Portside

This new survey of a 50-year arc of Latin America's recent history comes from the pen of one of our most esteemed Marxist historians. Reviewer Tony Wood offers this informative review.

If “Captain Fantastic” doesn’t cram all of human experience into that box we like to call the dysfunctional family — a category that suggests that all anyone needs to get through Thanksgiving is therapy talk and a group hug — it’s partly because its characters have politics, not simply feelings. The Cash children stumble, but they’re supremely capable and self-aware. What makes them unusual isn’t their knife skills; it’s that they talk seriously about ideas.

New research reveals that 39% of consumers use nutritional and performance drinks as a replacement for breakfast. What’s more, three in five (58%) consumers currently use nutritional and performance drinks as a meal replacement and 48% consume them as part of a meal, up from just 20% who used nutritional drinks as a meal supplement in 2012.

From Halt and Catch Fire to The Americans, some of "the best television of the moment is mining the fairly recent past in a meaningful way." Critic Meghan Lewit on what nostalgia for the 1980s and '90s might tell us about who we are now.

After the murders, poet Anita Barrows addresses this elegy to a survivor, Diamond Lavish Reynolds, asking "how can we make your tears not/another deleted narrative?"

The Council on Foreign Relations is a supercharged, highly connected establishment think tank. While producing reports and staffing varied policy working-groups, its recommendations are invariably market-based. CFR leaders and members pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter which party holds power. The book under review, Wall Street's Think Tank, charts the council's key links to US imperial policy.

This new book by Enzo Traverso is "a master class in historical analysis," writes reviewer Alan Wald. This "full-on riveting reconceptualization of 1914-1945 as a 'European Civil War,"' he adds, "is a benchmark achievement in the flowering of socialist scholarship by the generation identifying with May 1968."

Boal’s litigation is supported by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “We firmly stand with Mr. Boal in his effort to protect these tapes,” says the organization’s executive director Bruce Brown. “Well-established law recognizes that journalists cannot do their jobs to keep the public informed if they cannot work free from government interference.”

Can plant-based burgers really replace the real thing, especially for someone who enjoys meat? Here's what Ione author found in serious taste tests.

Taking over Stephen Colbert’s Late Show to blast Fox News, the former ‘Daily Show’ host was unapologetically partisan while also seeking to build bridges.