Portside

The New York poet Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad offers a soulful Life Jacket to those displaced and forlorn by international tragedies: "remember," she writes, "you were born first/into a province of hope."

A review of the martyred German/ Polish Marxist's revolutionary's writings, with special emphasis on her seminal work, Reform and Revolution (1900, revised 1908). The classic essay is available in numerous collections of her work, and is accessible on line at Marxists.org

Here is yet another entry in the history of how the blacklist impacted Hollywood during the McCarthy era, and how artists resisted through their art.

People seem to think that a movie or a television show or a book is "diverse" when there are "one or two black people or brown people, or one girl or a couple of girls," DuVernay says. "Inclusion is really half—half of the cast, half of the directors, half of the writers are women or girls, half of the room, more than half of the room is of color," she says. "I think we get really satisfied with less.

Although you still can’t get a decent sandwich in space (who knew?), plans are underway to develop a special dough for low-crumb bread and an oven in which to bake it on the ISS.

With its surreal twist on death, birth, and reincarnation, the poet Philip St. Clair reminds us that some memories we don’t ever want to hear again.

China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was a well-known Cold War era CIA-sponsored organization whose role was to promote an international anti-communist, pro-US cultural policy. This latest study examines the well-funded and influential intellectual periodicals the CCF bankrolled all over the world.

The French comic series Valérian and Laureline, newly adapted into a summer blockbuster, gave the genre one of its first protagonists to powerfully own her womanhood.

Locol is a response to the challenge of food access in underserved communities in which issues of poverty, hunger and access to nutritious food are exclusively about race. But it is an imagined solution, designed to overcome the wrong threat. It is based on a dangerous minimization of the facts, lacking a larger racial analysis and the admission that racism, not some aberrant market failure, is the culprit in the deprivation of communities of color.