Portside

Reader Comments - Defending Immigrants; Protecting Detroit's Water; Israeli and Palestinian Families Comfort Each Other; Hobby Lobby; Peoples Climate March; Overtime Pay; Global Action on Antibiotics; Homeopathy was quackery - readers respond; Full Employment and Shared Prosperity; Mapping Militarism; Limits of Corporate Citizenship; Abe Cohen - R.I.P. Seeger Family's Memorial Concert Series for Pete and Toshi - July 17 - 21 - New York City and surrounding area

Reader Comments - Defending Immigrants; Protecting Detroit's Water; Israeli and Palestinian Families Comfort Each Other; Hobby Lobby; Peoples Climate March; Overtime Pay; Global Action on Antibiotics; Homeopathy was quackery - readers respond; Full Employment and Shared Prosperity; Mapping Militarism; Limits of Corporate Citizenship; Abe Cohen - R.I.P. Seeger Family's Memorial Concert Series for Pete and Toshi - July 17 - 21 - New York City and surrounding area

In the 75 years since novelist John Steinbeck published his masterpiece about the Okie migration, the towering Ma Joad has faded from archetype to anachronism. Ever since Steinbeck published his opus on the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants in 1939, readers have warmed to Ma as a paragon of folksy integrity - "an unforgettably vigorous figure, like Mother Courage without the corruption or rapacity," - and, more recently, praised her as a feminist icon...