Portside

A century ago, Madison Grant was one of the most influential racists in the United States. Republican presidents echoed his ideas. He helped shape immigration legislation. His ideas showed up in U.S. literature and popular culture. Adolph Hitler was a fan. In this essay, Noel Hartman focuses on Grant's best-known book and reminds us how some of Grant's ideas have survived and resurfaced in our current presidential campaign.

Snowden, Oliver Stone’s new film is a perfunctory biopic about the NSA’s international surveillance programs that lacks his trademark fearlessness. The film feels trite in its efforts to depict America’s ensnarement in the creepy web of online spying.

Latin America is transforming itself into a sort of food-policy laboratory. Some of the reforms they’ve enacted have also been proposed in the United States, but have been thwarted by the food industry and its political allies. Brazil has also made huge progress against poverty and food insecurity while supporting the family farmers who produce 70 percent of the food that Brazilians eat.

In the New York Times, critic James Poniewozik wrote, “Representing more people in more ways is the right thing to do, and it has made TV better. But it happened largely because there was money in it.”

Seattle poet Jed Myers writes about "a man/who’d left his house in rubble, crossed a plain and then a sea, gone north without a plan,/now faced a razor wire fence..." It's a story of upheaval, a refugee, a stalemate, all too familiar this sad saga.

While Michael Walzer's book on religious revivalism is acknowledged by the reviewers as a critical engagement and characteristically insightful, they also fault the author for wrongly diagnosing its effects and its prescription. In a link (below the review) Walzer replies, as do the reviewers.

This young Toronto-based poet won a place on the best-seller lists with her epigrammatic, haiku-like poetry that sometimes addresses emotionally difficult subjects. This is an unusual accomplishment for poetry in today's culture. Here is this remarkable writer's story.

It is the festival's Documentary Programme that offers the most bang for the buck. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, about urban activist Jane Jacobs who saved New York neighborhoods in the 60s; it’s been awhile since we’ve seen a film about the revered muckraker, but All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone will once again raise the issue of truth in the media; the Canadian doc Black Code exposes how governments use the Internet to spy.

FX’s new comedy Better Things, created by and starring Louie’s Pamela Adlon, is an acerbic look at the life of a working actress raising three children.

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by China's military forces, no longer attract much editorial space, but the protests for freedom and the massacre that followed linger in history and in the conscience of the California poet Patrick Daly.