Portside

The UK poet Jane Spiro, a seasoned traveler and keen observer, reminds us that pleasure, wisdom and all good things depend on knowing "where to look."

Legendary rock star Patti Smith's look back expresses supremely well the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard from again, never perhaps even hear from the deepest part of oneself again. For a book that ends in success, it is acutely sensitive to that abyss of failure that haunts the attempt to become any kind of artist.

Pro baseball player and coach Dusty Baker was a teenage rock and roller. His new memoir details those years, centered on the legendary Monterey Pop Festival, where Jimi Hendrix played his way to stardom. Charles Bethea profiles Baker in advance of his memoir of those year of hanging out with a host of legendary musicians and learning how rock and roll is like baseball.

Director Jay Roach, known for lighter fare like the Austin Powers series and Meet The Fockers, has taken on a heady subject, no less than the most famous communist in Hollywood history – Dalton Trumbo.

With an ambitious new visual-journalism unit at The Intercept, the Citizenfour director, Laura Poitras, is planning to take non-fiction film-making into the unknown.

The government’s 2015 dietary guidelines currently in preparation by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have triggered a ferocious food industry backlash.

“It’s an enormously popular show, and up until this current season it was taking place predominantly in the Middle East/Islamic world region, and depicting that region in a very particular way that reinforces this mythological stereotype that exists in a lot of the Western world.” - Heba Amin, associate professor at the American University in Cairo

Eric Garner, a sometime gardener who was killed by a New York City policeman's choke hold in 2014, lives on in Ross Gay's plain tribute to a man who worked with his hands.

The spread of capitalism as a global system and neoliberalism as its dominant economic policy has its analogue in the triumph of English as its undisputed enabling linguistic. The book under review argues that not only is this single-language sway historically unprecedented in allowing universal communication, but that its flattening effects on native languages and national discourse come with their own disabling downsides.

The Man Booker prize, given annually for best English language novel published in the United Kingdom, was awarded this week to Marlon James, for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. He is the first writer from Jamaica to win the prize. The novel is a tale of 1970s-1980s Jamaica, CIA plots, and violence. It is "a story about Jamaica that doesn’t only take place in Jamaica," says Kei Miller, who reviewed the novel late last year.