Skip to main content

Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It

Michelle Chen The Nation
Should we care that our college experiences are being funded by borrowed money? In recent years, financial markets have become increasingly entangled in budget decisions, and often those decisions have little to do with educating students. In many cases, schools are just borrowing for huge capital investments that help the college market itself, such as gleaming new football stadiums and shiny dorm buildings.

Who Needs the Supreme Court?

Emily Bazelon Slate
Gay marriage might just become the law of the land without ever heading back to Justice Kennedy.

The Ancient Roots of the 1%

Heather Pringle Science
Don't blame farming. Inequality got its start among resource-rich hunter-gatherers

Friday Nite Videos -- May 23, 2014

Portside
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's keynote at the New Populism Conference. John Lennon: Instant Karma. Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs. Just Say No ... to the War on Drugs. Drug Tests Must Now Include Females.

Tidbits - May 22, 2014

Portside
Reader Comments - Boko Haram; Portside articles on the Ukraine; Brown v. Board-what still needs to be done; Redistributing Income; NRA, Second Amendment; John Oliver; Jon Favreau - a correction; Whiteness of Liberal Media; Was the American Revolution Really Just A Counter-Revolution; THE REAL WORLD - a graduation address never given; Announcements - DIE LINKE, SYRIZA, Future of the European Left - New York - May 28; New Book -- Torture is still an urgent moral issue

Cecily's Pre-sentencing Statement to the Judge

Cecily McMillan Justice for Cecily
And though I am still young, and still searching for answers, I have started down a path where dignity is derived from the law of love, and though it has been said that this trial is personal and not political, I maintain that the personal cannot be divorced from the political.Whereas nonviolent civil disobedience is the manifestation of my ideology, it is rooted in a love ethic that is central to my identity.

What Cesar Chavez Movie Missed

David Bacon In These Times
The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.

A Mighty Oak Has Fallen - Dr. Vincent Gordon Harding (July 25, 1931 - May 19, 2014)

D.L. Chandler; Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove; Rose Marie Berger
Dr. Vincent G. Harding, Civil Rights pioneer, colleague, advisor and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King, died this week at age 82. He drafted King's anti-Vietnam War speech, "Breaking the Silence". As people like King and Rosa Parks became icons, Harding insisted that America could not celebrate their lives without continuing to devote ourselves to the work they and many others had done.

Afghan Women: the Kill List We Don't Talk About

Sahana Dharmapuri, WeNews commentator Women's e-News
In the world of pen vs. gun, we would all benefit from putting the Arab proverb "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" to good use. If women's rights are a security threat to violent extremists, then women's rights must be the asset we protect.

Work It! The New Face of Labor in Fashion

By Annemarie Strassel Dissent
“At first glance the runways of New York and the factories of Bangladesh couldn’t look farther apart, and yet we are all working in the same industry—the fashion industry—which is a $1.5 trillion business, where the work is overwhelmingly performed by young women and girls,” says Sara Ziff, the head of Model Alliance, an advocacy organization for models.