Contributing Writers

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.

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.

A scorching heat wave continues to fuel wildfires across southern Europe and parts of North Africa, resulting in hundreds of heat-related deaths and forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. The record-breaking temperatures come as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has effectively killed President Biden’s Build Back Better climate legislation after stringing Biden along for 18 months. “It’s appalling, but it’s not unexpected.

We speak with climate author and activist Bill McKibben, who is pushing for the climate movement to demand the release of Egyptian prisoner and human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah ahead of the next U.N. climate conference, which will be hosted in Egypt. McKibben says releasing El-Fattah to the U.K., which has agreed to house him, would be “the easiest of gestures” by Egypt, whose authoritarian leader met Saturday with President Biden.

President Biden met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Friday, as the Saudis agreed to increase oil production as well as open their airspace to Israeli commercial flights. Biden says he told the crown prince he held him responsible for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a U.S. resident, though Biden’s claims were later contradicted by a top Saudi official.

The release of the first images from NASA’s new flagship James Webb Space Telescope brought renewed attention to the controversy over naming the telescope after James Webb, who led NASA ahead of the Apollo moon landings in the 1960s. He also played a key role in purging LGBTQ+ people from NASA in what was known as the “lavender scare,” and before that at the State Department under President Truman.

NASA released revolutionary new images of the cosmos this week that were taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space observatory to date. Launched in 2021, the JWST was designed to study star and planet formation with exponentially more accuracy and detail than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. “We can actually essentially watch the formation of stars,” says astrophysicist Katie Mack.

COVID-19 cases are rising as the BA.5 Omicron variant puts more people in the hospital amid high rates of reinfection, which is the focus of a new piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong in The Atlantic that is headlined “Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?” Yong warns the premature rollback of protective policies, like mask mandates and public health funding, has left people more vulnerable to reinfection.

President Biden is set to meet with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Friday as part of a four-day visit to restore key relationships and build security cooperation in the Middle East. Human rights activists are outraged that the U.S. is willing to support a leader responsible for human rights violations including in the brutal war in Yemen, the state-sanctioned killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and more.