Portside

A bill being introduced in the City Council Monday would require all employers to put contracts in writing, impose civil and criminal penalties for taking longer than 30 days to deliver payments, and award double damages plus attorneys fees to contractors who’ve been stiffed — similar to the protections now enjoyed by regular employees.

That’s what’s provocative to me—that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do. And it’s not the first time we’ve done it. The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.

He first became a target of government snoops merely because he was upset about a racist and unconstitutional idea and, as a private citizen, wrote a letter about it.

My grandparents were just people who were hated because of their religion and the assumption that, because they were Jewish, they were probably communists, or at least socialist sympathizers.

Despite the political pressure to prosecute cops in cases like Tamir Rice’s, the current system grants enormous leeway to officers who employ lethal force.

That palpable feeling of separation helped inspire his latest work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, “Untitled America: First Movement.” The piece is the first of a three-part modern dance series that will explore the impact of prison on families.

It may be something of a stretch to claim, as Malcolm Harris does, that "anarchists get the artists and tacticians, Marxists get the theorists and politicians." Yet this remains an insightful review. It surveys the history of anarchism and its relationship to Marxism as it considers how adherents of these historic modes of thought might find themselves acting in this political year.

The millions of service members who live on military bases around the world experience a kind of economic and social security that is foreign to most of America’s middle class. In the military, clothing, food, shelter, and medical care are guaranteed. And although it offers less choice about what to wear or where to live than the private sector, there’s a baseline of care for service members that doesn’t exist in the civilian world.

We deserve to know, and we are obligated to know, the cost of America’s love for football.

Unhappy end; Lesson from Ukraine; Brass fears Trump; Mansplaining Lolita; I$I$; BSUs cut off private prisons; Suing the school system for science; NOLA dethrones the Confederacy; Yannis Behrakis