Portside

A no-fly zone in Syria isn't a humanitarian response -- it's a call to war.

Union members told In These Times that the accepted contract proposal includes a temporary worker cap and a company commitment to hire full-time workers. They are expected to return to their jobs Monday.

When the Nobel Foundation awarded him the prize for literature in 1997 they said he “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. When he received the prize he said the award was also for “the people in countries like Turkey, Afghanistan and Argentina who had been jailed for performing my plays.

The convention's keynote address was delivered by noted sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and author W.E.B. Du Bois. Titled "Behold the Land," the speech was one of the last major orations by Du Bois, who was 78 at the time. It remains timely today with its calls to unite blacks and working-class whites.

Then came the bitterest drop of reality: Hillary Clinton was the nominee. That meant her election was all that stood against Donald Trump. And THAT meant we would be forced to choose someone we didn’t want, even hated, to head off a result that would open the floodgates of a fascist insurgency.

A few decades from now, when the realities of climate change have hushed even the loudest, densest deniers, we may look back on October 2016 as the month political journalism died. Amid the relentlessly tawdry campaign news, there has been a near total absence of any discussion of substantive issues, including global warming and the environment. TV news celebrities, and horse-race coverage, driven by Twitter, bluster and clickbait, have left them all in the lurch.

John Oliver | Third Parties. Leonard Cohen | You Want It Darker. Where Does Complexity Come From? The Park of Friendship in Tijuana. Monkeys Can Make Stone Tools Too.