By Michael Andor Brodeur | These days there’s a guru waiting around every corner for young men to come clicking. They cover fitness, diet and nutrition, dating, politics, philosophy (however rudimentary), and, their favorite topic, masculinity—its dire state, its necessary preservation, its unlockable secrets, its bestowal of dominion. The difference between the manfluencers of old and today’s glut is that, because white heterosexual men now perceive themselves as having (so generously!) ceded physical, financial, professional, and cultural ground to women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks (i.e., everyone else), they’re doubling down on their occupation of virtual space. Unlike any other comparable Internet niche or eddy, the manosphere carries itself like it owns the place. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Four months into this administration defined by an onslaught of draconian executive orders, we finally have some good news. Just a week after publication, David Pakman’s “The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America” made it to the New York Times Best Seller List! It ranked number six on their print hardcover list and number seven on their combined print and e-book list! Read more →

By Aviva Chomsky | Since President Trump took office on January 20, he’s issued a torrent of executive orders aiming to criminalize, detain, and deport large numbers of immigrants. Close Trump advisor Stephen Miller promised that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” and indeed he has. But why? Read more →

By Christian Coleman | It wasn’t just Black History Month that Google Calendar removed from its holiday list. They did away with Women’s History Month, too. Just check your phones. In true fashion of an avowed fascist’s pick me, Big Tech was thorough with the forty-seventh administration’s anti-DEI scourge. But we said it once and we’ll say it again: We don’t need you to recognize Women’s History Month. Keep on with pandering to the patriarchy as we keep this party rolling. Read more →

By Kyle T. Mays | The discourse of Black Power and Red Power existed side by side. The phrase “Black Power” emerged as a rallying cry in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966, in a speech by Stokely Carmichael during the March Against Fear, which was organized after the shooting of James Meredith. While there were earlier iterations of “Black Power,” Carmichael popularized it. In “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation,” Carmichael and Charles Hamilton wrote, “The adoption of the concept of Black Power is one of the most legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race relations in our time. . . . It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society.” Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Did you check your phones? Is it any shock that Google Calendar genuflected to the current scorched-earth administration’s anti-DEI tour and removed Black History Month from its holiday list during Black History Month? Is it a shock that they claimed their holiday list wasn’t “globally scalable or sustainable?” Talk about Big Tech being an avowed fascist’s pick me. Doublespeak and all. Well, guess what, Google Calendar? We don’t need you to recognize Black History Month. Read more →

Primarily known as the president of Planned Parenthood and champion of reproductive rights, Cecile Richards was a feminist activist on more than one front. She brought her A-game to intersectionality in several social justice movements and political arenas. She deserves all the accolades and recognition, the most recent of which was the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden at the White House last November. Read more →

A Q&A with Cheryl L. Neely | When I wrote my first book, “You’re Dead—So What?: Media, Police, and the Invisibility of Black Women as Victims of Homicide,” I shared the story of the murder of my schoolmate and friend, Michelle Kimberly Jackson in 1984 in the book’s prologue, focusing on the lack of media coverage and police response it garnered. Her case was solved a few years after the book was released and almost forty years after she was killed. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | And the New Year’s category is . . . Transformation! As the oligarchs of the free world steer us on a rocky ride toward dire changes we didn’t want, we’ll be focused on changing ourselves for the greater good. What shall we work on? Expanding our minds about what Buddhism is and what it has to offer? Ditching the me-centric trend of girlboss feminism? Renegotiating our relationship with social media? Beefing up at the gym without the macho trappings? This handful of titles from Beacon’s catalog will set us on the runway of life to get tens across the board for progress and self-reinvention! Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s OG text has had more than one life. Published in 2014, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” is the third installment of Beacon’s ReVisioning History series, created by Beacon Press director Gayatri Patnaik. Now, a decade later, there is more than one way to read and radically reframe four hundred years of US history through the lens of Native American struggle and resistance. The book has even been adapted to two other genres, too! Read more →

By Landon Y. Jones | The received wisdom is that Donald Trump was an aberration in American political life. Attention to his rise usually focuses on his assiduously cultivated celebrity status and picturesque obsession with acquiring more fame, more praise, and more money. Yet he was hardly the first celebrated American to make a calculated leap into politics. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Here we are again with the nail-biting tension from four years ago. The neck-and-neck polls between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump alerted our attention to other issues at play in addition to the debate and rally talking points. Lies about voter fraud that distract us from how voter suppression at the systemic level threatens our voting rights. Read more →

By Steve Early | How has the RPA managed to operate year-round for two decades as a multi-issue, membership-based organization and make steady electoral progress in the face of well-funded corporate opposition? Read more →

By Steve Early | On a Saturday evening last spring, Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) co-chair Claudia Jimenez hosted a high-spirited rally and party with 200 supporters of her re-election campaign for the Richmond City Council. Jimenez is a forty-six-year-old immigrant from Columbia, who worked as an architect and community organizer before seeking elected office four years ago in her diverse, blue-collar city of 114,000, that’s eighty-percent non-white. Read more →

A Q&A with Russell Cobb | The natural resource curse is what happens when a given society strikes it rich by extracting some resource and chases after that wealth as other parts of the economy decline. The race to make as much money as possible leads to corruption, inequality, violence, and environmental destruction. Economists and political scientists point to places like Nigeria, Russia, and Venezuela as object lessons in the natural resource curse, but many of those social ills also plague places like Oklahoma and Texas. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | A Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month unmarred by election-year drama would have been a miracle. No such luck in 2024. Not with anti-immigrant rhetoric regrowing its Hydra’s head when right-wing candidates take to the debate and rally stages. If that weren’t enough, Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month started off with news that Jeanine Cummins will release new novel next year about the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | And the category is . . . Challenged! Challenged as in a hair’s breadth away from being banned. For Banned Books Week, United Against Book Bans released the latest roundup of challenged books, and ten Beacon Press titles are on it! Tens across the board for each one strutting their red-alert stuff! Some are par for the rabid far-right course—Race and history and queers! Oh, my!—while others, indeed, will make you do a double take. Read more →

By Samira K. Mehta | Since Kamala Harris has become the Democratic candidate for president, her multiracial identity has returned to the news. Harris is the child of a Black Jamaican father and a South Asian mother. You can read that heritage as multiracial, as we are increasingly inclined to do now, but for most of American history, Harris would have been read more or less exclusively as Black. Vice-President Harris has explained that her mother knew this aspect of American race relations, and so she understood that Kamala and her sister Maya would be seen as Black girls and then as Black women. She is a Black woman, a graduate of Howard University. That said, she is Black with South Asian heritage, a multiracial presidential candidate in an increasingly multiracial world. Read more →

A Q&A with Lisa Mueller | Readers will discover that the evidence-based approach that has powered remarkable breakthroughs in medicine, elections, economic development, and other high-stakes endeavors can apply to protests and social movements, too. Activism often feels very emotional, but it can be strategic at the same time. If we want our activism to really improve the world, we should consider which strategies are most likely to produce the desired results, not just those that feel right in the moment. Read more →

By Michael Andor Brodeur | For millions of gym bros like me, the closure of gyms nationwide amounted to the loss of a primary habitat, a source of identity. And for many of the men I watched unravel online—throwing tantrums on social media over the perceived oppression of public health measures, mask mandates, and home quarantines—the loss of the gym compromised a key source of their manhood. Read more →