Portside

A review of two important new books that tell a different story about what teachers do, what parents want and what children need.

The Liberal Government in Quebec is attempting to pass a bill that would mandate a 50-50 split between municipalities and unionized workers on pension contributions and future deficits. Over 122,000 municipal workers and retirees would be affected. The bill would freeze the automatic indexing for current retiree pensions. Unions are fighting back.

The South, where 55 percent of America's black population lives, is increasingly looking like a different country. Fewer children can read; more adults have HIV; its residents suffer from the shortest life expectancies of any in the United States. Six of the eleven states that made up the former Confederacy are at the bottom. That deprivation tends to be concentrated in the parts of these states with disproportionately large African American populations.(long article)

Increasingly Jews in the United States, in Israel and around the world are finding their voice - speaking out and demonstrating against the siege of Gaza. Many Jews are also questioning what hard-line politics and policies have done to Israel - increasing racism, discrimination and inequality. Sally Gottesman wrote the following letter to her family and friends, after living in Israel the past seven months. She has been in Israel more than 50 times.

Everywhere you look there is destruction: mosques, factories, schools, hospitals, universities and thousands of houses, many shattered into piles of bricks, glass and metal. The death toll - more than 1,900 killed, including at least 450 children. But a longer-term trauma may be the large number of wounded - more than 9,800, mostly civilians, including at least 3,000 children.

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.