Video: Katherine Newman on the Near Poor

Katherine S. Newman is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs of the Woodrow Wilson School and Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Newman is an expert on urban poverty, occupational mobility, and subjective dimensions of economic dislocation, and is the author of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and several other books on poverty, downward mobility and school violence. This video was produced by the Woodrow Wilson School's Office of External Affairs.

If the video doesn't appear in your reader, you can watch it here. And you can check out Beacon Broadside's growing Video Log here.

Audio: Irina Reyn reads "I Was a Pre-Pubescent Messiah"

Believer, Beware: First-person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, the second collection to spring from KillingTheBuddha.com, presents true tales of sex ed in Catholic school, witches in Kansas, sects and the city, Buddhists in the barbershop, Sufis under your nose, an adolescent Jewish messiah in Queens, and more. In a world riven by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt-of religion lost and found and lost again.

Hear Irina Reyn read “I Was a Prepubescent Messiah" at the Believer, Beware release party on June 29, 2009. You can also read the essay here.

Stone Prairie Farm: Thrilling Evening and Foggy Morning

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm.

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Last night seems like a dream now. So where do I start? What do I remember?

This morning, as the sun slowly rose, the engulfing fog began to glow and my eyes opened to a dripping landscape, where coalescing dew slowly formed into earth-bound droplets from every plant leaf and flower around my head. The fog-muffled calls of birds were accompanied by the sound of these drips careening from upper leaves on the grape vines as I watched from my bed on our screen porch. On such mornings, my mind and the land are awash in this fog.

About the time I was preparing to go to bed last night, our dog, Willow, started pacing in circles from room to room. He sensed the low grumble of a distant thunderstorm well before I did and probably couldn’t decide which bed to hide under. Driven by his need to be with his pack-- me in this case-- he followed me out to the screen porch where I would do some reading and then, hopefully, simply fall asleep. I placed his white fabric “fuzzy bed” next to mine and settled in to read about managing our apple orchard. His unsettled behavior amplified as the storm flashed its way closer and finally arrived at Stone Prairie Farm. After a single attempt to push under my blankets, the flashes and cracks of lightning sent him into the house to hide under a real bed. I turned off my reading light and lay back to experience the show.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver's Provincetown, Opposites Attract, Church-State Divide

Some Beacon Press mentions in the media over the past week:

In the New York Times: The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown.

Profile of Sophia Raday in the SF Chronicle: Peacenik, Military Man Prove Opposites Attract.

Review of Holy Hullabaloos in the Boston Globe: Separation Anxiety: A traveling professor chronicles the church-state divide, with results that prove both comedic and unsettling. Also catch Holy Hullabaloos over at the Page 99 Test blog.

An excerpt from Mean Little deaf Queer in the Advocate.

U.S. News interviews Jeremy Adam Smith about the Rise of Stay-at-Home Dads.

Kate Clinton interviews in both Edge and the Blade.

AOL Health interview with Jennifer Culkin about her life as a critical care nurse.

Digging With Doug Video with Nancy Gift talking about her love of weeds.

Video: Kate Clinton on Comic Pride Month

Kate Clinton congratulates Senator Al Franken on his new job. If the video doesn't appear in your reader, watch it here.

Sign up for Kate's newsletter, get Kate's latest dates, news, and Vlog archives at: http://kateclinton.com Kate also blogs at Bilerico Project: http://www.bilerico.com/

Nancy Rubin Stuart: Happy July 4th to our Forgotten Founding Mothers!

We celebrate Independence Day this weekend, and Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, honors the often overlooked women of the American Revolution.

Traditionally, we celebrate our nation's birthday on July 4th with parades, fireworks and tributes to the Founding Fathers. Rarely do we recall the women who supported our patriots, those forgotten Founding Mothers who watched their men march off to fight for American independence, leaving them to struggle to support children, homes and farms.

Silence surrounds the lives of those nurturers. While we recall the names of "celebrity women" of that era-- Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams; Mercy Otis Warren, author of anti-British propaganda plays and historian of the American Revolution; Betsy Ross, who stitched the American flag; Deborah Sampson, disguised as a soldier who fought against the British, and Margaret Corbin, who loaded cannons on the battlefield-- we know relatively little about their personal sacrifices and those of their peers.

Before the Revolution, Abigail Adams and her historian friend, Mercy Otis Warren, shunned tea and proudly wore homespun garments in lieu of British finery. Living miles apart south of Boston with their children, the two friends spun dozens of skeins of wool which they collectively donated to the poor. So, too, did countless other women who gathered in private homes for spinning parties or participated in public spinning contests. To stir patriotic sentiment even hotter, patriotic newspapers offered suggestions about North American substitutes for imported teas, among them sassafras, raspberry and mint.

While patriotism required sacrifice, American women still needed certain manufactured goods and fabrics for their households. Since Abigail's husband, John, and Mercy's son, Winslow, lived in Europe during the last years of the Revolution, those matrons sent for certain household goods and fabrics which they sold or traded to friends and neighbors.

Many women and their children, however, no longer lived in old neighborhoods. Among those who fled from Boston during the British occupation was Abigail and Mercy's friend, Betsy Adams, wife of Samuel Adams, who hid in a humble cottage far from the city.

Nancy Gift: Mowing Meditation

Today's post is from Nancy Gift, an assistant professor of environmental studies and acting director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a lawn full of weeds. She is the author of A Weed by Any Other Name: The Virtues of a Messy Lawn, or Learning to Love the Plants We Don't Plant.

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After over three full summers of using my reel mower, I have come to love the click-click-click and the flying clippings, the instant sound of kids' playing and birdsong when I stop for breath at the top of our backyard slope. I love the exercise of arms, core, and legs simultaneously, and have had visions of beginning a suburban biathalon, with the star event being mowing a mile-long course with a reel mower, following my nine-mile bike home from work.

But, despite my purchase of one of the premier brands – Brill – and despite my affections for it, it seems to be dead, with wheels turning but little corresponding mower action to match. I suspect the gears are stripped, but I am no mechanic, and I can't even seem to figure out how to break into the wheel machinery to check. I doubt many of these machines are used on as large a lot as ours – half an acre, minus gardens and house footprint – but I had always thought of them as indestructable, the kinds of machines which you find in an abandoned garage, oil a bit, and voila! Mow your way home to use them. Apparently my Brill is not that kind of reel mower.

Kim E. Nielsen: Annie and Helen, BFFs

This past weekend marked the birthday of Helen Keller, and Kim E. Nielsen, author of Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller, reflects here on an enduring relathionship that began when Keller was a young girl and spanned fifty years.

The friendship of Anne Sullivan Macy and Helen Keller was not very glamorous. It lacked the men and clothing of the “Sex and the City” women. It lacked the dramatic guns and suicidal road trips of Thelma and Louise. It wasn't a fifty year slumber party of everlasting conversations, hugs, and secrets, and included no backstabbing cattiness and sexualized mud-fights. Somehow, however, the two women, remained friends— genuine friends— for nearly fifty years.

Having first written extensively on Helen Keller and now on Anne Sullivan Macy, I sometimes feel that I've lived two sides of the same story. After meeting in 1887, fourteen years apart in age, the two women quickly became the central persons in each other's lives. They became, slowly and eventually, dear friends.

Thomas N. DeWolf: What’s the Point of the U.S. Senate Apology for Slavery?

Thomas N. DeWolf is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, published by Beacon Press. Tom speaks regularly at schools, conferences, and other events around the country. For further information go to: www.inheritingthetrade.com, where you can also read find his Inheriting the Trade blog.

Does anyone out there know Chris Matthews, host of Hardball on MSNBC? I'd like to send him a copy of my book, Inheriting the Trade. My impression is that, like my own, his education lacked some aspects of our nation's history that have been kept hidden from students.

Most of you know that last week the United States Senate unanimously passed S. Con. Res. 26 apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.

