Portside

"Imagine--a woman in the White House." As Florida poet Meryl Stratford implies about her pre-feminist mother--"It wasn’t worth the argument"-- of just how hard it is to change someone's mind when it comes to voting!

Michael Yates has produced a primer on inequality for our times. Steve Early takes a look.

The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.

La La Land is not, in the end, so very different from Whiplash (an earlier Chazelle film) for all their tonal differences. Above all, the vision they paint of the artistic life is masculine. In Damien Chazelle’s movies, men have power, and they get (almost) everything they want... And women? All they get to do is listen.

With coeliac disease and wheat allergy affecting only 1.2% of the population, why is it that an estimated 15% of UK adults and an astonishing 29% of US adults are trying to avoid gluten?

The BBC show seems to have difficulty fitting female characters into its universe. But it isn’t Arthur Conan Doyle’s fault.

Poet Tessara Dudley speaks of vulnerability, the burden of being "not"--"we will know every word we speak is true/we will know every word counts for nothing."

The interviewer doesn't exaggerate in ranking W.E.B Du Bois as the 20th century's pre-eminent African-American author and thinker, crediting his founding and stewardship of the NAACP's The Crisis with granting him not just an agenda-setting role in civil-rights history but also international influence. Before going into detail with the biographer, he also praises Mullen for a work that is a timely introduction to this impressive and somewhat imposing figure.

In the 1970s a group of African American experimental jazz improvisors organized musician-sponsored concerts in a network of lower Manhattan lofts. The music they produced was not only sonically adventurous, much of it was also driven by a host of social concerns. Michael Heller has published a new history of this movement. Michael J. Agovino helps guide us through this important cultural moment.

It feels perfectly appropriate that in 2016, a mortifying examination of one man’s ego played a role in the election of America’s next president. Weiner is a depressing pile-up of the year’s governing impulses: the media’s veneration of scandal, the increasing shamelessness of the country’s politicians, and Weiner’s quiet, ashamed delight in his own continued relevance.