Portside

"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?

In 900 schools in 30 cities—from Houston to Miami, Patterson to Pittsburgh—teacher unions participated in “walk-ins” to “reclaim our schools.”

Union President Laura Glading stepped down in October—under pressure from angry members, who were pushing for a special recall election. American Airlines announced in January that it had hired her as a consultant.

Extermination, extinction, genocide--themes of history so horrible, we seldom want to consider how close they are to our own homes. Poet Esther Kamkar reports from a Zuni friend who cannot forget what happened here,

Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.

The idea that "everything and everybody everywhere should operate as if they were a business" has emerged a working definition of contemporary neoliberalism. Another way of putting it is that "everything and everybody everywhere" should actually be a business. Lester K. Spence shows how this philosophy pains most of us while focusing on neoliberalism's effects on black politics. Brandon Soderberg offers an introduction to Spence's argument.