He returned to the United States in 1962, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he covered economics and industry for The New Republic for eight years.
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.
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.
"[1] Following his departure from the Voice, Ridgeway was hired by Mother Jones to run its Washington, DC bureau.
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.
[1] Ridgeway was the author and editor of twenty books on domestic and foreign affairs, including The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis; The Politics of Ecology; and, more recently, The 5 Unanswered Questions About 9/11: What the 9/11 Commission Report Failed to Tell Us; The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis; Yugoslavia's Ethnic Nightmare (a collection co-edited with Jasminka Udovicki); A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (with Jeffrey St. Clair); and Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, the Rise of a New White Culture.
He wrote the text for Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry, with photographs by Sylvia Plachy.
[12][1] Together with Jean Casella and Sarah Shourd, he also co-edited the first anthology of writing from solitary confinement, Hell Is a Very Small Place, published in 2016.
[13] Ridgeway co-directed the companion film Blood in the Face, as well as Feed, a documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign.