Portside

Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head.

In the ever-evolving restaurant industry, trend forecasts range from menu tweaks to technological and social upheavals.

For the novelty fetishists, everything's new, new, new. Boston-based poet Jill McDonough shines a light on what's happening, what's coming. Only maybe not.

Were the mass 'We are Charlie' demonstrations in France in support of 'We are France,' in the best republican tradition or a shot against Muslim immigrants signifying that 'You are not?' Polymath Emmanuel Todd argues that the demonstrations, like much of Charlie Hebdo's satire, were not so much attacks on toxic religious ideology as broadly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, indicating that the vaunted French secularism has lost its solidaristic component, 'equality.'

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.

A children's book showing happy slaves in the South was pulled off the market last weekend after a major controversy about its contents. This is just the latest flareup in an ongoing dispute about books aimed at children that show slavery and racist subordination in a positive light.

The outcry over the nomination of 20 white actors, and no black ones, for the Academy Awards gained momentum Monday — Martin Luther King’s Birthday — as director Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith announced they would not be attending the ceremony on Feb. 28.

“The Civil War truly was a time when women, for the lack of a better word, came into the workplace,” says PBS chief programming executive Beth Hoppe. “It was also a time when medicine was undergoing huge changes.” Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays a nurse, said that part of what she appreciated about “Mercy Street” was getting a part in a project where women find each other in conflict over power and intellectual traditions, rather than simply for the sake of drama.

Nothing more clearly shows the absurdity and evil of the Vietnam War and yet the subsequent successful invasion of capitalism in a country ostensibly an enemy state than John Daniel's new poem.

"The proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie," Marx wrote, but the corporate class formatively battles internationally, including locating fake corporate headquarters to low-tax nations, in effect bleeding their home sovereign nations of tax dollars, starving state services and aiding in turning both governing and opposition parties into austerity regimes. This book and film chart the practice and ways to combat it.