Portside

In our age of cultural pluralism, mixing ethnicity, race, religion, gender, not to mention economics, the poet Diana Goetsch enjoys an evening celebrating what’s different and what’s not

98 percent of black women and 93% of black men voted for Democratic Senator-elect Doug Jones yesterday in Alabama, a state where black people make up a quarter of the population. Black voters made up 28% of the electorate on Tuesday, a turnout that hasn’t been seen since President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Since those numbers started to trickle in late last night and early this morning, one thing became clear: black voters saved America from Roy Moore.

Sheryl Crow, who is releasing a song dedicated to Newtown victims, says country musicians are afraid of speaking about gun laws and losing their audience. Money and fear have kept country music artists from speaking out about gun laws, the nine-time Grammy Award-winner said, even after thousands of country fans were targeted in October in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

The basketball legend and social activist who counted Ali and King among his contemporaries discusses Colin Kaepernick, LaVar Ball and Trump’s America.

By roping India and Japan into its standoff with China, the U.S. is raising the nuclear stakes in Asia — including, dangerously, between India and Pakistan. With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid much attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000 ships a year.

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Amazon has become a symbol of the new economy in Italy and the unions are determined to make these new workplaces, union fortresses. While Italian labor law has many advantages compared to our own, patient worker based organizing remains the fundamental building block of organizing.

Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.

"This action indicates an intent to appease employers who want every tool possible to defeat workers’ efforts to form a union, instead of ensuring the fairness of the union representation process," said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

The mobilization for Jones was just the latest chapter in “decades and generations of groundbreaking work to win voting rights” and “deep, proud movement building.”