Portside

A Review of Chocolate Cities: the Black Map of American Life by Marcus A. Hunter & Zandria F. Robinson, University of California Press. Chocolate Cities is an ode to agency. A work of truth-telling without polemics, this book almost literally breaks new ground, revising our most basic ideas of US geography while questioning the truth claims of social science itself.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

Brazil ignored inequality and injustice for decades, and failed to enforce proper gun controls, allowing a daunting situation to become truly terrifying. In the United States, inequality is skyrocketing. Economic inequality, coupled lax gun control laws, could prove to be a formula that makes the United States more closely resemble Brazil with every passing decade.

Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.

Dennis Magnasco said he’s a combat veteran, a gun owner and a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. And he’s ready for gun reform. “I recognize the power of firearms. I’ve seen what they can do,” Magnasco said. “And it makes me sick to know that we have high school kids seeing this in their schools.”

Why is Chavismo still so popular amid Venezuela's worst economic downturn in decades?

Donald Trump’s retrograde policies on immigration, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBT rights, and economic inequality have spawned an impressive and growing resistance. It remains to be seen whether his generous treatment of the Pentagon at the expense of basic human needs will spur a similar backlash.

Lead poison; The myth that murders; Black and white in the slave south; Graham, cracker of souls; BS manufacturers; On the new gun control movement

As Ava DuVernay prepares to release Disney’s eagerly anticipated A Wrinkle in Time adaptation, which has put her in the history books as the first woman of color to direct a film with a $100 million-plus budget, she cautions against thinking that Hollywood has finally solved its diversity problems.

In the tumultuous 1970s, women and people of color streamed into unions, strikes swept the country — and employers launched a fierce counter-attack.