Portside

The reality of life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe is not at all what was promised.

Chef Tom Colicchio is dropping the name of his newest Manhattan restaurant, Fowler & Wells, after learning that it has historically racist connotations. It was named for a publishing company and scientific institute that once operated in a building on the same site.The men who started the company were proponents of phrenology, a 19th-century practice used to justify slavery and beliefs in African-American inferiority.

The current conflict is one of the many unintended consequences of the continuing Cold War and the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula that has lasted to this day. In a military confrontation with the United States, North Korea faces a terrible choice between using its weapons first or losing them in a conventional war against a far superior power.

The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank is intensifying its crackdown on Palestinians exercising their rights to free speech. Meanwhile politicians and activists in France are calling on their government to act on behalf of a Palestinian-French human rights defender arrested by Israel.

David Simon has created a gritty, urban drama about the moment pornography became "street legal" in New York City, and the commodification of flesh became an industry.

DigBoston commits to expanding coverage of workers and unions

With Gill v. Whitford, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the most important case in decades dealing with how Americans are represented in Congress and state legislatures.

Yair Netanyahu, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, removed an anti-Semitic meme from his Facebook page on Sunday after an outcry from Israeli politicians and Jewish community leaders in the United States. The image, posted by Yair Netanyahu on Friday, appeared to be a local take on a classic anti-Semitic cartoon suggesting that Jews control the United States. It has appeared widely on extreme alt-right websites.

Norway's parliamentary elections on Monday, September 11, 2017 will point the way forward for the country's left.

Would something like us have appeared if that asteroid had missed?