Portside

The German-language drama revolves around an East German soldier who is recruited in 1983 by the Stasi secret police to go undercover in the West German army. The series, the first entirely German-language drama to air in the U.S., has garnered “best-show-you’re-not-watching” attention from influential pop culture observers.

A National Labor Relations Board hearing officer has ruled that Teach for America teachers should be included in the union at a Detroit charter school chain.

The right-wing Illinois governor is slashing programs for the state and threatening bankruptcy for Chicago Public Schools instead of offering any revenue raising solutions.

How do we call people in even as we call them out?

How social media brought its own set of troubles to U2’s latest tour.

Secrecy, extraordinary levels of classification, lies, denial, and deception became the chief legacy of the initial impulse to censor radiation information from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?

While most of Latin America has been reducing poverty, Mexico is moving in the other direction: new official figures reflect an increase in the number of poor in the last two years. The negative impact of the 2014 fiscal austerity program, poorly-designed and mismanaged public policies, sluggish economic growth, and frozen family incomes are all factors underlying the rise in the number of people living in poverty in the region’s second-most populous country.

Increasingly technology companies are aggressively gathering information on their unsuspecting customers even when they are not using a company’s app or software. The ride-hailing company Uber, for example, has changed its privacy policy to track its users through a “unique identifier,” even after they have arrived at their Uber destination. Yet these same tech execs are taking byzantine steps to keep their personal information out of the public domain.

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan puts the responsibility on states to develop the strategies for reducing climate pollution. But states are already charged with monitoring and mitigating their air pollution, which hasn’t boded well for communities close to pollution-heavy facilities. And despite the plan’s emphasis on “community involvement and environmental justice,” the agency responsible for its implementation has a very poor environmental justice record.