Portside

The FDA announced that it will withdraw its approval for three chemicals used to make grease, stain, and water repelling food packaging and consider banning seven food additives used in both “artificial” and “natural” flavors. This raises much larger questions about one of the agencies with the most control over the safety of what we eat.

For voters who’ve been around for a few decades, this election season has often been an agonizing time-loop back to the nineteen-nineties, to old debates, to long-dormant controversies, especially when it comes to Hillary Clinton. If you’re seeking perspective, I have an offbeat suggestion: go to Hulu, then watch one of the most indelible episodes of “A Different World”: “The Little Mister,” from 1992.

Stewart Acuff, national organizer for 1199, brings a poet's eye to the struggle for social justice. Fear, he says, is "our humanity overcoming that fear."

On the morning of November 22, 1963, President Kennedy told his wife Jackie as they started for Dallas, where he would later be assassinated, "We're heading into nut country today." The city was full of reactionary Kennedy haters, led by powerful ultraconservatives who would eventually remake the Republican party in their image. The book under review charts what made Dallas a hub of far-right activism back then, shedding light on today's national political landscape.

This new memoir by pop culture and music critic Rashod Ollison is about growing up with rhythm and blues, and, writes reviewer Reginald Harris, "about the role of music in the lives of everyday music lovers, as both a consolation and a vision of a possible different future." Ollison writes about coming of age, coming to terms with his sexuality, and about what his early twin loves, literature and music, taught him.

The New York Times, which historically tends to ignore Chomsky, ran a prominent review in its Arts section, going so far as to praise the film and calling Requiem a "well-paced and cogent seminar." Reviewer Daniel Gold writes, "citing Aristotle, Adam Smith and James Madison, among others, he melds history, philosophy and ideology into a sobering vision of a society in an accelerating decline.

The New York-based nonprofit, Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, has recruited thousands of volunteers to help it work with organizations that have leftover food for institutions like homeless shelters and food pantries. The organization has “rescued” and donated 290,000 pounds of food since it started in late 2012.

Insider jokes, hedge fund titans, financial jargon – creators have all the ingredients of a compelling financial suspense storyline.

Climate change; glacial melting: Northern California poet Kirk Glaser depicts what's already happening, forecasts where we're all heading.

Hardly a comic book and without the obesseive psychologizing common to many biographies and biopics, the work under review portrays the subject, the martyred German revolutionary marxist Rosa Luxemburg, with a vividness and drama that engrosses the reader even as it explains and elucidates a cogent political worldview that was for too long relatively foreign to the American left.