Meagan Day
Meagan Day is an activist, staff writer for "Jacobin", author of the 2016 book "Maximum Sunlight" and co-author of the book "Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism". Early life and education. Day was raised in San Antonio, Texas. In an interview with the "Harvard Political Review" Day stated that she grew up relatively well off. She received her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College graduating in 2012. It was while attending Oberlin College that she became a writer and editor at magazine "Full Stop." She later received her master's  at University of London in 2013 and in the years following, contributed to "N+1" and "The New Inquiry". It was also at this time that Day began to read the magazine "Jacobin", and found a growing interest in politics and journalism growing. Writing. Section::::"Maximum Sunlight" (2016). In 2016, Day wrote the book "Maximum Sunlight" which details her experience as she visits Tonopah, Nevada, an unincorporated city located in the middle of desert in between Reno and Las Vegas, interviewing the local residents there. The book has photography by Hannah Klein. Olivia Durif, writing for the "LA Review of Books", described  Maximum Sunlight as "a long piece of investigative journalism and a short, intimate work of nonfiction". Going on to describe Day's writing as "observant and respectful" saying "[Day] never denies her assumptions, but she also doesn't trust them. Her book is propelled by curiosity — about herself as much as others". Shift toward socialism. In an interview with "Columbia Journalism Review," Day said she first encountered the magazine while living in Turkey during Gezi Park protests where see "start[ed] to see the importance of class division and of class conflict everywhere, and was finding that left-liberal media was  insufficient to explaining the world." and that the magazine had influenced her political view points, but that it wasn't until 2016 presidential run of Bernie Sanders that she began to read the magazine regularly. In 2016, she joined the Democratic Socialists of America, an experience which she described in "Jacobin" as being formative for her. Writing for "Jacobin". One year after joining the DSA, she officially joined "Jacobin" part-time as one of two staff writers. She first received media attention for her writing on "Jacobin" when she was invited in 2018 to be interviewed on "The Michael Brooks  Show", which she would later say became the start of a friendship with the host, Michael Brooks. She received note during a 2019 "Politico" piece referred to her as "probably the biggest Bernie stan on Jacobin's masthead" while discussing why her magazine had started to have a negative opinion on the then candidate Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, Jeremy Cliffe, writing in the "New Statesmen" while writing in support of Joe Biden during his general election campaign, used Day's writing to show how the former Vice President was not "exactly the preferred Democratic presidential candidate of progressives in the  US" going on to say she "spoke for many on the left". Section::::"Bigger than Bernie" (2020). Along with co-author Micah Uetricht, Day published the book "Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism". In an interview with the "Washington Post" co-author Uetricht said they had written the book to target socialists, people who liked Bernie Sanders but didn't consider themselves 'activists', and those "who want to understand what at least one wing of this newly reborn socialist movement in the United States thinks." Day also mentioned in that interview that the way  they approached the book was to have it be useful no matter how the then on going democratic primary turned out, and so when writing about their ideas had "tried to boil it down to basics". Elsewhere Day has also said that her motivation for writing the book was because "forces were amassing on the left that had great potential, but that there was not really a roadmap for what to do with that potential after the Bernie moment was over." Rick Perlstein, when talking to "The Boston Globe," mentioned the book as one of many "popularly oriented books on  socialism" also mentioning "The Socialist Manifesto" by "Bhaskar Sunkara", "How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century" by Erik Olin Wright"," and "The Sinking Middle Class" by David Roediger.