Portside

If you go by Western press accounts, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a strutting peacock of the Trump school of self-reflection, or maybe a classic strongman, with the caveat that he's no twit. The book under review presents Putin as more acted upon than actor, more puppet to internal and external forces than puppet master, a formidable tactician but with no grand strategy, no end-game. In other words, a politician.

In the age of "fake news" and other mysterious media distortions, this book reminds us of a "simpler" time. Joel Whitney offers a new history of how, beginning in the late 1940s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) simply (if much of the time secretly), paid writers, musicians, and artists, and sponsored publications, concerts, exhibitions, and cultural institutions as part of its Cold War arsenal.

The story behind the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011—the struggle of class forces--has been told in some detail in several books, but a new film, Divided We Fall, supplies the crucial elements of drama that few of us in the marching crowds understood at the time. It is also a wonderful re-enactment of the whole scene, bringing to life the drama and months’ long glory of a fightback that mirrored and mirrors so many anti-austerity struggles across the world.

Recent experiments show how sound can interplay with your sense of smell—and, thus, flavor—in the brain

In its first episode of the new administration, the NBC sketch show skewered Vladimir Putin, Kellyanne Conway, and the “lower-case KKK.”

Extinction: Lisa Allen Ortiz, child of Mendocino county, California knows a thing or two about birds and about how precarious are the lives of many species, speaks of our impending "civic sorrow."

Through the use of family archives and other new sources, the grandson of Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci seeks to reconstruct the cultural and political saliance of his grandfather's contributions to building and defending the Italian working class movement and international socialism in the face of Stalinist distortions, capitalist enmity and today's reactionary Russian regime.

In reviewing two new books on the 20th Century's intertwined histories of labor, the Democratic Party, the Civil Rights movement, and the African American people, Rich Yeselson offers a nuanced and deeply informed assessment of this complicated tale.

Washington’s and Davis’ reprisals of their superb 2010 Broadway performances, do not disappoint. Washington takes us on an episodic journey through love, pain, betrayal and redemption, and with such heavy topics, the audience will struggle through it. With performances that will literally take your breath away, Fences is a must-see film offering a timeless critique of a family trying to determine who should be on each side of the fence, one fence post at a time.

Daniel Duane examines how a shy Ph.D. in English literature revolutionized the science of cooking and became revered in the most famous kitchens in the world.