Portside

The Australian poet Joyce Parkes brings us the word “swags,” meaning the bedding rolls used by homeless persons, asking why in a wealthy country so many remain homeless.

A survey of the life, work and associations of the late New York Review of Books editor Elizabeth Hardwick, the transplanted Southerner who became a writer of note among the literary and political circles comprising the New York Intellectuals of the pre- and postwar period, she had a knack for illustrating what might have been called feminist themes by way of specific details of specific lives.

Once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help. It's been an extraordinary year. A year of unparalleled dangers, which we won't dwell on, as you know them well. Because information is power, we are always trying to make what we present easy to read. We hope you like what you see - the new upgraded Portside.

Starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep as Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, this drama about the Washington Post is squarely aimed at our current moment. The movie, written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, sprouts from this rift between the true state of affairs and the alternative facts that are presented to the public. As is common knowledge, it was Ellsberg’s conscience about the rift that led him to steal—or, if you prefer, to liberate—a hulking stash of incriminating documents, which came to be called the Pentagon Papers.

Clothing retailer Everlane uses profits to feed its workers farm-fresh food.

From The Keepers to National Treasure, The Deuce to The Handmaid’s Tale, new shows probed the institutionalized nature of sexual assault.

In our age of cultural pluralism, mixing ethnicity, race, religion, gender, not to mention economics, the poet Diana Goetsch enjoys an evening celebrating what’s different and what’s not

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."