Portside

The poet Martin Espada, called the North American Pablo Neruda, turns his eye to the continuing murders of non-white peoples and asks how people in the future will look back at our times, wondering "how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them."

Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined...In 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate...by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. [*]

Most university teachers in the United States are part time, contingent employees. Their job title of "adjunct" is added to term designating academic rank (lecturer, assistant professor), but carries no job rights, benefits, or expectation of continued employment beyond the present semester. Most full time "academic" jobs are now held by administrators. How did we get here? Benjamin Ginsberg considers these questions, as Matthew Abraham explains.

Chefs are using neurograstronomy to change the way your brain perceives flavor to create a dining experiences on the frontier of gastronomic science, a place where brain, body, and nutrition intersect.

Celebrating a progressive South means supporting the whole economy of practices that enabled our traditions in the first place. That means supporting the actual communities and the actual restaurants that have been here—that made this place a here in to begin with.

Rather than just as solely a psychologically tortured individual, it’s probably more useful to see the Punisher as a cipher onto which we collectively project our ambivalence about veterans.

Love, sex, and feminism intertwine in Ohio poet Louise Robertson's wry poetic observations.

It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions. On closing these books many readers will feel that the only way out of the Vatican impasse would be to wind up the territory's anomalous statehood, hand it over to the Italian government and free the Church and above all Pope Francis to get on with their Christian mission. Right...

A new book about the abolitionist movement puts African Americans in the center of the history of our country's movement to end slavery.

There is something deeply shameful in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic. ​The new film "Nina" proves that the world still isn’t ready to tell her story.