Contributing Writers

As the Supreme Court weighs whether to keep mifepristone available nationwide, we speak with Julie Burkhart, who is on the frontlines of the fight for reproductive justice. Burkhart is president of Wellspring Health Access, the only full-service abortion clinic in Wyoming, that was firebombed by an anti-abortion activist last year, as well as co-owner of Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois. Burkhart previously worked for eight years with Dr. George Tiller before his assassination in 2009.

As the abortion pill mifepristone remains available for at least another two days after a delayed U.S. Supreme Court ruling, we discuss the case with law professor Michele Goodwin. She notes the push to force more people to give birth is taking place against a backdrop of poor maternal health outcomes.

As pressure grows on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign over his decades-long relationship with a billionaire benefactor, we speak with legal journalist Adam Cohen, who says there is a precedent that should guide lawmakers in how to address the growing scandal. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign after his financial relationship came to light with businessman Louis Wolfson, who paid Fortas to consult for his foundation.

Calls continue to grow for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to step down or to be impeached, after ProPublica uncovered more damning information about his relationship with Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. According to the new report, Thomas and his family sold a house and two vacant lots in Savannah, Georgia, to Crow for around $130,000 but never disclosed the sale, which appears to be a violation of the 1978 Ethics in Government Act.

A New York immigration judge on Tuesday ruled that Jean Montrevil, a Haitian immigrant and longtime activist, will no longer face deportation, after a decade of being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his activism. Montrevil was deported to Haiti in 2018 under the Trump administration but got a second chance in 2021, when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam granted him a pardon for two drug convictions from three decades earlier, which ICE had used as a pretext to deport him.

Our guest Hannah Dreier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times, has published a bombshell new investigation headlined “As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings.” It reports that the Biden administration has repeatedly ignored or missed warnings about a surge of migrant children as young as 12 working in factories across the United States under grueling and often dangerous working conditions in serious violation of child labor laws.

We discuss climate solutions and the need for broad involvement in the fight to avert climate catastrophe with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit and longtime Filipino climate activist Renato “Red” Constantino. Solnit is the co-editor of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, which features an essay by Constantino about his role in the Paris Climate Agreement titled “How the Ants Moved the Elephants in Paris.

We speak with Ugandan LGBTQ activist Frank Mugisha about a draconian new anti-gay bill the country is on the verge of imposing, which makes it a crime to identify as queer, considers all same-sex conduct to be nonconsensual, and even allows for the death penalty in certain cases. Both the Biden administration and the U.N. secretary-general are urging Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni not to sign the bill into law.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that poverty is the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States. Roughly 500 people die from poverty in the U.S. every day. Our guest, sociologist Matthew Desmond, is the author of the new book, Poverty, by America, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

In Atlanta, Georgia, the family of a prisoner says he was “eaten alive” by insects and bedbugs in his cell there last year. The family of 35-year-old Lashawn Thompson, who was being held in the jail’s psychiatric wing, is demanding a criminal investigation and that the jail be shut down. In an exclusive interview, we speak to Thompson’s brother Brad McCrae and sister Shenita Thompson, as well as Michael Harper, a lawyer representing the family.