Portside

It's been an extraordinary year. A year of unparalleled dangers, which we wont dwell on, as you know them well. Also a year that people invented new ways to assert themselves -- from athletes kneeling to women speaking out to voters flipping seats up and down the ballot. Just once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help.

Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.

Erdrich takes up the genre of literary dystopia in a manner that is focused, writes reviewer Goodman, "on the agency of women and the centrality of procreation and pregnancy in the way they are treated by society."

'The Public' follows a group of homeless library patrons, who, after learning that emergency shelters are at capacity during a brutal Midwestern cold front, refuse to leave Cincinnati’s downtown public library at closing. What begins as a nonviolent Occupy sit-in and ragtag act of civil disobedience quickly escalates into a stand-off with local riot police, a no-nonsense crisis negotiator, and a savvy DA with lofty political ambitions.

Jollof rice is a dish hugely popular in countries such as Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cameroon. Somehow, Mark Zuckerberg got into the fray about which country's recipe is best.

The moral of the story is “don’t tell stories about these big topics if you can’t do it well.” And by “well,” I don’t mean create a post-racial utopia. I mean have the ability to give that story its own weight and importance beyond what it does for your two white leads. I mean the very least you can do is not make Jamie and Claire white saviors. At the very least. But that isn’t possible because they are the people this story is about.

"Oral history we call it: I want his past, he hopes/ for my future." So poet/historian Peter Neil Carroll traces the story of a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought the good fight, stuck to his principles to the end.

The author queries the existence of bad readers, linking causes not to illiteracy or injuries of class or the diffusion of mass culture, but to a Cold War literary trend sporting "an abundance of paraliterary works," such as memoirs, diaries, biographies, diplomatic studies, and feature reports as primers for engaging with literary texts as seemingly historically accurate yet stressing outcomes and expectations consonant with systemic social ends.

The camera, just by its presence, altered human behavior. The motion picture camera changed the nature of acting. Among other things, it created that apparent oxymoron, the non-actor, the subject of an unusually rich and stimulating series now at the Film Society of Lincoln Center entitled "The Non-Actor".

Food manufacturers use language to magnify the desirability of a product and can lead you to believe it’s something to make you healthier—even though what’s inside that box may not be all that good for you.