Portside

When Obama took office, it seemed that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House. The Big Food stepped in.

When Obama took office, it seemed that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House. The Big Food stepped in.

The pilot of Good Girls Revolt does a good job of setting the scene for why the women decide to sue in the first place, even if the gender discrimination lawsuit that inspired the series isn’t even mentioned as a possibility until episode two.

In this time of pipeline protests in the Dakotas, poet Carol Denney sings her lyrics of a familiar ecological catastrophe: “they tear through our mountains/they tear through our town/after the damage/they’re nowhere around.”

Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

This new book details a little-known aspect of the leaders of Nazi Germany: that many of them, including Hitler himself, were drug addicts. Rachel Cooke has interviewed author Norman Ohler and gives us this portrait.

In the stellar documentary "Fire at Sea" Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate thousands of migrants landing on the shores of a Sicilian island with the everyday existence of the locals.

A main finding from this research is that babies learning about food is fundamentally social. When they see someone eat a food, they can use the person’s reaction to the food to learn about the food itself, such as whether it is edible, and also to learn about the people who are eating the food.

Poet Terry Adams lives in the house formerly occupied by the hipster Ken Kesey, famous for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the influence of the latter on the former may give a clue for understanding the style and point of Adams’s poem dealing with the rights and wrongs of the universe.

The reviewer faults the book's author for deflating both Marx's and the author's own earlier stance as a creative British Marxist historian of the working class. While the reviewer grants that Jones offers solid accounts of developments in the British working class movement and in European radical politics that made the First International possible, he faults Jones for relying on a narrow reading of Marx's political economy at the expense of its revolutionary core.