Portside

A democratic foreign policy or empire building as central to U.S. action abroad? It's an old debate. Author Stephen Kinzer sees the alternatives set at the turn of the 20th century, when imperium boosters Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and William Randolph Hearst squared off against Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. Here, Kinzer is queried about his analysis and his thinking on just where Trump and his malignant "America First" grandiloquence stand.

This first of two projected volumes of a new biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee takes his story to the end of 1968. It offers some surprises about this significant, and some would say underrated, politician.

Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.

Making meat and other animal food products that look and taste the same, but don’t necessitate the use of living creatures is the mission of New Harvest, a New York–based non-profit.

The show remains as smart, savvy, and blockheaded as ever.

With the poet's thanks and apologies to Walt Whitman, Dan La Botz captures the spirit of resistance in today's America and reaffirms the importance of speaking up and marching, marching, marching. Note the poem below is also translated into Spanish and French.

If you go by Western press accounts, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a strutting peacock of the Trump school of self-reflection, or maybe a classic strongman, with the caveat that he's no twit. The book under review presents Putin as more acted upon than actor, more puppet to internal and external forces than puppet master, a formidable tactician but with no grand strategy, no end-game. In other words, a politician.

In the age of "fake news" and other mysterious media distortions, this book reminds us of a "simpler" time. Joel Whitney offers a new history of how, beginning in the late 1940s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) simply (if much of the time secretly), paid writers, musicians, and artists, and sponsored publications, concerts, exhibitions, and cultural institutions as part of its Cold War arsenal.

The story behind the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011—the struggle of class forces--has been told in some detail in several books, but a new film, Divided We Fall, supplies the crucial elements of drama that few of us in the marching crowds understood at the time. It is also a wonderful re-enactment of the whole scene, bringing to life the drama and months’ long glory of a fightback that mirrored and mirrors so many anti-austerity struggles across the world.

Recent experiments show how sound can interplay with your sense of smell—and, thus, flavor—in the brain