Portside

This new Cold War is not about communism taking over the world. It is more about returning to 19th century balance of power interests, borrowing the phrase John Kerry has used against Putin. It is about dividing up the spoils of the first Cold War among the triumphal capitalist democracies, as if Russia is defeated and short-lived. Pushing Western capitalism and NATO towards Russia was sure to touch off the current escalation, and worse may come.

The banning of Students for Justice in Palestine at Northeastern University, replicates sanctions being imposed against numerous student Palestinian rights groups across the country. Israel's heavy-handed reaction to these campus organizations is symptomatic of its increasing isolation and concern about waning American support and have alienated traditional supporters of Israel, including many young American Jews.

Republicans can continue their desperate move to convince Americans that being anti-choice is actually pro-woman. But we are not stupid, and they are not fooling anyone. The more anti-choice politicians, pundits and activists underestimate women by continuing with their rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the more they reveal themselves. The anti-choice movement cannot erase us from our own lives by insisting that abortion isn't necessary.

Reader Comments - Tony Benn; Labor organizing; BDS and American Jews; Seniors; Mayor de Blasio; Education - Charters, Testing, Children's Literature, Adjuncts; Real Irish American history; Keystone XL; Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos; Announcements: GLobal Protests Against Racism and Fascism - this Saturday; Cecily McMillan Trial Update; New books/resources - New Labor in New York; Living Wage Calculator; Getting Back to Full Employment; Truth About Three Mile Island

Mr. President! Ladies and Gentlemen! [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to solve the entire crisis in Ukraine militarily. He has not understood that humanity's problems are to be solved neither with soldiers nor with guns, quite the contrary. . . It is however the same thinking that dominated and dominates in the West: In the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

With The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson has reached the dizzying point of fantasizing about feeling nostalgic for nostalgia itself.

“We have people dying every day just because they don’t have access to health care,” one protester, Shayna Adelman, 32, said in an interview before she was jailed. “It’s morally repugnant to me. Sometimes you have to take dramatic action to get people’s attention.”

The real story in Toronto, then, is not Rob Ford. It is how three decades of creeping neoliberalism have made it possible for one of North America’s most diverse cities in one of the west’s most robust democracies to elect a right-wing populist. It is how successive federal governments—Liberal and Conservative alike—shrank government spending by 20 percent as a share of GDP since the early 1990s and flattened the tax structure.

Adjunct abuse is one of higher education's great sins. So why is a leading writing conference not discussing it?

The stance of Cosmos, Tyson emphasizes, is not anti-religion but anti-dogma: "Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you've got doctrine, you've got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it."