Contributing Writers

In his new book, Yale historian Samuel Moyn explores whether the push to make U.S. wars more “humane” by banning torture and limiting civilian casualties has helped fuel more military interventions around the world. He looks in detail at the role of President Obama in expanding the use of drones even as he received the Nobel Peace Prize. “What happened after 2001 is that, in the midst of an extremely brutal war on terror, a new kind of war emerged.

As this week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., we look at a new five-part documentary series on Netflix about the attacks and the response from the United States, both at home and abroad. “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror” features a wide range of interviews with survivors of the attacks, U.S.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says global vaccine inequity endangers everyone on the planet, including those in rich countries, and says the best way to solve the problem is to drastically increase production of COVID-19 vaccines. “As long as the disease is festering someplace in the world, there are going to be mutations,” Stiglitz says. “So it’s in our own self-interest that we get the disease controlled everywhere.

As unemployment benefits for millions of U.S. workers expired on Labor Day, with many states suffering the worst surge of the pandemic, economist Joseph Stiglitz says it’s “disturbing” federal aid was allowed to lapse. “This is going to feed into the problems posed by the Delta variant.

Oil and gas investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz says the extent of damage done after Hurricane Ida from the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry from leaks, spills, flaring, ruptures and chemical releases in the Gulf Coast could be among the worst of such events ever recorded.

As part of our ongoing coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest storms to ever hit the United States, we go to St. James Parish, Louisiana, to speak with Sharon Lavigne, the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, who lives in the heart of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” home to more than 150 petrochemical facilities. She is now documenting oil spills in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida even as her home was badly damaged.

As the Taliban announces a new acting government in Kabul led by hard-liners from its previous stint in power and fight against U.S. occupation, Danish Afghan journalist Nagieb Khaja says the composition has been a “surprising outcome” as many observers expected the group to strike a more conciliatory tone. “It’s really been disappointing for the people who have been looking for a glimpse of hope,” Khaja says.

In an extended conversation with Spencer Ackerman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter, he examines the connection he sees between the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and the so-called war on terror, which he writes about in his new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

As we look at the public health crisis that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City, we speak with Lila Nordstrom, a student in 2001 at Stuyvesant High School, which neighbors ground zero and was reopened while the site was still burning and releasing toxic smoke and dust. “Our school wasn’t just next to the World Trade Center site, but we were also in the center of the clean-up operations,” says Nordstrom.

As we look at “9/11’s Unsettled Dust” and the massive environmental and public health crisis that followed the 9/11 attacks in New York City 20 years ago this week, we speak with Joe Zadroga, father of New York police officer James Zadroga, who died of a respiratory illness after assisting in rescue efforts at ground zero. He says government officials spent years denying his son’s symptoms were related to ground zero rescue efforts.

As this week marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we look at an enraging new documentary, “9/11’s Unsettled Dust,” on the impact of the toxic, cancer-causing smoke and dust that hung over ground zero and how the Environmental Protection Agency put Wall Street’s interests before public health and told people the air was safe to breathe.

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.