Portside

Labor unions are working to build tools at scale to support the spate of ballot initiatives voters will face next year.

Ironically, throwing more science at science denial ignores the social science research into denial. You can’t adequately address science denial without considering the root cause: the ideology driving the rejection. The way to inoculate people against anti-scientific myths is to explain the fallacy employed by the myth. Once people understand the techniques used to distort the science, they can reconcile the myth with the fact.

The UK poet Jane Spiro, a seasoned traveler and keen observer, reminds us that pleasure, wisdom and all good things depend on knowing "where to look."

Vera B. Williams the award-winning writer, illustrator, children's book author and social justice activist, died last Friday. Her best-known picture book, A Chair for My Mother, was named as a Caldecott Honor Book. Long active in antiwar, antinuclear and environmental causes, Ms. Williams was a past member of the executive committee of the War Resisters League.

The Middle-East map is being redrawn in Syria and Iraq by Moscow and Washington. The Obama Administration is co-leading with the Kremlin to help slice the Syria-Iraq area into five or more political states so as to deconflict this region and hopefully reduce the attractiveness of ISIL.

Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but the US needs its own version, not Denmark's. Socialism, on the other hand, historically has gone far beyond progressive welfare state measures by asserting that a democratic society can be achieved only if it includes democratic ownership of the economy. The steadily evolving localist forms of democratic ownership confront the traditional socialist questions and begin to answer them in novel ways.

With zero African-American managers and only one Latino manager, baseball needs an affirmative-action policy with actual teeth. And now we are all the way back to where we started. It's time for change: a change many thought had already been achieved. Rob Manfred: You're up.

Reader Comments: Sanders forces question - Are You a Capitalist; Media and Country Debate Socialism like no time in a hundred years; Clinton; GOP Crackup; Afghanistan; Puerto Rico; Palestine; Leonard Peltier; Readers Debate Tipping; Rosalyn Baxandall Announcements: Marxist classes and book talks in New York; Paul Robeson play in Peekskill; Palestine Solidarity and Paid Family Leave events in New York

Legendary rock star Patti Smith's look back expresses supremely well the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard from again, never perhaps even hear from the deepest part of oneself again. For a book that ends in success, it is acutely sensitive to that abyss of failure that haunts the attempt to become any kind of artist.

Dialogue is essential. It is the only way to put an end to situations of conflict. Otherwise there will be particular interests that will push conflict. There are governments, which claim that they want democracy but at the same time they encourage and assist terrorist bodies. To bring peace to the world is not an easy task because this depends on social justice.