Portside

“Non-competes (agreements) create a Balkanized labor force where you’re not a sandwich maker, but either a Jimmy John’s or Subway sandwich maker. Workers, in other words, are being forced to pledge fealty to companies that can still fire them at will. The payoff, of course, is that workers who, practically-speaking, can’t switch jobs are workers who can’t ask for raises.”

Thirty years since the Union Carbide gas leak tragedy, Bhopal is a city defined—and divided—by the disaster. Authorities labeled 36 wards gas-affected and 20 wards gas unaffected. Today, the contrasts between these areas are clear. The gas-affected areas are home to shanty towns where the deaths took place. They surround the now-dilapidated factory. It is in these towns that the legacy of the 30-year-old gas disaster lives on.

The US now is less equal and socially mobile than Europe. Many say education is key to addressing this growing inequality. But the American education system is an offshoot of an increasingly class-driven society, where Americans from different class backgrounds are living in what are effectively becoming different countries. And this inequality threatens to perpetuate itself "almost automatically."

With the acquittal of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on all charges of murder and corruption, the military-backed regime of former General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is sending a strong message that Egypt’s authoritarian rulers and their repressive institutions are not accountable for their actions. But, Mubarak’s actual conviction took place three years ago in Tahrir Square when millions of Egyptians condemned his repressive 30-year rule.

President Obama's new policing task force is a welcomed first step, but bolder change is needed to fix the broken relationship between law enforcement and communities of color. The Administration's current proposals are not enough to significantly transform policing nationally or ensure the country learns the right lessons from the tragedies in Ferguson and New York.

A new book explains why ‘Rahm Emanuel’ is a dirty word in many Chicago circles.

I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do . . . I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns.

The Government of Netanyahu continues to build in settlements and to make it harder to reach a peace agreement. Anyone who cares about Israel and the success of the current efforts to resume the negotiations for a two state solution must be very concerned about the ongoing construction in settlements.

Dmanisi provides the best window we have as to what normal variation looks like in the early Homo fossil record. Dated to between 1.81-1.76 million years, the site sits in the midst of some of the most important fossil sequences in the human fossil record (i.e. Koobi Fora and the Turkana Basin, Olduvai Gorge).

Play-with-music visits three generations of a family employed as porters and sets the action on June 22, 1937 a time of celebration and great hope for African-Americans. That night, Joe Louis beat James J. Braddock for the World Heavyweight Championship in Chicago. Later that year, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company, improving work place conditions and increasing wages for the porters.