Portside

There have been just a few more digits added to pi since Archimedes got to 3.141.

Forget Monopoly. There are new games that challenge us to turn our competitive drive toward solving social problems.

Under Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios, assessment system shaved $1 billion from Chicago’s most expensive homes, while owners of lower-valued homes picked up the tab.

Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters. How Cambridge Analytica’s algorithms turned ‘likes’ into a political tool

Within the last 10 days, 30,000 Arizona teachers have flooded into their own Facebook group, Arizona Educators United, and begun a series of highly visible actions, sporting their “Red for Ed” T-shirts wherever they go.

The British miniseries Collateral, which premiered on Netflix last Friday after an initial run on BBC Two last month, is to a post-Brexit United Kingdom what recent seasons of American Horror Story: Cult, American Crime, and even Broad City are to a post-Trump United States.

Turkey’s major trade unions called for a one-day strike on 29 December to protest the government-led military operations against the Kurds. Union representatives declared that they would persist in struggle against those who are trying to destroy the hope of both peoples [Turks and Kurds] to live together and build a common future.

A recently released secret U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) file can be justifiably termed “Stranger than Strangelove”, the 1964 film that satirically captured the madness of the Cold War. It reveals for the first time the scale of the holocaust that would have been unleashed in a nuclear war. The U.S. planned to attack more than 1,200 “Soviet bloc” cities, killing an estimated 520 million people. Even “friendly forces and people” would be radiated.

In one of the largest U.S. natural gas leaks ever recorded, Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon plant outside of Los Angeles is leaking harmful methane gas at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour, and according to the company, it may take more than three months to plug it. The single leak, which has been called the worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill in 2010, accounts for a quarter of the California's entire methane emissions.

Although there were many horrible developments in 2015, there were some goods ones too -- and let these encourage us to bring in the new year truly striking back at the injustices of the empire.