Portside

California is facing the gravest threat to its natural beauty on record but many of us view the state’s expanded fire season as a cyclical anomaly – a belief sometimes spread by the mainstream media. To climate and environmental scientists, a new kind of fire and the expanded fire season are evidence that global warming is creating a new and vastly expanded fire danger to the West.

Equity, Growth and Community, a new book by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor

On Wednesday, the Chicago City Council voted on a resolution to reaffirm the City's "status as a sanctuary city, and its commitment to remain a place of sanctuary and refuge for refugees from all around the world."

Is contemporary altruism the new activism? Or is it what writer Teju Cole once called an iteration of a "White Savior Industrial Complex"? Ashley Karlin takes up these complicated questions in this review of Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, by scientist-turned-Buddhist philosopher Matthieu Ricard. The answers, she suggests, may have as much to do with questions of power as with the desire to do good.

The chaos in the Middle-east which has led to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing ISIL’s barbarous rule is the result of fifteen years of Western interventionism. How can France ever take a convincing stand against ISIL while claiming to be the main ally, and provider of fighter planes, to the Gulf monarchies. The real question, to which French diplomacy has so far given no convincing answer, is not how to win the war but how to put an end to it.

After Paris, macho language about “pitiless war” defines the contours of leadership. Little else is on offer. It is red meat to our emotions.

Thirteen women came forward to accuse former police officer Daniel Holtzclaw of misconduct. Why aren't more people outraged?

The movement for labor to endorse Bernie Sanders is part of an effort to bring political decision-making back to the rank-and-file.

Dozens of citizens were planning to protest the auction Tuesday morning in Salt Lake City. Instead, they will celebrate the Bureau’s decision to postpone the auction of 73,000 acres of publicly owned oil and gas in Utah — which harbor an estimated 1.6 – 6.6 million tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. The planned protest had been led by elders calling on the BLM to act to prevent catastrophic climate change and to ensure a livable future for generations to come.

This is the first part of a multi-part series in The Outlook. One morning as I scanned the news-horror in the Middle East, Russia and America facing off in the Ukraine, I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war). And then interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room-the writer Arundhati Roy.