By Alexandra Minna Stern | It’s been widely reported that Robert Bowers, the man who gunned down eleven congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, was active on the platform Gab. Although it went offline after the massacre, Gab has consolidated itself as the Wild West alternative to Twitter, where anything goes. Its message boards are awash in a constraint stream of obscene, demeaning, and dehumanizing memes and messages about Jews, women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Read more →

A Q&A with Dominique Christina | I started writing when I was a senior in undergrad. I whimsically elected to take a creative writing course solely because the man who taught the course was a professor I would see on campus walking around in tye-dyed shirts and Birkenstock sandals with uncommercial hair. He was profane and funny, and I thought I would enjoy being in a classroom with him. What I did not know was that his course would change the trajectory of my life. He refused to let me hide in the writing which I fully intended to do. He insisted on authenticity and transparency and confession, and I found myself, for the first time really, having permission to say things I thought I would die with. Read more →

By Mary Collins | I have a transgender son, Donald Collins. Let’s start by erasing the D and make that onald Collins just to show how distorted this sentence becomes with that one edit, with that one irrational erasure. Let us now move on and erase onald and only use Collins, because the Trump Administration wants to define gender solely on the basis of genitalia at birth. Read more →

We are shocked and heartbroken. We learned of the sad news that our author, Rashod Ollison, passed away on October 17 from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was forty-one. He graced our catalog with his coming-of-age memoir Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues, and Coming of Age Through Vinyl. In his singular, flavorful writing voice, he brought to life his story of growing up Black and gay in central Arkansas during the eighties and the nineties. Back when we asked him if he had an audience in mind for his memoir, he said he didn’t think anyone would want to read it. Read more →

The deadline is 2030. By then, if we don’t do everything in our power to curb the causes of global warming, it’ll be too late. The world’s leading climate scientists issued this warning in a report at the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the worst-case scenarios forecast in the report are inundated coastlines, intensifying droughts, extreme heat, and poverty. It’s harrowing to think about. Will the panic around the report incite us as a species to take a stand for our survival and climate justice for the future? Can we keep global warming at a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius? We reached out to our authors who specialize in environmental issues to find out. Read more →

A Q&A with Lara Bazelon | Experts believe that the men and women who have been exonerated are only a small fraction of those who deserve to be. Many wrongful convictions remain hidden, or if known, unprovable. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, “By any reasonable accounting, there are tens of thousands of false convictions each year across the country.” A 2015 study by the University of Michigan found that 4.1 percent of those on death row were falsely convicted, and conservative estimates in non-capital cases range from two to five percent. Using these percentages, on any given day, somewhere between 15,300-61,200 innocent people are languishing behind bars. Read more →

It’s an iconic moment that’s been seared into sports history and Black history. Fifty years ago, track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute during the American national anthem at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City to protest racial inequality. That day, not only did Smith and Carlos win gold and bronze medals respectively; they also joined the ranks of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in a long legacy of Black athlete-activists. Journalist Howard Bryant covers the trajectory of their sports careers in The Heritage. Read more →

By Jonathan Rosenblum | “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass declared 161 years ago. Last week saw that truth on broad display as Amazon, facing growing political and organizing pressure, announced it was setting a minimum wage of $15/hour for its US workforce and also raising wages in England. Read more →

By Carol Fulp | When you think of dynamic, innovative, high-performance organizations, your local community bank doesn’t usually come to mind. But if you live in new England, it might. Founded in 1818, Eastern Bank is the country’s oldest and largest mutual bank, serving communities throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and beyond. It’s also one of the country’s most progressive banking institutions. Eastern provides fairly priced banking, investment, and insurance products and services for consumers, businesses, and underserved communities. since 1999, on average Eastern has donated at least 10 percent of its net income—seven times the national average—every year to charity and local organizations working on causes such as advancing women in the workplace, supporting immigrants, and advocating for social justice. Read more →

I was amazingly lucky. I’d been associate publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux when we were distributing Beacon, so I got to “help out” with some of their books, including best-selling books by Marian Wright Edelman and Cornel West. When my predecessor left, the search committee came knocking at my door. I just happened to know one of them, Roger Straus III, so maybe the fix was in. But it was the amazing Kay Montgomery, executive vice president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, who really settled me in and supported me for the next seventeen years. I’ve never recovered from her abandonment (well, yes, she retired after more than twenty-five years at her job…). Read more →

By Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce | “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Read more →

By Mark Warren | I am a college professor, but started off as a college dropout. And the story of my rocky road through the academy helps explain why I wrote a book on educational justice movements. I grew up in a segregated community in the ’50s and ’60s—an all-white segregated community, that is. It was a blue-collar community called Hungry Hill in Springfield, Massachusetts. My father was an unusual white working-class man for his time, maybe still would be. He was a warehouseman and a Teamster Union activist, but had a broad, progressive vision. He supported the civil rights movement and taught me to oppose racism. He also taught me that working people had to organize and stand up for themselves if they wanted a decent life—and that working people of all races needed to support each other. Read more →