Portside

Much commentary on the late Chuck Berry will focus on how his songs expressed fun and teenage angst. This is the right thing to do. Yet there’s more. For example, Berry’s obsession with the comparative qualities of fast cars — most brilliantly displayed in his song “Maybellene” — did not just reflect the rise of post-WW II consumerist culture....He preferred V-8 Fords over Cadillacs because he spent several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s helping make Ford cars.

After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. Bernie Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity. His emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders's run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.

`It's exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn't go over there, they couldn't eat in that place,' the American actor tells an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.

While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

What we need is a form of political leadership that frees democracy from liberalism through supporting citizens in asserting their popular sovereignty over the conditions of material daily life by getting organised as workers, as hospital users, as teachers, as students, as parents – and as citizens capable of mutual self-government.

Woody Guthrie reminds progressive citizens of a radical tradition upon which they might draw in the contemporary fight for social justice.

Derek Walcott, one of the finest poets of our times, died March 17 in St. Lucia, where he was born. He was 87 years old. His poetry helped illuminate the interconnections between the natural and the social worlds. Gabrielle Bellot, a staff writer for Literary Hub who grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica, offers this appreciation.

Gold's Gym's personal trainers set to become first U.S. fitness professionals to form a labor union.

Before taking office, Trump repeatedly criticized the cost of President Barack Obama’s travel, saying the fact that Obama’s trips were “costing taxpayers millions of dollars” was “unbelievable.” During the campaign, Trump pledged to save public money by working diligently in Washington and skipping out on expensive travel.