The Department of Transportation says that airlines must start providing more information to passengers stranded by flight delays and cancellations—and even start providing perks to passengers who have had their travel interrupted through no fault of their own. Letters signed by Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg were sent on Friday to major airlines warning that if they do not improve their treatment of customers, the Biden administration might create rules to formalize new rights for consumers.

The warning comes as 2022 has seen both a massive increase in travel—passengers are returning to the air following the pandemic—and a massive increase in flight disruptions. Airlines are largely blaming staff shortages, specifically a lack of pilots, whose ranks have been depleted over the course of the pandemic by voluntary retirements and a lack of recruiting new replacements. This summer thousands of flights have been canceled across the country, snarling air travel, and often leaving passengers stranded with few options to get to their destination. As many as 24 percent of flights in the United States have been delayed so far this year and 3.2 percent have been canceled. 

Earlier this month, the DOT said it would start making new rules in order to facilitate refunds from airlines to passengers when flights have been canceled or not taken for health reasons. On Friday, Buttigieg told NBC News that airlines were a long way from delivering the kind of service that should be expected of them.

“The message to the airlines is that you’ve got to make it easier for passengers to understand their rights,” Buttigieg said. “And you’ve got to support passengers when they experience delays or cancellations.”

In his letter, Buttigieg said airlines should begin offering passengers more help. Those who have delays of three hours or more should receive meal vouchers, for instance, and passengers forced to stay overnight due to delays or cancellations should be given free lodging or hotel vouchers.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will appear at a rally in Pittsburgh for Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano on Friday, sparking outrage from Jewish groups in DeSantis’ home state. DeSantis is one of the few GOP politicians who comes close to former president Donald Trump in terms of popularity among conservative voters, and his fundraising is on a record-breaking pace. But Mastriano is considered to be much further on the extremist fringes of the political spectrum—even for a Republican. 

Mastriano, who easily won the GOP primary earlier this year, is facing Democrat Josh Shapiro in November and is currently trailing by a sizable margin. In fact, Mastriano may owe some of his success in the primary to a Democratic effort to back the candidacy of someone so far to the right, he would defeat moderate GOP candidates who might have been more palatable to voters. Mastriano, often described as a Christian-nationalist, supports a total ban on abortion, expanded gun rights, and claims climate change is just “pop science.” He also has denied that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and has said that if elected governor, he would force everyone in the state to re-register to vote. In May, he suggested he would only certify a national election result if a Republican won. 

But he also has gushingly described DeSantis as the model governor and described his own vision of turning Pennsylvania into the “Florida of the north.” The flattery seems to have worked, as it appears that the invitation to DeSantis did not originate with Mastriano. In a Facebook posting, Mastriano said that DeSantis had contacted him about appearing.

Doug Mastriano says Ron Desantis reached out to him about doing a rally for him, and it will be Friday in Pittsburgh: “My goal as Governor is to make PA the Florida of the north. He set the gold standard for the good a Governor can do leading a state.” pic.twitter.com/KUzII1Mdnu

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 18, 2022

Donald Trump has offered a swirling array of excuses for why he took secret documents from the White House, stashed them around his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and refused to return them to the US government—which precipitated a raid by a team of FBI agents. The most recent Trump World narrative is not that the documents weren’t secret or needed to be kept secure. Actually, his lawyers now say, Trump is very interested in securing sensitive government documents. The reasoning seems to be that a country club allowing thousands of people to wander the grounds for a fee, will keep the material—said to include information labeled with the highest level of restriction, including some documents related to our nuclear arsenal—more secure than the ultra-secure, fortified residence of the most powerful person in the world, surrounded by law enforcement and military defenses. Also known as the White House.

On Laura Ingraham’s FOX News show Thursday night, Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb, told Ingraham that safeguarding the documents was all Trump was ever interested in.

Ingraham: Was there a limited number who had access to that storage room…
Bobb: Yes.. Mar-a-Lago is secure.. just getting on to the compound is hard.. Only certain members of staff can get down there.. It’s a very limited number of people that can get down there pic.twitter.com/5seWpty8h0

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 19, 2022

After all, documents were kept in a basement storage room that not many people had access to. Plus, only one key existed for the lock on the door, Bobb said. When Ingraham pressed her to clarify that only one or two people were able to access the room, Bobb demurred, settling on “a very small number of people.”

