Contributing Writers

A protest camp in the small border town of Lochiel, Arizona, is seeking to stop federal contractors from building another portion of President Trump’s border barrier with Mexico. At the center of the protest camp is a 200-year-old cottonwood known as a “grandmother” tree, with activists sitting in the tree to physically stop its destruction.

James Muldoon is a sociologist who writes about the changing nature of human-technology relationships. Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships investigates how people form emotional attachments with large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.

Sixty-nine-year-old Wynd Kaufmyn, a retired teacher from Berkeley, California, is believed to be the first person imprisoned for protesting the development of artificial intelligence, after she and other members of the group StopAI were arrested during a sit-in protest at the headquarters of OpenAI. Democracy Now! reached Kaufmyn at the San Francisco County Jail, where she is now serving a two-week sentence for charges including “interfering with a business.

Restrictions on women’s rights have expanded in Afghanistan since U.S. forces withdrew from the country five years ago, ceding control to the Taliban in the process. Afghan women are banned from attending schools and gyms, books written by women are removed from libraries, doctors and nurses are unable to practice, and child marriage rates have increased. Wives have been rendered legally subordinate to their husbands, and women are required to stay silent in public.

A protest camp in the small border town of Lochiel, Arizona, is seeking to stop federal contractors from building another portion of President Trump’s border barrier with Mexico. At the center of the protest camp is a 200-year-old cottonwood known as a “grandmother” tree, with activists sitting in the tree to physically stop its destruction.

The Trump administration has paused construction of border infrastructure in Big Bend National Park in Texas following public criticism of the controversial project. Crews were filmed bulldozing pristine desert wilderness earlier this month, sparking rare bipartisan pushback. The construction is part of a larger plan for the Big Bend region to build hundreds of miles of walls, vehicle barriers and other border infrastructure.

We speak with Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which is part of a lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his plan to monetize access to his social media platform Truth Social, where he routinely makes market-moving announcements. Truth API went live on August 1 and already has subscribers. Truth Social is charging up to $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts, giving investors an edge on major news events.

We look at major media news with Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy organization Free Press. She discusses the landmark lawsuit against Meta for making its social media platforms addictive for young people, efforts to halt the Paramount-Warner Bros. megamerger, and Disney’s lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over what it calls the Trump administration’s “retaliatory campaign” against the ABC television network.

A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel.

President Trump’s son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday after Israel rejected a 15-point plan for Gaza promoted by President Trump’s “Board of Peace.” The proposal would have seen Hamas gradually disarm and turn over governance of Gaza to an international force in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the besieged territory.

We continue our conversation with Maggie Haberman, whose recent book with fellow New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, digs into the handling of the Epstein files and the president’s decision to wage war on Iran.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Maggie Haberman is the co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. In the book, Haberman and her fellow New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan provide an inside look at how the administration has handled many of the biggest crises of Trump’s second term.

The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.

A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel.

A prominent human rights lawyer in the United Kingdom has been charged with criminal contempt for his closing speech in the trial of his client, Charlotte “Lottie” Head, one of four Palestine Action activists who were sentenced as terrorists over their involvement in a 2024 protest and raid on an Israeli weapons factory. Their sentencing marked the first time a British judge issued terrorism sentencing enhancements on people who were not actually convicted of terrorism.

Newly released federal documents have revealed the existence of an expansive surveillance program launched by the federal government against activists, labor unions, community groups, and even a bicycle repair collective, in Minnesota last winter. “Operation Puppet Master” was launched in response to statewide protests against the ICE killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.

One of the biggest upsets from Democratic primary elections this month was Donavan McKinney’s defeat of two-term Congressmember Shri Thanedar in the House primary to represent parts of Detroit and Wayne County in Michigan’s 13th District. McKinney, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, won on a platform to get corporate money out of politics, support Medicare for All and end military aid to Israel, among other issues.

We speak with Tennessee lawmaker Justin J. Pearson, who just won the Democratic primary to represent part of Memphis in the state’s 9th Congressional District. Pearson’s campaign focused in part on opposing large artificial intelligence data centers, particularly Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, which are in the Memphis area.
“People don’t want toxic data centers polluting the air that they breathe,” says Pearson.

We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone.

The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.

One of the biggest upsets from Democratic primary elections this month was Donavan McKinney’s defeat of two-term Congressmember Shri Thanedar in the House primary to represent parts of Detroit and Wayne County in Michigan’s 13th District. McKinney, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, won on a platform to get corporate money out of politics, support Medicare for All and end military aid to Israel, among other issues.

We speak with Tennessee lawmaker Justin J. Pearson, who just won the Democratic primary to represent part of Memphis in the state’s 9th Congressional District. Pearson’s campaign focused in part on opposing large artificial intelligence data centers, particularly Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, which are in the Memphis area.
“People don’t want toxic data centers polluting the air that they breathe,” says Pearson.

We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone.

We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone.

The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.

One of the biggest upsets from Democratic primary elections this month was Donavan McKinney’s defeat of two-term Congressmember Shri Thanedar in the House primary to represent parts of Detroit and Wayne County in Michigan’s 13th District. McKinney, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, won on a platform to get corporate money out of politics, support Medicare for All and end military aid to Israel, among other issues.