We’re Leveling Up

We’re ramping up our coverage on a host of important issues. Welcome new columnists Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Liza Featherstone.

The world is burning, hope is scarce, but we have new columnists at least.

Jacobin has added five new writers, including Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Liza Featherstone, as well as Nicole Aschoff (political economy and technology), Dawn Foster (London-based), and Luke Savage (Toronto-based). They join a team that includes Meagan Day and Branko Marcetic.

“The Left is at a critical moment, larger than in decades but still needing big ideas to grow and win,” said Jason Farbman, Jacobin’s associate publisher. “Jacobin has always contributed to the discussions and debates that shape this reemerging Left. We’re now in a better position than ever to contribute. Keeanga’s interventions have consistently reached a wide audience, beyond the growing — but still small — US left. We’re also extremely lucky to have Liza Featherstone on board. Liza brings years of journalistic experience and writes brilliantly on a really wide range of topics, from gender and sexuality to labor, education, and climate change.”

Jacobin is one of the most important publications on the US Left,” said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “I’m happy to be able to regularly engage with its readership on the important challenges and debates facing our struggles today.”

“I couldn’t be more honored and pleased to be part of Jacobin right now. At this crucial moment for the socialist left, the most exciting and terrifying in many years, Jacobin has become not only relevant but indispensable,” said Liza Featherstone. “No other media outlet is bringing socialist ideas to such a huge readership, both inside and outside the growing anti-capitalist movement.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor at Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies and has contributed to Jacobin since 2014. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016), for which she received the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book; and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017), which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. Her latest book, Race for Profit: Black Homeownership and the End of the Urban Crisis (2019), will be available in the fall.

In her last column for Jacobin, “Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism Speech Was a Landmark,” Taylor wrote: “In the course of a single speech, Sanders demonstrated the existential threat he poses to the political status quo in the United States by exposing the roots of the hardship and deprivation that roil wide swaths of the country. He named capitalism as the culprit and democratic socialism as a solution. What a breathtaking turn of events.”

Liza Featherstone is a journalist based in New York City and a contributing editor to the Nation. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Ms., and Rolling Stone, among many other outlets. She is the editor of False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton (2016), author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation (2017) and Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart (2004), and co-author of Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (2002).

In her most recent column for Jacobin, “The Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” Featherstone argued the Democratic Party is trying to avoid discussion of climate change at all costs: “Democratic Party chair Tom Perez brushed off the idea of a debate focused on the climate crisis as ‘just not practical,’ showing just how beholden the party is to the suicide-cult factions of both labor and capital.”

Nicole Aschoff has written for Jacobin since 2013, is currently on the editorial board of Jacobin, and previously served as managing editor. She is the author of the Jacobin book The New Prophets of Capital (2015). Aschoff received her PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University and taught for several years at Boston University. Her work has appeared in numerous other outlets including the Guardian, the Nation, Al Jazeera, and Dissent.

In “Autoworkers Deserve Better Than the UAW,” Aschoff’s most recent column for Jacobin, she analyzes two recent defeats for US autoworkers: the closing of the Lordstown plant and the UAW’s failure to organize a Chattanooga plant.

Dawn Foster is a Jacobin staff writer, covering the UK. She is also a columnist for the Guardian. Foster is the author of Lean Out (2017), which was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing; her next book, Where Will We Live?, will be published later in 2019. Her most recent column is “The Grotesque Horror Show of the Tory Leadership Race.”

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin, based in Toronto. He has also written for the Guardian, New Statesman, and Globe & Mail, among others.

In “The Biden Method,” Savage’s most recent column, he writes, “When you see politics as a giant boys’ club rather than a site of struggle or contestation, finding common ground with those in the opposing camp fast becomes the ultimate mark of enlightened magnanimity, even (especially?) when it involves selling out your own side.”