Portside

What is the true economic narrative about the 1990s? Was it a time of shared American prosperity brought on by smart policy? Or was it a time when the style of laissez-faire attitudes forged in the 1980s was co-opted by Democrats and began to create the growing inequality and periodic crises we’ve since become used to?

Neanderthals and Denisovans may have supplied modern humans with genetic variants that let them thrive in new environments.

The exiled Persian poet Majid Naficy draws on Christian parable (the Book of Matthew), suggesting that some of the irate voices on our streets are not enemies but prophets.

Romero Jucá, recently appointed planning minister, was recorded saying: `We have to stop this shit. We have to change the government to be able to stop this bleeding - the corruption investigation. The motives and nature of the plot to remove Rousseff are apparent in the transcript of the phone conversation between Jucá - a ally of new president Michel Temer - and Sérgio Machado, former senator who until recently was president of the state oil company, Transpetro.

Can the EU still unite a continent shattered by world wars, or is it little more than a vehicle for austerity capitalism? Soon British voters will vote on Brexit - leaving the EU. Given the absence of a strong, continent-wide left, however, reversing the current economic rules of the EU may be a country-by-country battle. It's already underway - and for all of the economic power of the EU, the organization is vulnerable to charges that Brussels has sidelined democracy.

Despite North Dakota's collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. Farmers were losing their farms to Wall Street bankers. They organized, won an election and passed legislation to create a public bank. The Nonpartisan League's rise to power was fast and had a lasting impact on North Dakota. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota's population, could do following that state's lead.

Across Europe, voters are turning to far-right parties, won over by nationalism, anti-immigrant hysteria and failed economic policies of austerity. In Germany, France, Poland, Hungary and Sweden, far right parties have made gains. Left political parties in these countries have not been as successful as those in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

In David Looseley's take on the iconic French chanteuse Edith Piaf, her notoriously elusive life story is rendered as cultural history, drawing out what Piaf meant - and still means - to France and to her wider audience. Looseley notes that her musical persona was highly and brilliantly constructed. She projected a stage mask of suffering that was all the more affecting because the audience saw there was deprivation behind it. With Piaf, you underwent her.

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France's new labor law allows a race to the bottom as employers take advantage of a fragmented workforce whose ability to call on the solidarity of workers elsewhere will be strictly controlled.