by MOHAMMED HANIF

ON THE NIGHT OF THE HANGING

Every thing is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims or their loved ones, which in most cases are the same people.

The Rawalpindi sky is clear and full of stars; all the talk about omens is rubbish: there are no meteor showers, no storms brewing on the horizon, the sky is not going to shed tears of blood, the earth is not about to split open and swallow its wretched inhabitants and their grief.

The man who is awake has asked for a safety razor, claiming that he doesn’t want to look like a mullah in death. After consultations with superiors, the jail superintendent has sent for a barber, who shaves the man gently, making sure to clear the fuzz from his earlobes. The man asks for a cigar and the jail superintendent doesn’t need to ask for his superiors’ permission. No man who is about to be hanged in three hours and forty-five minutes has ever tried to kill himself with a Montecristo.

The jailer makes sure to light it himself; the man chews on his cigar, takes two deep puffs and regrets it, thinking maybe he should have quit when he had the time. The man asks for his Shalimar perfume, sprays himself and lies down on the floor. A mosquito buzzes near his ear. On any other night he might have called in the jailer and given him a dressing-down for infesting his prison cell with poisonous insects, might have accused him of being a tool of the White Elephant, his favourite invective for the United States of America, but tonight he just shoos the mosquito away half-heartedly, listening to the rising and fading whirr of its wings. He is grateful for the company.

Everyone agrees on the above events. Those who wanted to hang him, those who wanted to save him, those who wanted a martyr in the early morning whose blood could help them bring about a revolution, even those who were indifferent, all agree up to this point that the man lay down on the floor, pulled a sheet over himself and stayed still, dress-rehearsing being dead.

The latest novel by Mohammed Hanif is set in the immediate aftermath of the hanging of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but revolves around an eclectic cast of characters, including a disillusioned socialist who runs an English tuition centre for the children of peasants in OK Town, his childhood friend who is a mosque imam and who provides him space in his compound, the on-the-run young daughter of a former comrade and an ambitious young army captain deputed to gather intelligence against the martial law regime’s foes. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from Rebel English Academy, published recently by Maktaba-i-Danyal in Pakistan…

Although everything was still and orderly in and around the cell where an about-to-be hanged man practised his death pose, there was activity, quite a lot of activity, around the country in some crucial spots. Many would later say, especially journalists and diplomats who made a living out of exaggeration, that it was the longest night of their lives, that they knew something historic, something catastrophic was about to happen. But only those who had been woken up without warning with a degree of rudeness would remember this night when their own time came.

Dawn for more

by SCOTT FERGUSON & WILLIAM SAAS

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people–the majority of them women–serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut.

In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about his recent article in The Wire, “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More than it Hides.” Vachhrajani contextualizes the sudden 2026 demise of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and its replacement by the new Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G). As he explains, this shift effectively “kills the golden goose” for millions of rural workers by replacing a demand-driven legal guarantee with arbitrary budget caps and centralized control. We discuss the neoliberal money politics behind this move: a calculated transition from a rights-based framework that empowered workers to a supply-led scheme that prioritizes fiscal austerity over human dignity.

Still, our dialog is not merely a post-mortem of a fallen policy. From the “Save MGNREGA” nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work. This episode explores both the devastating effects of the repeal and the growing movement of workers, unions, and activists who refuse to let this Golden Goose go quietly, proving that the struggle for democratic accountability is far from over.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas

Khush Vachhrajani, welcome to Money on the Left.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

William Saas

Could you start by just telling us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the kind of questions that you’re asking in your most recent research, which you’re producing through your position at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research, or SAFAR, and sharing on your Substack?

Khush Vachhrajani

Sure. So, I’m from India. I’m from this city called Ahmedabad, which is in the western state of Gujarat. That’s also where the Prime Minister comes from, so, I think it has gone on the maps because of that. But it’s also the state where Gandhi was born and a very long part of his life after coming back from South Africa, when he started his journey in India, began from the state that I come from. I studied in a school that was sort of built on the foundation of some of the principles that Gandhi himself sort of taught us as a society. I currently work with a collective called the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research.

