Portside

Extinction: Lisa Allen Ortiz, child of Mendocino county, California knows a thing or two about birds and about how precarious are the lives of many species, speaks of our impending "civic sorrow."

Through the use of family archives and other new sources, the grandson of Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci seeks to reconstruct the cultural and political saliance of his grandfather's contributions to building and defending the Italian working class movement and international socialism in the face of Stalinist distortions, capitalist enmity and today's reactionary Russian regime.

In reviewing two new books on the 20th Century's intertwined histories of labor, the Democratic Party, the Civil Rights movement, and the African American people, Rich Yeselson offers a nuanced and deeply informed assessment of this complicated tale.

Washington’s and Davis’ reprisals of their superb 2010 Broadway performances, do not disappoint. Washington takes us on an episodic journey through love, pain, betrayal and redemption, and with such heavy topics, the audience will struggle through it. With performances that will literally take your breath away, Fences is a must-see film offering a timeless critique of a family trying to determine who should be on each side of the fence, one fence post at a time.

Daniel Duane examines how a shy Ph.D. in English literature revolutionized the science of cooking and became revered in the most famous kitchens in the world.

The latest episode of the ABC sitcom expresses anger at the election’s outcome. It also insists on empathy.

"Imagine--a woman in the White House." As Florida poet Meryl Stratford implies about her pre-feminist mother--"It wasn’t worth the argument"-- of just how hard it is to change someone's mind when it comes to voting!

Michael Yates has produced a primer on inequality for our times. Steve Early takes a look.

The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.

La La Land is not, in the end, so very different from Whiplash (an earlier Chazelle film) for all their tonal differences. Above all, the vision they paint of the artistic life is masculine. In Damien Chazelle’s movies, men have power, and they get (almost) everything they want... And women? All they get to do is listen.