Portside

This book describes the cultural wreckage that accompanied the rise of Christianity, thereby adding nuance to our inherited understanding of the origins of Europe's "dark ages."

Chia seeds have been cultivated as a food source as early as 3500 BC; they come from the plant Salvia hispanica L., and were at one time a major food crop in Mexico and Guatemala. They may contribute to disease prevention as part of a varied plant-rich diet and other healthy lifestyle behaviors.

Bourdain engaged without fetishizing, touristed with ease, in the way of a person who’s been toggling between identities so long, the act of meeting a stranger from a strange land is the only familiar feeling.

As the moguls of the National Football League coerce the athletes to abandon their protests against racism, Kathy Engel’s poem reminds us of the larger stakes for us all.

Two Marxists associated with the left journal Monthly Review correspond in the years leading up to the publication of their magisterial Monopoly Capital. The reviewer calls the collection "fascinating for its details and quiet wisdom," grappling with a reconfigured empire that persists today.

This book shows how California recovered from the grim, racist 1990s by creating community and labor political coalitions that revitalized the state and put it on a problem-solving oriented, progressive path.

An Irish-Canadian-Luxembourgish co-production, adapted from Deborah Ellis’s much-loved YA novel, it’s a tale of youthful fortitude in Taliban-era Afghanistan that has something of the defiant feminist spirit of the French-Iranian gem Persepolis.

Workers at Burgerville voted to form a federally recognized union — the first in more than 40 years among fast-food employees nationwide. Now the Wobblies dream of organizing the entire Burgerville chain.

Those who contended that Roseanne shouldn't have been fired for her views, would not have backed Colin Kaepernick's right to free expression or any of his NFL colleagues', who are threatened with a ban for kneeling during the national anthem in protest against racism.

Coal may be a dying industry but, as St. Louis poet Kerry James Evans shows, the living miners go on working for less and less.