Portside

The eating of gold (chrysophagy? aurivorism?) dates back to long before the stunt-food era—it has been consumed by medieval alchemists, pharaonic Egyptians, and Victorian aesthetes.

Most depictions of trans people in the media either position trans people as the butt of the joke, a victim on a crime show or a hypersexualized trope. Instead, Pose centers trans people of color from a first-person perspective.

Amy O’Reilly’s “Boy White American” puts her finger not so gently on the dangers in a Trumpian universe of gender roles.

Reports of the forcible separation of parents and children at the border by U.S. immigration authorities tell only part of the story of the violence now being directed against hard-won norms of civil society.

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.