Portside

In 1970, the United States Post Office Department issued a 6 cent stamp to commemorate the Stone Mountain Memorial. Ken Lawrence summarizes the historical and political background of the memorial and suggests that the stamp was veiled gift to Southern advocates of white supremacy.

Events in Germany are truly alarming - with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) moving up into third place and both the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) slipping. This is connected with the immigrant wave but laden with too many nasty memories - and there is rightward shifts in France, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark and Sweden.

Reader Comments: Celebrating International Women's Day (Bev Grant in song); Democracy Spring - call for national civil disobedience actions in Washington, DC in April; Trumpism - What it Means; Race and Representation; Stephen Hawking and Robots; In Memory of Dr. Quentin Young; Tech Workers and Unions; Report from Palestine; Leonard Peltier Film Series starts in New York.

Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.