Portside

How Prohibition helped create today's "War on Drugs" infrastructure.

After premiering to prolonged standing ovations and plenty of critical acclaim, the slave revolt drama, Birth of a Nation, set off the fiercest bidding war Sundance has ever seen. Fox Searchlight has come out on top, landing the drama in a record-breaking $17.5 million deal, the biggest purchase in Sundance history.

In a not-so-distant future, Norway has elected a radical branch of the Green Party, and its charismatic new prime minister shuts down the country’s supply of oil and gas to continental Europe. Despite an impending climate crisis, the EU is none too pleased with this overnight weaning from petrol, and invites Russia to offer Norway “technical assistance” in restoring its fossil fuel production. Russian gunships descend on Norway’s oil platforms.

Chicago poet Nathan Hoks shows a keen understanding of bad things going on in our times and then takes it all a surreal step beyond or maybe not.

The last posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens's essays we are likely to see, the book under review shows the incomparable polemicist moved from being a practicing Trotskyist (though he never practiced enough to get good at it) to cosying up to the Washington neocons.

Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head.

In the ever-evolving restaurant industry, trend forecasts range from menu tweaks to technological and social upheavals.

For the novelty fetishists, everything's new, new, new. Boston-based poet Jill McDonough shines a light on what's happening, what's coming. Only maybe not.

Were the mass 'We are Charlie' demonstrations in France in support of 'We are France,' in the best republican tradition or a shot against Muslim immigrants signifying that 'You are not?' Polymath Emmanuel Todd argues that the demonstrations, like much of Charlie Hebdo's satire, were not so much attacks on toxic religious ideology as broadly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, indicating that the vaunted French secularism has lost its solidaristic component, 'equality.'

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.