Portside

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.

HBO’s latest web-series acquisition eschews Brooklyn for a queer, multiracial, multiethnic arts landscape in Chicago. Welcome to Fatimah Asghar and Sam Bailey’s world.

A native of Chicago, the poet Philip C. Kolin laments how the City of Broad Shoulders has become a death trap for the young.

Naomi Klein, the author of No Logos and other sharp critiques of capitalist culture and power, offers in her latest publication an in-depth elaboration of the book's title and a call-to-arms for a resistance that goes beyond criticism of Trump's malign politics to the need for mobilization on hundreds of viable and necessary fronts.

This new book joins a growing literature that takes a look at and tries to uncover the roots of today's right wing movement.

Classism, racism, and sexism in the age of (Ivanka) Trump are on full display in the film's clash of sage-burning touchy-feely types versus captains of industry.

There are at least 200 compounds contributing to the flavor of chiles and they all have a different effect. Capsaicin is the most common, first to be discovered, and hottest of the capsaicinoid family, but every chile contains a somewhat different mix of capsaicin, dihydrocapsaicin, nordihydrocapsaicin, homodihydrocapsaicin, nornordihydrocapsaicin, and quite a few others.