We are a group who’s just interested in making democracy work on a day to day basis for the most marginalized. We don’t see democracy as just an election-to-election arrangement, but also in terms of a person’s right to be heard, a person’s right to grievance, a person’s right to participate in the smallest decision making that affects the person or the society as a whole.

The work also is sort of anchored in some of these democratic principles. Apart from that, I love to read. I have been a follower of many of the progressive ideas that you all have sort of built over a period of time on Money on the Left and also have learned immensely from the writing, and the guests who have come here which has also sort of shaped a very core part of my own politics around money, around looking at monetary design. I enjoy music. I enjoy sports, and I have a lovely dog who’s going to turn five years old this year, and her name is Estelle. And that’s it. That’s more or less about me.

Scott Ferguson

That’s great. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of your experience? You also studied in the United States and worked in the United States for a little bit.

Khush Vachhrajani

I did, so I did my master’s in public affairs. In the US, I was at Brown University in 2019 and 20. So my education was over when the pandemic sort of kicked in. During my time in the US, I also spent three months working in Houston, in the Mayor’s Office of Complete Communities, which was an initiative largely to identify and then work towards supporting under-resourced and historically underrepresented communities in Houston. My task was to sort of look at the habitability question in one of those communities called Gulfton, where I learned a lot around some of the challenges that the United States also face in terms of the politics of, at times, immigration, challenges around creating a safer environment for many of the people who come to the United States with a lot of ambition or aspirations, and sometimes also out of desperation.

MROnline for more

by DREW FAVAKEH

Since the US and Israel first attacked Iran in late February, it has been easy to spot the stark difference between the New York Times’ distant coverage of Iran and its up-close and personal coverage of Israel.

Multiple Times employees are reporting from and currently living in Israel. These include reporters Isabel Kershner, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman, Natan Odenheimer, Ronen Bergman, Adam Rasgon, Johnatan Reiss and Raja Abdulrahim, as well as Jerusalem bureau chief David M. Halbfinger.

They routinely report stories that center Israeli citizens, as in “How Israelis Feel About Another Potential War With Iran” (2/26/26). First-hand Times reports have Israelis taking “Shelter as Sirens Warn of Incoming Missiles” (2/28/26), feeling “Tense But Relieved That Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead” (3/1/26) and celebrating “Purim Amid Iranian Missile Attacks” (3/4/26). They also have penned stories on Iranian missile strikes in Israel mere hours after they took place (3/1/26, 3/18/26).

Many articles have been based primarily on statements from Israeli officials (3/1/26, 3/3/26, 3/11/26, 3/19/26) and US officials (3/2/26, 3/7/26). Other articles have centered on the perspective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and what would benefit him (2/28/26, 3/14/26, 3/18/26).

Meanwhile, the Times has no reporters based in Iran, as its editors admitted in two Q&A-style articles (3/9/26, 3/16/26). Instead, the paper has largely relied on its Visual Investigations team (3/12/26) and reporters based elsewhere to cover Iran, including correspondents in Israel, the US, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, Sri Lanka, South Korea, England, France and Germany. The Times reporters who most often quote Iranian voices—like Farnaz Fassihi, Parin Behrooz (both based in the US) and Yeganeh Torbati (reporting from Turkey)—largely rely on telephone interviews (3/2/26, 3/27/26), along with “text messages and social media posts” (3/18/26).

This lack of on-the-ground coverage in Iran has directly resulted in slower coverage and confirmation of US/Israel culpability for deadly strikes. For example, it took five days for the Times (3/5/26) to report that the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike” on the school in Minab that killed at least 175 Iranian civilians, mostly schoolchildren.

Fair for more

by WALDEN BELLO

A landmark book on a remarkable Asian personality comes out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the passing of Zhou Enlai.

