By Naomi McDougall Jones | For female directors fortunate enough to be working, they can expect the average production budget for their film to be smaller than those of their male peers. Film budgets shrink by 20 percent when a woman has the starring role due to untrue but enduring industry “common knowledge” that “no one wants to see films about women.” Since female directors are more likely to either choose or be given films with female leading characters, they disproportionately suffer from these smaller budgets that are assigned to such films. Read more →

By Gayatri Patnaik and Christian Coleman | In her compelling Boston Globe article “Celebrating Black History Month as Black History Is Being Erased,” Renée Graham writes that Black History Month this year has a specific purpose and burden, “and that burden is not for Black people to bear alone.” The challenge, Graham notes, “is to save this crucial American history from being eroded book by book, law by law, and state by state.” We couldn’t agree more. Read more →

By Sheryll Cashin | As a daughter of civil rights activists from Alabama who knew Dr. King personally, it is a great honor to address you today for a Sunrise Celebration of him! And it is a joy for me, as a writer, to address librarians. I want to begin by thanking you for your service, for what you do to bring books and truth for free to the masses! Read more →

It confirms what we’ve known for the past two years—and then some. The January 6 committee’s report shows that our former despotic Cheeto in chief incited a mob with false allegations of voter fraud to storm the US Capitol and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Talk about moving the goal post of being the sorest loser. In the most violent way possible, too. Available to the public, the testimony and findings stacked against him are steep—over 800 pages worth. Read more →

By Samira K. Mehta | I have never worn a “Meat Is Murder” t-shirt to Thanksgiving dinner. Clearly, I have thought about doing it, and while I would like to be able to claim that I have not done so because it would be rude or because I have deep-seated reservations about Morrissey, really, I have not done so because I have never been quite enough of a Smiths’ fan to have ever made the jump from buying CDs to buying t-shirts. Read more →

All right. 2022 has been cute—in a We-Lumbered-Through-Yet-Another-Plague-Year kind of way—but now it’s giving shabby and dogged. That’s right. Time to sashay away and to do so with some grace and dignity. But before then, we need to give it up for our authors and staff who blessed Beacon Broadside with their words and insight. Read more →

By Edward McClelland | The heat wave begins on the Great Plains, in the Dust Bowl, that dead, dry land whose barren fields have transformed it into a furnace. The summer of 1936 is the hottest anyone can remember. After killing the meager yield of crops in the farm states, the dome of heat spreads north and east, smothering the Great Lakes. In the second week of July, every afternoon, workers preparing for second shift at the General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, look out the kitchen windows of their company-built Cape Cods and slope-roofed bungalows, at the thermometers bolted to the walls. Read more →

By Ruth Behar | When I called myself a vulnerable observer twenty-five years ago, most other scholars looked at me askance. The word “vulnerable” wasn’t on everyone’s lips then, so it always took a moment for colleagues to realize that it could be used in a positive way as something to be embraced rather than avoided at all costs. But since the 1990s, the word “vulnerable” has gone through a boom in the English language. We hear the word daily, referring to people, the environment, the planet. Read more →

By Meghan Privitello and Abbey Clements | When a child hears gunshots, she will say Mom is beating the pots and pans. She will say It sounds like home. Let’s keep it this way; our children misinterpreting the sound of dying as a crude percussion. Read more →

By Alicia Kennedy | The day after category 1 Hurricane Fiona had left the entire archipelago of Puerto Rico with no power, caused destructive flooding, and generally unleashed catastrophe in most places, tourists were back to normal in Old San Juan. My husband and I biked throughout the metro area to take stock of the damage and hear just how many generators were running—the hum and smell of burning diesel were constant—and when we returned, we saw the photo shoots continuing as planned: Women in their best dresses with full faces of makeup, flip-flops on their feet and Instagram-ready heels in hand; men attempting to keep up, carrying heavy cameras or maybe just a selfie stick. Bars were full because what else were we going to do? But you could tell who wasn’t local: They’d showered, their hotels being outfitted with cisterns for occasions such as this. The rest of us had no water. We couldn’t find a reason to put on our nicest clothes, but we could certainly find a reason to have a drink. Read more →

