Portside

• Beyoncé in ‘Formation’: Entertainer, Activist, Both? - Jon Caramanica, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham (New York Times)
• What Is or Isn't Cultural Appropriation? Let's Look at Coldplay and Beyoncé's Latest Video - Jamilah King (Mic)
• Pro-Rape Meet-Up Canceled After Women’s Boxing Club Threatens to Show Up - Jessica Roy (New York Magazine)
• UN Demands Zika-Infected Countries Give Women Access To Abortion And Birth Control - Alex Zielinski (Think Progress)
• Hundreds of Plumbers Assemble in Flint to Install Faucets and Water Filters for Residents in Need - Rose Minutaglio (People)
• What Is a BernieBro? - J.K. Trotter (Gawker)

Beyoncé in ‘Formation’: Entertainer, Activist, Both?

By Jon Caramanica, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham
February 6, 2016
New York Times

On Saturday afternoon, Beyoncé released “Formation,” her first new song since 2014, on Tidal and YouTube in advance of her Sunday appearance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. The song’s subject is familiar Beyoncé self-affirmation, and the video is among the most politically direct work she’s done in her career, with implicit commentary on police brutality, Hurricane Katrina and black financial power. Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times, Wesley Morris, The Times’s critic at large, and Jenna Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, discussed the song’s sound, the video’s look and the way that Beyoncé increasingly blends the aesthetic and the political.

What Is or Isn't Cultural Appropriation? Let's Look at Coldplay and Beyoncé's Latest Video

By Jamilah King
February 3, 2016
Mic

Say what you will about the African presence in Indian culture, Beyoncé Knowles is an African-American woman who grew up in Houston. She's not celebrating a culture that she grew up in. Neither is Chris Martin: Coldplay's lead singer, a white English musician who was born exactly 30 years after India gained its independence from Great Britain, who is the new music video's protagonist. Madonna, Selena Gomez and Gwen Stefani have also been called out for cultural appropriation when they wore bindis.
But is that appropriation wrong? That's the question that viewers are grappling with most. And it's a fine question, but it also misses the point: Discussions about cultural appropriation aren't just about who has the right to wear what they want. They're fundamentally about power — in this case, the power to deem what and who is worthy of celebration in the first place.
 

Pro-Rape Meet-Up Canceled After Women’s Boxing Club Threatens to Show Up

By Jessica Roy
February 4, 2016
New York Magazine

Professional douchebag Roosh V. has made a name for himself advocating offensive misogynistic positions on his terrible website Return of Kings, and he's collected a handful of devoted followers in the process. But after scheduling an International Meetup Day for his "tribesmen" this weekend, he appears to have met his match: female boxers.
When they heard that Roosh and his followers were planning to meet up in Toronto, the women of the Toronto Newsgirls boxing club decided they'd attend the meet-up, too. That way when Roosh did what he threatened to do — take photos of any female protesters who showed up to dissect and criticize online later — he'd actually be snapping photos of badass bitches in boxing gloves.

UN Demands Zika-Infected Countries Give Women Access To Abortion And Birth Control

by Alex Zielinski
February 5, 2016
Think Progress

Zika, a mosquito-borne illness currently spreading rapidly across the Americas, has been linked to a fetal neurological disorder called microcephaly. In response, a slew of Latin American countries have recently encouraged women to hold off getting pregnant to keep the virus from affecting their unborn children.
“The advice of some governments to women to delay getting pregnant, ignores the reality that many women and girls simply cannot exercise control over whether or when or under what circumstances they become pregnant, especially in an environment where sexual violence is so common,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein in a Friday statement.
 

Hundreds of Plumbers Assemble in Flint to Install Faucets and Water Filters for Residents in Need

By Rose Minutaglio
February 2, 2016
People

In an effort to help alleviate the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, more than 300 union plumbers assembled in the devastated town on Saturday to lend a hand.
The plumbers, representing the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry, visited over 1,100 Flint homes to help install new faucets and water filters free of charge.
 

What Is a BernieBro?

By J.K. Trotter
February 4, 2016
Gawker

You may have heard the term “BernieBro” being thrown around on Facebook and Twitter lately, usually during discussions about the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanderrs. Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic invented the term late last year, in an article describing what he saw as a collection of conversational and argumentative tics frequently exhibited by Sanders’ supporters (“The Berniebro talks a lot about DC insiders”; “The Berniebro knows the media is complicit in keeping Clinton the Democratic front-runner”) but he didn’t settle on a concrete definition. So what is a BernieBro? Language is a malleable thing, so for now we’ll defer to the definitions laid down by other outlets.