An epic life deserves an epic biography, and Chen Jian provides this for Zhou, who was probably the consummate diplomat of the twentieth century. Chen combs the vast literature on the Chinese revolution as well as primary sources in the archives of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to give us a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the second most important figure in the struggle to free China from imperial domination and feudalism in the twentieth century, one that set the stage for its emergence as an economic superpower in the first quarter of twenty-first.

The world is most familiar with Zhou’s diplomatic performance, especially his role in bringing about the historic visit of President Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972. But probably equally important was his debut on the world stage in 1954-55. He was the central figure in the Geneva Conference of 1954, where he crossed swords with a hostile American delegation led by the arch-anti-Communist John Foster Dulles in an effort to forge a diplomatic settlement of the Korean War. Although he was not able to break the stalemate in that front, he enjoyed success on the second issue at that historic meeting, critically contributing to the formal end of the First Indochina War that saw the political dismantling of the French empire in Southeast Asia after its defeat on the battlefield by the Viet Minh.

After Geneva, Zhou’s most important next stop was Indonesia, where he was key in planting the seeds of the Non-Aligned Movement of countries in the Global South during the historic Bandung Conference in April 1955. His personal warmth and flexibility won over personalities as diverse as the onion-skinned Indian prime minister Nehru, the mercurial Indonesian leader Sukarno, and the pro-American Filipino diplomat Carlos P. Romulo. As a middle school student, Zhou loved acting in plays, and Chen speculates that “if Zhou indeed deserved the accolade as ‘one of the world’s greatest actors’…his performance in stage plays must have enabled him to practice those performing arts that would benefit him tremendously in his political and diplomatic career.”

The French Connection

Like many in his generation, Zhou was radicalized by the efforts of the western powers and Japan to carve up China into spheres of influence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Japan especially was a source of fascination, admired for its successful effort to catch up with the West but hated for its brazen moves to colonize China. Zhou spent a year and a half in Japan, trying to get into a university. Exile politics, however, got in the way of academic commitments, along with difficulties in learning Japanese.

FPIF for more

by ANANYA BHATTACHARYA

Quick commerce promises instant convenience, but it’s driven more by deep discounts and habit-building than real need.

Amazon has placed its bet on a service that has struggled to thrive in the West.

On March 17, the company started testing a 30-minute delivery service in select locations across the U.S, alongside one- and three-hour delivery options across thousands of American cities.

The move marks a renewed push into quick commerce — a model that has struggled to take hold in Western markets.

Amazon hasn’t entered this experiment blind. It has been running a 10-minute delivery service in India since June 2025, and a 15-minute service in the United Arab Emirates since October. Those markets offer a glimpse into both the promise — and the pitfalls — of ultrafast delivery.

China has built the largest quick-commerce market in the world at $125 billion. Around one in four people in China use these services. Around 200 million workers, up to 40% of China’s urban workforce, rely on digital platforms for employment. 

India is inundated with ultrafast delivery services, with standalone apps BlinkIt and Zepto leading the pack. The segment has been one of the most-funded tech startup sectors in the past few years.

Experts believe these platforms have managed to “manufacture” the need for ultrafast deliveries by offering deep discounts rather than solving a real problem.

Companies trained consumers to expect instant fulfillment, whether or not the need was truly urgent.”

“A large part of the category was also manufactured through aggressive subsidy, convenience marketing, and habit formation,” Kartik Hosanagar, a tech and marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told Rest of World. “Companies trained consumers to expect instant fulfillment, whether or not the need was truly urgent.”

Quick commerce accounts for just 1%–2% of all trade in India, even after massive cash burn to increase speed and offer deep discounts. Price discounting in quick commerce is 6%–9%, compared with 2%–5% for general trade, data from management consultancy Kearney shows. India’s quick-commerce market, currently less than a tenth of China’s, has just 12 million gig workers.

