Portside

American history is littered with examples of pointless wars fought for bad reasons, and with people who risked their careers and their freedom to oppose them. some wars aren't worth fighting. Some causes aren't worth sacrificing American lives for. Those who've fought to remind the government of those basic facts deserve our respect and our thanks.

Although Puerto Ricans were granted US citizenship in 1917, the United States continued to exploit, oppress and eventually launch a "war" on the people of Puerto Rico to gain land and resources. The book, War Against All Puerto Ricans, is a vivid, detailed account of the brutal treatment of a people "liberated" from Spain only to be subjugated by the US.

Demonstrators protest Mayor Libby Schaaf's new policy banning nighttime street protests.

A new report “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women” by the African American Policy Forum (co-authored by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie) offers the stories of girls and women—both cis- and transgender—whose names are not as well known in the mainstream and argues that fewer numbers is no excuse for erasure.

The New York Times and NPR recently released their summer reading recommendations. Their lists might lead you to believe that only white authors are writing books worthy of summer reading. Here are two alternative lists from The Root and Book Riot.

This week, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus sent a letter to President Obama, with a copy to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking him to immediately commute the sentence of political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

The bail system affects the poor disproportionately, and the legal outcomes for those who await trial behind bars are much worse than the outcomes for those who don't. The work of Pretrial Services Agency shows that alternatives to bail exist.

Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."

Clouds of Sils Maria is a prolonged debate about the passage of time and the ceaseless rivalry of generations.

What neocons wrought; Henry K on trial; Kansas cuts kids; Oil rules OK; Classy Columbia chromedome: ALEC red-handed and red-faced