Portside

Thousands of farmworkers went on strike in Mexico to protest low wages. The strike, the first of its kind in decades, had a wide impact, as workers blocked highways and stopped the harvest at the height of the season. Workers not only want higher wages, but their own independent union.

With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Due, in part, to the environmental concerns posed by unsafe refineries, strikers quickly gained the support of green groups.

Fifty years after his assassination, this poem honors El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (aka Malcolm X)

People have intrinsic rights that democratically elected legislatures sometimes violate. The right of working people to combine, to organise, is one of them

Crucial to winning labor support for climate protection is the idea of a “just transition.” The burden of policies that are necessary for society—like protecting the environment—shouldn’t be borne by a small minority who happen to be victimized by their side effects. Climate protection advocates should insist from the outset that part of any transition away from fossil fuels includes protection for impacted communities.

Popular culture may be getting more diverse in terms of gender and skin color, but it's still mostly flat in presenting diverse human qualities and differences. Few characters play against type, which makes the exceptions all the more remarkable. Part of the power of characters playing against type is simply their insistence, humorous and without qualified explanation, of their existence. In other words, like most of comedy, its power is better experienced, not explained

Last week Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. It had been nominated in both poetry and criticism, the first book to be so doubly nominated. A bold, book of experimental writing that takes on the "invisible" practices of everyday person-to-person, interactive racism, Rankine's book is as illuminating as it is, at times, wrenching. Here Parul Sehgal guides us through this outstanding work of contemporary literature.

Oil workers alliance with greens helped win strike.

"India’s Daughter", Leslee Udwin's stirring documentation of the brutal rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, has been banned by the Indian government claiming the film is an international conspiracy to defame India and incites violence against women. The efforts to suppress the film are backfiring, creating what is being called an 'Arab spring for gender equality in India'.