2+ week, 4+ day ago (125+ words) New York State Sex Offender Registry/AP House Democrats on Wednesday released a set of emails in which Jeffrey Epstein called President Trump "the dog that hasn't barked" and alleged that Trump had once spent "hours at my house" with a sex trafficking victim. "[Trump] has never once been mentioned," Epstein wrote in a 2011 email. In another 2019 email, Epstein wrote to the writer Michael Wolff, of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislane [Maxwell] to stop." The shocking correspondences, part of 23,000 additional documents in the Epstein case, further tied Trump to Epstein despite the president's repeated and vehement insistence that he did not know about his longtime friend's sex trafficking. Kiera Butler and Julianne McShane...

1+ week, 2+ day ago (229+ words) Despite the anti-vaccine proclivities of the US Department of Health and Human Services under its secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency's public-facing sites about vaccines had remained largely unchanged, reflecting scientific consensus. That is, until Wednesday. In an emailed response to a request for comment from Mother Jones, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon repeated those statements and added, "We are updating the CDC's website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science." The chair of this committee is Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is also a physician and cast the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his post. On social media, critics of the new change have pointed out that Cassidy appeared to require the old language to stay on the site as a condition of his vote to confirm: "We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to…...

4+ day, 3+ hour ago (130+ words) Lily Meyer4 minutes ago What makes a good children's book, and how much does it matter if a children's book is good? "Kids are weird! They're joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross." AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct. Only instinct and imagination can tell you what Sandra Boynton means when she writes in "Dinosaur Dance!that "Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH." A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite. Jackie Flynn Mogensen and Henry Carnell...

3+ week, 4+ day ago (373+ words) Mamdani with Richard Chow on the first day of the hunger strike in 2021. As I stood in the park that day, it wasn't clear just how long "as long as it takes" might mean. Or if it would be enough at all. Mamdani had been an Assemblymember representing Astoria, Queens, for less than a year at that point. Fresh off a birthday, he was only three days clear of his twenties. Five days later, Mamdani had traded his suit for jeans and a New York Taxi Workers Alliance sweatshirt. In an act of civil disobedience, he and other New York elected officials then sat down to block traffic in Lower Manhattan. With cameras watching, NYPD officers lifted them to'their feet, zip-tied their hands, and loaded them into a waiting police van. It was not clear then, but the end was…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago (510+ words) Megyn Kelly mused on Wednesday about whether "pedophile" was really the right word for a man who "liked 15-year-old girls."Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for. But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows "somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything," and "this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile." "Or anything else," added Ungar-Sargon. In fact, we don't know. The comments read as something of a shift for Kelly. Back in 2023, she lashed out against Republicans who were defending British comedian and right-wing darling Russell Brand against rape allegations from three adult women and one minor. (Brand was charged…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago (241+ words) Another longtime CDC employee who works in communications said, "The best way I can put it is it feels like we're on a hijacked airplane." Several employees noted that there had been no warning about the new page before it was posted'in fact, said the NCIRD staffer, even department leadership had "only learned about it today when somebody saw it the same way everybody else did." "I don't even know who is updating these web pages, or if anyone at CDC has anything to do with any of that," said another staffer who works on immunizations. Department supervisors told employees that "their understanding is that these updates to the website are not coming from CDC. Somebody at the HHS level is going in and changing these pages." HHS did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. On the other…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (374+ words) HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, right, announced changes to the labeling of hormone replacement therapy for people in menopause on Monday.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services made an announcement that it promised would change the lives of millions of American women for the better: Hormone replacement therapy, the combination of hormone drugs that can treat the symptoms of menopause, was about to be depathologized. "For the first time in a generation, the FDA is standing with science and standing with women." But the specialists with whom Mother Jones spoke said that Monday's panel, which included doctors with robust social media presences, had at times overstated both the negative health effects of menopause and the science on the benefits of hormone replacement therapy."Spokespeople for…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago (223+ words) Rachel de Leon/Mother Jones "A lot of people are going to feel terrified, petrified, scared of what's going to happen next," Presby said in a viral clip of the podcast. Much to the fear of the disabled and low-income people who rely on it, Congress voted to pass the OBBB in early July, which will lead to around $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the course of the next decade." People like Presby and Fraser, said Kristianna Moralls of the Self-Determination Institute, "are able to use these Medicaid funds for helpers who teach cooking and cleaning, money management, so they can live more independently and be part of their community." Fraser goes surfing to help with his core strength'people with Down syndrome can have low muscle tone'which also helps his mental health. He hires a surfing coach as a very…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago (417+ words) President Donald Trump has done everything he can to try to tank the vote on releasing the Epstein files and discourage Republicans from voting for it.Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP But at least some on the right appear undeterred. On ABC's This Week on Sunday morning, Massie said he expects "a deluge of Republicans" to vote for the bill, adding, "There could be 100 or more." (On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Khanna offered a more conservative estimate, of at least 40 Republicans he expects to vote in support of the bill.) Massie added that the investigations Trump ordered the DOJ to conduct on Friday against high-profile Democrats could be "a big smokescreen'as a last-ditch effort to prevent the release of the Epstein files." "I've never said these documents will implicate Donald Trump," he said. "I think he's trying to protect…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago (543+ words) Siblings Timothy and Ally Rodriguez, outside the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn on Tuesday, hope Zohran Mamdani will both deliver on his affordability agenda and make Muslim New Yorkers feel more at home.Julianne McShane Timothy Rodriguez'has lived in New York all his life. But the notion of a Muslim mayor never entered the realm of possibility for him. That changed Tuesday when Zohran Mamdani's victory made him New York's first Muslim and South Asian mayor-elect. "It's a big win for New York City, of course, it's a big win for Muslims," Rodriguez, 35, told me after news of Mamdani's win broke on Tuesday night. "I'm happy to see change and that these things are possible." "A lot of Muslims don't feel like they have a place here," Timothy said. He hopes that, like former President Barack Obama, Mamdani can "inspire" other…...