Portside

Henry Segerman and Saul Schleimer paint beautiful shadows based on the maths of stereographic projection, a method originally used by cartographers to map the Earth

UC Santa Cruz Review writer Dan White had separate in-depth conversations this summer with Toni Morrison and Angela Davis about their past collaboration, their longstanding friendship, and their bedrock belief in the power of literature. Davis introduced Morrison while she was in Santa Cruz to deliver the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture at the Rio Theater on October 25. The subject: “Literature and the Silence of Goodness.”

Of the Southern states that have reported early voting counts, percent of registered voters who have voted early: 12.7

Former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein on how to raise the quality and performance of teachers.

Twelve Nobel Peace Laureates have called upon President Obama, who received the award in 2009, to ensure full disclosure of the torture practices of the CIA and other U.S. agencies conducted in the name of "fighting terrorism." The Nobel Laureates' letter urged President Obama to take four specific steps to reject the “flagrant use of torture and other violations of international law” and close one of the “dark chapters” of U.S. history.

Saudi Arabia, a chief U.S. ally in the “War on ISIS,” conducted 61 beheadings in 2014. Rape, murder, armed robbery, drug trafficking, and apostasy are all punishable by death under Saudi Arabia's strict version of Islamic Sharia Law. Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on executions has called for a moratorium on the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, charging the trials are "grossly unfair," often relying on confessions obtained through torture.

In response to a lawsuit filed by one of its female former employees, UPS announced it had "voluntarily decided" to provide light duty work as an accommodation to its pregnant employees, much as it does for workers with on-the-job injuries, disabilities, and other work restrictions. The announced change in policy was submitted in a brief filed in a Supreme Court case brought by a pregnant UPS employee who was denied light duty and placed on unpaid leave.

Can privately invested pension funds be disconnected from destructive financial patterns and deployed in socially positive ways? Can neoliberal capitalism be forced to provide decent pensions to all workers? Can a predatory private financial system be reformed?

More than 3,000 migrants have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year, more than any previous year. The European Union (EU) is ignoring the tragedy unfolding on its southern maritime borders and its impact on the so-called border countries of Greece, Spain, Italy, and Malta. The EU's "woeful response" has transformed the Mediterranean into a “survival test for refugees and migrants," and thousands are paying with their lives.

The liberation of Afghanistan women was one of the Bush Administration's prime selling points for the U.S. invasion in 2001. But for more than a decade the U.S. has repeatedly sided with the most ultraconservative undemocratic forces in Afghanistan to the detriment of the rights of Afghan women. Today, after 13 years of war, and 13 years of U.S. promises, the women of Afghanistan "have been shut out, shut down, and silenced by fear."