Portside

Dave’s Killer Bread, POP! Gourmet Foods, and other food companies are helping people with criminal records overcome the barriers to employment they often face.

Jayro Bustamante‘s debut feature “Ixcanul” generates its power from an intimate observance of the quotidian. As such, its titular volcano — the translation of Ixcanul in the Mayan K’iche’ dialect spoken in Guatemala — is the least volcanic thing in it. Steeped in a culture rarely observed on screen and filmed entirely in Kaqchikel, Bustamante’s film explores a clash between reproductive rights and tradition.

Hip-hop has always been queer. Some of its very first hitmakers were part of, if not closely adjacent to, queer communities, and some of its first musical and technical innovations premiered at gay clubs. But it's not the history fans usually read.

Haecceity is derived from a medieval philosophical word meaning the "property" of something that makes it unique to itself--in the case of Joshua Clover's poem, the meaning of the word and principle of "Revolution."

Labor historian E.P. Thompson is perhaps best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. The collected essays reviewed here, many either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963. They show Thompson as also a dedicated educator of workers, a sharp polemicist, a skilled political theorist and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons and for a rebirth of the socialist project.

Much of the political debate this election season concerns who will win the support of working class white voters. At the same time, as Alec MacGillis notes in this review of two new books on the history and present conditions of this sector of the population, much of this discourse strains under the influence of condescension, sentimentalism, and a host of explicitly or implicitly stated biases.

More ingredients are designed to accommodate free-from foods, a hot trend for 2016 as Americans continue to be affected by food allergens and intolerances.

In the official teaser for the show, Cage dons a hoodie just as Batman would put on a cowl or Thor would don a cape. But in a post-Trayvon Martin world, that image—of Cage pulling the hood tight around his face—is a loaded one. And all of this imagery comes in a series that centers on Luke Cage’s wrongful imprisonment.

An antidote to anti-immigrant sentiment, Seattle poet Jed Myers generously welcomes newcomers to this nation of immigrants, offering empathy and greeting from our ancestors: "what we’ve secured/only a few breaths before..."

As the Olympic Games go, the reviewer says, it's time to ask the big question: which were the worst Olympics ever? David Goldblatt's The Games is a history of the tarnished Olympics, from Avery Brundage to, yes, London 2012. The evidence shows indisputably that it was Hitler's Berlin games of 1936, which set the stage for spectacle and nationalist-racialist sentiment.