Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza (winner of the Ridenhour Book Prize), and Safe Area: Gorazde.

Tamar Sarai

Tamar Sarai is a writer and staff reporter at Prism where she covers the criminal legal system. Her work has been published in Essence, ShadowproofCapital B, and other publications.

Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill is national security correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and most recently Dirty Wars: The War Is a Battlefield (both published by Nation Books). He is also the subject, producer, and writer of the film “Dirty Wars,” an official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the US documentary cinematography prize and now available on DVD. This essay is the epilogue to his book Dirty Wars.

Jonathan Schell

Jonathan Schell, a fellow at The Nation Institute, a TomDispatch regular, and the peace and disarmament correspondent for the Nation magazine, died on March 25, 2014. Among many other works, he was the author of The Real War, a collection of his New Yorker reportage on the Vietnam War.

Anya Schiffrin

Anya Schiffrin is the director of the media and communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs. She teaches courses on media innovation and writes on journalism and development as well as the media in Africa. Schiffrin spent 10 years working overseas as a journalist in Europe and Asia and is on the advisory boards of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and of the Revenue Watch Institute. Her most recent book is Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press 2014).

Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency as well as on American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites including Tomdispatch.com, Asia Times, Mother Jones.com, and ZNet, and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine.

Jonathan Schwarz

Jonathan Schwarz is a frequent contributor to Mother Jones and co-author with Michael Gerber of Our Kampf, a collection of their humor from the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Saturday Night Live. His website is named after a saying of George Orwell’s: “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

Wallace Shawn

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor. His plays The Designated Mourner and Marie and Bruce have recently been produced as films. He is co-author of the movie My Dinner with Andre and also author of the plays The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors. His nonfiction collection Essays (Haymarket Books) is out now in an expanded paperback edition featuring “Why I Call Myself a Socialist,” as well as in an audio edition.

Rick Shenkman

Rick Shenkman, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter, New York Times bestselling author, and associate professor of history at George Mason University, is the founder and editor of History News Network, a website that features articles by historians on current events. This essay is adapted from chapter two of his new book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). His observations about the 2008 election can be followed on his blog, “How Stupid?” His recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” can be viewed by clicking here.

Danny Sjursen

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and director of the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN).  He taught history at West Point and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He is the author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War.  He co-hosts the “Fortress on a Hill” podcast.

Alan Snitow

Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman are award-winning filmmakers whose PBS documentary “Thirst” was the first film to bring attention to the global movement against water privatization. Their book by the same name exposed how the corporate drive to control water has become a catalyst for community resistance to globalization. Their PBS films include “Secrets of Silicon Valley” and “Blacks and Jews.” Snitow is on the board of Food and Water Watch. Kaufman is on the board of the Progressive Jewish Alliance. They are currently working on a film about Jewish power and identity in America. This essay was adapted from a longer version in the new book Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Rebecca Solnit

Twenty years ago this October, Rebecca Solnit was writing about the Kennedy assassination for her first book when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. She hit save, stood in a doorway until the shaking was over, and marveled in the days after at the calm, warm mood of the people of her city and her own changed state of mind. She’s written regularly for TomDispatch since the outbreak of the war in Iraq. Her just published new book, A Paradise Built in Hell (Penguin, 2009), is a monument to human bravery and innovation during disasters.

Susan Southard

Susan Southard’s first book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, received the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction and the Lukas Book Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, the Economist, and the American Library Association. Southard’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles TimesPoliticoTomDispatch, and Lapham’s Quarterly.