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

Peter Bradshaw The 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 The 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 The 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.

Food Preferences Learned in Social Contexts

Jim Logan Noozhawk
A main finding from this research is that babies learning about food is fundamentally social. When they see someone eat a food, they can use the person’s reaction to the food to learn about the food itself, such as whether it is edible, and also to learn about the people who are eating the food.

You Do Not Have the Right to Remain Silent (a Rant)

Terry Adams World of Change edited by David Madgalene
Poet Terry Adams lives in the house formerly occupied by the hipster Ken Kesey, famous for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the influence of the latter on the former may give a clue for understanding the style and point of Adams’s poem dealing with the rights and wrongs of the universe.