Portside

Louis Armstrong believed his birthday was July 4, 1900 (though a recent discovery suggests August 4, 1901 is correct). But Elaine Feinstein's portrait of that great trumpet player just starting out seems appropriate for this American holiday weekend.

A new book chronicles the travelers ignoring borders to spread ideas of liberty and equality, from the American revolution to the declaration of Haitian independence. "Without social media or even an international postal system," author Janet Polasky writes, "revolutionaries shared ideals of liberty and equality across entire continents." Decades before Marx, these internationalist radicals were soon betrayed by the very societies they helped build.

As the United States and Cuba start to restore full diplomatic relations, here is a picture of an aspect of the dysfunctional relationship that has existed between our two countries. The release and return to Cuba of the last of the "Cuban Five" helped pave the way for the new stage in US-Cuba relations. Here is the backstory of that group, told, as Chris Serres says, by Fernando Morais in a new, well-researched, "cinematically vivid" account.

From 100 hours of recently unearthed audiotapes recorded over decades, the Liz Garbus film weaves together Nina’s narrative, told largely in her own words. Rare concert footage, archival interviews, along with diaries, letters, interviews with Nina’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, friends and collaborators, make this the most authentic, personal and unflinching telling of the extraordinary life of one of the 20th century’s greatest recording artists.

AMC’s new show goes beyond the obvious questions about what happens when robots can think like people.

The award-winning poet Julia B. Levine opens her eyes to global tragedies we leave for our children to inherit and our attempts still to shelter their innocence from what will haunt them.

In higher education, whether as affordable land-grant state colleges, tuition-free municipal universities, grants to children of the poor or need-blind admissions, access to learning was at least prized as a right, not a privilege. As tuition and administration costs soar, the number of low-paid adjuncts explodes and financial aid collapses, college funding shifts from the public purse to student debt. Wither democracy or plutocracy?

As part of the deep and broad reaction to the killings in Charleston, historian Chad Williams and his colleagues have put together a deeply informative and useful bibliography of essential readings on African American life and history, and on the struggle against racism. We have provided a link to the project, below, followed by a short article on it, published in The Guardian, by Marta Bausells. More links and information are available at the Guardian site.

The films that opened and closed the Human Rights Watch Film Festival - Marc Silver’s 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets, and Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution - tell interlocking stories. Although more than four decades separate the events they trace, there is a connection between what happened in the 1960s, when cities exploded in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Kiing and discord today.

Airplane noise affects our taste perception, and tomatoes are the winners!