Portside

Civilians need to understand-- the biggest problem with the destruction of tenure is not that a handful of teachers will lose their jobs, but that entire buildings full of teachers will lose the freedom to do their jobs well.

The worst states are all in the Old South.

The logarithm is 400 this year. Glen Van Brummelen, a fellow in the Dibner Library of History of Science and Technology, explains how logarithms came to be and why they're considered miraculous.

The Great Recession may be over, but every night people are sleeping on benches or in makeshift shelters. Here are a few of their stories.

Might Thuringia, the land of Weimar and Jena and long the home of Goethe and Schiller, become the very first Left-led state in all Germany? This is a possibility; five years ago the Social Democrats rejected just such a solution - but later came to regret it.

The well-publicized debate at the Creation Museum was not about two minds sparring.

In one of the worst coal ash spills in U.S. history, up to 27 million gallons of contaminated water and 82,000 tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolina’s Dan River after a pipe burst underneath a waste pond. Did state regulators intentionally block lawsuits against Duke Energy in order to shield the company where Republican Gov. Pat McCrory worked for 28 years?

The dark money strategies Noble helped pioneer at the Center are likely to play a substantial role in the upcoming midterms. Targeted blasts of spending by outside groups could have far more effect on this year’s smaller slate of congressional and local races than they had on 2012’s megabuck national and statewide contests, campaign finance experts said.

“Profiting from Probation: America’s ‘Offender-Funded’ Probation Industry,” describes how more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.

When the new farm bill is enacted, many of America’s hardest working families will experience cuts in services and have trouble putting food on their family’s table. But there will be major gains for an industry that most Americans might not expect: banking.