Portside

The democratically-elected president and parliament (let alone the media and ordinary citizens) have no prayer of checking the powers of the Supreme Leader. As a result, the system has remained opaque, blind to its own flaws, resistant to growth and incapable of adaptation to its evolving internal and external environments. These uprisings express the frustration of the people with that obdurate rigidity.

Erica was a rare person whose honesty far outweighed her self-interest. In a life full of tragedy, she died too soon.

This is the question people left of center have been asking for some time now. In different ways, it is being posed in Latin America, in much of Europe, in Arab and Islamic countries, in southern Africa, and in northeast Asia. The question is all the more dramatic because, in so many of these countries, this follows a period when there were significant shifts leftward.

The question posed by the Vietnam War experience remains: how to navigate a world in which the US is no longer the pre-eminent power. Trump offers an unequivocal, aggressive, national chauvinist response.

On a wide range of issues, high schoolers across the United States opposed the Trump agenda this year, both directly and in principle. At the end of a bleak political year, here are ten stories about awesome high schoolers who led the charge in 2017. Plus five youth organizing victories in 2017 in California.

Five ways the administration has waged war on Muslims at home and abroad in its first year.

2017 saw artists, performers, athletes, politicians, cultural workers, faith-based organizations, students, academics, unions and activists grow the movement for Palestinian rights.

To counter the FCC’s attack on net neutrality, we need to start treating the Internet like the public good it is.

As African-American families leave Chicago, the percentage of poor black students in the suburbs has grown dramatically, straining already cash-strapped school districts.

In the early years of the Cold War, the academic study of international relations was an ideological tool serving the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. But in the 1960s, a new generation of scholars began to challenge the reigning orthodoxy.