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Inverted Beethoven

We hear music in relation to the lowest note. What happens when we turn this relation upside down?

Friday Nite Videos | March 24, 2017

Portside
Bernie Sanders: We Beat Right-Wing Extremists Today. Inverted Beethoven. This Is Your Brain on Terrorism. Downbound Train | Chuck Berry. Grassroots Protest Set the Stage for ACHA's Defeat.

How Smart Women Got the Chance: The Ivies' Late Admission of Women

Linda Greenhouse New York Review of Books
The integration of women students into the elite all-male Ivy League student bodies was a relatively recent (largely late1960s) phenomenon, the product less of a broader consciousness among university trustees and more due to the fact that these universities were losing a share of high-achieving college men to other elite schools that were already co-educational.

“There is no negotiation whatsoever”: Union leader Douglas Izzo talks about labor rights in post-coup Brazil

Brian Mier Council on Hemispheric Affairs
No candidate has ever run for the presidency promising to raise the retirement age, end formal employment protection and greatly expand outsourcing. Nobody would ever get elected saying these things. The only way to remove the labor rights that we fought for over the last 100 years was through a coup such as the one in Brazil that forced Dilma Rousseff out of office. Workers have responded by strikes, demonstrations and massive rallies.

Tidbits - March 23, 2017 - Reader Comments: U.S. Wants Cambodia to Pay for U.S. War; Trump, Russian Hacking; Democratic Party - Which Way; Bernie Sanders; MLK Vietnam Speech; Incredible Resource List (with links); Announcements; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: U.S. Asks Cambodia for Millions in War Debts - for U.S. Destruction of Their Country; Trump Administration, Russian Hacking, Danger of a New McCarthysim; Democratic Party - Which Way; Bernie Sanders: Most Popular Politician in Country; Gorsuch Supports Torture; Irish-American History - James Larkin; Martin Luther King and Vietnam - 50th Anniversary of Historic Speech; Incredible Resource List (with links) from Stansbury Forum; Announcements; and more...

“I’m Going to Learn to Dance If It Takes Me All Night and Day” - Thoughts on Chuck Berry

Geoffrey Jacques Portside
Much commentary on the late Chuck Berry will focus on how his songs expressed fun and teenage angst. This is the right thing to do. Yet there’s more. For example, Berry’s obsession with the comparative qualities of fast cars — most brilliantly displayed in his song “Maybellene” — did not just reflect the rise of post-WW II consumerist culture....He preferred V-8 Fords over Cadillacs because he spent several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s helping make Ford cars.

Socialism's Return

Patrick Iber The Nation
After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. Bernie Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity. His emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders's run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.

Richard Gere on Segregation in Hebron: It's Exactly Like the Old South

Lisa Goldman +972 Magazine (Israel)
`It's exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn't go over there, they couldn't eat in that place,' the American actor tells an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.

These Are the Elections That Will Decide Europe's Fate

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.