Portside

The permanence of racial injustice makes the struggle for the future necessary today, says James Forman Jr. Over the next few weeks, The Atlantic will be publishing a series of responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. This is the first in a series. Readers are invited to send their own responses to hello@theatlantic.com, to follow along on Twitter at #BTWAM, or to read other responses to the book from Atlantic readers and contributors.

The status of the controversial facility, along with its inhabitants, remains mired in delays, appeals and political dramas that make shutting the prison increasingly difficult to imagine.

In this look at three new and “valuable contributions to our cultural thinking and political thinking on today’s feminist movement,” Rinku Sen finds much to praise; however, she criticizes these authors because they “treat these two realms as largely disconnected from each other.” That’s too bad, Sen adds, because the movement is strongest “when cultural and political interventions reinforce each other.”

The University of California, New York State, and Washington, DC move to increase the minimum wage. This continues a trend that is taking place across the country.

Directed by the popular Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis and written by Arab-Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua, 'A Borrowed Idenity' chronicles a young Arab-Israeli man’s painful coming of age--detailing Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. At its best, 'A Borrowed Identity' concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.

Marlene Sanders; BBC in the Red; Avengers Assemble; Reddit Blues; Cybercrime Pays

The value for me personally was in what the protest exposed in Bernie Sanders, and by extension, myself. When asked directly about white supremacy and police violence against people of color, Sanders responded by talking about fixing the economic system and providing more jobs. But the BLM protestors chanted “Say her name!” in reference to Sandra Bland because Bland’s particularity demonstrates that increased economic opportunities alone will not solve the problem.

I respond that I am not here to broker a merger between the secular climate movement and the Vatican. However, if Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.

The goal of strengthening Social Security was only one of the prime liberal issues barely audible from the East Room stage at the July 13 conference. But there was an undercurrent of concern over the prominence of commercial interests on the day’s agenda. Liberal leaders on Social Security have expressed frustration at the president’s “neglect” of calls to increase benefits for the most vulnerable seniors, especially ethnic elders and women.

“A new stage will begin, long and complex, on the road toward normalization, which will require the will to find solutions to problems that have accumulated over more than five decades and hurt ties between our nations and peoples,” Castro said in remarks published on the state-run website Cubadebate. Cuba is trying to forge new ties with the United States “different from those of our entire common history,” Castro said.