Portside

The recently published Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (“PURE”) study made headlines about the conventional wisdom on fats and carbs, but several methodological problems cast doubt on its conclusions.

Atlanta doesn't run on its ability to make you tune in to see what happens. It's a show about hustle; if it ever really stops being about hustle, that's likely to be just another vignette about a sudden windfall. For now, it runs on its ability to place you in a particular moment and depict the feeling of it with great precision in whatever way works best.

Inspired by student outrage at the link between politicians and the National Rifle Association, the poet find hope in the no-longer-so-innocent next generation.

Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is the best buddy movie since George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. It’s also among the most important films in decades, bringing to a mass audience not just the revolutionary ideas of Marx and his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels in the early days of modern capitalism, but an approach to politics and history that still has no peer.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

As Ava DuVernay prepares to release Disney’s eagerly anticipated A Wrinkle in Time adaptation, which has put her in the history books as the first woman of color to direct a film with a $100 million-plus budget, she cautions against thinking that Hollywood has finally solved its diversity problems.

The original Heathers were a group of croquet-playing WASPy socialites; the new Heathers are comprised of a plus-size girl, a genderqueer student, and a black girl. In other words, this is less a reboot and more an intentional inversion of the original concept, built on the premise that the bullied have since become the bullies.

The Wall goes on, but as the El Paso poet Abigail Carl-Klassen announces: “We’re still here. In protest. In Pachanga. Fists raised.”

Writers once busy in prestigious magazines rationalizing war and torture are now confronting the obdurate pathologies of American life that stem from America’s original racial sin. Coates wonders why those once fierce in defending bloody imperial missions now embrace him for describing American power from the rare standpoint of its internal victims. Yet the danger for Coates is not so much seduction by power as a distorted perspective caused by proximity to it.

This poet and this book have just won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award based at Claremont Graduate University. The prize is given to a mid-career poet, and is one of the top literary prizes given in the United States. It is a significant testament to the power of Smith's work. This review shows wide-ranging and powerful art that Patricia Smith practices.