Portside

This novel by Paul Beatty won England's Man Booker Prize last month. He is the first American writer to ever win the award. Here is a review of the book.

Ever since his workshop days in Japan, gunpowder artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, has been obsessed with creating a Ladder In The Sky, exploring ways to create a structure that could hang in the air and support a series of fuses. Each time he found a sponsor to underwrite the Ladder something fell through, Finally, as shown in the film, he decided to pay for the experiment himself, to create it in the fishing village on Huiyu Island, Gwanhzhu, where his grandmother was born.

The Real Junk Food Project (RJFP), which organizes networks of cafes and shops to sell ‘waste’ food recovered from supermarkets and restaurants, has launched over 120 eateries in seven countries from Israel to Australia, and the movement is gathering pace.

As the creator of a program that has become a vital example both of the transgender rights movement’s growing steam and of streaming television’s revolutionary power, “Transparent” creator, writer, and director Jill Soloway has become something of a lightning rod, too. As beloved as “Transparent” is, the show has also received criticism for the casting of a cisgender man (Jeffrey Tambor) as a transgender woman.

Jan Barry, poet and longtime activist in Veterans for Peace, puts the Veterans Day holiday in its historical and spiritual perspective.

We know the rancid politics of the Tea Party, but what is behind the thinking of white, rural and hard-scrabble far-right supporters whose economic self-interests are at odds with their hard-right political and social beliefs. Berkeley sociologist Hochschild spent five years doing field research in western Louisiana, describing what people say, how they live, reconciling their contradictions and what lessons can be learned by knowing these people in a deeper way.

A new book of essays by one of this country's most celebrated poets.

A documentary about Donald Trump’s battle with Aberdeenshire residents over a golf course reveals the corporate, sociopathic nature of his political vision. This is the film Donald Trump does not want you to see....

Pseudoscience is perpetuated by self-declared experts with no scientific background or understanding of food science, or even scientists with credentials but who conduct poor, unscientifically sound research and spread unreliable, false or even debunked results. The trend has hit the pet food industry.

The best show on TV right now is about working-class African-Americans in the Southern suburbs, and it highlights one of the country’s biggest, least-appreciated problems: living without a car in the midst of sprawl. The show demonstrates the suburbanization of poverty, including how hard it is for people in low-income neighborhoods to get to their jobs.