Portside

Vermont’s GOP governor could appoint a Republican to replace him and throw everything into disarray.

A new Urban Institute study measures the spatial mismatch between where job seekers live and employment opportunities.

When the county implemented a penny-per-ounce tax on both sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened drinks — purchases of the taxed beverages decreased by 21%, even after an adjustment for cross-border shopping.

Sen. Bernie Sanders supports registered nurses in North Carolina as they work to make the union at Mission Health-HCA with National Nurses United.

Queen Sono will gain attention for being Netflix’s first African original series. It deserves attention for breaking barriers in Netflix’s programming examining everything from Black female independence to the impact of white colonialism on Africa.

Trying to explain rising inequality without talking about unions is like explaining why the train is late – the tracks are worn, the weather is bad – without noting that one of its engines has been sabotaged.

RAD is a second cousin to everything from privatized highways to the Affordable Care Act, which keeps the public provision and modest expansion of health insurance mostly private. It could be more cost-effective to just appropriate more direct funds to the program and keep it in the public sector, but Congress is not about to do so.

American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income. Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children. Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points.

People had trouble trying to wrap their minds around how the Passenger Pigeon could disappear,. They came up with all kinds of theories to explain why it wasn’t human’s fault, like that the birds moved to South America and changed their appearance. There is a similar reaction now. There is a common human reaction that when confronted with an inconvenient truth to deny it, You can see it today with climate change.

Countries do need to be able to buy foreign products that they cannot acquire or produce domestically, and for that they need a form of currency or an international credit line that other nations will accept. But countries are increasingly breaking away from the oil- and weapons-backed US dollar as global reserve currency. To resolve the mutually-destructive currency wars will probably take a new Bretton Woods Accord.