Portside

Evolutionary theorists propose that female desire for domineering males helped create a patriarchal world

In the early years of the Cold War, the academic study of international relations was an ideological tool serving the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. But in the 1960s, a new generation of scholars began to challenge the reigning orthodoxy.

As African-American families leave Chicago, the percentage of poor black students in the suburbs has grown dramatically, straining already cash-strapped school districts.

To counter the FCC’s attack on net neutrality, we need to start treating the Internet like the public good it is.

Labor still has the power to throw sand in the gears of exploitation. The next step is for all these disparate troublemakers to start seeing their workplace struggles—from defending pensions to defending refugees—as part of the same bigger movement.

Why should we care about historical biopics such as HBO’s mini-series Gunpowder? Is it because it stars Kit Harington—the heartthrob Jon Snow of Game of Thrones fame? Is it because of its message of religious bigotry and violence?

The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, an umbrella entity representing 600,000 workers, has arguably reached a zenith of its influence under Durazo, its first woman leader. It helped land allies on the Los Angeles City Council and county Board of Supervisors and recently pushed through a minimum wage law requiring large Los Angeles hotels to pay workers at least $15.37 an hour, one of the nation's highest base wages.

The US Supreme Court decided that it's constitutional to exclude women from registering for the draft because they're banned from combat units. That ban ends in 2016.

Far from signaling the retreat of the state from investment in urban economies, this process has witnessed the shift of robust public spending on cities away from public goods like affordable housing and toward spaces and structures designed to provide the elite with new opportunities to consume conspicuously.

Why has the law been such a flop in a state that had so much to gain from it? When I traveled across Mississippi this summer, from Delta towns to the Tennessee border to the Piney Woods to the Gulf Coast, what I found was a series of cascading problems: bumbling errors and misinformation; ignorance and disorganization; a haunting racial divide; and, above all, the unyielding ideological imperative of conservative politics.