Portside

One of the biggest climate stories of 2017, the disastrous wildfires that engulfed the West. Fires burned millions of acres in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Montana. Then the fires came first to Northern and then to Southern California.

For delegates in Bonn from Nov. 6-17, the goal was to define and firm up terms and goals of the Paris Agreement, drafted with much fanfare at COP21 in Paris in 2015.

Labor still has the power to throw sand in the gears of exploitation. The next step is for all these disparate troublemakers to start seeing their workplace struggles—from defending pensions to defending refugees—as part of the same bigger movement.

Katharine Graham was an inspirational publisher, and in retrospect, the epitome of white feminism.

The Australian poet Joyce Parkes brings us the word “swags,” meaning the bedding rolls used by homeless persons, asking why in a wealthy country so many remain homeless.

A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.

The selection of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) as the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee was the clearest sign yet of how seriously House Democrats consider the possibility of a full-blown constitutional showdown with Trump.

Younger people consistently see human rights—racial, immigrant, gender, LGBT—as important and uncontroversial.

Cathy Glasson is the farthest left candidate in recent memory to mount a serious campaign for Iowa governor. She is betting on a coalition of service workers, many of them immigrants and people of color; members of manufacturing unions, many of them white and some of whom supported Trump; and young members of DSA.