Contributing Writers

We speak with the award-winning filmmaker Reid Davenport about his directorial debut, “I Didn’t See You There,” in which he reflects on the portrayal of disability in media and popular culture. “Documentary film has traditionally subjugated disabled people, so I wanted to completely turn that on its head” by filming from his perspective without being seen, says Davenport.

The lobby of DCTV’s new documentary film center in New York will be dedicated to the filmmaker Brent Renaud, who worked out of the historic firehouse alongside Democracy Now! for many years. Renaud was the first journalist to be killed in the Ukraine war after he was shot dead on March 13, 2022, while filming refugees near the capital Kyiv for a documentary series.

The New York City firehouse studio that housed Democracy Now! from 2001 to 2009 has reopened as a movie theater devoted to documentary films. The opening of Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film comes as Downtown Community Television celebrates 50 years of media activism and training.

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro faces former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s presidential election. Lula is a former union leader who held office from 2003 through 2010. He’s running on a leftist platform to uplift Brazil’s poor, preserve the Amazon rainforest and protect Brazil’s Indigenous communities, and is supported by a broad, grassroots alliance, explains Brazilian human rights advocate Maria Luísa Mendonça.

We speak with Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the courts and the law for Slate, about women who fought the racism, sexism and xenophobia of Trump’s presidency. She profiles many of them in her new book, “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.” “Law is slow and takes a long time, but at its best, it really can make us all freer and safer and restore dignity to those that have been harmed,” says Lithwick.

Russia has announced it will formally annex four areas of occupied Ukraine on Friday, after organizing referendums in the regions widely denounced by Ukraine and its allies as a sham. We speak with Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk, who explains how armed Russian soldiers went to the houses of Ukrainians in the occupied territories, forcing them to vote. She also describes widespread abuses committed by Russian forces, including mass graves and suspected torture chambers.

As millions of Florida residents in the path of Hurricane Ian were ordered to evacuate, advocates pushed authorities to also evacuate what they say are as many as 176,000 people incarcerated in prisons, jails and immigrant detention centers. Now the storm has left millions without power and many without water.

Authorities say hundreds may be dead after Hurricane Ian made landfall Wednesday along Florida’s southwestern coast as a powerful Category 4 storm, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the continental United States. We get an update from Tampa and look at links between the climate crisis, rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

We speak with Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the courts and the law for Slate, about women who fought the racism, sexism and xenophobia of Trump’s presidency. She profiles many of them in her new book, “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.” “Law is slow and takes a long time, but at its best, it really can make us all freer and safer and restore dignity to those that have been harmed,” says Lithwick.

NASA successfully crashed a robotic spacecraft into an asteroid this week, a first-of-its-kind test of technology that could prevent a comet or asteroid from hitting the Earth, though the chances of such a catastrophe are low. We speak with NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who calls the successful mission “bittersweet.

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin abandoned his own energy permitting proposal Tuesday that would have fast-tracked the federal review of energy projects, including the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline. Following intense pressure from a range of climate justice and Appalachian organizers, Manchin asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to drop the permitting reforms from a funding bill after it became clear he did not have the votes to pass the proposal. 350.