Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr

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Straight trollin’, yo.

Tumblr's love affair with media outlets...and vice versa. →

Via Josh Sternberg.

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Someone who says he’s Dick Derhodge, a graphic designer in Canada, just sent our scoop email [scoop at motherjones dot com] this—what should we call it? Let’s go with “odd”—Photoshopped image of Michele Bachmann (the Newsweek cover version) turning into golfer Phil Mickelson.

We’ve reached out to Mr Derhodge to ask him what he was getting at. In the meantime, you should all read Tim Murphy’s magazine profile of Bachmann, which includes a lot of interesting details about her early years in Minnesota.

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“For Those About to Salute, We Rock You”

The Pentagon has clearly realized that teens would rather listen to Cee-Lo than Sousa. There are no fewer than two dozen official Army rock bands, with names like Show of Force, Gunpowder and Lead, Down Range, Night Fire, the Loose Cannons, Controlled Detonation, Sandstorm, 5-Star, and Burned Aftermath. And senior editor Dave Gilson has compiled their music videos here. You’re welcome.

(Source: Mother Jones)

Business Insider highlights magazine Tumblrs! →

With shout-outs to ourselves and our buds at The Atlantic, GQ, and more. Awesome read, once you get past the snarky hed. (Hey, man, we’re here for the community karma, not the subscriptions. We’ve got folks who make up card mailers for that sorta thing.)

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Which Congressional Staffer’s License Plate Is This?

Sent to MoJo by a congressional tipster: Some Texan on Capitol Hill apparently wants to send President Obama an extra “WTF?” message. On his Lincoln Navigator.

Check out the full tip email here.

(Source: Mother Jones)

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What’s Inside Glenn Beck’s Brain?

Glenn Beck has announced that he “intends to transition off of his daily program” on Fox News later this year. It’s not clear what killed The Glenn Beck Show—perhaps it was the fleeing advertisers or the shrinking audiences. Or perhaps it was the increasingly bizarro obsessions and labyrinthine conspiracy theories, which we’ve attempted to catalog in this map of the inner workings of Beck’s brain.

To see the full-size version, click here.

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House GOP leaders triumphantly announced a plan to cut the defense budget: no more color photocopies!

No, seriously. And we wondered: How does that measure up with the rest of America’s military spending? Well, the money the GOP is saving could:

• Run the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for about 2.5 hours.
• Buy 8.6 percent of a fighter jet. One (1). Fighter. Jet.
• Cover the cost of one-sixth of the Tomahawk missiles we’ve lobbed at Libya…so far.
• Purchase a crapload of Humvees that the Army doesn’t want…but a GOP congressman is forcing them to buy, because the vehicle’s maker donates a lot to his campaign fund.

We’ve put it all in visual form for you here. The original story lives here. Check ‘em out, pass ‘em on.

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Neena Sasaki, 5, carries some of the family belongings from her home that was destroyed after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 15 in Rikuzentakata, Miyagi province.

(Paula Bronstein/Getty Images, via the Big Picture)

Listen to the Japan earthquakes.

According to Dangerous Minds, this is what they sounded like:

“Audio sonification of the incredible seismic activity off the coast of Honshu, Japan - Friday March 11th. Tectonic is a realtime seismic analysis and sound synthesis system. Sound is created in realtime by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A tightly integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Symbolic Sound’s Kyma processes earthquake data that is translated into sound synthesis parameters.”

The harmonic, rhythmic shifts are especially haunting/scary at 1:20, 1:50, 3:00, and 5:20.

Animation of Wave Propagation from the Japan Earthquake

Via NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research

“Mother Jones web traffic up 400+ percent, partly thanks to explainers”

From Megan Garber at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab:

We wrote about MoJo’s Egypt explainer in January, pointing out the feature’s particular ability to accommodate disparate levels of reader background knowledge; that format, Adam Weinstein, a MoJo copy editor and blogger, told me, has become the standard one for the mag’s explainers. “It was a great resource for the reader, but it also helped us to focus our coverage,” Weinstein notes. “When something momentous happens, it can be hard for a small staff to focus their energies, I think. And this was an ideal way to do that.”

Note the important part: Readers. You guys. From Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Bahrain to Wisconsin and beyond, nothing’s shaped our coverage so much as your questions, concerns, tips, and comments. So keep the dialogue open!

PS: The exact number on our growth was 420 percent. Yeah, we know.

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Newt Gingrich’s Awkward Prom Photo

Guess this one didn’t make the cut for his website.