Portside

Unlike most guestworkers, many in North Carolina have a say in their working conditions and seniority rights because they belong to a union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee.

There seems to be a growing audience for poetry that speaks to the anxieties of our era. Traffic to the academy’s online poetry archive has surged in recent months. Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise,” has been viewed nearly 470,000 times since Nov. 8, compared to about 280,000 times in that period the previous year, while Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again,” has been viewed some 280,000 times, up from about 88,000 times.

The Bernie Sanders show, which is filmed in the Democratic party’s DC-based studio, is atypical in ways beyond just presentation. Sanders has decided to bypass traditional media and broadcast exclusively on Facebook. And it is attracting – to borrow a Sandersism – a huge audience.

By reorganizing Science for the People, we aim to revitalize its legacy of documenting the use and abuse of science and to organize scientists to contribute to human liberation and transformative social change. As a coalition of progressive and radical science workers and supporters, Science for the People finds the alternatives of “science for science’s sake” and “science for the progress of capitalism” equally unacceptable.

Early results place left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon third, behind Macron and Le Pen. But his campaign, under the banner of France Insoumise, has succeeded in shifting the debate in France’s presidential election to the Left, forcing discussion of democracy and redistribution into a terrain previously dominated by the Right. What does it mean for France’s left?

How institutions gift a veneer of respectability to white nationalists who promote racist pseudoscience.

Appalachia, the federally defined region that consists of 490 counties in 13 states, is one of the poorest regions in the U.S., beset with unemployment but more importantly, with desperately low income levels among those with jobs. In 2016, 63% of Appalachian voters supported Donald Trump. And his proposed budget would reward them by making them even poorer, while eliminating the agency that compiles the statistics on Appalachian poverty, income, and employment.

The political war being waged against the right to science is challenging scientific evidence as a basis for policy-making, government funding for research, and scientists’ ability to convey their work. The right to science influences everything from freeing wrongfully accused prisoners to crop rotation. But to successfully defend the right to science, the scientific and human rights communities must more effectively articulate its unique value to human advancement.