Portside

Billingham has used his camera to create personal, intensely specific images that double as snapshots of urban poverty and parental neglect. In that respect, Ray & Liz extends, and also interrogates the impulse to transform life into art.

Iowa is unrecognizable from centuries ago, when Europeans took the land for themselves. What were prairie and wetlands are now neatly partitioned grids of intensely cultivated land: the model for the farm as factory.

It’s not enough to settle for having a flat, oversimplified version of feminism on television. The conversation is nuanced and deserves representation as such.

Illinois poet Jeff Balch takes some liberties with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” turning the verse into something like the voice of our president, if he were poetic.

Few films portray working people realistically. One thinks of rare movies such as Hollywood’s Norma Rae, the independent Salt of the Earth, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike or the Italian classic, The Organizer.

Here is a book that many will find helpful in trying to understand, and explain, the various ways that bias works in contemporary society.

Newly restored, Elaine May’s darkest comedy is one of the great underappreciated American movies of the 1970s.

Years and Years is a broad-strokes diagnosis of a species in existential crisis. It’s meant as a warning about what’s happening in the present moment.

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.