Portside

Birthright bingo; Scifi civil war; Race shift?; AIPAC’s PR machine; Wallyball

Nothing can save the coal industry in the face of market forces -- especially the boom in natural gas extracted from shale deposits via fracking -- and the relentless advance of climate change. If Morrisey and his cohorts had West Virginia’s true interests at heart, they would be petitioning for federal funds to turn the state into an innovation center for clean energy -- the only sure path to economic growth in a climate-ravaged world.

For many of its ideologues, a slaveholding Confederacy was meant to be a bulwark against radical politics of all stripes.The development of Southern nationalism sprang in part from the desire to forestall the influence of radical ideas on American society. Conservative Southern writers developed a term for left-wing social theory — “red republicanism.”

Why are Chicago parents on a hunger strike to save a neighborhood school? Because after five years of fighting, they’ve run out of options...

Algae, quinoa and pulses are considered by some food technologists to be the best protein sources and strong alternatives to slow meat consumption, reduce food waste and help feed the world’s growing population.

Whether he wins or loses, Sanders is already helpfully tapping into rank-and-file discontent about who gets to decide what in our unions. While other big union endorsements of Clinton may soon be announced, the Labor Day buzz—at the grassroots, in early primary states—is largely about Bernie.

The tendency to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality has a long liberal lineage.

The Walking Dead spinoff Fear the Walking Dead is going to look at how different family units operate at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, and one of those families will feature a Salvadorian immigrant and his first-generation American daughter, examining the American dream in the Walking Dead world.

Sue Bradford Edwards, local Missouri journalist, and Dr. Duchess Harris, Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, new book, Black Lives Matter, is a comprehensive guidebook introducing without emotionally overwhelming 6-12th graders who are learning about the movement, and its inheritance, for the first time to antiblackness violence in U.S. law and society. Surprisingly, the text also resonates with lower-division university students.

This year, State Senator Holly Mitchell, (D-Los Angeles), introduced Senate Bill 23, a repeal of the Maximum Family Grant rule, on the grounds that it has only driven poor women deeper into poverty, and done nothing to reduce the birth rate of women on welfare. That assertion has been supported by several studies, including one from the University of California, Berkeley and another from Cornell University.