Portside

Last year also saw the launch of Portside Culture, with reviews, news and analysis on the arts and letters. The service Portside provides is in greater demand. Thousands are discovering that there is a Left in the US, and our daily posts help give a sense of its real scope. We turn for you to help because as we grow, so do our financial needs. We will continue, but to measure up to a re- charged and re-vitalized movement, your contributions will make all the difference.

Like the people within, immigrant detention centers are often invisible as well. Photos and drawings of these places are rarely public; access is even more limited. Canada has three designated immigrant prisons, and it also rents beds in government-run prisons to house over one-third of its detainees. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention begins to strip away at this invisibility.

Here is a necessary addition to the literature on FBI harassment of Americans and on U.S. social movements over the last century.

Chi-Raq begins with a devastating overture, Pray 4 My City, with the lyrics printed directly on the screen, impossible to ignore. 'I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq,' it concludes, using the controversial nickname given to the city where gun deaths outnumber those in America’s foreign wars. Narrator Dolmedes, Samuel L Jackson, explains that communities under siege aren’t a new phenomenon, and explains how previous authors wrote about such tales.

To combat the voices of health advocates who expressed concerns on the health effects of the Standard American Diet, which is high in processed foods, the food industry cast doubt and reframed the conversation on processed foods.

This new series on Amazon imagines a world in which the Axis powers triumphed in World War II and carved up America into three zones: the Greater Nazi Reich in the East and Midwest, ruled from New York; the Japanese Pacific States, ruled from San Francisco; and a derelict neutral zone splitting them, running roughly along the Rocky Mountains.

From Alexis Rhone Fancher"s State of Grace (2015), an elegy to her son Joshua, we find compassion mixed with irony, grief with dark humor, as the poet's life must go in an absurd world.

If you're looking for something special for the holiday table, Meg Favreau has some suggestions from her collection of 1970s and 1980s locally printed cookbooks. These books, she says, are "a window into what communities actually eat – not the idealized version of the area’s cuisine you see in a “real” regional cookbook." Recipes for eggless applesauce squares, the "ribsticker," and gumdrop bread can be found on the article's original website.

'So I’m not going to write a review about 'Suffragette', because I’m no longer going to legitimize films that refuse to acknowledge the existence of people of color. And neither should you'.

In the 1980s and 90s, science rediscovered the existence of umami and in 2002 identified its taste receptor. And, as they say, the rest was history. Not only has umami been universally recognized in sensory science, it’s become the darling of professionals looking to enhance the taste of savory foods. Umami can be leveraged, not just for tastier foods, but for healthier ones.