Portside

Stranger Things 3 is more deeply informed by American paranoia than ever before, as the show starts to mine classic, Cold War–inspired works of the mid-1980s.

Idaho poet Alexandra Teague takes us back to a child’s innocent, albeit cloudy, view of the world (in contrast to its perverse current state.)

From the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and the McCarthy era’s end, the author weaves his father’s story of inquisitors and defenders as the family struggles with racism, fascism, communism, and tenuous first amendment freedoms

“Hadestown,” written and composed by Anaïs Mitchell and directed by Rachel Chavkin, is a very radical play. It takes the audience to Hell, which is peopled by oppressed workers who have been indoctrinated to fear those who are poorer.

This new novel by Vietnamese-American poet and writer Ocean Vuong, is an immigrant's story that, writes reviewer McAlpin, is also about "beauty, survival, and freedom, which sometimes isn't freedom at all."

This moving and profound portrait serves as a fitting biographical tribute as well as a piercing, often painful recount of African American history from slavery and the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement and beyond.

Seed saving is an ancient practice of saving seeds and reproductive matter from plants for future use. For Native Americans, it is spiritually meaningful because they believe that seeds are living, breathing beings from whom they are descended.

This disconnect, the palpable condescension and disgust the Ailes family feel for the communities and viewers who’ve made them impossibly rich, is one of the most intriguing and under-explored parts of The Loudest Voice.

“Yet another story” of a black woman “getting shafted by white women” knocks the poet off her feet, literally, and she rises to the continuing struggle.

Retracing the 160-year-old Southern journey of famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the author looks to uncover the roots of the region's still extant poisoned racial politics.