Portside

For the author of the work under review--much heralded by the reviewer--Czech novelist Franz Kafka was no chronic pessimist or dour, fatalistic misbeliever in human emancipation, but a consistent partisan artist siding with the humiliated.

In HBO's film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn about the miraculous clump of cells that changed medical science forever before really learning about the person who made and was killed by them. In 1951, a 31-year-old African American woman named Henrietta Lacks learned she was dying of cervical cancer. She sought treatment from a then-segregated Johns Hopkins Medical Center where a piece of her tumor was removed without her knowledge for ongoing research.

Gordon Shepherd’s compact Neuroenology is a straightforwardly didactic exercise, tightly focused on wine. It's a companion to his previous work, Neurogastronomy (2012), a well-received study of “how the brain creates flavor,” mostly about food. Lots of wine drinkers, and even wine writers, don’t know some of the facts about wine sensation that Shepherd wants us to learn.

In the wrenching fifth episode of the series, Reggie gets into a fight with a white character who uses the N-word at a party, then winds up held at gunpoint by the campus police. As Richardson explained, the episode, which was directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, rejiggered the structure of the show and forced the writers to figure out a new way forward.

Our ship of state, writes Berkeley poet Susan Cohen, may be facing extinction, but there's no practical escape that will suffice; alternatively, we may resist.

Writer, poet, college teacher, political activist, peace agitator and feminist,Grace Paley was a well-known and highly respected commodity to those of us active in left protest during the 1960 and much later. This new collection of her writings should remind us of what we justifiably admired most, not just her talent as a writer but her commitment to the struggle and the long haul.

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.