Portside

Among the findings of a new survey of all public mass shootings in the United States over the last 50 years: we account for one third of all such events in the world, mass murderers here use more weapons than elsewhere, and a nation's civilian firearm ownership rate is the strongest predictor of mass shootings.

Given that gender portrayals in music videos, advertisements, video games and other popular culture powerfully shape expectations and attitudes about gender roles, it is not surprising that the emergence of powerful, but still hypersexualized, heroine images has affected popular beliefs and self-images. But the impact has not always been what you might think.

'Women do not lead single-issue lives,' says Ms. Foundation president on Women's Equality Day

 “I hate the way they portray us in the media,” Kanye said. “You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days because most of the people are black…. America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible.”

Birthright bingo; Scifi civil war; Race shift?; AIPAC’s PR machine; Wallyball

Nothing can save the coal industry in the face of market forces -- especially the boom in natural gas extracted from shale deposits via fracking -- and the relentless advance of climate change. If Morrisey and his cohorts had West Virginia’s true interests at heart, they would be petitioning for federal funds to turn the state into an innovation center for clean energy -- the only sure path to economic growth in a climate-ravaged world.

For many of its ideologues, a slaveholding Confederacy was meant to be a bulwark against radical politics of all stripes.The development of Southern nationalism sprang in part from the desire to forestall the influence of radical ideas on American society. Conservative Southern writers developed a term for left-wing social theory — “red republicanism.”

Why are Chicago parents on a hunger strike to save a neighborhood school? Because after five years of fighting, they’ve run out of options...

Sue Bradford Edwards, local Missouri journalist, and Dr. Duchess Harris, Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, new book, Black Lives Matter, is a comprehensive guidebook introducing without emotionally overwhelming 6-12th graders who are learning about the movement, and its inheritance, for the first time to antiblackness violence in U.S. law and society. Surprisingly, the text also resonates with lower-division university students.

This year, State Senator Holly Mitchell, (D-Los Angeles), introduced Senate Bill 23, a repeal of the Maximum Family Grant rule, on the grounds that it has only driven poor women deeper into poverty, and done nothing to reduce the birth rate of women on welfare. That assertion has been supported by several studies, including one from the University of California, Berkeley and another from Cornell University.