Portside

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were legendary actors and activists. “Life’s Essentials With Ruby Dee,” a new documentary about their remarkable partnership by their grandson Muta’Ali Muhammad, will premiere on Centric this Sunday.

Science doesn't need another moonshot, and it really doesn't need another vaguely thought-out initiative dropped on it during a State of the Union address. What it needs is much more important—and probably much more difficult politically, because those needs are much less flashy. What science needs is stable, sustainable budget growth. Take the NIH budget and promise to grow it at a percent or two above inflation for a number of years. The number 10 would be good.

President Obama’s final State of the Union address serves as an epitaph for a tenure that began with a promise to halt the Iraq war but ended with capitulation to the status quo. Long forgotten is his pledge to end the “mindset” that led the U.S. into that war. President Obama will leave office as Bush did: passing on to his successor two wars, one the longest in American history, the other a reboot of the conflict he promised to end, no longer boasting of ending either.

According to a new finding, described as a "shock" by its discoverers, a single mutation 600 million years ago may be responsible for the emergence of complex organisms -- including all of the plants and animals that we are familiar with -- from a single-celled ancestor. This evolutionary accident enabled cells to communicate with each others and therefore to cooperate.

The impact of GE's move to Massachusetts remains unclear. The company said it expects to move roughly 800 jobs to Massachusetts, but the company has notoriously kept billions of dollars of profits offshore, leading to it typically paying a state tax rate of less than 2 percent.

The giant retailer, based in Bentonville, Ark., said in a statement that it would shutter 154 stores in the United States, or about 3 percent of its locations, as well as 115 stores overseas.

Still, Gu said, there were two fairly large quakes in the area in January 2015, one of which had a magnitude of 4.4. He wasn't able to confirm that they were caused by fracking, but said it is "highly probable." The energy regulator said at the time that the 4.4 magnitude quake was likely caused by hydraulic fracturing.

But if AJAM gave us one thing in its brief life in the United States, it was a dedication to covering economic inequality and the growing opposition to it in the wake of Occupy Wall Street.

Last month a majority of Republicans said they would rather see their habitat destroyed by rising sea levels than agree with President Obama.

Candidates can get easy applause by lambasting journalists. Nevertheless, as a scholar concerned with the critical functions journalism fulfills in a democracy, the author argues that the highest imperative for journalists is to serve the needs of audiences and the democratic process for critical information. Journalists moderating presidential debates must function as journalists.