I wrote about this–so won't repeat myself–on June 15. Read my post here. Also read my cousin James DeWolf Perry's excellent post here about why apologies are both important and troublesome.

My focus today is on the mixed reaction the apology has received. Chris Matthews certainly had a strong reaction. Watch as he interviews Reps. Steve Cohen and Jim Clyburn, embedded after the jump.

Kate Clinton: Stonewall 40

Today's post is from Kate Clinton, author of I Told You So. Clinton is a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. With a career spanning over 25 years, Kate Clinton has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and ten presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime and scoundrel time. This post originally appeared on Clinton's CommuniKate blog.

On an early morning flight from Orlando, after appearing at the 19th Annual Gay Days at Disneyworld, I was “sirred” twice by a cab driver and flight attendant. All before 7 a.m. I would have thought the brand new faux leopard Croc flats I was sporting would have thrown them off. Or that the “Gay Day” banners everywhere would have heightened their threat levels to rainbow.

Usually I find mistaken identification an embarrassment or irritant. In past years I would correct quickly with "That's Ma'am not Sir," and then try to lessen their discomfort. But this 40th anniversary of Stonewall, I wear the gaffe as a badge of pride. I stare them down. Even if they seem remorseful, I don't help them through their moment. In solidarity with the unsung butch lesbians who were with the fags and drag queens at the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969, I have been doing my own version of butching it up.

It used to be hard to find a NY gay person of a certain age who did not claim to have been at the Stonewall Riots. I am a New Yorker of that certain age, but I most certainly was not at the Stonewall Riots. In 1969 I had just graduated from a small Jesuit college in upstate New York. Insert "Class of 69" joke here.

I was a member of the Gay Resistance. I was trying not to come out. Because of that resistance, I could not and then would not hear the news of gay liberation spreading upstate from Greenwich Village. Though pre-internet, the Stonewall message quickly reached upstate gays in the anti-Vietnam war, women’s liberation and civil rights movement. Before long even my little town in upstate New York had out gay activists organizing, educating and agitating.

Kai Wright: (Traditional) Fathers Don't Always Know Best

Today's post is from Kai Wright, author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Wright is is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY, whose work explores the politics of sex, race, and health. He contributes to several publications, ranging from The Nation to ColorLines magazine. This post originally appeared on TheRoot.com, where he is senior writer.

Who's your daddy? Barack Obama, that's who. We haven't seen black family role modeling like this since the Huxtables. Actually, Cliff and Clair couldn't touch the Obamas-- they didn't have Bo. Still, the president's not content with his own nuclear family bliss. He really, really wants you to have a great dad, too.

But the problem with Obama's effort to turn Father's Day into an annual conversation about the tragedy of failed fathers is that it's rooted in one of the greatest-- and most consequential-- lies the Christian right has sold the country: That “traditional” family structures are best equipped to produce healthy kids. The notion that biological fathers are essential to childhood development wasn't true when Dan Quayle asserted it in 1992, and it won't become true no matter how eloquently Barack Obama restates it.

“The hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill,” Obama wrote in a beautifully crafted Parade magazine essay last week. “We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to fully make up the difference.”

This is a terribly moving refrain that echoes through all of the president's rhetoric on fathers-- and it's entirely beside the point. Nobody sane would argue that government can give a child love. That truism, however, does not mean only a gendered dyad of parents are adequately equipped to do so.

Video: The Daddy Shift on KGO-TV San Francisco

Click here if you can't see the video: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/video?id=6879634.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow Ending Israel’s Settlements

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration in January, there's been talk of a looming policy confrontation with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who took office in March, over Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Headlines like "U.S., Israel square off over settlement expansion" boosted hopes or worries (depending on one's viewpoint) that the U.S. would use its considerable leverage to crack down on the continuing growth of the settlements, which are illegal under international law. At the first hint that Washington might do so, inflammatory posters popped up all over the West Bank (see this photo).

