Portside

One book that's making it onto lots of people's best-of-the-year lists is Counternarratives, a collection of stories and novellas by John Keene. It's an extraordinary collection that uses historical fiction to make visible the human beings that racism and imperialism have pretended were not there. Not only that, but, as McDowell shows us in his review, this is a set of awfully good stories, too.

UNITE HERE's Culinary Union Calls for Immediate Contract Negotiations. We voted yes to make our jobs good jobs with fair wages and job security, said Celia Vargas, a housekeeper at the property. We won that vote, so our voices and votes should be respected.

The pair talked pot, poverty, guns, social justice, universal healthcare and more in a wide-ranging conversation at Killer Mike's Atlanta barber shop.

In a united voice, Puerto Rican society has called on President Obama to release López Rivera. Members of the Puerto Rican diaspora and others in the US have also joined this campaign. As part of this growing support, New York attorneys Juan Cartagena and Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan accompanied attorney and activist Jan Susler, who represents López Rivera, on a legal visit in November. The attorneys' last image of the political prisoner made a deep impression.

Republicans, voters and yes, Democrats are to blame for making Muslims feel like second-class citizens

At the launch of the Stuart Hall Foundation in London, journalist Gary Younge spoke of our present, stating, "If politics is the art of the possible then radical politics, the kind of politics that Stuart espoused, must at very least engage with, showcase and promote new possibilities. And right now we are in need of imagining and articulating new possibilities."

The Seattle City Council voted 8-0 Monday afternoon to enact an ordinance giving taxi, for-hire and Uber drivers the ability to unionize. The backdrop for the council’s vote is a nationwide conversation about what role governments should play in the country’s growing app-powered gig economy.

More than 2,000 workers remain on strike in Kohler, Wisconsin, a site of historic struggles for labor rights.

Between 13-15 December, the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, Mada al Carmel, the Birzeit University Institute of Law, the Stop the Wall Campaign, the Trans-Arab Research Institute (TARI), and the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) will be convening a conference under the banner: Alternative Strategies for Realizing Justice in Palestine. What follows is a summary of the ideas that led the aforementioned organizations to join together in this effort.

During the midterm elections in 2014, for which there was a historically low showing, voters in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, reached through Ms. Hackett’s initiative, turned out at a considerably higher rate than registered voters in the Bronx and Queens generally, 35 percent compared with 22 percent. Nearly half of those “community voters” had a household income of under $25,000. Among those reached in Queensbridge through Jacob Riis, turnout was 40 percent.