Portside

Two veteran Washington reporters mine a host of anonymous sources to give us a devastating portrait of a Hillary Clinton presidential effort that was a campaign without either a mission or a vision. Matt Taibbi takes a look.

The Zookeeper’s Wife shows the Holocaust was not an easy existential battle fought between a massive evil machine and good, tough men. It was also made up of unrecorded domestic crimes, often of sexual aggression and abuse. What Caro makes clear is that a society that overlooks these transgressions is in dangerous territory. In attempting to understand these crimes and how to counter them, Caro challenges us to look closer to home, into the finer grain of the horror.

Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel lays bare the horrors of collusion with the patriarchy.

Earth Day on our minds, what can be more rueful than what's happened to the once-ignored state of North Dakota, fracked to its core? Poet Debra Marquart sings a lament.

A one-time defender of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, the well-regarded journalist has had an extended and systematic rethink that is part memoir and part scourging critique, concluding that the reigning Israeli consensus, abetted by the U.S. and shared by liberal Zionists, is less a victim and more a provocateur, with a long list of moral and ethical lapses and a compelling case for world censure and well-deserving of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions.

Many commentators who have affirmed that something called "white rage" gave us Trump appear to treat the phenomenon as if it was a newly sprouted thing. Here is a book that aims to add nuance and historical context to a widely noted, but still too-little examined, aspect of our contemporary political reality.

Their lives crossed paths diagonally. Zola started off fatherless and poor, but through his writing eventually joined the very bourgeoisie he mocked in his early work. By contrast, Cézanne came from a wealthy banking family but rejected his privilege to focus entirely on his work, depending, often unwittingly, on the kindness of his more successful colleagues, such as Zola himself and the painter Edouard Manet.

How we feel about bologna reveals something about ourselves. The history of such seemingly mundane food can be fascinating, as is consideration of its future.

In the Levantine region of the Middle East, the Easter or Eid holidays are marked by a shortbread cookie called maamoul. Stuffed with date paste or chopped walnuts or pistachios, and dusted with powdered sugar, these buttery cookies are the perfect reward after a month of fasting during Ramadan or Lent.

Part 2 of Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix series about hip-hop’s origins continues the squandering of great material and talent.