Portside

Part of what made the episode so bracing was this combination of serious material — the way holidays announce whose history is important — and biting jokes that would have no place in your ordinary Let's Learn A Leson episode of TV.

"Whoever said a black woman/was always liberated/didn’t walk in my Mama’s heels," says southern California poet Angela Franklin, a poet active in the Social Justice movement.

A hard look at African-American author Chester Himes, whose literary fame and financial success later in life hardly made up for the oppressive racial travails that preceded it and forced him to live much of that life abroad.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most significant essayists in contemporary U.S. letters. Here is a review of his new book.

To keep changing our country in the right direction we should learn the right lessons from that terrible war. Unfortunately, Burns and Novick have thrown up roadblocks to that happening which we will have to overcome.

Seven of the biggest olive oil manufacturers in the US have been cutting their products with cheaper, inferior oils (such as sunflower oil or canola oil) in order to minimize the cost of production. This prompted the University of California to carry out studies on 124 imported brands of extra virgin olive oil, and they found that over 70% of the samples failed the test.

The new Star Trek spin-off passes the Bechdel test under a minute into the series premiere.

Rosie Flores, a young Latina poet from Los Angeles, speaks to the cultural differences that surround daily life. “Roses are red and we are brown,” she writes, “…we didn’t cross the border the border crossed us.”

In The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon emphasizes broad patterns, making the book more timely than even the headlines of white nationalist outpourings the past months would suggest, writes Scott McLemee. What stands out in Gordon’s book is that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s tried to create a world unto itself through spectacle, mass communications and branding.

Stephen Greenblatt gives a new look into one of our civilization's origin myths and its role in the development of misogynist discourse.