Portside

With Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and migrant rights organizer Tings Chak peels away the invisibility of massive immigration detention facilities. In graphic novel form, she walks the reader through these physical spaces step by step.

The exit from a dystopian future does not rest with a brave individual or a small group of high tech activists who undermine the state. Rather, it rests in winning the confidence of millions that there is an alternative to chaos and dystopia that is not to be found in one or another variant of authoritarianism. This is the challenge for the global Left . . .

If companies want to grumble about creeping socialism, they could always choose, at their own free will, that tried-and-true market-based solution to poverty wages: paying their workers enough to live on.

Emmy Noether's Theorem may be the most important theoretical result in modern physics.

Even if it were true that cell phone users “voluntarily” disclose their location, it strains credulity to argue that, simply by virtue of putting a cell phone in their pocket, they voluntarily disclose “a wealth of detail about their familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

An abundance of data has fueled the reform movement, but from prisons to prosecutors, crucial questions remain unquantified.

It took more than 40 years, but Attica’s survivors and families of the deceased had finally convinced a judge to force the State of New York to release sealed records relating to deaths of some 39 inmates and staff following the 1971 prison uprising. But the documents released May 21 provide little information as to who was responsible for the dead and wounded when state officials decided to forcibly retake the prison, and why no one has been held accountable.

A new website called Canary Mission is publicizing the identities of pro-Palestinian student activists to prevent them from getting jobs after they graduate from college. But the website is keeping its own backers’ identity a secret. “It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees,” a female narrator intones in a slick video posted to the website’s YouTube account. The website has posted profiles of dozens of students and recent graduates.

There are plenty of shocking statistics in a recently rediscovered 2014 study on suicide from the World Health Organization. The report found that suicides are responsible for half of all violent deaths in men and 71% of violent deaths in women. It also showed that globally, suicide is the second leading cause of death for all young people between the ages of 15 and 29 years old. Yet, somehow, it took us until now to notice just how badly it affects young women.

North Charleston, South Carolina, has received strong praise for its handling of the fatal police shooting of 50-year-old African American Walter Scott. According to the media, the city's quick response saved it from becoming another Ferguson, MO. But, North Charleston's response should be understood not in contrast to Ferguson but in the context of Ferguson and a national upsurge of protest against racist policing.