Portside

The poet Martin Espada, called the North American Pablo Neruda, turns his eye to the continuing murders of non-white peoples and asks how people in the future will look back at our times, wondering "how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them."

Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined...In 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate...by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. [*]

“Which is worse: a poor, uneducated young man who sells drugs because he sees no other opportunity, or a multimillionaire executive, at the pinnacle of his power, who decides to subject his workers to a daily game of Russian roulette? ...

Most university teachers in the United States are part time, contingent employees. Their job title of "adjunct" is added to term designating academic rank (lecturer, assistant professor), but carries no job rights, benefits, or expectation of continued employment beyond the present semester. Most full time "academic" jobs are now held by administrators. How did we get here? Benjamin Ginsberg considers these questions, as Matthew Abraham explains.

DC37 Executive Director Henry Garrido announced that his union has endorsed Secretary Hillary Clinton. DC37 is the largest municipal union in New York City with 121,000 members and 55,000 retirees and is affiliated with American Federation of State, County and Municipal Emlpyees which has already endorsed her.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing workers to refuse to pay the fees would have been the culmination of a decades-long campaign by a group of prominent conservative foundations aimed at weakening unions that represent teachers and other public employees. Tuesday’s deadlock denied them that victory, but it set no precedent and left the door open for further challenges once the Supreme Court is back at full strength.

Chefs are using neurograstronomy to change the way your brain perceives flavor to create a dining experiences on the frontier of gastronomic science, a place where brain, body, and nutrition intersect.

Celebrating a progressive South means supporting the whole economy of practices that enabled our traditions in the first place. That means supporting the actual communities and the actual restaurants that have been here—that made this place a here in to begin with.

Just in time for the 2016 Labor Notes Conference, the Chicago Teachers Union is planning a one-day strike and citywide day of action April 1. The union’s governing body, the House of Delegates, gave its stamp of approval to the action last night.

Rather than just as solely a psychologically tortured individual, it’s probably more useful to see the Punisher as a cipher onto which we collectively project our ambivalence about veterans.