Portside

A deep dive into a single issue: network neutrality and the current debate at the Federal Communications Commission around protecting the future of our open Internet.

These corporate tax scofflaws are so bad that even a top journalistic cheerleader for the corporate class can’t bring itself to defend them.

Net neutrality deadline; Big Data World; Donahue spills; Facebook messes with your mind; Changing narrative on Israel-Palestine

Listeners prefer and respond more favorably (or in technical terms, in a more “proceptive” fashion) to opposite-sex voices that contain these special subtle acoustics

The Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not all about resources. But in an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels are increasingly influencing the critical decisions that can inflame war.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett haven't found a way to hire school librarians.

The Zionist strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in it very few, if any, native Palestinians. And nowadays the vision is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.

Jazz is by nature a contradiction. No other music is so dependent upon individuality, but it hinges on an interplay with others in a giving, attentive way that emphasizes communication and communion. The single voice is key, but it takes on a rare power within the ensemble. Charlie Haden embodied that duality with a vital and beautiful grace.

The act of illegally crossing the border into the United States used to be treated as a civil offence resulting in deportation. But the decision of the federal government several years ago to treat illegal crossings as a criminal offence has led a mass incarceration of immigrants in segregated facilities.

Historians cannot understand the behavior of the American people past and present without paying serious attention to nationalism and religion--or, more precisely, religions, since religion is a weak category. The relationship between religions and foreign relations is more problematic. Thus my text for this sermon is an old American adage, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: For someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail.