Portside

The thing about food is that everyone eats, whether it’s written about or not; knowing how to cook can be political because in times of economic uncertainty, it can sustain you not just with nourishment, but with the money needed to survive.

The Mexican actor and director Diego Luna has persuaded experts to join him on a new TV show to talk, eat and, hopefully, examine their own beliefs and prejudices

“After living 60 years…as a Black man from Jamaica,” writes poet Geoffrey Philp, “a DNA test … [revealed} my Jewish ancestry. I am astounded by the endurance of Nazi propaganda and the need for constant vigilance.”

Labor journalist John Swinton visited the Marx family on vacation in Southern England and wrote this dispatch showing Marx in his last years - no less astute, productive and committed to the class struggle than at any time in his adult life.

A reviewer's respectful, if somewhat critical, look at a new book on the Italian Renaissance that seeks to contextualize that movement within the broader sweep of history and within the social conflicts of its time.

Sunless Shadows, Oskouei’s new documentary about a juvenile detention center in Iran, interrogates the experience of women in prison in Iran.

In New England towns like Fall River, Massachusetts, or East Providence, Rhode Island, Portuguese restaurants and markets carve out an identity of ’60s and ’70s nostalgia.

“Lovecraft Country” is rooted in traditions of horror, and uses that genre’s tools to argue that, for Black citizens, America is not a problem to be solved but a monster to be outrun.

Southern California poet Alexis Rhone Fancher offers a musical rendition on the theme “guns matter/kids do not.”

This book, first published in 2011, remains useful in this time of renewed popularity for socialist ideas. As reviewer Terry pointed out when the book was first published, it is an informative treatment of its topic, despite its weaknesses.