Contributing Writers

We speak with first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel, who was fired last week for a viral tweet in which she criticized the Waukesha, Wisconsin, board of education’s decision to ban her students from singing “Rainbowland” during a school concert earlier this year. The hit song about inclusivity by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton includes the lyrics “We are rainbows, me and you / Every color, every hue / Let’s shine on through.

As world leaders from the United States to France welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we look at press freedom in India under the leader of the Hindu nationalist party BJP. One of India’s last bastions of free media, NDTV, has been taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, believed to have close ties to Modi.

We speak with first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel, who was fired last week for a viral tweet in which she criticized the Waukesha, Wisconsin, board of education’s decision to ban her students from singing “Rainbowland” during a school concert earlier this year. The hit song about inclusivity by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton includes the lyrics “We are rainbows, me and you / Every color, every hue / Let’s shine on through.

As world leaders from the United States to France welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we look at press freedom in India under the leader of the Hindu nationalist party BJP. One of India’s last bastions of free media, NDTV, has been taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, believed to have close ties to Modi.

In an in-depth interview about her work, we speak with Isabel Allende, one of the world’s most celebrated novelists, author of 26 books that have sold more than 77 million copies and have been translated into 42 languages. Her books include The House of the Spirits, Paula and Daughter of Fortune, and her latest novel is The Wind Knows My Name, which looks at the trauma of child-family separation, from Nazi Germany to the U.S.

A damning new investigation by journalists Maria Hinojosa and Zeba Warsi examines how immigration officials have failed to properly address complaints of sexual abuse from people held in detention centers. The report from Futuro Investigates and Latino USA details how women in jails run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have been sexually abused, often in a medical setting when they are at their most vulnerable.

Multiple reports are reinvestigating the neo-Nazi fighters and militias involved in the war both in Russia and Ukraine. “You have neo-Nazis on both sides of this conflict,” says Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin, a longtime reporter on the far right in Ukraine and Russia who is critical of the Western media’s normalization of groups like the Azov Battalion.

A new investigation reveals the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, where the agency operates clandestinely in what, under a formal declaration of war, would be the domain of the military. We’re joined on the show by the author of the investigation, William Arkin, a national security reporter and senior editor at Newsweek, who says that the CIA has “got its hand in a little bit of everything” in Ukraine.

We speak with first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel, who was fired last week for a viral tweet in which she criticized the Waukesha, Wisconsin, board of education’s decision to ban her students from singing “Rainbowland” during a school concert earlier this year. The hit song about inclusivity by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton includes the lyrics “We are rainbows, me and you / Every color, every hue / Let’s shine on through.

As world leaders from the United States to France welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we look at press freedom in India under the leader of the Hindu nationalist party BJP. One of India’s last bastions of free media, NDTV, has been taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, believed to have close ties to Modi.