Contributing Writers

Following the resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Finance Minister Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss have advanced to a runoff to succeed Johnson as Conservative leader, which would also make them prime minister. Both candidates would be “utterly devastating” for the U.K., says Guardian columnist George Monbiot. “What these people have to do to become prime minister is really to appeal to the worst instincts of humanity.

A massive heat wave has scorched much of Europe this week, with the U.K. shattering its record for highest temperature ever recorded Tuesday. We’re joined by author and environmental activist George Monbiot, whose latest column for The Guardian is headlined “This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather.

As heat waves scorch much of the globe, we look at who bears the brunt of the climate emergency and go to Kampala, Uganda, to speak with climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate. “The climate crisis has been here. It has been impacting the lives of so many people on the African continent, which is responsible for less than 4% of the global emissions,” says Nakate.

President Biden outlined new efforts to combat the climate crisis in a speech Wednesday but stopped short of declaring a national climate emergency — a move sought by the U.S. climate movement and many progressive lawmakers. This comes after Senator Joe Manchin just scuttled Biden’s Build Back Better climate legislation and as more than 100 million people in the United States are under heat advisories.

On Tuesday, 17 Democratic lawmakers, almost all women, were arrested outside the Supreme Court while protesting the court’s recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade. We speak with Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who was one of several Democratic House members who has shared her personal experience of getting an abortion, about what a post-Roe America looks like.

We speak with Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, after a man was arrested on suspicion of hate crime after neighbors said he allegedly pointed a gun at her home and threatened to kill her. He was found outside of her home last Saturday night with a .40-caliber handgun yelling “Go back to India.

A new 988 suicide and crisis hotline launched Saturday that people can call, text or chat. The three-digit shortcut phases out the 1-800-273-TALK number. Until now, the 988 lifeline was only available in some parts of the United States. We speak with Congressmember Jamie Raskin, who helped introduce legislation that provides funding for states to implement the rollout. His son Tommy tragically died by suicide at the age of 25 in December 2020 after a battle with depression.

We speak to Maryland Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin, member of the House January 6 select committee, about the pro-Trump Republican who won Tuesday’s gubernatorial primary in the state and helped organized buses to the insurrection. Dan Cox is the latest in a slate of Republicans across the U.S. to advance in the party after supporting Trump’s election lies. If elected, Cox has vowed to conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election.

Ahead of the eighth hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, we speak with Congressmember Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, and get an update on how the Secret Service has only provided a single text exchange from the insurrection and may have purged the messages after oversight officials requested them.

We speak with Harvard journalism analyst Laura Hazard Owen, who says reporters will have to abandon “conventional journalism wisdom” to cover abortion stories following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

We speak with pioneering scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about the growing Republican effort to ban critical race theory — an academic field that conservatives have invoked as a catchall phrase to censor a variety of curriculums focusing on antiracism, sex and gender. Crenshaw has launched what she calls a “counterterrorism offensive” against the Republican efforts with a “summer school” inspired by the Freedom Summer movement of the 1960s.

Pro-Israel lobby groups have spent “shocking” amounts of money to change the course of multiple Democratic congressional primaries over the past year alone, reports our guest Peter Beinart. The latest is in Maryland, where former Congressmember Donna Edwards is being outspent sevenfold by corporate attorney Glenn Ivey in her bid to win back her old seat in the state’s 4th Congressional District.

Outraged residents of Uvalde, Texas, confronted members of the city’s school board Monday, nearly two months after an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 fourth graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.