Portside

The forthcoming film Concussion, starring Will Smith, is coming for the NFL. If Concussion came out now, it would get less coverage than the Washington quarterback controversy. But tragically, we know that by December, another season of injuries, another season of tragedies will be winding down and the film will amplify all of those renewed concerns.

[M]inority candidates will, with some frequency, come with unconventional political backgrounds and views as judged from majority perspectives. Regentally imposed political tests which assault the academic freedom of all will fall upon such candidates with unusual severity. (Leon Letwin's letter in defense of Angela Davis in 1969, relevant today as we defend faculty members such as Steven Salaita.)

The EU's belt-tightening measures are cutting holes in Europe's social-safety net. Austerity as an economic strategy is more than just throwing a scare into countries that, exhausted by years of cutbacks and high unemployment, are thinking of changing course. It's laying the groundwork for the triumph of multinational corporate capitalism - undermining the social contract between labor and capital that's characterized much of Europe for the past two generations.

Images of Czech police inking the skin of newly arriving Syrian migrants, and the government says they were unaware that this brought back memories of the Holocaust, when prisoners at Auschwitz were systematically tattooed. While in the north of Europe, in 24 hours, responding to a Facebook campaign, 10,000 Icelanders opened their doors to their Syrian brothers and sisters.

On the 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking history, Hammer and Hoe, author Robin D.G. Kelley discusses the lessons Alabama’s forgotten black communists can offer today’s activists.

In a landmark court settlement in California, most inmates currently serving time in solitary are expected to qualify for removal under the settlement agreement—including all who have served more than 10 years—and they will be transitioned out over the next year.

Kathleen Cleaver, who is featured in a new documentary on the history of the Black Panther Party, talked to The Root about the past and present civil rights movements of African Americans.

On tennis and black excellence.

The exhibition, in a converted basement space at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in North Philadelphia, is a model of a classroom at Fairhill, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school a mile away that closed at the end of the academic year in 2013. "reForm" captures the outpouring of protests, grief and tears in response to the closing of 31 publics schools in Philadelphia three years ago.

MSNBC Confidential; Black Twitter; Web of Freedom; Facebook Gulag; Who’s Afraid of the Dark Web?; Pentagon Dirty Pool