By Bev Rivero | To everyone’s delight, beloved ABC comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” has returned for its second season! The award-winning show has earned fans across every demographic and pulls off being sweet while still being grounded in the reality faced by staff and parents navigating the public school system. Read more →

Talk about an affront to human life. In a bait-and-switch tactic to push the Right’s anti-immigrant message, FL Governor Ron DeSantis paid to send 50 migrants like cattle on an airplane from San Antonio, TX, to Martha’s Vineyard, MA. The migrants were told they’d land in Boston, where they could get expedited work papers. On top of that, hundreds of thousands of people across Puerto Rico are waiting for water and power to be restored after Hurricane Fiona knocked out power lines and collapsed infrastructure with massive flooding. A rough way for Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month to start. Read more →

By Alan Levinovitz | As long as national parks have existed, people conceived of them in religious terms. In his book “Discovery of the Yosemite,” the nineteenth-century explorer Lafayette Bunnell described the valley as hallowed ground. Yosemite wasn’t just beautiful, it was holy, “the very innermost sanctuary of all that is Divine in material creation,” a place where visitors could “commune with Nature’s God.” When his companions failed to behave respectfully, Bunnell reacted as one would in church. Read more →

By Ricky Tucker | On July 29, 2022, our lordt and save-her, Beyoncé, released “Renaissance,” her long-awaited seventh studio album that, coming off its lead single, “Break My Soul,” promised to be redemptive to all of us who, in the past few years, have felt cast aside, if not full-on antagonized, by the powers that be, including that relentless microscopic militia known as COVID. That jerk . . . Anyhow, Beyoncé delivered. Us. Read more →

By Jonathan Rosenblum | Surrounded by the vistas of western Montana, the generals of the war against Starbucks baristas will gather on August 3 at a swanky Rocky Mountain resort for three days of discussing labor-management relations. Big Sky Resort is hosting the confab, and when attendees aren’t meeting, they can avail themselves of golf, guided trout fishing, luxurious dining, and spa treatments before retiring to their $600-a-night hotel suites. Read more →

By Jon Hale | News of the projected 30,000-student enrollment drop in New York reveals, yet again, that public schools are suffering from long-term effects of the pandemic. Beyond this, however, insidious politics are at play. Dramatic student disenrollment also illustrates that privatization efforts through charters and homeschooling have benefitted from the pandemic. Read more →

Nobody wanted long COVID on our collective pandemic Bingo card, but there it is. In her “The Daily Show” interview, OG disability rights badass Judy Heumann told Trevor Noah that the likelihood of his acquiring a disability, temporary or permanent, was statistically high. He took her statement as a threat in jest, but there’s truth in that for us. Read more →

This is not the time warp we want to do again. Or ever. The conservative-majority SCOTUS wants to take us on a detour back in time when folks who aren’t straight white cis men didn’t have rights. A time when we thought of the planet as nothing more than an ashtray. A time when . . . you get the idea. Overturning Roe v Wade was the lowest of blows. Gutting the Clean Air Act stripped power from the EPA to curb greenhouse gas emissions. What’s next? Read more →

By Solomon Jones | The first time I heard Geneva Reed-Veal speak of her late daughter, she did so with the passion of a preacher. Her voice rose and fell with righteous indignation and when she paused, I was anxious to hear more. Sandra Bland’s mother is a force to be reckoned with, and when I interviewed her for my radio program in 2016, she told me that her daughter was too. Sandra had shown as much while asserting her rights during her traffic stop arrest, and even through the pain of recalling what it was like to see that, Geneva made room for pride. Read more →

By James Baldwin | The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one’s sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the American imagination. Read more →