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Commemorating Peace

Jan Barry Portside.org
Jan Barry, poet and longtime activist in Veterans for Peace, puts the Veterans Day holiday in its historical and spiritual perspective.

Inside the Sacrifice Zone

Nathaniel Rich The New York Review of Books
We know the rancid politics of the Tea Party, but what is behind the thinking of white, rural and hard-scrabble far-right supporters whose economic self-interests are at odds with their hard-right political and social beliefs. Berkeley sociologist Hochschild spent five years doing field research in western Louisiana, describing what people say, how they live, reconciling their contradictions and what lessons can be learned by knowing these people in a deeper way.

The Hope of a Suggestion

M. Sophia Newman The Millions
A new book of essays by one of this country's most celebrated poets.

Another human food trend impacts pet food: pseudoscience

Debbie Phillips-Donaldson Pet Food Industry
Pseudoscience is perpetuated by self-declared experts with no scientific background or understanding of food science, or even scientists with credentials but who conduct poor, unscientifically sound research and spread unreliable, false or even debunked results. The trend has hit the pet food industry.

The Best Show on TV Right Now is About Living Carless in the Suburbs

Ben Adler Grist
The best show on TV right now is about working-class African-Americans in the Southern suburbs, and it highlights one of the country’s biggest, least-appreciated problems: living without a car in the midst of sprawl. The show demonstrates the suburbanization of poverty, including how hard it is for people in low-income neighborhoods to get to their jobs.

How We Win

William Taylor Jr. portside.org
San Francisco poet William Taylor Jr. writes in the spirit of Beat poetry, finding sly ways of survival and triumph in an often dreary, hostile world.

A Solid Trump Exposé That Gives Hillary a Pass

Michael Hirsch New Politics
A new book on Donald Trump is as revealing of the foibles and dangers of this reactionary, mysogynistic megalomanic as any honest and brutal piece of opposition research can be. It's also a latent warning of how a future hard right candidate might succeed absent Trump's egregious vulnerabilities. The reviewer faults the book for what it doesn't offer and some readers might expect; any indication that centrist Hillary Clinton is no sure friend of working people.

Edward Albee’s Beautiful Venom

Shehryar Fazli Los Angeles Review of Books
Edward Albee, who died September 16 at age 88, was a major force in U.S. literature and one of the American theater's most significant playwrights. In this essay, Shehryar Fazli offers some insight into Albee's art by focusing our attention on his landmark 1963 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

'Loving' Review: Civil Rghts Tale Marries Heartfelt Drama With Too Much Restraint

Peter Bradshaw Guardian
“The Crime of Being Married.” So read the headline that accompanied photos of Richard Loving, a Southern “white trash” construction worker, and his African-American wife Mildred... "Loving" audiences will watch Jeff Nichols’ nobly hatred-proof period romance, as it dramatises and gives due mythological prominence to a remarkable legal case which helped change America’s ugly Jim Crow race laws in the 50s and 60s.