Contributing Writers

Amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, we look at the experiences of meatpacking workers during the pandemic and beyond. Dulce Castañeda, a founding member of Children of Smithfield, a Nebraska-based grassroots advocacy group led by the children and family members of meatpacking workers, says conditions in the meatpacking plants during the pandemic remained as usual.

As the United States ends a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, a former intelligence analyst for the CIA’s drone program offers an apology to the people of Afghanistan “from not only myself, but from the rest of our society as Americans.

Ahead of Labor Day, we speak with journalist and sociologist Eyal Press about his new book, “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.” Press profiles workers like prison guards and oil workers — people who make their livelihoods by doing “unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn’t want to hear too much” about, he says.

As the death toll from the remnants of Hurricane Ida in the northeastern United States climbs to 46, President Biden is visiting New Orleans, which is under curfew enforced by police and the National Guard as most of the city remains in the dark amid sweltering temperatures.

With the official end of the War in Afghanistan, we speak with Rafia Zakaria, author of “Against White Feminism,” about how U.S. officials used the plight of the women in the country to justify the 2001 invasion and subsequent occupation. “Feminism has been delegitimized in Afghanistan because it is associated with an occupying force,” says Zakaria. “Now Afghan women are left to pick up the pieces and deal with the Taliban.

Mahbouba Seraj, president of the Afghan Women’s Network and a longtime advocate for women’s rights, says the Taliban have already restricted women’s freedoms since taking over the country, despite their assurances that they have shifted their views since the last time they were in power. “If they continue like this, … Afghanistan will go back another 200 years,” says Seraj.

Three police officers and two paramedics in Colorado have been criminally charged in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was tackled by police, placed in a chokehold and later injected with a large amount of the powerful sedative ketamine. McClain, who was not suspected of any crime, suffered a cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital and died several days later.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to let stand a new anti-abortion law in Texas, which bans all abortions in the state after six weeks — before most people even realize they are pregnant — and allows for private citizens to sue anyone who “aids and abets” a person in getting an abortion. Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, says, “It is clearly an unconstitutional law” that must be reversed.

As Haitians cope with the devastating aftermath of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, Tropical Storm Grace and the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July, a coalition of over 300 rights groups is denouncing the Biden administration’s ongoing deportations to Haiti and urging it to expand temporary protected status.

In a major setback for reproductive rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed a Texas law to go into effect that bans abortions after six weeks — before most people even know they are pregnant. Until now, no other six-week ban has ever gone into effect in the United States. The law is seen as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and allows private citizens to file civil suits against abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks.

Afghan doctor Wais Aria describes how he fled Afghanistan with his family after the Taliban takeover, packing up his wife and four children and trying for days to leave from the Kabul airport, where he was beaten by the Taliban. They managed to catch a flight out of the country Thursday and arrived in the U.S. on Saturday. “It was a disaster for me and my children,” says Aria, now in Alexandria, Virginia.

President Joe Biden has forcefully defended his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, describing the removal of U.S. forces as an “extraordinary success.” He noted in a speech Tuesday that the U.S. helped more than 120,000 people flee Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power, and called for a new era in foreign policy.