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How We Win

William Taylor Jr. portside.org
San Francisco poet William Taylor Jr. writes in the spirit of Beat poetry, finding sly ways of survival and triumph in an often dreary, hostile world.

A Solid Trump Exposé That Gives Hillary a Pass

Michael Hirsch New Politics
A new book on Donald Trump is as revealing of the foibles and dangers of this reactionary, mysogynistic megalomanic as any honest and brutal piece of opposition research can be. It's also a latent warning of how a future hard right candidate might succeed absent Trump's egregious vulnerabilities. The reviewer faults the book for what it doesn't offer and some readers might expect; any indication that centrist Hillary Clinton is no sure friend of working people.

Edward Albee’s Beautiful Venom

Shehryar Fazli Los Angeles Review of Books
Edward Albee, who died September 16 at age 88, was a major force in U.S. literature and one of the American theater's most significant playwrights. In this essay, Shehryar Fazli offers some insight into Albee's art by focusing our attention on his landmark 1963 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

'Loving' Review: Civil Rghts Tale Marries Heartfelt Drama With Too Much Restraint

Peter Bradshaw Guardian
“The Crime of Being Married.” So read the headline that accompanied photos of Richard Loving, a Southern “white trash” construction worker, and his African-American wife Mildred... "Loving" audiences will watch Jeff Nichols’ nobly hatred-proof period romance, as it dramatises and gives due mythological prominence to a remarkable legal case which helped change America’s ugly Jim Crow race laws in the 50s and 60s.

Why Did the Obamas Fail to Take On Corporate Agriculture?

Michael Pollan New York Times
When Obama took office, it seemed that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House. The Big Food stepped in.

Why Did the Obamas Fail to Take On Corporate Agriculture?

Michael Pollan New York Times
When Obama took office, it seemed that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House. The Big Food stepped in.

They’re Building a Pipeline

Carol Denney Youtube
In this time of pipeline protests in the Dakotas, poet Carol Denney sings her lyrics of a familiar ecological catastrophe: “they tear through our mountains/they tear through our town/after the damage/they’re nowhere around.”

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

Walter Johnson Boston Review
Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

High Hitler: How Nazi Drug Abuse Steered the Course of History

Rachel Cooke The Guardian
This new book details a little-known aspect of the leaders of Nazi Germany: that many of them, including Hitler himself, were drug addicts. Rachel Cooke has interviewed author Norman Ohler and gives us this portrait.