Skip to main content

Stacey Abrams On Voting Rights, COVID-19, And Being Vice President

Melissa Harris-Perry Elle
Abrams's impulse to reach for the lessons of history while staying fixed on the necessity of service to the future suggests she may be the singularly remarkable leader America needs in this time of unprecedented economic and social change.

The Global Struggle to Control the Coronavirus

Amy Davidson Sorkin The New Yorker
Defeating COVID-19 has to be a joint project, as if the whole planet were racing to get to the moon together. Every nation can contribute, including those whose voices are less often heard. And no one can be left behind.

Odetta, the Shy Folk Singer Who Defied McCarthyism's Fear Tactics

Ian Zack Literary Hub
It wasn't only Odetta's selection of material that set her apart from many other white folk singers in the early 1950s. It was also her extraordinary interpretive ability. Among Her Fans Were Rosa Parks, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King.

Tidbits - Apr.23, 2020 - Reader Comments: Reopen or Re-Infect; Black Plague; Voting Imperiled - Today, Remembering the 60s; Coronavirus: The Crisis This Time; Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags; The Killing Floor at Smithfield; Killing the Post Office

Portside
Reader Comments: Reopen or Re-Infect; The Black Plague; Voting Imperiled - Today and Remembering the 60s; Coronavirus - The Crisis This Time; Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags - Really?; The Killing Floor at Smithfield; Killing the Post Office; more...

The Dilemmas of Lenin

Lindsey German Counterfire
A look back on the key revolutionary more frequently worshiped on the left than read, Ali's Lenin biography includes his last years' observation that "we knew nothing," insisting that the revolution had to be renewed lest it wither and die.

The Chapel Hill Murders: Why Muslim Lives Don’t Matter

Nadia El-Zein Tonova and Khaled A. Beydoun AlJazeera America
The aftermath of the murder of the three American students in Chapel Hill reconfirms the truth that Muslim lives matter only when they're villains not victims. But the responsibility extends beyond the media. Government-run programs targeting Muslims as "enemy combatants", "national security risks", and "unassimilable", affix the state seal of approval on the vilification of Muslim Americans, stirring Islamophobia and spurring violence.

Washington’s Prying Eyes and the Latin American Backlash

Kirsten Weld North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance practices sparked outrage around the world, but nowhere more than in Latin America. Now that the dust has settled, we should ask: Did the Latin American response to the NSA disclosures represent a historic break in hemispheric relations? Or was this just business as usual, another insult added to the ongoing injury of U.S. hegemony in the Americas?