Portside

To make better fried foods, food scientists are exploring the microstructure and "tortuosity" of potato chips.

Conventional presentation aside, the sharply funny ABC sitcom explores darker family conflicts about religion and sexuality.

In the same weeks that astronomers sighted the brightest supernova and the sound of a radiation wave confirmed Einstein's gravitational theory, the poet Maggie Clark turned her eye to the human dimension and noted the death of a great poet C.D. Wright.

The following excerpt is the Foreword to America's Addiction to Terrorism. Portside is pleased to share this with our readers. In the U.S. today, the term "terrorism" conjures up images of dangerous, outside threats: religious extremists and suicide bombers in particular. Harder to see but all the more pervasive is the terrorism perpetuated by the United States, itself, whether through military force overseas or woven into the very fabric of society at home.

This new book argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was the first of the USA's modern sociologists. Du Bois's empirically-based studies of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are models of sociological research. Aldon Morris details this legacy, which academic Sociology still does not universally acknowledge. In this review, Monica Bell considers the significance of Morris's argument.

The Oscars aren’t just a competition for cultural value: They double as an assessment tool that helps pick the industry’s economic winners and losers.

A farmland mapping project by a UC Merced professor indicates that most areas of the country could feed between 80 percent and 100 percent of their populations with food grown or raised within 50 miles. The study immediately generated comment, including positive accolades from author and influencer Michael Pollan (also a UC professor). Many have noted the importance of the study in filling a research gap about local food.

The sitcom aired a powerful episode centered entirely around a family discussion of race and the criminal-justice system—a too-rare event for network TV.

Tom Karlson is not inhibited by the cliche Do not speak ill of the dead but it's still true that a certain justice of the Supreme Court is still dead.

Harper Lee's classic novel was one of hope, young hope. Her last, Go Set a Watchman, a sad acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial hate in my home state of Alabama, reveals that Atticus turns out to be a Kluxer! An example of how America, especially the American South, has yet to confront, admit, and rectify the original sin of legal racialism enshrined in our founding documents - three fifths of a person.