A Q&A with the filmmakers behind ‘The Janes’ abortion rights documentary​​ — A t the edge of 39, my brain often hollers about motherhood — do I want it? Is it even possible? After all, at this point, I am officially a geriatric pregnancy. It’s difficult to overstate, at times, how much this question of children, or their absence, haunts me. …

Governor Whitmer’s case possesses the potential to provide a playbook for other states to fight zombie laws across the nation. — Rarely have three letters and five numbers belied so many horrors. MCL 750.14 is a 1931 Michigan abortion law (which itself stems from an 1846 abortion ban), that makes it a felony to procure a miscarriage, unless necessary to “preserve life.” (More on the dangerous vagaries in that caveat in…

“Centering class is pivotal because it is the working class who keep the system running, yet that society is also based on our collective exploitation.“ — “You can’t charge a person to work for you. They’ve gotten away with this in the sex industry for decades. I’ve been a stripper now for 26 years… They call it ‘stage fees’ or a ‘mandatory tip out.’ They have various titles, but don’t be confused. It’s literally wage theft.”

A Massachusetts lawyer defrauded more than 1,000 Brazilian immigrants in an elaborate asylum scam. This exploitation is all too common. — Eleven years ago, Ricardo Souza was driving home when heard the two-tone howl of a police siren and was pulled over. The officer asked to see his license, and Ricardo produced his driving permit from Brazil. “He asked me a bunch of questions and I said, ‘Hey, that’s all I…

A new graphic novel ‘Who Was the Voice of the People?’ aims to raise a new generation of activists — Terry Blas’s graphic novel opens in 1965 in Delano, California; Cesar Chavez is poised to galvanize thousands of farmworkers to make a 300-mile march to Sacramento, a pilgrimage for workers’ rights that all begins with grapes. Their roving protest takes them through 53 towns — nearly all on foot and…

“In the construction industry, people are looked at like commodities. Everyone loves a ribbon-cutting — no one wants to know about the people that got injured in building those tall, shiny buildings downtown.” — Texas possesses the dubious honor of being one of the most dangerous places in America to be a construction worker; its labor force is riddled with wage theft and misclassification, predatory inequities further compounded by the fact that more than half of construction workers across Texas are undocumented, leaving them…

Q&A with researcher Joshua Clark of the Othering & Belonging Institute of Berkeley: “The march of history isn’t inevitably one of progress.” — I t would be difficult to understate the danger of redistricting and gerrymandering in the United States, so I’ll start with a seeming hyperbole that is actually just a fact: “one person, one vote” is currently a fallacy. …

Named a Best Graphic Novel of 2021 by the New York Times, “On Tyranny” is a timely — and beautiful — call to action. — Vigilance can be exhausting. All that waiting for danger has a way of fraying one’s nerves. But what if instead of it making our collective spirits crave sleep, we leaned into the vigil of vigilance, the responsibility and arguable joy in ‘staying awake,’ in keeping watch over one another.