Portside

A new documentary by Rewire chronicles the rising tide of harassment and violence against abortion providers and clinics under the Trump administration. Called "Care in Chaos," it features Calla Hales, director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, one of the busiest abortion clinics in North Carolina. She faces a gauntlet of harassment, threats and physical violence just to do her job.

'Jane Austen and tea' is after all, a comely capitalist hustle that has spawned a cottage industry of crockery, tea towels, tea bags, tea rooms and boutique brews. What we get from Austen's novels is the role of this extremely popular national beverage in upper class Regency society. Austen lived at a time when tea, which had become popular in England in the late 1600s, was drunk by everyone, from the elite to the working classes.

Where HBO's Game of Thrones once showed a one-dimensional view of female strength, it now makes clear that there are many ways to be strong.

For the Labor Day holiday, David Salner offers a poet’s glimpse of what it feels like not to be working while working a long shift at night.

Kafka's life was itself Kafkaesque, and if you want to know its span and its ending better- the book's author contends and the reviewer agrees - readers need to start at the beginning. The book under review is the third of a three-volume biography that critics widely call definitive.

This new book reminds us of the scope and power of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, beginning a century ago. As reviewer Scott McLemee points out, however, to only point out the Klan's racist heritage can be deceptively simplistic. McLemee reminds us that what made the Klan a mass force in the 1920s was that the movement's reactionary politics and racist passions "were widespread enough to count as mainstream.'

A year after racial discontent neared levels not seen since the Rodney King beating case, the country finds itself convulsed by controversies over neo-Nazis emboldened by Donald Trump’s rise to power. Now, a burst of new films, many of them documentaries, are taking a deep look beyond the headlines at the lasting impact that racial schisms and racism have on Americans’ everyday lives.

By folding a discussion of mental illness and its stigmas into the series, The Tick has proven a powerful source of representation.

The circus--as in Bread & Circus--is coming to town but as Oregon poet Amy Miller explains with brilliant clarity, it will not set you free.

Building on her past work analyzing capitalism, Naomi Klein, in the book under review, does not stop with an analysis of the crises. She not only argues how to defeat the new shock politics of Trump (explicit in the subtitle), but outlines a resistance politics that not only rejects what she terms a domination/subordination dynamic but proceeds from saying "no" to the existing order to a "yes" to other values. Favoring the book, the reviewer wishes she had dug deeper.