Portside

The U.S is ostensibly a democracy, yet past presidential elections, most recently in 2016, saw the loser of the popular vote elected. Two authors look at the convoluted Electoral College system, singular among advanced nations, and propose remedies.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, radical psychologists and psychoanalysts sought to transform their profession. This book shows how those efforts intersected with the radical cultural and political movements of the day.

Spike Lee has spent nearly four decades and more than 30 films reckoning with the jagged and brutal course of history. Now, in the middle of a global calamity, and with a new film, “Da 5 Bloods", he revisits the Vietnam War.

Jefferson brought James Hemings to France and gave him a first-rate culinary education with some of Europe's most illustrious chefs. His legacy thrives today in kitchens across America.

The U.S. Space Force is about to be eclipsed by Netflix’s upcoming parody—and that might be a good thing.

In a time when the murder of African Americans in plain sight terrifies the news, Poet Amaud Jamaul Johnson captures the feeling of capture.

The world economy, to the degree it still works at all, serves to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The author of the book under review does an economic deep dive into ways that can reverse that antidemocratic equation.

Journalist Lawrence Wright brings his considerable skills to bear in this novel about a pandemic, written before our current crisis erupted.

Elliza Hittman’s coming-of-age story about a teenager seeking an abortion is heartbreaking and painfully authentic. Hittman has described her film as “a narrative about a girl carrying around a lot of pain and burden, and the lonliness of it all".

Snowpiercer is full of people who aren’t white men who nonetheless prop up an unequal system; the series contemplates the ways in which we are all cogs in the machine, while looking to all of these same parties to dismantle it.