Portside

With the feeling that there’s a “war on science” afoot, savvy scientists are thinking about how to defend their work.

On September 3, 1991, the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina burst into flames. Twenty-five people died, trapped behind the locked doors of the red-brick factory. Most of the victims were women; many were women of color, most were single moms. Another sixty people were injured, and the blast left more than fifty children orphaned. Local officials called the fire an accident, but the women and men who worked at Imperial had been made vulnerable by the factory’s owners as well as public policy.

Year end casualty count; Where the bodies are buried; Another press martyr; Wormy Apple; Bloodshot eye on sexism; NPR sausage recipe; Hazen out

For my part, I see value in putting Coates’s and West’s perspectives in dialogue. To be clear, I am not interested in repeating or endorsing West’s critique here, and Coates needs no one to defend him, certainly not me. I believe that the reconciliation of their respective insights might open new directions.

With so many good people feeling depressed, let’s point to the positive things that happened, even in this really, really bad year.

"As the winds of war are blowing in our world," Pope makes appeal for an end to conflicts that impact the world's children."

"RJ is a model not just for women of color, nor just for achieving reproductive freedom. RJ is a model for organizing for human equality and well-being," writes author Dorothy Roberts in her foreword to the new anthology.

Thousands of Arab Bedouins in Israel's Negev desert are denied power, water, sewage, and roads by the state. And their villages are under constant threat of demolition.

There are 23 million people around the world displaced from the only homes they've ever known.

As the US media obsesses about Russia’s involvement in the U.S. elections, it is ignoring nearly everything else about the Putin government’s role in the world. But recent warnings from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the Trump administration is dangerously escalating the North Korean crisis deserve serious attention.