Portside

The English poet John Daniel provides a perfect Mother's Day memory of his hard-working Mum, Violet Daniel, who defied the usual expectations of mothering. Happy Mothers Day!

The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.

The new documentary film Solitary goes inside a supermax prison to discover what it’s like being in solitary confinement—a practice experts now describe as unnecessary and prisoners say is torture.

Child nutrition reauthorization draft calls for increases in school breakfast reimbursement and other compromises included in the Senate draft, but also raises the threshold for CEO eligibility

The PBS-aired educational program 3-2-1 Contact was one of the best things on TV in the 1980s.

Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax throws a cold eye on this year's election: her conclusion is chilling.

In the period between the world wars, Stefan Zweig was among the world's best-known authors. His books would soon fuel Nazi bonfires. Zweig held that humanity could no longer afford the belligerent nationalism that had led them into the Great War. Yet Zweig was struck dumb by post 1933 events. That failure, the reviewer says, was of imagination, not nerve. Against the Nazis' depredations, all the consummate writer and speaker could muster was nostalgia for a lost world.

This new book by a retired Army colonel and emeritus professor of history at Boston University tells the story of decades of US policy failures in the Middle East.

The new Mapplethorpe film begins with the voice of Senator Jesse Helms exhorting everyone to, "Look at the pictures!" He was protesting an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's work that he viewed as pornographic, and we see the conservative politician waving what he viewed as smut, seeking to inflame the culture wars, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe had died just a few months prior at the age of 42 of AIDS. That protest turned out to solidify the artist's legend.

The flourishing of soul food’s sub-genres has been fun to watch (and eat), but it has also meant that fewer African-American chefs are embracing traditional soul food. Some side-step the cuisine in order to avoid being pigeon-holed as a “soul-food cooks,” while others follow their passions for other flavors.