Portside

If members run the local... what exactly is the union rep's job? We asked four experienced staffers how they approach their day-to-day tasks while keeping the rank and file in the driver’s seat.

Not only do patents push higher prices onto consumers, they burden the research world with the increased costs of paying for the intellectual property needed to do further research . . . If anything, the neoliberal approach to academic research is a return to the privately funded, pre-tenure origins of the university system when numerous schools were simply research labs and promotional arms for private industry

The vision of the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, of “pre-crime” squads identifying people likely to commit crimes is getting less fantastic all the time.

In a remarkable job of reporting, Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post describes the creation of the Common Core standards. Two men–Gene Wilhoit and David Coleman–went to see Bill Gates in 2008 to ask him to underwrite national standards. He agreed, and within two years, the standards were written and adopted by almost every state in the nation. -- Diane Ravitch

When teachers at the Perelman Jewish Day School in Montgomery County were told in March that the private religious academy would no longer recognize their 60-member union, they filed a federal labor complaint - and then they went to a higher authority.

Spying on Ban Ki-moon, New York election, seniors, Detroit, and food stamps

Although Twitter’s founders, investors and employees deserve to be rewarded for their ingenuity and hard work, the company’s public offering provides an opportunity to take stock of the growing disparities and misplaced priorities in the home of the nation’s celebrated technology industry.

"...to stand the test of time and to keep enchanting the world."

Tragically it is not the kind of character valued in the NFL, and that’s the heart of the damn problem.

Many of us here in the U.S. had entertained the notion that whatever disappointments await us after the election of the U.S. President Barak Obama, at least the reactionary U.S. policy toward Cuba might change