Portside

This past year in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish, a small group of residents began organizing their community to compel the state to protect them against an invisible menace: the air they breathe. Their parish, the Louisiana equivalent of a county, is situated in what’s known as Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that hosts more than 100 petrochemical factories.

As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But last year’s bonanza is likely to be no more than a down payment on even better days to come for the military-industrial complex.

Although he has not yet imposed any explicit cuts, on January 11, the Trump administration took another step toward undercutting these essential social programs: It issued guidance allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. This staggering and unprecedented change in health-care policy is expected to adversely affect millions of people in the United States, particularly those with disabilities.

Jonathan Kauffman's new book, Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, follows the people and places throughout the country that brought organic vegetables and whole wheat bread into the counterculture, and then, eventually, mainstream supermarkets.

The Passaic Textile Strike is notable for the use of force against the demonstrators, the debates over free speech, the role of intellectuals and intellectualism, and for being the Communist Party’s first attempt to organize a large-scale demonstration encompassing the region’s textile industry.

Is network TV ready for a Black Lesbian superhero?

Despite the time elapsed, almost three-quarters of a century ago, a similar text, with the same title, could be written today: “Adrift by the seas of history, without direction, without destination, goes Puerto Rico: for four and a half centuries “ Now it should be added that the situation is worse and the island, hit by fierce hurricanes, especially the most recent and brutal named Donald Trump, faces a decisive moment in its history.

In 50 years, only one officer has been fired for abuse involving racial or ethnically biased language.

An agricultural economist writes that treating Twinkies and carrots as the beginning and end of the farm subsidies discussion distracts from useful public discourse.

Dutch spies hacked the Russian hackers, even capturing them on film, the new report says.