Portside

A handful of middle-aged men think they invented the everything bagel. We talked to four of them.

Superstore illustrates the precarious nature of unions in a retail environment with an episode that takes on the vagaries of organizing and negotiations.

The poet MEH describes a classroom moment, someone hijacking “communal grief,” and a good teacher’s response.

Objectivity may be tricky; fairness in reporting is not. The book author blasts the media for using a rhetoric of neutrality to marginalize insurgent POVs. Truth may be contingent on time and place, but leading news venues only serve power.

The FX network TV drama, Pose, dramatizes New York City's 1980-1990s black and Latino LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming ballroom culture scene. This book, on the ballroom culture in Detroit, describes a community of affirmation and resistance.

Mexico City’s health care crisis, much like America’s, primarily revolves around prohibitive costs and limited access. The issue’s myriad complexities are neatly embodied by a single problem plaguing the city: an ambulance shortage.

This potholder could have been an emblem of the abolitionist movement, but is now considered offensive by modern standards.

Midge ultimately struck a nerve with a lot of women not because she is “perfect” but because she is, as Roxane Gay might say, a decidedly, “bad feminist.”

“I’ve become obsessed,” writes the poet Branden Walsh, “with trying to understand the compulsions and sickness of a society that believes billionaires are a healthy/natural component of civilization.” He tries here to humanize just one.

It's no Marxist critique of class power--would that it were--but Matt Stoller's Goliath, aimed at moving the Democratic Party off dead center, slams all the right enemies in urging the resuscitating of the anti-monopoly tradition of the 20th century