Portside

The sitcom aired a powerful episode centered entirely around a family discussion of race and the criminal-justice system—a too-rare event for network TV.

The man who wants to transform public education by bringing market discipline to schools has no problem gorging at the public trough to beef up his namesake museum.

The world is being split into two halves: the U.S. dollar orbit, and countries that the U.S. cannot control and whose officials are not on the U.S. payroll, so to speak.

The statistics about global inequality desperately need someone who can explain them in terms that can anger, mobilise and inspire people. If Corbyn can do this, it would mark an important shift in English politics.

While some communities are currently enjoying the fruits of the recovery, others have sunk further into poverty. According to the authors, this pattern of distress vs. prosperity not only “diverges between cities and states but even more starkly within cities at the neighborhood level." In the period of recovery following the Great Recession, the authors find, jobs in the median U.S. ZIP code grew at less than half the national rate.

An evolutionary burst 540 million years ago filled the seas with an astonishing diversity of animals. The trigger behind that revolution is finally coming into focus.

Each stage in Afghanistan’s tragic 40-year history of intervention-- the 1980s covert war, the 1990s civil war, and the U.S. occupation since 2001 --- helped transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state --where illicit drugs dominate the economy, fuel corruption and determine the fate of foreign interventions. Afghanistan can only progress when it is no longer a client narco-state with its rural areas dependent upon the opium crop.

The H-1B visa program is supposed to have safeguards against abuse, including rules designed to ensure that guest workers are not a significantly cheaper option for companies looking to save a buck. But Costa says 83 percent of the H-1B recipients are paid wages below the average for that occupation, because of flaws in the system.

There's a perverse form of American exceptionalism circulating around the Clinton camp: just because things work in other countries doesn't mean they can work here. As Hillary herself put it, "We are not Denmark. I love Denmark, but we are the United States of America." True enough, but that has no bearing on why single-payer couldn't work here. The only obstacles are political -- elites, which include Hillary and Starr, don't want it.