Portside

Entering its third season, the ’80s-set AMC show portrays the tech world with nuanced, character-driven narratives that its rivals lack.

This poem is about flowers. Or maybe not only about flowers. Or maybe not. But Cortney Lamar Charleston's poem will make you think twice or even more times if it's about flowers. Or not.

Even in the era of the Beatles and Motown's roster of stars, the brilliant James Brown established a place that was his alone. His was not about magic, it was about power that could not be denied by anyone brought within its field of influence. What the book's author also finds is a wary solitariness that paradoxically found its fullest expression in Brown's ability to give himself so completely in performance to suggest a generosity approaching self-immolation.

The upsurge in interest in the ideas of Socialism also means a reassessment of its traditions. Jack Ross offers a new, ambitious attempt to come to terms with the history of the Socialist Party in the United States, an organization, and movement, whose story is one of this country's modern legends. In this review, Harold Meyerson, who, as he points out, was a part of this history, takes a look.

Dave’s Killer Bread, POP! Gourmet Foods, and other food companies are helping people with criminal records overcome the barriers to employment they often face.

Jayro Bustamante‘s debut feature “Ixcanul” generates its power from an intimate observance of the quotidian. As such, its titular volcano — the translation of Ixcanul in the Mayan K’iche’ dialect spoken in Guatemala — is the least volcanic thing in it. Steeped in a culture rarely observed on screen and filmed entirely in Kaqchikel, Bustamante’s film explores a clash between reproductive rights and tradition.

Hip-hop has always been queer. Some of its very first hitmakers were part of, if not closely adjacent to, queer communities, and some of its first musical and technical innovations premiered at gay clubs. But it's not the history fans usually read.

Haecceity is derived from a medieval philosophical word meaning the "property" of something that makes it unique to itself--in the case of Joshua Clover's poem, the meaning of the word and principle of "Revolution."

Labor historian E.P. Thompson is perhaps best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. The collected essays reviewed here, many either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963. They show Thompson as also a dedicated educator of workers, a sharp polemicist, a skilled political theorist and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons and for a rebirth of the socialist project.

Much of the political debate this election season concerns who will win the support of working class white voters. At the same time, as Alec MacGillis notes in this review of two new books on the history and present conditions of this sector of the population, much of this discourse strains under the influence of condescension, sentimentalism, and a host of explicitly or implicitly stated biases.