Portside

Kafka's life was itself Kafkaesque, and if you want to know its span and its ending better- the book's author contends and the reviewer agrees - readers need to start at the beginning. The book under review is the third of a three-volume biography that critics widely call definitive.

“If the president pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.”

A new video from Equal Justice Initiative argues we need more memorials devoted to remembering racial violence.

Recent lawsuits claim the agency is targeting people for deportation based on spurious allegations of gang connections.

We do not know when or if the DACA program will be terminated. Here's what you need to know if it does.

This new book reminds us of the scope and power of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, beginning a century ago. As reviewer Scott McLemee points out, however, to only point out the Klan's racist heritage can be deceptively simplistic. McLemee reminds us that what made the Klan a mass force in the 1920s was that the movement's reactionary politics and racist passions "were widespread enough to count as mainstream.'

Successful social movements rarely travel along a linear route toward victory, or a fast one. Even with new digital media, organizing for change requires all the old virtues.

“Millennials view unions favorably and are worried about their economic security and are appalled by the monstrous economic inequality that threatens to reduce the future of the American dream to rubble." said Henry Garrido, executive director of District Council 37, which represents roughly a third of New York City’s municipal workforce If we don’t focus on engaging the next generation of American workers, then ours may be the last generation of unionized workers.”

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

To pardon a public official who refuses to obey the law (especially a direct court order) is to give the finger to the judiciary, and thus our constitutional order. It encourages further lawlessness. It unleashes bias, hate, vigilantism, mob rule. And it hits where the rubber meets the street.