Portside

Clothing retailer Everlane uses profits to feed its workers farm-fresh food.

From The Keepers to National Treasure, The Deuce to The Handmaid’s Tale, new shows probed the institutionalized nature of sexual assault.

It's been an extraordinary year. A year of unparalleled dangers, which we wont dwell on, as you know them well. Also a year that people invented new ways to assert themselves -- from athletes kneeling to women speaking out to voters flipping seats up and down the ballot. Just once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help.

In our age of cultural pluralism, mixing ethnicity, race, religion, gender, not to mention economics, the poet Diana Goetsch enjoys an evening celebrating what’s different and what’s not

Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.

Erdrich takes up the genre of literary dystopia in a manner that is focused, writes reviewer Goodman, "on the agency of women and the centrality of procreation and pregnancy in the way they are treated by society."

'The Public' follows a group of homeless library patrons, who, after learning that emergency shelters are at capacity during a brutal Midwestern cold front, refuse to leave Cincinnati’s downtown public library at closing. What begins as a nonviolent Occupy sit-in and ragtag act of civil disobedience quickly escalates into a stand-off with local riot police, a no-nonsense crisis negotiator, and a savvy DA with lofty political ambitions.

Jollof rice is a dish hugely popular in countries such as Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cameroon. Somehow, Mark Zuckerberg got into the fray about which country's recipe is best.

The moral of the story is “don’t tell stories about these big topics if you can’t do it well.” And by “well,” I don’t mean create a post-racial utopia. I mean have the ability to give that story its own weight and importance beyond what it does for your two white leads. I mean the very least you can do is not make Jamie and Claire white saviors. At the very least. But that isn’t possible because they are the people this story is about.

"Oral history we call it: I want his past, he hopes/ for my future." So poet/historian Peter Neil Carroll traces the story of a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought the good fight, stuck to his principles to the end.