Portside

The future of the sketch series Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace has become a political flashpoint for the subversive network.

The opening scenes of After Fire, the new documentary about the struggles faced by women veterans after they leave military service, make a case for its importance through statistics. Viewers are informed that women are the fastest growing group of veterans, and that one in five veterans are women.

As the anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination returns in a month of political trauma, Peter Neil Carroll's "JFK" reflects on the loss of possibility and the hope for renewal.

With the far right now soon to command government, ongoing movements are also growing to challenge corporate domination, white supremacy, environmental degradation, union busting and organize workers in low-paid industries. Written before the November election, Sarah Jaffe's book chronicles these and other struggles, letting the activists--many new to politics-speak, and suggesting the fight for social and economic justice is ongoing, no matter which party reigns.

This novel by Paul Beatty won England's Man Booker Prize last month. He is the first American writer to ever win the award. Here is a review of the book.

Ever since his workshop days in Japan, gunpowder artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, has been obsessed with creating a Ladder In The Sky, exploring ways to create a structure that could hang in the air and support a series of fuses. Each time he found a sponsor to underwrite the Ladder something fell through, Finally, as shown in the film, he decided to pay for the experiment himself, to create it in the fishing village on Huiyu Island, Gwanhzhu, where his grandmother was born.

The Real Junk Food Project (RJFP), which organizes networks of cafes and shops to sell ‘waste’ food recovered from supermarkets and restaurants, has launched over 120 eateries in seven countries from Israel to Australia, and the movement is gathering pace.

As the creator of a program that has become a vital example both of the transgender rights movement’s growing steam and of streaming television’s revolutionary power, “Transparent” creator, writer, and director Jill Soloway has become something of a lightning rod, too. As beloved as “Transparent” is, the show has also received criticism for the casting of a cisgender man (Jeffrey Tambor) as a transgender woman.

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

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.