Portside

Tom Karlson is not inhibited by the cliche Do not speak ill of the dead but it's still true that a certain justice of the Supreme Court is still dead.

The BCTGM is organizing to protect its members and their community in Chicago. However the odds of success appear stacked against them. Job security has become the key issue in the national negotiations between Nabisco and the BCTGM, in which the company is also trying to eliminate the multi-employer BCTGM pension plan for all plants. Nabisco was recently purchased by the stridently anti-union Mondelez, a global food conglomerate.

Harper Lee's classic novel was one of hope, young hope. Her last, Go Set a Watchman, a sad acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial hate in my home state of Alabama, reveals that Atticus turns out to be a Kluxer! An example of how America, especially the American South, has yet to confront, admit, and rectify the original sin of legal racialism enshrined in our founding documents - three fifths of a person.

Some 85% of African American eighth graders cannot read at grade level, yet only seven percent of teachers are black and less than two percent of all teachers in our country's schools are black men. Former teacher Alvin Irby started Barbershop Books, a nonprofit, in response to this crisis. It brings books to barbershops in black communities, in a fight to raise literacy levels among black boys. The information below comes from the group's website.

Governor Cuomo" has yet to reach a contract agreement with CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, whose more than 25,000 members have been without one since 2010, or District Council 37, which represents over 10,000 non-professional workers at CUNY and hasn’t had a contract since 2009." He’s denied CUNY staff a $15 minimum wage, even as he insisted upon it at the State University of New York.

"Son of Saul has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s a clear favorite at the Oscars. It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead." - Christopher Orr

Last week, the Republican-controlled legislature in West Virginia overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, making the measure officially law. The story of how West Virginia got to that point is a boiled-down version of the changes America has undergone over the past half-century — the pain of de-industrialization, the shift in political power, the casting about for anything that might create jobs.

Although Cuba is a fertile tropical place, post-revolution shortages and rationing and complicated bureaucracy have not been beneficial to its culinary traditions. As diplomatic relations thaw, restauarants and a variety of food places are competing for the tourist trade.

It was the first year since 2011 that saw the number of major work stoppages increased in the US.

As the rightly acclaimed television series Downton Abbey unspools its final episode some fans have criticized the producers decision to devote so much time to a debate about the future of Downton’s Cottage Hospital. But underneath the repartee lies a serious and persistent issue: what should be the relationship of the community to the emerging age of a high tech, highly capitalized and highly specialized medical system?