Open season

Because Karissa Mokoban spends most of her day analyzing and cataloging classified documents pertaining to ongoing criminal investigations, the office of Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey denied BCM’s request to play fly on the wall while Mokoban worked. “Karissa handles extremely sensitive and confidential material,” said administrative assistant Marsha Cohen, Mokoban’s supervisor. Instead, I’m asked to pass through security in the lobby and take the elevator to the criminal bureau on the 19th floor, where a receptionist, behind bulletproof glass, unlocks the entrance and leads me to a small conference room veiled by frosted glass. Mokoban sits upright in a Kelly green blazer over a black dress. Cohen and deputy press secretary Chloe Gotsis sit nearby to monitor the discussion. “I’ll try to walk you through my day without leaking anything,” Mokoban says, laughing.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, she enters her cubicle down the hall from the conference room at 9:00 and checks her email, reading briefings about the latest investigations. Among dozens of other cases this summer, the office has sued the giant opioid maker Purdue Pharma for misleading doctors about the dangers of OxyContin and the Environmental Protection Agency for illegally rolling back climate protection regulations, and is leading an 11-state investigation into a “no-poach” agreement by eight fast-food companies that prevents employees from switching franchises. “A lot of this summer is about learning how many different ways people try to commit crimes,” says the sociology major.

Then she’ll set to work on her latest project. As cases develop, attorneys from across the criminal bureau email her case files and visit her desk to explain the investigation. “By the time I’m on a project, I know how it will connect with the investigation as a whole.” So far she’s worked with the state police and the divisions of human trafficking, of enterprise, major, and cyber crimes, and of financial investigations. “It turns out everything isn’t resolved by the end of the [television] episode,” she says. In July, Mokoban spent about 40 percent of her time on spreadsheets, logging bank statements, time sheets, and other financial data. “My Excel skills have grown exponentially,” she says. “But I know now that I don’t want to work with numbers all day.” She also transcribes witness interviews—”that’s when I’m most alert, and I feel the empathy building in me”—and analyzes and documents surveillance footage, second by second. Every two weeks, she also runs the reception desk, fielding calls from citizens filing criminal complaints.

Alone in a compact lab with warbling centrifuges, spinning trays of test tubes, rows of micropipettes marked with all-caps radioactive signs, and a microwave—”Don’t know what that’s for yet, but it’s not for lunch,” he says—Matt Yan pulls a beaker containing 300 millileters of a fizzy, lemonade-colored solution from a refrigerator. He’s spent two weeks cultivating and diluting the mixture—a saline broth of isopropyl-D-1-thiogalactopyranoside, which triggers protein expression, and E. coli cells carrying GFP, a bright green florescent protein found in jellyfish and used as a marker in cellular biology. With slicked black hair and wearing a black button-up, black track pants, blue plastic gloves, and an oversized white lab coat with the name of a former post-doctoral fellow stitched over the breast pocket, Yan carries the beaker across the hall into a room filled with large freezers belonging to labs in MD Anderson’s Center for Neuroscience and Pain Research. He places the beaker in an incubator shaker, which resembles a microwave. He sets the machine to 2.8 degrees Celsius (37 degrees Fahrenheit), and sets his iPhone alarm for four hours later. At that point, the protein may or may not be pure, and he may or may not be one step closer to answering the main question to which he’s devoting his summer in Texas: Do isotopes Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 affect the florescence of GFP differently? The answer may open up another avenue of testing. “It’s exhausting. Hard work is hard. I’m finally seeing the struggle of being an adult,” says the 18-year-old Yan.

The biochemistry major spent much of his freshman winter break at home in San Francisco researching labs across the country and emailing principal investigators he wanted to work with. The lab of Jiusheng Yan (no relation) investigates the structure, function, and regulation of ion channels related to pain, “something we all experience every day but most of us know nothing about.”

Jaime Martinez sits at the back of a compact, high-ceilinged, wood-paneled office that houses 11 others—on the phone, marking up documents, or typing at their desks—on June 26. Beneath three-foot-tall portraits of a white-tailed deer, a desert cardinal, a Gulf squareback crab, and other flora and fauna of Texas’s 34th district, which borders Mexico, he is hunched over a laptop in a simple wood chair. In the three weeks since the rising junior political science major began interning for Democratic U.S. Representative Filemón Vela Jr., he’s been fielding up to 10 phone calls a day from constituents concerned about the Trump Administration’s family separation immigration policy (which was suspended on June 20). His task this morning is to create a sheet of bullet points comparing the number of children who remain apart from their families as reported by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, and other networks. Vela will cite the variance among these statistics in interviews with the media and when debating on the House floor.

