Portside

The WWE wrestlers who put their bodies through the ringer on a near-nightly basis lack basic control over their work and lives. Many know they need a union — but the barriers to forming one are steep.

The arrest and death of a young Iranian woman by the morality police prompts the poet Esther Kamkar to consider her exile from home.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison was a hotbed of student radicalism in the 1960s. and left-wing activists there were among the first of their generation to organize around issues related to their own mis-treatment as workers.

This new examination of the civil rights movement considers it in terms of a military-style campaign.

Conversations about cancel culture so often frame things in extreme terms for the sake of catching those Substack subscriptions and Twitter likes; they tell people exactly how to be outraged. But Field conducts discourse like a symphony.

The updated definition may help foster a healthier food supply if manufacturers add more vegetables or whole grains to meet criteria or develop products that meet the updated definition; it may help consumers identify healthier food choices.

The new series Fire Country revolves around an incarcerated California firefighter. Based on a real program, the drama is made possible by California’s budget priorities: few resources for climate protection or fire services and abundant investment in prisons.

For all the news about the invasion of Ukraine, US observers scarcely know the price of war, but as San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil writes, that won’t last forever.

This book situates the climate crisis in a socioeconomic context, showing, writes reviewer Chen, how events like big wildfires are "important signifiers of an unfolding global calamity that urges the public to challenge the status quo."

Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde ignores the assertive and hardworking real-life Marilyn Monroe and instead gives us a lurid tale of perpetual victimization.