explain his company's harassment — and apologize. The incident catapulted auto safety into the public spotlight and helped send Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), to the top of the bestseller lists. He served as Washington correspondent for The Village Voice where he worked for 30 years, from the mid-1970s until 2006. He covered politics and foreign affairs including Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans. On April 13, 2006's Democracy Now! broadcast, Ridgeway told host Amy Goodman that Michael Lacey, the executive editor of the Voice, "killed my column, and he asked me to submit ideas for articles to him one by one, which I did, and which he either ignored or turned down, except in one case ... they won't say that I'm fired. I'm supposedly laid off." However, in 2012, he would write about his time at the Voice, talking about the independence while he was at the newspaper, "Nobody censored what we wrote. Nobody messed with how things were written, or dreamed of questioning a political opinion." Following his departure from the Voice, Ridgeway was hired by Mother Jones to run its Washington, DC bureau. He continued working for the magazine until 2012. His topics included the demise of the social safety net, the racist far right's response to the election of Barack Obama, and the case of the Angola 3, three Black men held in solitary confinement for decades in Louisiana. In 2008, he covered the Democratic primary elections, filmed interviewing Mike Gravel in New Hampshire, in which Gravel is interviewed on the phone by Neal Conan for NPR's, Talk of the Nation. In 2009, together with longtime editor and collaborator Jean Casella, Ridgeway founded Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog project that exposes the widespread use of solitary confinement and other abusive conditions in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention facilities. Solitary Watch was the first media project devoted to the topic, and helped bring the largely hidden practice to the attention of the public and larger media outlets. He received a 2012 Soros Justice Media Fellowship, a 2013 Media for a Just Society Award, and a 2014 Alicia Patterson Fellowship for his reporting on prisons. In 2016, the New Yorker'''s Jennifer Gonnerman wrote a piece titled "James Ridgeway's Solitary Reporting", about his work at Solitary Watch and the extensive correspondence he maintained with people held in solitary confinement. He was also extensively interviewed for