Portside

So-called "supercoils" change the behavior of DNA, opening a new role for topology in the study of life.

Maybe they can get away with it, but it certainly seems worthwhile putting up a fight to stop them.

A new report charges the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable foundation, is dangerously distorting the direction of international development, promoting the interests of corporate America against those of ordinary people seeking social and economic justice rather than charity. The Gates Foundation is aggressively expanding the role of multinational corporations in health and agriculture, particularly in Africa and the global south.

Two years ago this month, more than 300 residents of Kure Beach, North Carolina (pop. 2,000), packed town hall to voice their anger with then-Mayor Dean Lambeth's decision to sign a letter supporting seismic testing for offshore oil and gas deposits. The letter was written by America's Energy Forum, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s leading trade association.

After the defeat of San Francisco Prop F, Airbnb's Conley celebrated Silicon Valley media’s “Glowing perspective on Airbnb’s prospect,” tweeting, ”With Prop F Gone, Airbnb Is Now Unbeatable.” Less well known has been Conley’s side job, before and during his Airbnb tenure, as visionary leader and chief pitchman for Tres Santos, a mega-resort under construction in Todos Santos, a small Mexican fishing and farming town on Baja’s Pacific Coast.

Ricot Jean-Pierre shares about how inequitable control of land has devastated the vast majority throughout Haitian history, from enslavement to today.

Gitmo is an offshore penal colony that’s close enough to administer with ease, but far enough away to exist on the margins of legality.

It’s worth asking what those special ops forces of “ours,” relied on ever more heavily from one administration to the next, and settling into so many bases, actually represent. It’s hard to argue that they are there for the defense of this country. Like the bases themselves, they are, it seems, carrying out the increasingly messy business of empire in the far reaches of the planet. They are, you might say, Washington’s imperial shock troops.

Texas is just one of 19 states to receive a failing grade on reproductive health according to a new report from the Population Institute, a nonprofit that provides family planning education.

Here in the states, we know what it means to see our democratic rights attacked. But do we have a vision of what an expansion of democracy and popular participation in government might look like?