Portside

Besides a reason to enjoy baked goods while feeling mathematically in-the-know, just what is π anyway?

Despite its rich fund of hard-won detail, the Senate report has, at best, produced a neutral outcome, a draw in this political contest over impunity. Unless we inscribe the lessons from this Senate report deeply into the country’s collective memory, then some future crisis might prompt another recourse to torture that will do even more damage to this country’s moral leadership.

The heroes of antiquity are perhaps due for another revision of their status.

Hope and pessimism have defined two traditions of American thinking about race. Fully acknowledging recent setbacks, the author makes the case for the tradition of hope.

The southern New Mexico mining town of Santa Rita no longer exists, even as a ghost town, except in the memories of Terry Humble and others who lived there. In September, another vestige of Santa Rita disappeared when workers at the Chino Mine voted 236-83 to decertify a 72-year-old union celebrated for its heroic struggle to improve the lives of Hispanic miners and immortalized by the 1954 movie “Salt of the Earth.”

The point isn’t whether Obama is or isn’t a radical. It’s that we ourselves need to be.

In Jefferson County, Colorado, a newly conservative school board instituted a review to ensure that the AP US curriculum will “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system”.

The lawsuit against Rick Perlstein is a distraction from a much-needed debate over Reagan’s rise.

Kolko reshaped the way we think about how the state protects and advances capitalist interests

“The New Deal illusion survives because it is a very useful to today’s Democratic Party,” Kolko wrote in 2012. “It needs myths, but if one knows the truth about it then we have the basis for understanding the essentially conservative nature of today’s Democratic Party.”