Portside

It turns out . . . the real threat to the Homeland did not come from fringe radicals in the Middle East. Americans are more likely to be struck by lighting or fall down in their bathtubs and fatally hit their heads than they are ever to be negatively affected by Middle Eastern terrorism. Where did the real threat come from? From toxic carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

Ultimately Pruitt, Trump and even Rush Limbaugh, who called Irma a "liberal hoax," are only a fraction of the problem. Krugman continues: "Almost every senior figure in the Trump administration dealing with the environment or energy is both an establishment Republican and a denier of climate change and of scientific evidence in general."

A new report lays out how effective the assault on organized labor has been. The decline of unions—which now represent just over one in ten US workers, down from one in five from 1983—has been less about their value for workers than the result of a concerted effort to destroy the labor movement.

The reality of life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe is not at all what was promised.

Chef Tom Colicchio is dropping the name of his newest Manhattan restaurant, Fowler & Wells, after learning that it has historically racist connotations. It was named for a publishing company and scientific institute that once operated in a building on the same site.The men who started the company were proponents of phrenology, a 19th-century practice used to justify slavery and beliefs in African-American inferiority.

The current conflict is one of the many unintended consequences of the continuing Cold War and the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula that has lasted to this day. In a military confrontation with the United States, North Korea faces a terrible choice between using its weapons first or losing them in a conventional war against a far superior power.

The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank is intensifying its crackdown on Palestinians exercising their rights to free speech. Meanwhile politicians and activists in France are calling on their government to act on behalf of a Palestinian-French human rights defender arrested by Israel.

David Simon has created a gritty, urban drama about the moment pornography became "street legal" in New York City, and the commodification of flesh became an industry.

DigBoston commits to expanding coverage of workers and unions

With Gill v. Whitford, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the most important case in decades dealing with how Americans are represented in Congress and state legislatures.