Portside

Dr. Linda Murray, former chief medical officer for Cook County Department of Public Health, was a doctor serving public housing residents when one of the deadliest heat waves in U.S. history hit Chicago. 25 years later, she sees the same root causes.

A new D.C. lawsuit targets the world’s four largest oil companies (BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell) for misleading consumers about climate change.

COVID-19, and before Covid everything else, has raised a question that is now percolating, and even reverberating. And then came a white knee crushing a Black neck. A dream so long deferred suddenly exploded in city after city. What's next?

Margy Wilkinson participated in the Free Speech Movement, helped secure a contract for UC Berkeley classified workers, led KPFA and fought to preserve the character of South Berkeley.

Reader Comments: Today's Movement - Make It Last; American Fascism; Carl Reiner and Black Lives Matter; Confederate Monuments; Defund the Military; Police Violence; Slavery in Illinois; Laundry Workers & COVID; Student Voting; Concert for Cuba; more

I often used to look at the union work as something like walking a tightrope backwards while juggling without a net … The wire must be made of grassroots. The moment the union highwire artist feels those grassroots under foot, they know they are safe

We work together as a union to attack racism because racism hurts working people. It hurts our members who are targeted by it and it hurts our members who perpetuate it or ignore it.

"Mudbound" is about how things change—slowly, unevenly, painfully. It is also, as the title suggests, about how things don’t change, about the stubborn forces of custom, prejudice and power that lock people in place and impede social progress. Set mainly in the Mississippi Delta in the years just after World War II, when Jim Crow was still enshrined in law and practice, the film tests and complicates Faulkner’s much-quoted claim about the not-even-pastness of the past.

Leaders must also know when it’s time for a new person to take the helm. To keep new blood flowing through the labor movement, older leaders have to make room for their successors, RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, said. “You have to get out of the way. You can’t just talk about it,” she said. “If you’re a leader, a strong leader, you step down and open that up to someone you believe reflects where this union needs to be.”

Residents of Winlock, Washington can barely stream Spotify and Netflix. Changes to Obama’s net neutrality rules are going to make things even worse.