Portside

Bernie Sanders, Daniel Ellsberg, former members of the NSA and more weigh in on whether Obama should grant clemency to the divisive whistleblower

Minimum wage referendums will be on the ballot in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington in November. Democrats hope this will energize voters to come to the polls.

This young Toronto-based poet won a place on the best-seller lists with her epigrammatic, haiku-like poetry that sometimes addresses emotionally difficult subjects. This is an unusual accomplishment for poetry in today's culture. Here is this remarkable writer's story.

The absurdity of privatizing prisons, institutions whose purpose is to rehabilitate, so that their economic motivations no longer match up with their social missions, has for years been at the forefront of conversations regarding criminal-justice reform.

Recent scholarship in the history of black women and the carceral state illustrates the extent to which systems of criminal justice and law enforcement have both historically failed to protect black female victims of domestic violence and criminalized black women who rise up in their own defense.

In the 15 years since the attacks, heightened surveillance and security have cracked down on Muslims and immigrants.

We need to understand and fight against oppression in whatever arenas it occurs. Organizing like that of Black Lives Matter or the Dreamers or against sexual assault on campus shows us that, important as they are, support for minimum wage and unions is not enough. It shows us as well that intersectionality is not just about privilege but about the fight against the institutions, the system of oppression.

If left-leaning publications value diversity, why don't they have any?

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

The mixed-income development was ostensibly designed to liberate the poor from the projects. Instead, it has created for the chosen among them a sort of well-outfitted prison.