Portside

The New York Times and NPR recently released their summer reading recommendations. Their lists might lead you to believe that only white authors are writing books worthy of summer reading. Here are two alternative lists from The Root and Book Riot.

This week, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus sent a letter to President Obama, with a copy to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking him to immediately commute the sentence of political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

The bail system affects the poor disproportionately, and the legal outcomes for those who await trial behind bars are much worse than the outcomes for those who don't. The work of Pretrial Services Agency shows that alternatives to bail exist.

Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."

Clouds of Sils Maria is a prolonged debate about the passage of time and the ceaseless rivalry of generations.

What neocons wrought; Henry K on trial; Kansas cuts kids; Oil rules OK; Classy Columbia chromedome: ALEC red-handed and red-faced

"Don't underestimate me," says the independent who has entered to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. "We're going to do better than people think. And I think we got a shot to win this thing."

Charismatic and tough as nails, the two ideologically opposite women are leading the showdown for the job of mayor of Madrid, in one of the most closely watched electoral battles to emerge from the political and social transformation gripping Spain.

'The murder of Freddie Gray was like a boomerang,' says West Baltimore resident Randolph Ford, 'flipping the status quo around to where the unity of the people and the fight for social justice has strengthened.' Ford is a leader in United Workers, a Baltimore-area worker center. Through the Fair Development Campaign, our group and others in the labor movement here are calling for a new kind of development.

Of course, you don’t have to be homeless to use a library, but that’s the point. You don’t have to be anyone in particular to go inside and stay as long as you want, sit in its armchairs, read the news, write your dissertation, charge your phone, use the bathroom, check your email, find the address of a hotel or homeless shelter. Of all the institutions we have, both public and private, the public library is the truest democratic space.