Portside

Hospital lobbyists have tried for years to convince us all that predatory pricing policies don’t matter. But the grotesque reality tells a different story.

Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.

Mothers Day, unemployment, Pope Francis, climate change and more...

An eggplant should be as obvious to a 7 year old as an iPhone. Knowing how to make a loaf of bread should be part of the national curriculum, and an understanding of seasonality and our food supply should be taught from a young age.

When the Internet began to take off in the mid-1990’s, it created the opportunity to do something scholars had been dreaming of for millennia — to gather all of the writings of scholars past and present together in a single online public library — a free, globally accessible version of the ancient library in Alexandria. But 20 years on and we are barely any closer to achieving this goal.

An estimated 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, according to the latest government report. That’s up from 19,000 in 2010, despite recent claims that the military has been focusing more on prevention efforts.

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix.

A&F Gets a Brand Readjustment. Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. Just Cancel the Sequester. Everyone But Cheney and Rumsfeld. Absolutamente Quilapayun.

The current political environment shows that activists must be flexible in choosing which political arenas are most open to their goals. Opportunities for state government to enact progressive economic measures are there for the taking, but are not being seized due to a lack of grassroots pressure that is connected to the exclusive focus on federal action.

New York Times is asked to examine its coverage of Venezuela and Honduras by leading journalists, activists and media scholars. "Whatever one thinks of the democratic credentials of Chávez's presidency-and we recognize that reasonable people can disagree about it-there is nothing in the record, when compared with that of his Honduran counterparts, to warrant the discrepancies in the Times's coverage of the two governments."