Portside aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world, and to change it.
Portside Culture
Posted by Portside on July 14, 2017
Pedestal
With its surreal twist on death, birth, and reincarnation, the poet Philip St. Clair reminds us that some memories we don’t ever want to hear again.
Posted by Portside on July 13, 2017
Los Angeles Review of Books
China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.
Posted by Portside on July 12, 2017
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was a well-known Cold War era CIA-sponsored organization whose role was to promote an international anti-communist, pro-US cultural policy. This latest study examines the well-funded and influential intellectual periodicals the CCF bankrolled all over the world.
Posted by Portside on July 11, 2017
The Atlantic
The French comic series Valérian and Laureline, newly adapted into a summer blockbuster, gave the genre one of its first protagonists to powerfully own her womanhood.
Posted by Portside on July 10, 2017
San Francisco Chronicle
Locol is a response to the challenge of food access in underserved communities in which issues of poverty, hunger and access to nutritious food are exclusively about race. But it is an imagined solution, designed to overcome the wrong threat. It is based on a dangerous minimization of the facts, lacking a larger racial analysis and the admission that racism, not some aberrant market failure, is the culprit in the deprivation of communities of color.
Posted by Portside on July 9, 2017
The Atlantic
HBO’s latest web-series acquisition eschews Brooklyn for a queer, multiracial, multiethnic arts landscape in Chicago. Welcome to Fatimah Asghar and Sam Bailey’s world.
Posted by Portside on July 7, 2017
Portside.org
A native of Chicago, the poet Philip C. Kolin laments how the City of Broad Shoulders has become a death trap for the young.