Rest of world for more

by B. R. GOWANI

(Warning: some people may find certain words offensive.)

the biggest dick is stuck in the Strait of Hormuz

the pale blue dot's biggest & the 2nd biggest dicks are on the loose
they both have been unrestrained since before they were born!
no exaggeration, they've been fucking around prior to birth
the 2nd one has the entire region as a screwing field
the biggest one has the entire planet as fucking/looting ground

in its region, the 2nd one could screw all except one
the one it couldn't get was the one it wanted by any means
the 2nd one could only do that with the help of the biggest one
the biggest one had joined it once last year but through air only

this time biggest one was very reluctant to get involved
the 2nd biggest one is extremely clever compared to the biggest 
the biggest is surrounded by supporters of the 2nd 
people say the 2nd has secrets about the biggest

the 2nd biggest is trying to blackmail the biggest 
the 2nd has been getting free money from biggest for a long time
the biggest one, for whatever reason, agreed to join the 2nd one
the 2nd biggest said it'll get orgasm from the air only

 so, all alone, the biggest dick penetrated the Strait of Hormuz
aiming to achieve the greatest orgasmic pleasure
the Strait was narrow without any expansion room 
the biggest realized it has gotten stuck in the Strait

the fear of pleasure-less exit was unbearable
but the dread of staying jammed for long, also intolerable
world's biggest dick is cursing the 2nd biggest dick for this dilemma
the biggest could neither stay in and enjoy nor exit and relax
it couldn't summon any other dicks from the 2nd one's region

it had to be a trustworthy dick trusted by involved parties
the current situation is not a pleasant one for the biggest one
 with mediator's help, the biggest is trying to exit the Strait
but the 2nd biggest is pushing the biggest one back in

the 2nd biggest is trying not to let the biggest one egress
one dick is terribly mad and now feels itself irrelevant
that dick thought it was smart being friend of the 2nd biggest  
nevertheless, the dick next door got away with all the limelight

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by JUAN COLE

The Iranian government went 12 rounds with a genocidal Trump—and its people suffered a lot of punches—but the nation is still standing. That counts as a win and a massive failure for the United States..

Trump announced a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday, April 7, the 39th day of the Israeli-US war on Iran. He depended on Pakistani mediators and a 10-point peace plan put forward by Iran itself.

And so, Iran won the 2026 war.

It did not win as in, scoring a knockout. It won in the sense that if I went 12 rounds with Deontay Wilder and was still standing up at the end of it, it would count as a win.

The Israeli-US attempt to decapitate the government failed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated along with family members, but the 88-member clerical Assembly of Experts simply elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed him. The civilian minister of defense was killed, which is probably a war crime. President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed IRGC General Majid Ebnelreza as acting minister of defense. The pragmatic civilian Secretary of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani was assassinated, likely another war crime. He was succeeded by hard liner Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC general. In essence, Trump and Netanyahu made an internal coup against Iran’s centrist pragmatists in government, ensuring that they were replaced by far right hard liners.

Going into the war, the Iranian government had just committed a massacre of thousands of protesters and was without a friend in the world. Trump and Netanyahu committed breathtaking war crimes on Iran and acted and spoke so monstrously that many countries ended up at least rhetorically supporting Iran, or at least opposing the war on it. Israel comes out of the war a pariah. The US is too rich, big and powerful to be a pariah but its standing has certainly plummeted and it can expect much less cooperation going forward.

Iran likely inflicted a billion dollars worth of damage on the 13 US military bases in the Middle East, most of which are largely destroyed. It used cheap little drones to take out radar installations in Kuwait and elsewhere worth hundreds of millions of dollars, blinding the US to its missile barrages and allowing some deadly strikes, as on Dimona in Israel. Iran demonstrated that having a US military base does not protect the host country but rather exposes it to greater danger. Most US military personnel appear to have had to flee the bases, relocating to local hotels. Iranian intelligence in the Gulf is good enough so that some of those hotels were attacked by drones. Some personnel arrived back in Washington D.C. with only the clothes on their back and Pete Hegseth doesn’t seem to have helped them much.

Whether Gulf states will want US bases in the medium to long term, after this, is now an open question. And are any US personnel at all left in Iraq? Iraqi Shiites supported Iran in the war.

