Portside

With all the toxicity coming out of the White House and the GOP-dominated Congress, it's important to remember how insufferable were the politics of the neoliberal Democrats in power under Bill Clinton. The book under review (an article derived from the book is below) should help us remember how malignant were the Clinton years when it came to economic and social justice.

This week the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, named Tracy K. Smith as the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2017-2018. Smith is the fifth African American poet and the fourth black woman to hold the honor. She is the author of three books of poems, the most recent of which, Life on Mars, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. A link to the Library of Congress citation, and a review, from 2012, of Life on Mars, are posed below.

Wonder Woman doesn't just subvert superhero movie gender tropes, it does it in clever ways.

In the South, America has identified food-system problems and developed solutions. Today, as Americans agitate for food sovereignty, the bold agricultural ideas conceived in the late 1960s by Fannie Lou Hamer and other radical Southerners suggest paths for us to follow out of our food deserts.

Master of None's second season tackles the intersection of queer identities and race, as well as the diversity of New York City, painting a fuller picture of the city than shows that have come before like Girls, or even Louie.

Amid “the caked-on lies” of our political leaders and corporate aggressors, New Zealand poet John Sweden offers no remedies, only an imagined hope.

National Public Radio's media critic Brooke Gladstone talks with the Poynter Institute about the myth of post-fact journalism and the need for journalists to ferret out and offer common pools of accurate information, if only to provide contending parties with a basis to negotiate and for democracy to work.

The acclaimed Indian novelist and essayist whose first novel, The God of Small Things (1997) was a prize-winning, international sensation, has just published a new novel that reviewer Walter describes as "a bright mosaic."

In an era where more scripted shows are being produced than ever before — why aren’t we trying to make more shows like the HBO classic?

Fifty-some years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are still waiting for the end--not necessary of the world, but the US embargo. Poet Peter Neil Carroll recalls an October day when Paul Simon, relatively unknown, sang for a class of nervous students at Queens College and how a young Cuban today looks back at that moment.