Portside

At first, the biologist Richard Lenski thought his long-term experiment on evolution might last for 2,000 generations. Nearly three decades and over 65,000 generations later, he’s still amazed by evolution’s “awesome inventiveness.”

Fidel Castro's life, and the example of the Cuban Revolution, demonstrates the enduring relevance of state power. It is fundamentally irresponsible for anyone on the left to think one can avoid the question of power, and let someone else face its contradictions and deformations. Somebody will exercise it, for good or ill. Fidel Castro embraced this question, choosing to wield power in as many ways possible for what he deemed social goods, even on the global scale.

On the eve of the election, in a deeply red state, the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, took a small but significant step in furtherance of this goal by dedicating a memorial bench to a victim of police violence named Eugene Ellison.

The pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College derives from two main dynamics: it overweights the impact of mostly conservative voters in small population states and it negates entirely the mostly progressive votes of nearly half of African American voters, more than half of Native American voters and a major swath of Latino voters.

The department of the Army will not approve an easement that will allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe. The following statement was released by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II.

What had been cautiously optimistic when the episode had premiered just a few weeks before was now upsettingly fantastical. In the wake of Donald Trump’s win, a pro-immigration woman of color being elected president seemed less realistic than the alien trying to kill her.

From local to local, the labor movement needs to transform into an effective machine for fighting the Right.

In 2010, more than half of all the people with science and engineering related jobs were White men. But—enough wallowing in disheartening numbers and bigoted language. Plenty of people are moving the conversation forward: writing, speaking, and tweeting intelligently about the lack of diversity in science.

Disabled people tend to live in the poorest areas with much less access to jobs and good education. There are a lot of obstacles. It’s the kind of social issue that isn’t being addressed -- when we talk about poverty, we don’t talk about people with disabilities.

In Chicago, over a 5 year period from 2005-2009, there were: 851 blocks with over $1 million committed to prison sentences; 121 blocks with over $1 million committed to prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses. This is wasteful spending at its worst, especially given that research has shown that incarceration does not necessarily reduce crime in neighborhoods. The good news is that there are many innovative, common-sense, and creative alternative approaches.