Portside

Scientists know that we have taste receptors for fatty acids in our mouths and intestines. They are studying if fat meets the criteria to qualify as a primary taste along with sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami.

Coney Island's standing for some 147 years as inspiration for artists, from its inception as an elite seaside resort through its days as an entertainment mecca and leisure refuge for New York's working people, up to its more recent decline and the closing in 2008 of Astroland, its last iconic amusement park.

It's clear that President Obama out-organized his opponents in both of his runs for president. But how did he do it? Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han, in Groundbreakers, shows us how. As Andrew Mayersohn notes in this review, "giving people meaningful responsibilities is a powerful way to engage them and keep them engaged." This is a vital lesson in politics, one that Team Obama, in two national campaigns, realized with spectacular results.

“Taxi” is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s third film since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda. He was barred from making films for 20 years, from leaving the country and from speaking to the foreign media. He got around some of these restrictions this time by filming inside a taxi driving through the streets of Tehran, producing a beautifully humane fable. "Taxi" took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Yet another bio-engineered solution without (much of) a problem: inserting extra genes into apples turns off the enzyme responsible for apples turning brown.

With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Fifty years after his assassination, this poem honors El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (aka Malcolm X)

Popular culture may be getting more diverse in terms of gender and skin color, but it's still mostly flat in presenting diverse human qualities and differences. Few characters play against type, which makes the exceptions all the more remarkable. Part of the power of characters playing against type is simply their insistence, humorous and without qualified explanation, of their existence. In other words, like most of comedy, its power is better experienced, not explained

Last week Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. It had been nominated in both poetry and criticism, the first book to be so doubly nominated. A bold, book of experimental writing that takes on the "invisible" practices of everyday person-to-person, interactive racism, Rankine's book is as illuminating as it is, at times, wrenching. Here Parul Sehgal guides us through this outstanding work of contemporary literature.

"India’s Daughter", Leslee Udwin's stirring documentation of the brutal rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, has been banned by the Indian government claiming the film is an international conspiracy to defame India and incites violence against women. The efforts to suppress the film are backfiring, creating what is being called an 'Arab spring for gender equality in India'.