And after Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4, when he called for the settlements to stop, it seemed that the two leaders indeed were headed for a showdown over the most contentious issue in the Middle East.

Partly in response to Obama's address, a major policy speech by Netanyahu was promised. It came on June 14, struggled for lift and landed with a dull thud. "In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect," Netanyahu said. "Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other."

Some commentators made much of Netanyahu's use, for the first time ever, of the words "Palestinian state." The phrases the prime minister actually used were "armed Palestinian state" and "demilitarized Palestinian state," and pointed only to a future territory without an army, without control of its airspace, and one that provides "ironclad" security guarantees for Israel. The speech offered nothing new, and was breathtakingly ungracious to the Palestinians.

David W. Moore: Five Reasons Why The Iranian Pre-Election Poll Can't Be Trusted

Today's post is from David W. Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (out in hardcover now, paperback with a new afterword available this fall). Moore is a senior fellow of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. A former senior editor of the Gallup Poll, where he worked for thirteen years, Moore also served as professor of political science at UNH and is the founder and former director of the UNH Survey Center.

Over the past several days, according to the New York Times and other news sources, millions of protesters in Iran have taken to the streets to express their opposition to the official results of last week's disputed presidential election. So widespread is the protest that the country's Guardian Council has ordered an investigation into the election, and even invited the three losing candidates to meet with Council members.

Earlier this week, however, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, who claimed that a scientific pre-election poll in Iran, conducted "three weeks" before the balloting (in fact, it was four weeks), presaged incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's official landslide victory. If we can believe the poll, and the authors' arguments, it's plausible that Ahmadinejad did in fact win the election with more than 60 percent of the vote.

But don't be fooled. The same poll results can be used – and just as persuasively – to argue that the Iranian election was stolen, as can be used to argue the opposite viewpoint.

In fact, there are at least five (somewhat overlapping) reasons why we can't trust that poll. But first, some background.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Father’s Day Recommended Reading

Today's post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic.

It's an empirical fact that fathers are comparatively rare in children's books — when economist David A. Anderson and psychologist Mykol Hamilton studied 200 children's books in 2005, they found that fathers appeared about half as often as mothers. Mothers were ten times more likely to be depicted taking care of babies than fathers and twice as likely to be seen nurturing older children.

No surprise there, of course. Moms are still the ones most likely to be taking care of kids. But where does that leave families who don't fit the traditional mold? And how does that help parents who want to provide caring role models to their sons?

There are books out there, few and far between, that depict dads as co-parents and primary caregivers. In an effort to find them, I consulted bookstores in San Francisco as well as my local children's librarian.

My list is not exhaustive; these are only the ones I can recommend, and there are many titles I found online that I wasn't able to read in real life. And because these kinds of books are so rare, I'm willing to bet that there are plenty out there that few people know about.

Video: Jay Wexler on the Holy Hullabaloo at Grendel's Den

In Beacon Broadside's first original video, blog editor Jessie Bennett talks with Jay Wexler about a famous church/state hullabaloo in Cambridge, MA: Larkin v. Grendel's Den.

Jay Wexler is the author of Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. He teaches at the Boston University School of Law. He studied religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and law at Stanford, and worked as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He has published numerous academic articles, and reviews, as well as nearly three dozen short stories and humor pieces in outlets such as Spy and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

If the video doesn't appear, click here to watch.

Wexler is reading tonight at the Brookline Booksmith.

Believer, Beware: Birth is Suffering

Today's post is from Jeff Wilson, an assistant professor of religious studies and East Asian studies at Renison University College in Waterloo, Ontario. His most recent books include: Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America (Oxford University Press 2009) and Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness (Wisdom Publications 2009). He is also a contributor to Believer, Beware: First-person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith. This post originally appeared at Killing the Buddha.

