Portside

We all know that at this moment everything is on the table. This year has been astounding, sometimes inspiring, and ultimately menacing. It gave lightning flashes of what a people's movement could accomplish. But the election outcome is ultimately brutal -- a nightmare President and administration packed with white nationalists, ultra-billionaires and militarists that threaten the existence of the entire democratic system. No one, no group and no institution is safe.

This year's Super Bowl between the Falcons and Patriots is viewed by many across football as a battle of cultures. On one end, some in the game see the Patriots as a conveyor belt of winning machinery, aligned with Donald Trump, but despised by a large swath of the American populace. On the other are the Falcons, a talented, less rigid team, supported by a city starving for a winner and viewed as the welcome alternative in this fight.

The top lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board issued an official opinion this week that players at all 17 private colleges in the FBS are employees of their schools. It is a significant expansion of a 2014 ruling by NLRB regional director Peter S. Ohr that Northwestern football players are employees.

The dispute is not over their wages. It's Honeywell that's demanding deep concessions in their new 5-year contract, including the elimination of cost-of-living increases and pensions for new workers, cuts in overtime pay, subcontracting out work, restricting representation rights, and more.

Poet Bill Glose, a former paratrooper and author of three collections of poetry, addresses the psychology and luck that brought him back from Iraq.

A democratic foreign policy or empire building as central to U.S. action abroad? It's an old debate. Author Stephen Kinzer sees the alternatives set at the turn of the 20th century, when imperium boosters Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Randolph Hearst squared off against Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. Here, Kinzer is queried about his analysis and his thinking on just where Trump and his malignant "America First" grandiloquence stand.

In 2014, the last year with full statistics, 899 construction workers nationwide died from workplace injuries. The reason: loss of union strength and decline in OSHA funding. President Trump's anti-union and anti-federal spending polices promise to only make the situation worse.

DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido wrote, "we are carrying out our own "100 Days of Resistance" fight-back and I pledge that we will not back down in the next four years". DC 37 represents 125,000 municipal workers in New York City.

This first of two projected volumes of a new biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee takes his story to the end of 1968. It offers some surprises about this significant, and some would say underrated, politician.

Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.