Portside

Can the movement rebuild itself below the Mason-Dixon line, and change Southern politics in the process?

Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head.

In the ever-evolving restaurant industry, trend forecasts range from menu tweaks to technological and social upheavals.

In July, Emeryville, California, passed the highest city-wide minimum wage in the country. Here's how workers' lives changed - and didn't. As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation.

However, once those bargaining sessions between unions reps and their government employers are redefined by the Supreme Court to be political speech, any law restricting what can be said, what items can be raised, seems to be a restriction by the government on those union members’ free speech rights.

For the novelty fetishists, everything's new, new, new. Boston-based poet Jill McDonough shines a light on what's happening, what's coming. Only maybe not.

Noting that conditions today are similar to those at the dawn of the Gilded Age characterized by disproportionate wealth and extreme corruption, retiring DC Metro Labor Council President Joslyn Williams added, "In that era, they were lobbing vicious attacks against workers with guns and batons. Today, they are armed with suits and maneuvers that undercut workers from Wall Street to the state house to U.S. Supreme Court."

Were the mass 'We are Charlie' demonstrations in France in support of 'We are France,' in the best republican tradition or a shot against Muslim immigrants signifying that 'You are not?' Polymath Emmanuel Todd argues that the demonstrations, like much of Charlie Hebdo's satire, were not so much attacks on toxic religious ideology as broadly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, indicating that the vaunted French secularism has lost its solidaristic component, 'equality.'

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.

A children's book showing happy slaves in the South was pulled off the market last weekend after a major controversy about its contents. This is just the latest flareup in an ongoing dispute about books aimed at children that show slavery and racist subordination in a positive light.