Portside

Raoul Peck's new film 'I Am Not Your Negro' about James Baldwin has a powerful structure utilizing rare videos and photos and personal writings of Baldwin, and at the same time aligning them with contemporary issues of police brutality and race relations, creates a mesmerizing awareness of the continuity in the struggle for civil rights.

A deep dive into archival documents from the 1950s and 1960s produced compelling evidence that a sugar trade association not only paid for but also initiated and influenced research expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD).

The candidate’s appearance on Zach Galifianakis’s satirical chat show was the funniest of her career.

"Hamburger Hill," site of a notorious battle in May 1969 in Vietnam, in which American troops made daily frontal assaults on entrenched enemy positions, receiving grisly casualties and causing, for the first time, significant voices of mutiny. On the tenth day, they captured the hill. Then, since it had no military value, the troops were withdrawn. California poet Anne Cheilek succinctly captures the absurdity.

Frederic Jameson writes that for Raymond Chandler, a detective novel may reveal patterns that underlie the workings of our society. Reviewer Angela Woodward agrees, crediting Chandler's novels with brilliantly illuminating the grimy microcosm, played out "in the heart of the darkness of a local world without the benefit of the federal Constitution, as in a world without God." She finds that Jameson makes every strand of Chandler's oeuvre glisten with significance.

A century ago, Madison Grant was one of the most influential racists in the United States. Republican presidents echoed his ideas. He helped shape immigration legislation. His ideas showed up in U.S. literature and popular culture. Adolph Hitler was a fan. In this essay, Noel Hartman focuses on Grant's best-known book and reminds us how some of Grant's ideas have survived and resurfaced in our current presidential campaign.

Snowden, Oliver Stone’s new film is a perfunctory biopic about the NSA’s international surveillance programs that lacks his trademark fearlessness. The film feels trite in its efforts to depict America’s ensnarement in the creepy web of online spying.

Latin America is transforming itself into a sort of food-policy laboratory. Some of the reforms they’ve enacted have also been proposed in the United States, but have been thwarted by the food industry and its political allies. Brazil has also made huge progress against poverty and food insecurity while supporting the family farmers who produce 70 percent of the food that Brazilians eat.

In the New York Times, critic James Poniewozik wrote, “Representing more people in more ways is the right thing to do, and it has made TV better. But it happened largely because there was money in it.”

Seattle poet Jed Myers writes about "a man/who’d left his house in rubble, crossed a plain and then a sea, gone north without a plan,/now faced a razor wire fence..." It's a story of upheaval, a refugee, a stalemate, all too familiar this sad saga.