Portside

Before the film was overshadowed by the revelation that Nate Parker was acquitted under dubious circumstances of sexual assault, The Birth of a Nation was lauded as an achievement in filmmaking. It received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox Searchlight acquired it for a record $17.5 million. Parker was praised for his visionary and brave retelling of the life of Nat Turner.

DNA bar-coding that quickly confirms or reject claims that a food product is what it purports to be are entering the market, with the promise of exposing economically motivated fraud.

At a time when representation on screen matters most, Her Story offers an authentic look at the trans experience.

In this touching, unembellished poem, Kathleen Lynch introduces the domestic situation of two people aging differently: "the man who once wanted everything" and his wife who now "wants the world."

As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.

Arlie Russell Hochschild has taken readers deep into the lives and minds of contemporary conservative voters and Donald Trump supporters. As reviewer Sean McCann shows, Hochschild's new study offers welcome insight into the forces that are driving our divisive politics.

Ava DuVernay’s new documentary chronicles how our justice system has been driven by racism from the days of slavery to today’s era of mass incarceration. The film, "13th," is named for the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery with the exception of punishment for crime.

What is the unpredictable candidate’s policy when it comes to food safety—and the regulation of fast food restaurants? If his original statement is in any way representative, he wants a lot less regulation of food, arguing that it is both burdensome to farmers and “overkill.”

The star of the new Netflix series was reimagined as a modern black champion. The show's creative team looked to current events to ground Cage in reality from a specifically African American perspective. They wanted the show to fulfill “comic-book geek sensibilities” while also digging into subjects such as police brutality, the gentrification of Harlem (where the show takes place), and even the privatization of prisons.

It's not easy to discover that a loved one holds views (prejudices) inimical to your own. The Carolina-based poet Dan Albergotti offers an exquisitely balanced portrait of what happens at such moments of discovery.