Portside

HBO's Succession peeled back the layers of the all-powerful Roy family, a Murdoch-like media empire built by despicable, ruthless people, and what it showed us was more putrid and awful than we ever could have imagined.

“Outside from Inside,” words found in a letter written from a Japanese American concentration camp, are transformed by New York poet Anne Whitehouse.

Fascism may be resurging, but so is socialism. Yet what would a genuine post-scarcity, egalitarian, democratic, communist society look like? The author thinks he knows, offering tantalizing if evanescent glimpses that tweak the imagination.

After a series of tweets from President Trump, Universal canceled the release of a film that’s been alternately praised and decried by critics who haven’t seen it.

Lepore argues, says reviewer Detrow, that "advocates for liberal democracy ceded the field of studying and interpreting American history to nationalists." Democracy's defenders must retake the initiative of telling our nation's stories.

A surprising aspect of Julia Child, as discussed in a new volume about her conversatons with journalists, is her passionate political engagement.

True believers like Ailes or for that matter Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson may be cynical and fundamentally financially motivated yet they are a foundational part of an emerging right wing international.

“Someone with wings,” writes the critic Elizabeth Willis, “may be angelic, but the figure also embodies the predatory power of a country—the one we live in…”

They may not all be beach reading, but this clutch of books will keep any reader busy--working or not--in the doleful last days of summer.

Novelist and writer Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Here is the speech she gave on that occasion.