Portside

After being evicted at the height of the recent foreclosure crisis, a construction worker tries to reclaim his family’s home by taking a new job with the evictor. Ramin Bahrani's '99 Homes', a relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things, proves to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and—paradoxically, given the dark subject matter—elating films to come along in recent memory.

NEA state officials and rank-and-file members plan to protest upcoming vote to endorse Hillary Clinton.

Many students have lunch periods that are 20 minutes or less, which can be an insufficient amount of time to eat.

Puerto Rico is in a severe economic crisis. The Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (PPT) was founded in 2010 to build a movement to combat austerity and the fundamental roots of the crisis: Since 1898 when the United States took Puerto Rico from Spain, the movement and shape of Puerto Rico’s economy have been largely determined by the priorities and preferences of U.S. capital. The PPT unites electoral work with movement building with the goal of radical change.

Seattle teachers went on strike for a week this month with a list of goals for a new contract. By the time the strike officially ended this week, teachers had won some of the usual stuff of contract negotiations — for example, the first cost-of-living raises in six years — but also less standard objectives.

A gray hoodie will not protect her son from rain or cold, writes Massachusetts poet January Gill O'Neil, but a mother's fears for "the darkest child/ on our street" express a deeper threat from the outside as color and race threaten the safety of the young.

Autoworker expectations for the 2015 UAW/Big Three contracts were to end the lower-tier wage that the union agreed first agreed to in 2007, at the time of the economic crisis. Over the last decade the higher-tier workers lost four dollars an hour to inflation and have been looking for a raise, and perhaps a restoration of the Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) that had been suspended.

Walking with eyes wide open into the ranks of labor is a necessity. An informed approach is critical. Learning about the history, the limitations and the possibilities of a revitalized labor—or labour—movement becomes part of the tool kit for workers crafting novel approaches to challenge their working conditions. Knowledge is a form of power.

Herbert Aptheker, to introduce the man by his highest prestige, was an early scholar of African American uprisings against slavery, and in his middle years, the director and coordinator of the W.E.B. DuBois Papers, one of the great archival triumphs of US history at large. For many in the 60s, through his books and public apperances, a generation became aware of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus (ca. 460 BC) is an ancient tale about refugees, sanctuary, and moral duty. Charles McNulty argues that the play provides a precedent for helping us think about today's European refugee crisis. "It provides historical depth" to today's refugee crisis, he says, "framing the basic dramatic situation of its asylum seekers in moral, democratic and religious terms."