Portside

Monday night, Hillary Clinton butchered Reconstruction's history. It's a good opportunity to correct the record, and glean why Lincoln really was America's greatest president. Reconstruction in reality was a briefly successful attempt to build a true democracy in the South. Clinton implies that it was Southern anger at unjust Reconstruction policy that led them to institute Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was the goal from the very end of the war.

Can the movement rebuild itself below the Mason-Dixon line, and change Southern politics in the process?

January 25, 2016 We must reclaim King’s nightmare—and place it forever more beside the dream along the banner of King’s memory. We must reclaim the nightmare as a symbol of the progression of racism—a progression that liberals tend to downplay and conservatives tend to dismiss outright.

French taxi drivers blocked key roads and hundreds of flights were cancelled as air traffic controllers joined civil servants, hospital staff and teachers for a "Black Tuesday" of strikes.

The Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign shares a special message from Marissa herself one year after she was released from prison.

There’s no question that the United States is long overdue to elect a woman head of state. But electing Hillary Clinton — or anyone else who supported the invasion of Iraq — would be sending a dangerous message that reckless global militarism needn’t prevent someone from becoming president, even as the nominee of the more liberal of the two major parties.

Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head.

Woody vs Trump; Le Guin vs Bundy; For sale: The New Republic; Neolib noblesse oblige; Bechdel test; When Donald met Sarah

There are thousands of Mexican workers in Los Angeles. Their home country is two-and-a-half hours down the I-5 South of San Diego to Tijuana, Baja California and deep into Cartelia. But as far as most of my mainstream news outlets are concerned Mexico might be located in Tibet or at the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. I know more about Mosul in Iraq or Kiev in the Ukraine than I do about anything south of my border. I do know that Mexico is North America's ISIS...

It's like living in "some sort of a dystopian novel," Sean Crawford writes, to find National Guard troops going door to door delivering drinking water on his street. To skimp on water costs, the governor and dictatorial emergency manager exposed the whole city to lead poisoning.