Portside

The jokes in the HBO comedy may not be all that funny, but the show reveals something raw and authentic about public-school dynamics.

After striking for a day April 1 and coming to the brink of a long strike this fall, Chicago teachers are mulling a tentative agreement that won something unprecedented. They pressured the mayor into pulling money out of Chicago's treasure chest of diverted property taxes, the Tax Increment Finance program.

On May 8, 2006, the South African Judge Willem van der Merwe ruled that ANC leader Jacob Zuma was not guilty of the rape of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo. Zuma did not deny having sex with her, but claimed since the victim wore a khanga, a wraparound cloth, she had “asked for it.” Here is her poetic response.

More than 30,000 farm workers are being brought to Canada from the Caribbean, Mexico and South East Asia to do the jobs that no one wants to do, they are treated as sub-human and forced to return home, many times as injured bodies.

Disagreement on the left reigns over pornography. Is it in essence the objectification of capitalist commodity relations applied to "the other" with possibly disastrous social consequences, or is its celebration of eroticism potentially subversive of an entire repressive culture? The book under review examines the modern porn industry where the Internet has made it ubiquitous, and access on many sites even free. So if this isn't our fathers' old titillations, what is it?

One of the newer fields of academic study is called "Affect Studies," described by Maggie Doherty as the "humanistic and social-scientific investigations of the ways that feelings are generated, experienced, and interpreted" In this review, she explores how two authors use ideas generated by this field to explore the political life of feelings.

Farmworkers at Washington's Sakuma Brothers farms have voted to join what could be the first union for Driscoll's berry pickers in the nation. In September, they voted to be represented by Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), the first farmworker union led by workers who are indigenous to Central America.

Before the film was overshadowed by the revelation that Nate Parker was acquitted under dubious circumstances of sexual assault, The Birth of a Nation was lauded as an achievement in filmmaking. It received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox Searchlight acquired it for a record $17.5 million. Parker was praised for his visionary and brave retelling of the life of Nat Turner.

A union president explains how labor should adjust to changing times.

DNA bar-coding that quickly confirms or reject claims that a food product is what it purports to be are entering the market, with the promise of exposing economically motivated fraud.