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 June 19, 2015
EARTH IN ANGER
Minnesota poet James P. Lenfestey's "Skin of Dust" offers an aerial view of our environmental holocaust, the Earth as a living body endangered.
Posted by Portside on June 18, 2015
New York Times Book Review
Even the most expensively educated - Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others - have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams.
Posted by Portside on June 17, 2015
New York Journal of Books
In these days of heightened discussion about "race" and racism, it is useful to keep reminding ourselves about the contingency of racial categories. Jennifer Teege is a German author who is the daughter of a Nigerian father and German mother. In her search for origins, she found that her grandfather was an officer in the SS who ran a World War II concentration camp. Charles S. Weinblatt reviews this harrowing tale of cross-racial family discovery.
Posted by Portside on June 16, 2015
Huffington Post
Six short films profile nine women across Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, with each detailing their journey through uprisings and crackdowns. While each story is unique, they often share an arc similar to the larger political developments of the post-revolution countries in the region, where an initial hope for change is quashed by increasing repression and conflict.
Posted by Portside on June 15, 2015
www.smithsonianmag.com
The complicated science behind picky eating is giving experts plenty of food for thought.
Posted by Portside on June 14, 2015
Women and Hollywood
Eight strangers around the globe are psychically linked after experiencing violent visions involving a woman (Daryl Hannah) unknown to any of them. The eight characters are about as diverse as you can get in terms of location, culture, race, economic situation, sexual orientation and occupation. As Lana Wachowski put it in an interview with io9 earlier this year, the show is "trying to get at the human question of how are we the same, and how are we different.
Posted by Portside on June 12, 2015
The New Verse News
Mississippi poet Philip C. Kolin sees analogies between the recent wave of police shootings and the old Fugitive Slave Act.