In August, I become regretful about everything that I haven’t squeezed into my summer and probably won’t. Here is an incomplete list of books I have started and not finished: First Love by Gwendoline Riley, At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, Sex in the Archives by Barry Reay, and—many times—Swann’s Way (the first few pages). I abandoned all these books at different points and for the usual reasons; I was busy, bored, or left my copy at the beach. It seems like they are no longer going to be my summer reading—maybe in September.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

This week, I returned to one of my favorite explorations of the strange geometries of syntax: “Way down the deserted street, I thought I saw a bus which, with luck, might get me out of this sentence which might go on forever, knotting phrase onto phrase with fire hydrants and parking meters, and still not take me to my language waiting, surely, around some corner.” In Curves to the Apple, Rosmarie Waldrop’s sentences accelerate and swerve, reconfiguring the modern discourse on embodiment and subjectivity; there’s a spectacular volta lying in wait in each of these prose poems. “I learned about communication by twisting my legs around yours,” she writes, “as, in spinning a thought, we twist fiber on fiber.”

This spring, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who’s running for US Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania, filmed himself in the produce aisle of a Redner’s grocery store as he shopped for “crudité” ingredients. The video, which resurfaced this week, was intended to spotlight high inflation under a Democrat-controlled federal government. Instead, it has been widely lampooned due to the multi-millionaire’s less-than-convincing performance as an everyman experiencing sticker shock at the cost of asparagus. But however out of touch parts of the video were, it did tap into a reality that has hit many Americans hard: rising prices.

It can be difficult to fully grasp just how much prices have risen—and why. And it might feel like a few cents here and there don’t add up to all that much. But they do. To the tune of an average $460 per month versus last year, according to Moody’s Analytics economic analyst Ryan Sweet. 

1. Gas

How expensive is it?

In June, the average price of gas in the US surpassed $5 for the first time in history. That grim milestone wreaked havoc on household budgets—and not just because car owners were now stuck paying more than ever to commute. Skyrocketing gas prices affect everyone, regardless of driving habits, because they’ve led companies that produce goods to inflate their own prices to cover higher shipping and transportation costs, passing on the higher expenses to their customers.

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On August 11, thousands of Brazilians gathered inside and outside of the University of São Paulo’s law school to follow along with the reading of two letters in defense of democracy. The documents, which had been signed by former presidents, artists, scholars, and businesspeople, were in response to President Jair Bolsonaro’s repeated attacks on the Supreme Court and the electoral system ahead of the October presidential elections. One of the letters took as its inspiration a 1977 “Letter to Brazilians” that denounced the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time.

“In today’s Brazil, there is no more room for authoritarian setbacks,” states the 2022 manifesto, which has collected more than 1 million signatures. “Dictatorship and torture belong to the past. The solution to the immense challenges facing Brazilian society has to be tied to respect for the results of the elections.” The pro-democracy statement also referenced “how authoritarian follies put the United States’ century-old democracy at risk” and those “efforts to disrupt democracy and people’s faith in the reliability of the [electoral] process did not succeed, and nor will they here.” 

With about a month and a half until the most polarized election in Brazil’s recent history, the most recent polls show the far-right incumbent president trailing 15 points behind his biggest rival, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the left-leaning Worker’s Party. A cornered Bolsonaro, who has been in power since 2019, saw his approval ratings tank in no small part due to his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in more than 680,000 deaths in the country. The unapologetically authoritarian leader is reportedly scared of being sent to prison for potential offenses that include corruption and crimes against humanity should he no longer be in office. “I have three alternatives for my future: jail, death, or victory,” Bolsonaro said last year. 

Tensions are running high in Brazil and the risk of political turmoil and violence in the next few weeks appears to be increasingly likely. Bolsonaro’s supporters have attacked pro-Lula rallies with feces and urine, and in July one of the president’s backers shot and killed a Worker’s Party local official. Frontrunner Lula has since increased his security apparatus and started wearing a bulletproof vest to public events. On top of the escalating threat of even greater political violence, some worry about a scenario in which the democratic order would be completely disrupted. “The number of times people ask me if I fear a coup d’état means that there’s something strange going on,” Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso told CNN. 

As the presidential campaign officially kicks off, Mother Jones spoke with Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist and professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo about Bolsonaro’s radicalization, the possibility of “social chaos” ahead of the elections, and fears of a January 6-like scenario in Brazil. 

