Archive | Portside

Indian Election Update | Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj

June 7, 2019

Hasan takes a look at exactly how the Hindu nationalist BJP managed to pull off a lopsided win and what it says about Prime Minister Modi’s agenda for the largest democracy in the world

Ava DuVernay - Revisiting the Central Park Jogger Case With “When They See Us”

June 7, 2019

Ava DuVernay describes the process of humanizing the falsely accused boys in the Central Park Jogger case and coming to terms with her reputation in Hollywood

June 7, 2019

How the ‘Good Guy With a Gun’ Became a Deadly American Fantasy

Susanna Lee The Conversation

Reality check: Most gun enthusiasts don’t measure up to the fictional ideal of the steady, righteous and sure shot

June 7, 2019

Schrödinger's Cat Could Be Saved, Say Scientists

Nicola Davis The Guardian

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment exploring the fate of an animal placed in a box with poison and radioactive material. Until now, the cat seemed to exist in a zombie state in which it was neither alive nor dead -- until you looked in the box

June 7, 2019

Russia's Social Media Campaign Was Far Larger, and Vastly More Effective, Than Previously Reported

Mark Sumner Daily Kos

Twitter has released a dataset of 3,836 accounts that were used by Russian trolls in 2016—accounts that had put out nearly 10 million tweets and accumulated 6.4 million followers. That data informed Symantec’s new report.

June 7, 2019

Tariffs Are a Bad Response to an Imaginary Border Crisis

Mark Weisbrot The New Republic

The migrants that do arrive in the U.S. are fleeing situations exacerbated by decades of bad American foreign policy. Tariffs on Mexico would continue that pattern.

June 7, 2019

What We Did in the Resistance (Part 1)

Alison Luterman Rattle

California poet Alison Luterman moves the reader from the despair of the 2016 election to the longer passage “of empire and uprising,/ extinction and evolution….”

June 6, 2019

March Separately, Fight Together - Some Thoughts on the 2020 Election

Jack Kurzweil Portside

I am persuaded that the failure to defeat Trump in 2020 would open the door to a very different path for the United States – and for the world – that would subsequently be very difficult to reverse.

June 6, 2019

The New Trove of Secret Gerrymandering Files Will Be a Nightmare for the GOP

Mark Joseph Stern Slate

In a North Carolina lawsuit challenging the Republican gerrymandering of congressional district map, lawyers discovered links to the Trump Administration effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

June 6, 2019

Nurses Defend Union Contract - Response to May 26 Posting of Labor Notes Column

Anthony Ciampa, Jaiveer Grewal, Mary Ellen Warden, Wendy Braithwaite, Heather May Portside

Negotiating committees at each of the hospitals are nurses elected by nurses. They have the final say prior to ratification by the entire nurse membership. Approved by a 2/3 majority, the contract breaks new ground in establishing safe staffing.