Portside

Hollywood stars play all the major roles in the film, but it is no puff piece for the 1 percent. After watching “The Big Short” and talking to viewers, it’s hard to argue against Sanders’ demands to increase taxes on the billionaires and break up the banks, and use the revenue to fund better health care and education.

Two potentially sweeping Supreme Court cases set the stage for a seismic shift in the battle over abortion and contraception.

Birthers Target Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders: Wall Street Reform. Tracy Chapman - The Times They Are A Changin'. Dry Up or Drown - Evan Webb and the Rural Route Ramblers. Don't Let Donald Trump Fool You: Rightwing Populism Is the New Normal.

Lessons the climate movement can draw from Black Lives Matter.

The upsurge of protest in communities of color against the increasingly visible pattern of unrestrained police brutality revealed in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, combined with the rise of student activism over the climate on a variety of campuses in recent months have evoked memories of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

From an interview with Mphatheleini Makaulele, an award-winning indigenous leader, farmer, and activist, and Director of Dzomo la Mupo, a community organization in rural South Africa. She is also part of the African Biodiversity Network.

Reader Comments: New Threat to Voting Rights before Supreme Court; The Portrayal of African Americans on Stage and Screen - Tonya Pinkins the Real Mother Courage; Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Oregon Thugs; Left Gains Ground, Can It Hold; Trump and Fascism; Readers Respond to poem about Berlin Wall - The GDR, A Different Perspective; The Real Northern Student Movement; Shostakovich; Vivian Stromberg Presente.(Sorry for length, three weeks since Tidbits last appeared)

The fate of police officers who kill often rests in the hands of the prosecutors they typically work alongside. A Guardian analysis reveals district attorneys cleared colleagues in more than 200 cases this year

Honesty may be poetry's best gift in the coming year, as these writers and others say what needs to be said about guns, anger, racism, family, and how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another.

Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera reminds Americans of a colonial and imperial past whose contours are still visible. Despite a stingy record for commutations and pardons, President Barack Obama could and should use his constitutional powers to commute Oscar’s punitive sentence and grant his immediate release.