Portside

Edward Albee, who died September 16 at age 88, was a major force in U.S. literature and one of the American theater's most significant playwrights. In this essay, Shehryar Fazli offers some insight into Albee's art by focusing our attention on his landmark 1963 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

“The Crime of Being Married.” So read the headline that accompanied photos of Richard Loving, a Southern “white trash” construction worker, and his African-American wife Mildred... "Loving" audiences will watch Jeff Nichols’ nobly hatred-proof period romance, as it dramatises and gives due mythological prominence to a remarkable legal case which helped change America’s ugly Jim Crow race laws in the 50s and 60s.

When Obama took office, it seemed that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House. The Big Food stepped in.

When Obama took office, it seemed that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House. The Big Food stepped in.

The pilot of Good Girls Revolt does a good job of setting the scene for why the women decide to sue in the first place, even if the gender discrimination lawsuit that inspired the series isn’t even mentioned as a possibility until episode two.

In this time of pipeline protests in the Dakotas, poet Carol Denney sings her lyrics of a familiar ecological catastrophe: “they tear through our mountains/they tear through our town/after the damage/they’re nowhere around.”

Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

This new book details a little-known aspect of the leaders of Nazi Germany: that many of them, including Hitler himself, were drug addicts. Rachel Cooke has interviewed author Norman Ohler and gives us this portrait.

In the stellar documentary "Fire at Sea" Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate thousands of migrants landing on the shores of a Sicilian island with the everyday existence of the locals.

A main finding from this research is that babies learning about food is fundamentally social. When they see someone eat a food, they can use the person’s reaction to the food to learn about the food itself, such as whether it is edible, and also to learn about the people who are eating the food.