Portside

This book chronicles the World War II-Cold War-era program that encouraged private pen pal correspondence between women in the USA and the Soviet Union, an initiative that fell victim to the rancorous politics of the era.

This review is 20 years old, but it is nevertheless especially relevant to the United States at this political moment.

Today's autocracies range “from theocracies to monarchies, that operate more like companies,” united by “a laser-focus on preserving their wealth, repressing their people and maintaining power at all costs."

Heightened efforts in recent years to paint public schools as bastions of ideological perversion, sexual permissiveness and anti-white ideology are part of a long-running campaign that is gaining momentum.

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

This book is a history of the far right wing movement in the United States, told in the form of a political biography of neo-Nazi author and activist James Mason.

For her new book, “Salvage,” the Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand rereads classic English novels, teasing out evidence of the ravages of colonialism.

This book and this review are nearly five years old. Their relevance remains undiminished.

Reviewer McManus calls this new book "a lucid defense of American democratic socialism."

Faiza Shaheen reviews the memoir of UK Labour party MP Diane Abbot, who has held her seat since 1987. She is the first Black woman to be elected to parliament, and is the country's longest-serving female MP.