Portside

The Nation blog, The Curve - Where feminism and economics intersect - examined Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. If economic inequality continues to soar, as Piketty says it will, and inherited wealth plays a growing role in our economy, in what ways does that affect women specifically? And what weaknesses arise in Piketty's own analysis due to the absence of gender and race from his book? Where can we, as feminists, build on Piketty's analysis?

A union leader is being hailed as a possible mayor in Chicago while elsewhere mayors are pursuing policies Obama has been unable to enact on the national stage. Now Karen Lewis is seriously considering running against Rahm Emanuel in Chicago next year. She could win. A Chicago Sun Times poll last month gave Lewis a nine-point lead with 18% undecided.

Might Thuringia, the land of Weimar and Jena and long the home of Goethe and Schiller, become the very first Left-led state in all Germany? This is a possibility; five years ago the Social Democrats rejected just such a solution - but later came to regret it.

The Great Recession may be over, but every night people are sleeping on benches or in makeshift shelters. Here are a few of their stories.

The logarithm is 400 this year. Glen Van Brummelen, a fellow in the Dibner Library of History of Science and Technology, explains how logarithms came to be and why they're considered miraculous.

The worst states are all in the Old South.

Civilians need to understand-- the biggest problem with the destruction of tenure is not that a handful of teachers will lose their jobs, but that entire buildings full of teachers will lose the freedom to do their jobs well.

The deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and former president of the National Lawyers Guild calls for the criminal prosecution of U.S. and Israeli leaders for committing, aiding and abetting war crimes in the war against Gaza. She outlines the charges against the Israeli leaders for the commission of war crimes, "aided and abetted" by the U.S., which provided the "means for its commission" through its vast military aid.

In moves likened to the privatization of East Germany’s state-owned enterprises following unification, international finance has placed the privatization of Greece's public sector, one of the most developed in Europe, in the hands of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED). This "extra-legal organization" has close ties to the banks and no accountability for the impact of so-called austerity measures on Greece's increasingly impoverished population.

A new report by Standard & Poor's, one of the country's Big Three credit-rating agencies, points to increasing income inequality and the danger it poses to continued U.S. economic growth. In its report,. "How Increasing Income Inequality is Dampening U.S. Economic Growth, And Possible Ways to Change the Tide," S&P cites "all sorts of nasty" economic and political problems that flow from this growing inequality, but few solutions.