The Buddha killed his mother. This is a fact so shocking, so distasteful to the reverent mind, that it was quickly buried beneath a mythological gilding, just as Jesus’ failed ministry and gruesome execution as a criminal were transformed by his followers into the occasion for his ultimate triumph. Officially, the Buddha’s mother gave birth painlessly, standing on her own two feet, in a beautiful garden filled with flowers. The newborn babe jumped up, took seven steps in each direction, and announced “Above the heavens and below the earth, I alone am the honored one!” Truly, we are told, it was an auspicious birth.

All of this is a lie. The Buddha is said to have been born from his mother’s side, which hints at an emergency Caesarian section, and a week later she was on the funeral pyre. Supposedly, the Buddha never knew about death until it became time for him to enter the religious life, but this is blatantly incorrect. He grew up with the knowledge that his birth had been the occasion of his mother’s demise. How could he not have become introspective? In later years, when he said that killing one’s mother was one of the five cardinal sins, he could only have spoken with the knowledge of his own unwilling guilt. It is in the light of his hidden history that we should evaluate the Buddha’s puzzling statement that birth is suffering. Certainly it puzzled me until it came my time to learn its truth for myself.

Link Roundup: SCOTUS keeps it clean, Father's Day for SAHDs, Rev. Church in Businessweek

Jay Wexler uncovers the truth behind the euphemisms in the Supreme Court's "F-Word and S-Word" case (a.k.a. FCC v. Fox Television Stations). And the Globe takes note of his book, Holy Hullabaloos, in anticipation of his reading Wednesday night at the Brookline Booksmith.

In the run up to Father's Day, there's been a lot of chatter about stay-at-home Dads and Jeremy Adam Smith's The Daddy Shift. We'll have Smith on Beacon Broadside later in the week, and he has numerous radio gigs in the coming days. In the meantime, check out the first installment of his Father's Day link roundup at Daddy Dialectic, read up on Daddy bloggers, or check out this review of The Daddy Shift by a fellow stay-at-home Dad.

With the release of Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith on the horizon, Jeff Sharlet introduces a series of "from the archives" posts over at Killing the Buddha.

Can you find spiritual inspiration in BusinessWeek? When the Rev. Forrest Church is there, you can.

Live Science talks about youth sports and overuse injuries.

Michael Patrick MacDonald's memoir All Souls shows up on Boston.com's list of 100 Essential New England books. How many have you read? 

Friday's Distractions: Loving Day, Paternity Leave, Watching a friend become a Nazi

Happy Loving Day! On this day in 1967, the Supreme Court made interracial marriage legal.

June 12th also marks the day Medgar Evers was murdered and the day Anne Frank was born.

A law prof talks about his paternity leave.

Is contemporary literature doomed to "the Gothic fate of poor slain poetry"? But, wait! Poetry's not dead yet!

Watching a family friend turn into a Nazi.

A conversation between a traditional nun and her gay cousin about sexuality and the Catholic Church.

Good-bye, Shaman Drum Bookshop.

Congratulations, GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings, on being appointed to the Department of Education. Now someone needs to counter the conservative backlash.

Nancy Polikoff: Israel, Civil Marriage, and Valuing All Families

Today's post is from Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. Polikoff is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Sexuality and the Law and has taught Family Law for more than 20 years. This post originally appeared at her Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage blog.

Earlier this week, Tel Aviv University was the site of the 9th annual queer studies conference An Other Sex. I was honored to deliver a keynote on my book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.

Israel has a distinctive legal regime within which to consider same-sex relationships. There is no civil marriage in Israel, only religious marriage. This keeps many straight couples from marrying because, for example, a Jew cannot marry a non-Jew. So there has been pressure for years for different-sex couples to not make marriage the dividing line between relationships that count and those that don't.

Israel recognizes the legal status of those "known in public" as spouses. It also allows couples to register foreign marriages (they say Cyprus does a thriving business marrying different-sex couples who can't marry in Israel). Because of this (after much litigation), Israel will register the marriages of same-sex couples who marry elsewhere and will recognize same-sex unmarried couples in ways that are similar to those accorded unmarried different-sex couples.

There is a push for civil marriage here -- but it would be for different-sex couples only. So this is not a good thing for lesbian and gay families.