Growing up in Mexico City, Martinez was “fascinated by the way American politicians used their intellect and their personality to try to change history.” He immigrated with his family to the border town of Brownsville (within the 34th district) when he was 15, and saw Vela speak at his high school. Last winter, he called the same constituent hotline he now answers and inquired about an internship. “I didn’t want to just apply online. I wanted to apply to a person.”

Martinez spends his 8:30 to 5:30 workdays in this bustling office on Independence Avenue. He conducts research on pending bills; translates constituents’ letters and social media posts from Spanish to English; stocks office supplies; ships surplus books from the Library of Congress to underserved schools in the 34th; attends and writes briefings on caucus meetings and special interest lectures (topics have ranged from human trafficking to Canadian tariffs on American lumber); and pinballs across the cavernous, marble-floored Cannon Building to pop into its many 10-foot-high doors and ask other U.S. Representatives to sign various petitions his Congressman authors (e.g., to convince the president to declare a state of emergency, from flooding, in the Rio Grande Valley). Once a week Martinez gives visiting Texans up-to-two-hour tours of the U.S. Capitol. “It slows down a lot when Congress isn’t in session. That’s when you struggle to prove yourself,” says Martinez. “You want to keep asking, What can I do? But you don’t want to constantly disrupt. That’s a useful skill I’m learning: keeping busy even when it’s not busy.”

Almost 25 years since the dawn of democracy in South Africa, Cape Town remains one of the most segregated cities in a country of stark inequality. As property prices skyrocket in a cosmopolitan and rapidly gentrifying city center, the city’s black South African population continues to be routinely relegated to the impoverished peripheries. Over the past six months, beginning in February, Tia Rashke, a theology major from Madison, Wisconsin, has had a chance to view the city close-up, first as a student for a semester at the University of Cape Town, and this summer as an intern with the Southern African Bishops’ Conference Parliamentary Liaison Office, located near South Africa’s parliament buildings and within sight and sound of regular protests that speak to the persisting injustices of post-apartheid South Africa.

Rashke arrived in Cape Town toward the end of a prolonged drought that threatened to run municipal taps dry. But the winter has been unusually wet, bringing relief, and on a July day it’s raining as Rashke works in an office stocked with shelves of bound reports on the nation’s history and social issues, car tires hissing on the nearby street. She is just more than half way through her two-month internship at the bishops’ liaison office, where her primary project has been researching and writing a briefing paper on how migrant children are received around the world.

In a plain black T-shirt, white Bermuda shorts, and running sneakers, Daniel Schantz, who goes by Danny, is among the more formally dressed at Relix Magazine‘s headquarters in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The red-and-white walls are crowded with oversized prints of magazine covers; psychedelic posters of the Grateful Dead, Phish, and Cream, some of which are signed; white string lights; and a three-foot-tall orange foam finger with “Fans.com” printed on the palm. Nineteen-seventies reggae plays on surround-sound speakers and Schantz, who is developing a spreadsheet of summer and fall holidays that may be ripe for magazine promotions, swivels in rhythm in his chair at one end of a conference room table he shares with seven other student interns. “Oh word,” he calls out. “We’ve got so many Deadheads among our subscribers. What about August 21, Senior Citizens Day?”

“That’s brilliant,” says Harrison Ezratty, the magazine’s marketing coordinator and Schantz’s 24-year-old supervisor, positioned two feet behind Schantz at a desk in the corner.

Relix was founded in 1974 as a handwritten, photocopied newsletter informing Grateful Dead fans of amateur concert recordings, or “relics,” as the magazine’s founder called them. It’s evolved into an eight-times-a-year glossy (circulation: 100,000) dedicated to live music of all genres, with a heavy emphasis on jam bands. Schantz, an English major who minors in marketing and philosophy, grew up in New Jersey listening to “all hip-hop all day,” until his high school baseball coach played the Grateful Dead one day after practice. “It was thrilling. I didn’t know musicians could communicate with each other on that level.” Last winter he cold-called Relix, which he has been reading avidly for years, and inquired about an internship. “I love music more than anything. But you hear horror stories about the industry. I wanted to have an inside look before making it a career.”