Marcus, Jim, Luke and Andy gear up for another wonderful weekend of Premier League football!

There’s a literary theme as Cristiano Ronaldo opens up his secret notebook and Neil Warnock pens a poem about his career. Elsewhere, Nottingham Forest and Everton each take their slice of the transfer madness pie and Eddie Howe has some bright ideas…

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Early Saturday morning, the room on the fourth floor of the Washington, DC, church is full. It’s not yet 7 a.m. and already about sixty migrants, mostly men and a handful of families with children, some women breastfeeding, sit around nine round tables. Their scant belongings—keepsakes of the homes they had left behind and tokens of solidarity from strangers they encountered along the way—are preserved inside transparent Ziplocs and white trash bags. After a 1,700-mile, 40-hour journey from Texas, two of the more than 150 buses transporting migrants that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sent to Washington, DC, had arrived at Union Station at dawn. One woman approaches me to ask where she can take a shower, telling me she really needs to clean up. Another wonders if she can have a new pair of shoes because the cheap rubber sandals on her feet are falling apart. Some people need diapers and ointment for their babies; others ask around for some medicine that could relieve a headache. 

David Swanson, a 60-year-old compliance manager with the Human Rights Campaign finance department volunteers at the church every other weekend. (Mother Jones is not disclosing the location of the church or the migrants’ full names to protect their identities.) Since the church started receiving migrants in late May, over a month after they began arriving in the city, he has met people from all over the world—Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and even Afghanistan. During one of his shifts, a volunteer who happened to be a pediatrician noticed a woman who had surgical staples all over her chest. Swanson recalls that she had been shot many times, then hospitalized, but left her home country before she could get them removed. Another man had told him that he felt “a little bit like a prisoner” when he saw his final destination—Nashville, Tennessee—fly by the window as his bus raced towards the east coast without making a stop. 

This Saturday in August, Swanson is cooking breakfast for a group he had anticipated would number about 23 people. The gathering had more than doubled, and it turned out to be the biggest group the church had welcomed in a while. Dressed in an apron, Swanson started at 5 a.m. and prepared 130 eggs and eight rolls of pork sausage to be served with slices of melon, mandarin oranges, white bread, coffee, and apple juice. Still, he worries there might not be enough food for everyone. “Luckily we had a lot of leftover eggs from last week,” he tells me. Nearby, a young man thanks a volunteer, saying he hadn’t had a proper meal in several days. A mother breastfeeding a cheerful eight-month-old boy tells me she is happy to drink coffee for the first time in more than a week. Like so many people in the room, she and her husband hope to leave soon for New York.  

“We mostly stay out of the way and let them do their work,” Swanson says of the volunteers with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, a coalition of about 20 grassroots groups from the DMV area and countless individuals who have mobilized to receive the buses at Union Station. “They work like a machine,” he says, coordinating with churches and other faith-based organizations to provide assistance and orientation to the migrants. 

A group of about 60 migrants arrived at a Washington, DC, church on a Saturday in August.

House of the Dragon is 'a darker Game of Thrones'

June 10

I wake up to three missed calls and matching voice mails from a blocked number that turns out to be FedEx Express Heavyweight informing me that since I was not around to receive my thousand-pound skid, it’s on its way to JFK. The delivery in question is Issue Seven of The Drift, the magazine I cofounded and co-run, and it was supposed to arrive next Monday or Tuesday in time for our launch party Thursday at the Public Hotel. Evidently it’s early … and sleeping in was a potentially multithousand-dollar mistake.

Kicking myself for how late I stayed out last night—there was a party at Russian Samovar for Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus won this year’s Pulitzer in fiction—I dial FedEx and shoot an email to our printer. I got through most of The Netanyahus in a single sitting last summer, before I’d met its author. It’s mostly a satire based on an anecdote told to Cohen by the late literary critic Harold Bloom, but it’s also pointedly presentist, a self-conscious parable for liberalism in the Trump years. Early on it draws a dichotomy between history and theology that I’ve been mulling over since I encountered it.

While I’m on hold with FedEx I receive an email asking me to write a culture diary for this website, and I decide to start right away—no cherry-picking. Not that what I’m doing now is particularly “cultural”: I’m telling the automated system I’d like to “speak to a representative … speak to a representative,” getting transferred to incorrect extensions, hanging up, and dialing the line again. I haven’t even gotten out of bed.