Portside

California poet John J. Brugaletta explains the silent magic of Houdini and why the public adores escape artists.

A new history of bigoted opposition to immigrants through the manipulation of fake science shows the most vociferous baiters of emigres in the past were among the most privileged U.S. ruling class members.

This book has received a lot of attention since its publication, as a pioneering study of not just the fact of gender discrimination in the tech industry, but also as a glimpse into how such discrimination works.

Six black filmmakers discuss a 1990s boom that went bust. They talk about racism, misogyny, of being marginalized by executives who feigned interest in their work, of lacking a safety net that buoyed white peers, of 'director's jail'.

Air, bottled water and seafood were the biggest sources for ingested microplastics. If you live somewhere with clean, safe tap water, relying less on bottled water is a great place to start reducing your plastics exposure.

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."