Portside

This work by Zora Neale Hurston, the famed author of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), has surfaced after over eight decades. It is the autobiography, as transcribed by Hurston, of the life of one of the last persons enslaved in Africa and brought to this country.

The renowned Renaissance literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whose 1980 book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, was a landmark study, has now turned his attention to Shakespeare's treatment of tyrants. Michael Thomas Barry looks at this new, timely volume.

The City of London, Britain's financial equivalent of Wall Street, is--like its American co-equal --virtually unrivaled given its capacity to develop a business largely on the basis of using the new post-war world currency, the U.S. dollar, and its corresponding wasting away of British industry.

This new examination of the rise of Fascism focuses on how the expansion of democratic rights, the reaction to that expansion in the realms of philosophy and culture, and how that reaction fueled Nazi and other Fascist ideology.

At a time when the attack on reason as such is the stuff of everyday news, Steven Pinker reminds us of an important aspect of our society's intellectual legacy.

A survey of a dozen self-help books reveals a genre with an ideological axe to grind: it’s not the system that needs changing, it’s you.

A "computer" used to be a job description, not just a machine. At the time, most computers were women. Dylan Schleicher reviews a fascinating history of how "computers" helped make the computer networks that are so interwoven into contemporary life.

Mitch Landrieu writes about how a conversation with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis helped him confront his city's racist history and what he did about that history.

Medicine has grown so powerful and so profitable procedures go unquestioned. Many tests detect something worthy of follow-up -- procedures sometimes dubious, all to the point of extending life without regard to its quality. Stealing a march on every medical vulnerability as you age can boomerang.

The March 18 killing of 22-year old Stephon Clark by Sacramento Police once again calls our attention to the racist aspect of the problem of civilians murdered by law enforcement. Angie Thomas's award-winning Young Adult novel is among the most recent literary responses to this crisis.