Portside

This novel by Paul Beatty won England's Man Booker Prize last month. He is the first American writer to ever win the award. Here is a review of the book.

Four years ago, when Obama won re-election, he carried this town by a 67-26 percent margin. This year, Trump won 50-42 percent over Hillary Clinton. They didn’t care about Clinton’s emails or where Trump likes to grab women. They cared about their jobs. They know Trump alone can’t save the mill from closure, but they felt they knew what they’d be getting with Clinton: Four, or even eight, more years of the same.

Ever since his workshop days in Japan, gunpowder artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, has been obsessed with creating a Ladder In The Sky, exploring ways to create a structure that could hang in the air and support a series of fuses. Each time he found a sponsor to underwrite the Ladder something fell through, Finally, as shown in the film, he decided to pay for the experiment himself, to create it in the fishing village on Huiyu Island, Gwanhzhu, where his grandmother was born.

Victors’ spoils; Broken hearts, sticky notes; The peculiar Electoral College; Misogyny and militancy; Winning

In September 2002, Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League, offered a warning I’ve never forgotten. The Bush administration’s intention to invade Iraq and topple its ruler, Saddam Hussein, was already obvious. Were they to take such a step, Moussa insisted, it would “open the gates of hell.” His prediction turned out to be anything but hyperbole -- and those gates have never again closed.

 Ross made his money collecting “distressed assets”—failing steel and textile mills in the midwest and south, and coal mines in Appalachia. Dubbed the “The King of Bankruptcy,” Ross cut jobs, wages, pensions, and health benefits at the companies he acquired, and reaped the profits.   So much for Trump’s supposed commitment to coalfield workers.

The selection of Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of the far-right website Breitbart News and the CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign, deepened the fears of liberal activists that the Trump administration would embolden and enable antisemites, racists and misogynists.

One day after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers again delayed construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—and one week after the election of Donald Trump all but ensured the project's eventual completion—actions are taking place in hundreds of cities across the United States and around the world on Tuesday calling for the crude oil pipeline to be rejected.

Unions were finally on an upswing. Now, they’re staring down the barrel of the GOP’s gun.

Janice Fine contributes to a forum on "After Trump." She argues that many people care about inequality, but not all like unions. Some think unions are too conflictual, but Fine argues this is necessary to win the kinds of demands we need to win.