Portside

Ben Fountain's "Beautiful Country Burn Again" revisits (and tries to make historical sense of) the convulsions of the 2016 election as prelude to--and forewarning of--the perfervid run-up in Trump country to the 2018 midterm contests.

"Hedges’ assessment of the sickness of our times is searing in its directness," writes reviewer Weller. "His rage is palpable in his scolding of the system we take for granted, one we preserve at our own peril."

As election results came in, Blum was given the Isreal Film Festival’s achievement in film and television award. His acceptance began with criticism of Trump.“ A lot is at stake. The last two years have been hard for all of us who cherish freedom."

Thousands of types of rice are cooked throughout the world in more than 100 countries.

“Bearing false witness is the worst crime that you can commit,” says a character in the most recent episode of the Amazon series "The Romanoffs".

On this Veterans Day weekend, Kansas poet H.C. Palmer, a combat surgeon during the Vietnam war, offers the wisdom of a peacetime soldier.

As results from the recent midterm elections show and the book under review chronicles, restrictive voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement and voter purges still deny millions access to the ballot box.

This new collection of essays by a highly regarded radical intellectual receives a mixed, but engaging review.

“Boy Erased,” adapted from Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same title, tackles the subject of conversion therapy, a technique that is a mix of religious dogma and dubious science whose cruelty and ineffectiveness are amply documented.

Judy Chicago’s “A Dinner Party” inspired a meal at the Museum of Food and Drink, in Brooklyn, honoring four women out of the thirty-nine in Chicago’s work. The trickiest part proved to be finding recipes from the relevant eras.