Portside

Martín Espada gives an eloquent elegy to Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, a Puerto Rican abolitionist and revolutionary who addressed issues of pandemic and racial oppression.

The Republican deal with the devil to tolerate Trumpian corruption in exchange for a supermajority deserves both scorn and redress.

Biden is not going to quadruple anybody’s taxes, but he will increase the tax burden on the very rich. The richest 5 percent of taxpayers would bear almost the entire burden of Biden’s plan, which would raise $2.8 trillion over the next decade...

The months ahead will be difficult. But the medical cavalry is coming, and the rest of us know what we need to do. The final death toll from Covid-19 will depend both on how we behave going forward and how quickly innovations arrive.

In the stiflingly reactionary cultural atmosphere of postwar America, most filmmakers didn’t talk much about class. But there was one significant exception: film noir was the most class-conscious genre of motion picture America has ever produced.

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Stranded seafarers and port workers are facing physical and mental exhaustion, trapped on shipboard since the pandemic began. They do not have access to shore leave; some have been denied emergency medical treatment.

Almost singular these days, the Times media critic does a salient institutional self-criticism of a wayward reporter and the indulgence of top management in fostering a string of poorly sourced when not fabricated international news stories.

The ultimate goal of many liberal movements is equity, which does not seem too much of a priority for Barrett.

Most Democrats, now looking forward to a Biden presidency and a narrow majority in the next Senate, realize that Republicans can block virtually all Democratic legislation by using the filibuster, and they therefore favor its abolition.