Israeli military censorship makes it difficult to assess the damage to that country. The Haifa refinery was hit, as were military and intelligence research institutes. Netanyahu was clearly over-confident in Israeli interceptors. Many Israelis have had to move house to sleep in shelters. Moreover, Israel is running out of interceptors faster than Iran is running out of ballistic missiles, so that if the war continued, at some point Israel would be a sitting duck. If Israel actually does agree to abide by Trump’s two-week ceasefire, that is the reason–Israel is days from being completely vulnerable to Iran’s strikes. Already, Arrow interceptors are so low that Israel has had to let some missiles through if they seemed to be headed for relatively unpopulated areas. In that sense, Israel lost on points.

I have argued that the war failed not only because the government still stands but because its annual income from petroleum and new Strait of Hormuz tolls could be several times what it was earning from petroleum sales to China before the war. Petroleum prices are falling from highs because of the two-week ceasefire, which may or not signal the end of the war. But so much supply has been destroyed or delayed in the Gulf that prices could remain high in the coming year. Likely a third of the Gulf’s refining capacity has been damaged.

Common Dreams for more

by TRITA PARSI

Yesterday began with Donald Trump issuing genocidal threats against Iran on social media and ended—just ten hours later—with the announcement of a 14-day ceasefire, on Iran’s terms. Even by the volatile standards of Trump’s presidency, the whiplash is extraordinary. What, then, have the two sides actually agreed to—and what might it mean?

In a subsequent post, Trump asserted that Iran had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open during the two-week pause in hostilities. Negotiations, he added, will proceed over that period on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, which he described as a “workable” foundation for talks.

Those 10 points are:

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.

2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program

4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.

5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.

6. End of all United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.

7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program.

8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.

9. Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.

10. Cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The United States has not, of course, signed on to all ten points. But the mere fact that Iran’s framework will anchor the negotiations amounts to a significant diplomatic victory for Tehran. More striking still, according to the Associated Press, Iran will retain control of the Strait during the ceasefire and continue—alongside Oman—to collect transit fees from passing vessels. In effect, Washington appears to have conceded that reopening the waterway comes with tacit recognition of Iran’s authority over it.

The geopolitical consequences could be profound. As Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti note in Responsible Statecraft, Tehran is likely to leverage this position to rebuild economic ties with Asian and European partners—countries that once traded extensively with Iran but were driven out of its market over the past 15 years by U.S. sanctions.

Iran’s calculus is not driven solely by solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also strategic. Continued Israeli bombardment risks reigniting direct confrontation between Israel and Iran—a cycle that has already flared twice since October 7. From Tehran’s perspective, a durable halt to its conflict with Israel is inseparable from ending Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an aspirational add-on; it is a prerequisite.

Trita Parsi for more

by LISA MULLENNEAUX

‘Steal This Story, Please!’ is a call-to-action for independent media.

A defining moment in Steal This Story, Please!, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s portrait of the journalist and Democracy Now! founder Amy Goodman, comes midway through the film. It’s Election Day in November 2000, and then-President Bill Clinton telephones Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York City with an ask: Can he share a “get out the vote message” with her audience? Seizing her moment, Goodman says yes, then grills him on air for nearly thirty minutes. Clinton accuses her of being combative and adversarial, but it’s clear who’s in charge. 

It’s also clear that Goodman relishes being a thorn in the side of “business as usual” bigwigs. Whereas some journalists would see Clinton’s surprise call as a chance to ingratiate themselves with the most powerful man in America, she uses it to pose the questions others are afraid to ask, such as Clinton’s taking his party “to the right” or that NAFTA was “pushed through” with false promises. That tenacity and fearlessness makes her a unicorn among reporters muzzled by corporate media. In addition to offering a comprehensive look at the events that have shaped her forty-year career, Steal This Story, Please! is also a call to action for people to seek out and support independent news outlets.

