Jennifer Baumgardner, co-author of Manifesta and Grassroots, and sole-author of Looks Both Ways and Abortion & Life, has a new book out. It’s actually a collection of essays she’s published over the years, with updated epilogues, spliced with interviews with feminists Baumgardner admires.

The book is boldly titled F’em! Goo Goo, Gaga and some Thoughts on Balls. As a feminist in my mid-twenties, I’ve paid attention to Baumgardner’s work. As someone who was working at Ms. Magazine while I was growing up, Baumgardner represents this middle generation of feminists, almost in-between the third and forth waves. She’s also a mainstream feminist who seems intent on listening and learning from the new wave of younger feminists, something she continues to ...

Turns out Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedge’s bleak polemic on the failure of liberal institutions to challenge the rise of the corporate state, is not exactly good beach reading material. But while it totally ruined my vacation high, I’m glad I read it. Because damn: this book is some real talk.

Hedge, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, argues that the liberal class, which once served as a safety valve that provided hope for progressive democratic reform, has become a “useless and despised appendage of corporate power.”

Anger and a sense of betray: these are what…tens of millions of other disenfranchised workers express. These emotions spring from the failure of the liberal class over ...

America Pacifica, written by Jezebel blogger Anna North, is about the end of the world. As such, you might expect it to be dark and cynical. On the first count, you would be right. North paints a gruesome picture of post-ice age America–complete with class warfare, synthetic everything, and violence, violence everywhere. On the latter count, however, you would be wrong.

There is something palpably brave and idealistic about North’s badass female protagonist, Darcy. As she navigates seedy back alleys, sleazy authority figures, and hunger, poverty, and corruption to save her mom and, in a sense, society at-large, one gets the sense that she is a new kind of hero. Darcy is someone within whom outrage and complexity intermingle, someone ...