Portside

The left’s big net neutrality win; NN’s mobile revolution; Your snitching gadgets; Community broadband giveth; PBS taketh away

In the November, 2014, special issue of Socialism and Democracy, "The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor," provides a penetrating analysis of a range of the issues involved and points toward the steps that are needed to turn around these horrors. This publication couldn't be more timely and relevant, as the mighty river of the Black Lives Matter movement flows across and brings new life into the country.

What value would be added by viewing the war from outside the nation? How does it change our understanding of the war to situate it within a larger international context? One simple answer is that the war mattered greatly to the world. In newspapers and magazines, in meeting halls, churches, taverns, lecture halls, workers unions, and at posh dinner parties, foreigners followed the war with great interest and they debated what it meant for their future.

US President Obama supports Chancellor Merkel's efforts at finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis. But hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin's approach. And NATO's top commander in Europe hasn't been helping either.

In an executive order issued by Barack Obama, the White House said the situation in Venezuela posed an “extraordinary threat” to US national security. Maduro, the Venezuelan president, reacted with anger in a televised address on Tuesday night, calling on his country’s Congress to grant him additional decree powers to “fight imperialism”.

Stanford linguistics professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky links the origins and evolution of foods to history, culture, tradition and trends. Wide-ranging topics include sexual metaphors in restaurant reviews, relationship of price to the number of syllables in menu descriptions, and the language on potato chip bags...among other things.

Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America's workers' comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found. The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty. Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and

PM Narendra Modi wants to boost manufacturing in his country, but it's cheaper and easier to import than make in India.

PM Narendra Modi wants to boost manufacturing in his country, but it's cheaper and easier to import than make in India.

Stanford linguistics professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky links the origins and evolution of foods to history, culture, tradition and trends. Wide-ranging topics include sexual metaphors in restaurant reviews, relationship of price to the number of syllables in menu descriptions, and the language on potato chip bags...among other things.