Portside

Some grated Parmesan suppliers have been mislabeling products by filling them with too much cellulose, a common anti-clumping agent made from wood pulp.

Last summer’s surprise hit returns to NBC, tackling infidelity and Bill Cosby in its first two episodes.

On February 28 2016, Delmer Berg of northern California died. He was last known veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--the 2800 American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Here is a tribute for them all.

Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.

One of the cornerstones of the campaign Senator Bernie Sanders is waging for the presidency is his opposition to our corrupt campaign finance laws. He often names the Koch brothers as a prime exhibit of the dangers of unregulated big money in politics, and for good reason. In her new book, Jane Mayer traces how the Koch brothers are trying to buy our politics. Greg Waldmann introduces us to what Mayer has found.

To make better fried foods, food scientists are exploring the microstructure and "tortuosity" of potato chips.

Conventional presentation aside, the sharply funny ABC sitcom explores darker family conflicts about religion and sexuality.

In the same weeks that astronomers sighted the brightest supernova and the sound of a radiation wave confirmed Einstein's gravitational theory, the poet Maggie Clark turned her eye to the human dimension and noted the death of a great poet C.D. Wright.

The following excerpt is the Foreword to America's Addiction to Terrorism. Portside is pleased to share this with our readers. In the U.S. today, the term "terrorism" conjures up images of dangerous, outside threats: religious extremists and suicide bombers in particular. Harder to see but all the more pervasive is the terrorism perpetuated by the United States, itself, whether through military force overseas or woven into the very fabric of society at home.

This new book argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was the first of the USA's modern sociologists. Du Bois's empirically-based studies of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are models of sociological research. Aldon Morris details this legacy, which academic Sociology still does not universally acknowledge. In this review, Monica Bell considers the significance of Morris's argument.