Portside

Seven years ago local officials in Marin County, California organized to form a nonprofit electricity company with the noblest intentions. Buying and selling electricity allowed the group, Marin Clean Energy (MCE), to route around the local utility giant, Pacific Gas & Electric, which for years had resisted its customers’ pleas for cleaner, more reliable power, all the while “greenwashing” its image with marketing campaigns.

I wrote this paper originally in 1996—for a magazine called Sojourner: The Women’s Forum. As a clinic defender, I witnessed people yelling violently and acting aggressively towards women going into clinics in Boston and Brookline, Mass. to get abortions. I wanted people to know what it was like at the clinics on Saturday mornings. And I also wanted to honor the two women who were killed at a Massachusetts clinic in 1994 and others murdered over abortion rights.

The effects of the gas on the people of Bhopal have been nothing short of catastrophic. Birth defects continue to occur among families affected by the gas leak and contamination of water at a higher-than-average rate even now -- 30 years after the explosion at the Union Carbide plant.

The Voyage of the Sable Venus, the highly regarded debut poetry collection by Robin Coste Lewis, won the national book award this year for poetry. The title poem unites art history with the history of slavery and racism. Here, Dan Chiasson introduces this book, which has become a must-read across the literary spectrum.

Nothing suggests she was a danger to the community, so why was she kept in jail?

Five months after Sandra Bland was found hanging in a Texas jail cell, her family still searches for resolution. An intimate look at a life interrupted published in Chicago Magazine last week.

'In desperation and insanity, you call for a ban on all Muslims entering this country. I was raised to believe that we are all each other's brother and sister, regardless of race, creed or color. That means if you want to ban Muslims, you are first going to have to ban me. And everyone else.'

Times tells tales I; Times tells tales II; Cable coup in Philly; Work 2.0; Sports bubble

 While the government remains mum on the detentions, the police sweep seems an unusually harsh crackdown on community-based groups that have long struggled to balance mutual aid and advocacy without courting controversy. Working outside the international spotlight and concentrated in China’s gritty southern manufacturing belt, organizers toil thanklessly each day on behalf of local workers: filing complaints, winning back wages, fostering collective bargaining, ...

Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Russia, Iceland, Ireland and Equador.