After graduating college, Goodman applies for a job at The Phil Donahue Show, but instead joins the news department at WBAI radio in New York City and later travels to East Timor in 1991 to cover the ongoing Indonesian occupation there. Why would Americans need to know about East Timor’s independence movement? Because their tax dollars helped arm and train the Indonesian forces that killed one-third of East Timor’s population over a period of seventeen years—a violent campaign that went largely unreported due to heavy restrictions on media and repression by the Indonesian government. Into this explosive setting, Goodman arrives with her colleague Allan Nairn, and they quickly end up running for their lives at a pro-independence demonstration that becomes a massacre. Steal This Story, Please! includes the now-infamous footage by BBC correspondent Max Stahl that served as a wake-up call to the world. “It’s a day I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” admits Goodman, who, like Nairn, was beaten by Indonesian soldiers. The U.S. government’s collusion with Indonesia against East Timor’s independence, she says, “taught me how critical it is to expose what is done in our name.”

Goodman is a reporter with good running shoes, and she’s proven she will risk anything for a story. In the film’s opening sequence, we see her pursuing P. Wells Griffith III, a Trump policy advisor on climate change, up stairs and through crowded halls at the 2018 U.N. Climate Summit in Poland. He refuses to comment or set up an interview, and eventually shuts a door in her face. When he accuses her of “harassment,” she throws back, “a reporter asking a question, sir, is not harassment.” 

But Goodman isn’t just a reporter; she’s a reporter with a mission. She co-founded her WBAI radio show Democracy Now!  in 1996, she explains in the film, to “bring out the voices of people who are not usually heard.” Those voices include  Moreese Bickham, a Black man from Louisiana Klan country who was wrongfully convicted of a double-homocide and sentenced to death in 1958. After journalist David Isay’s efforts to get the prisoner released fail, he turns to his colleague Goodman and uses her morning show to plead Bickham’s case. “[Governor Edwin Edwards] was getting so many calls from WBAI listeners,” says Isay, “they had to change his phone number.” In video footage from 1996, we see Goodman and Isay welcome Bickham to the WBAI studios in Manhattan after Edwards has been  forced to commute Bickham’s sentence. He had served thirty-seven years. 

Another example of Pacifica Radio’s advocacy was the decision in 1997 to air commentaries “From Death Row” by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Pennsylvania journalist who was sentenced to death for murder in 1982. The idea for the series, Goodman explains, was NPR’s, but it cancelled its planned programming after pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police. She picked up the baton and what WBAI’s audience heard was eye-opening testimony about the nation’s prisons as “social sinkholes of despair,” (in Abu-Jamal’s words). Twelve public radio stations in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey canceled Goodman’s show and for a time its viability was in question. Abu-Jamal remains imprisoned after decades of legal battles.

“Democracy Now!’s strength and singularity,” says Goodman’s current co-host Nermeen Shaikh in the film, “is speaking with people who have no platform. Most media exclude those voices from the frame. We expand the frame, and not just expand it, we center those voices.” Like others interviewed for Steal This Story, Please!, Shaikh explains that Goodman’s fearlessness inspired confidence in a media novice whose audition for the show was live. “I had never been in front of a camera, never read a prompter before I went on air,” she says. “I felt completely terrified, but during the breaks Amy told me I was doing a great job.” 

That kind of self-confidence impressed Jeremy Scahill, who was living and working at the Catholic Worker House in New York City when Goodman hired him in 1996. “I had imagined an entire newsroom of people working to create what I listened to every morning—it was that good. Then it turns out it’s just her,” he explains in the film. Scahill later went on to co-found The Intercept and Drop Site News.

Similarly, journalist Juan Gonzáles was reporting for The New York Daily News when he joined Goodman as co-host that same year because he needed to reach a different audience. After 9/11, his reports on the dangerous air quality at Ground Zero were read on air by Goodman, whose team never left their offices in lower Manhattan. “The only thing I got wrong,” says Gonzáles, “was that it didn’t take twenty years for people to die. It took five years.”

Progressive for more