Meagan Day

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.[6]

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".[7]

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.[5][8]

In 2016, she joined the Democratic Socialists of America, an experience which she described in Jacobin as being formative for her.[9]

One year after joining the DSA, she officially joined Jacobin[3] part-time[10] as one of two staff writers.[5]

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.[10][11]

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.[12] 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".[13]

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".[14] 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."[3]

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.[15]