highlights the practice of villagers in coastal communities sharing smoked fish in winter. It’s a bigger deal than that might sound:

In a community where a jug of fresh milk is considered a luxury item, with a $20 price tag, fish shared from the Christensen smokehouse contributes nutritious food to freezers and pantries throughout the long, cold winter months. But each act of sharing involved in bringing salmon to a loved one’s dinner table—from mending nets to delivery, and even child care—serves an additional purpose. It gives a reason to check in with those who can’t fish themselves and to ensure they have everything else they need, like medication, a working furnace, and a shoveled driveway. Together, these interactions keep families and community members connected and thriving…providing support that’s just as essential to human survival as food.

And here is Nelson again:

Ida Nelson of the Bristol Bay village of Igiugig is Yup’ik and a single working mom. Because she doesn’t have the time to fish and hunt, she welcomes gifts of moose and fish each year. “I think we’re a lot richer than the statistics say we are,” she says.