Portside

The strike meeting reflects growing tension between the union and Volkswagen, despite its carefully cultivated image as a pro-worker company.

Poet Tessara Dudley speaks of vulnerability, the burden of being "not"--"we will know every word we speak is true/we will know every word counts for nothing."

The interviewer doesn't exaggerate in ranking W.E.B Du Bois as the 20th century's pre-eminent African-American author and thinker, crediting his founding and stewardship of the NAACP's The Crisis with granting him not just an agenda-setting role in civil-rights history but also international influence. Before going into detail with the biographer, he also praises Mullen for a work that is a timely introduction to this impressive and somewhat imposing figure.

Almost every single province in Canada is ruled by a government committed to deep austerity cuts and assaults on workers rights. The tasks seem large, but as with various local labour battles, campaigns like the Fight for $15, and organizations like Iron & Earth, workers are constantly being pulled together in common struggles against common enemies.

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In the 1970s a group of African American experimental jazz improvisors organized musician-sponsored concerts in a network of lower Manhattan lofts. The music they produced was not only sonically adventurous, much of it was also driven by a host of social concerns. Michael Heller has published a new history of this movement. Michael J. Agovino helps guide us through this important cultural moment.

The company is doing what’s made sense for years—and what the Bush and Obama administrations made possible.

It feels perfectly appropriate that in 2016, a mortifying examination of one man’s ego played a role in the election of America’s next president. Weiner is a depressing pile-up of the year’s governing impulses: the media’s veneration of scandal, the increasing shamelessness of the country’s politicians, and Weiner’s quiet, ashamed delight in his own continued relevance.

“As we prepare to fight-back against the forthcoming attacks on working people and our communities under an extremist-run government, we know we must realign our resources and streamline our investments to buttress and broaden our movement to restore economic and democratic opportunity for all families,” said SEIU spokeswoman Sahar Wali.

Interview with behavioral scientist Dr. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating (2006) and Slim by Design (2014) and founder of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. The Food and Brand Lab was started in 1997 at the University of Illinois (before moving to Cornell in 2005), to explore how humans relate to food with the end goal of uncovering solutions to improve eating environments and help individuals eat better. Wansink analyzes why we eat what we eat.