Portside

The Chicago Teachers Union is under attack by critics for traveling to Honduras and allegedly focusing on global issues rather than the academic issues facing their district.

And the saddest of all, nothing is learned. Cleveland; Camden, New Jersey; Youngstown, Ohio, where I was born—these are all similar catastrophes being unfolded in front of our eyes now and the same inadequate response of a system that can’t deal with this problem.

If unions are not speaking out against PRISM, it is because they have short memories.

It's more than a movie . . . it's a landmark.

Sigal, in a wonderfully idiosyncratic style, nimbly summarizes each of Hemingway’s novels and stories. While Sigal is busy cataloguing Hemingway’s body of work, he adroitly disposes of the persistent myth that this man was some sort of misogynistic, anti-feminist ogre. Read this account of Hemingway’s complex rendering of various female fiction characters. When you finish, you’re going to wonder how on earth Papa ever got that rap of being “anti-women.”

There’s a direct relationship among health, well-being and one’s place in the greater scheme. Based on studies by the British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, “the higher you are in the social hierarchy the better your health.”

In evolutionary theory, we have this thing we tend to look for, called parsimony. What fits the data best? Fertility into old age is part of our ancestral history if menopause is to eventually evolve, yes? Then probably our closest living relatives, like say chimpanzees, don’t have menopause, unless it independently evolved more than once of course. Right.

In this 50th anniversary year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, we must recommit to the “unfinished march.” This includes constant vigilance to sustain the march’s clear, but still vulnerable, victories. But just as important as sustaining the civil rights goals achieved, we must confront the goals still unmet.