Portside

Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 disciplinary cases for “social networking”—almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

Ai-jen Poo's 'The Age of Dignity' bridges the gap between the concrete political and practical challenges of an aging population—and the harder moral questions of how we ought to treat our elders and how we imagine our own aging and death. The book is part testimony from caregivers and recipients; part manifesto, urging us to see the new demographic reality in a positive light; and, more cautiously, part exploration of how we might do better by our senior citizens.

At a time when police departments around the country are being criticized for a lack of a transparency, the arrival of Legal Aid’s "cop accountability" database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases.

Black history museums struggle to survive; The history of lynchings revealed and mapped; Blacks in the Holocaust; David Cole on Bryan Stevenson; Resurrecting Lucy Parsons

Karen Friedman, executive vice president and policy director at the nonprofit Pension Rights Center in Washington, is highly critical of the new law while acknowledging that pension reforms are needed. “We are not saying don’t fix multiemployer [plans],” Friedman said. But an act that allows plans to cut retiree pensions is “such a departure from current law,” she said. “It’s just such a buzz saw on retiree pensions.”

"Of all the people to hurt with sanctions, punishing students and undermining educational exchanges is a particularly damaging act," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council.

There are two compelling reasons for a challenge in the Democratic primaries: We need a big debate about the direction of the country, and a growing populist movement would benefit from a populist challenge to Hillary. In fact, there are deep divides between the party establishment and the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. All affirm, finally, that this economy works only for the few and not the many. But after that, the differences are immense.

[I wish those who complain about 'Muslim silence' would go see this film,] both because “Timbuktu” vividly depicts the courageous resistance of ordinary Muslims, especially Muslim women, to fundamentalist tyranny and because it makes the crucial but heretical point that Islamic militants are also human beings, and more likely to be driven by human motivations like greed or lust or power than by apocalyptic zealotry.

There is nothing new about Republican opposition to teachers unions, but in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that some Democrats have turned against them as well. In the following post we hear from a union leader, Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, about how he thinks teachers union must change to keep alive public education. This post first appeared in Rethinking Schools. Reprinted with permission of the author.

The bloody history of mine workers in West Virginia is truly as dark as any dungeon, but the recent indictment of a mine owner suggests that maybe the tide has turned.