Portside

Once the provenance of teens, counterculturalists or authors who were fans, comics are now entrenched in academic discourse in what the essayist calls, "the theorizing of a kind of artistic poetics." The book under review ably looks at nonfiction comics as apt reflections on modern social ills.

Our schools should teach dissent. Indeed, a flourishing democracy depends on an informed and active citizenry who will speak out when they find laws to be unjust.

Today, only a third of all prisons provide ways for incarcerated people to continue their educations beyond high school.

Congress created compassionate release as a way to free certain inmates, such as the terminally ill, when it becomes “inequitable” to keep them in prison any longer. Despite urging from lawmakers of both parties, officials deny or delay the vast majority of requests.

Let's put Black, women of color, Indigenous, anti-capitalist and queer-centered feminist politics at the heart of the overall struggle for justice in the coming year. What could that look like?

This review focuses on a riveting novel about an African American couple caught up in the criminal justice system.

How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.

Workers across many industries are increasingly banding together and standing up against management as part-time and contract work grows, automation amps up, and wages barely budge, labor observers say. Silicon Valley tech workers have started a coalition to unite.

Four Chicago-area students discuss why they are taking active roles in their schools' walkouts on March 14 to remember the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

“History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West.