Portside

Chi-Raq begins with a devastating overture, Pray 4 My City, with the lyrics printed directly on the screen, impossible to ignore. 'I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq,' it concludes, using the controversial nickname given to the city where gun deaths outnumber those in America’s foreign wars. Narrator Dolmedes, Samuel L Jackson, explains that communities under siege aren’t a new phenomenon, and explains how previous authors wrote about such tales.

To combat the voices of health advocates who expressed concerns on the health effects of the Standard American Diet, which is high in processed foods, the food industry cast doubt and reframed the conversation on processed foods.

This new series on Amazon imagines a world in which the Axis powers triumphed in World War II and carved up America into three zones: the Greater Nazi Reich in the East and Midwest, ruled from New York; the Japanese Pacific States, ruled from San Francisco; and a derelict neutral zone splitting them, running roughly along the Rocky Mountains.

From Alexis Rhone Fancher"s State of Grace (2015), an elegy to her son Joshua, we find compassion mixed with irony, grief with dark humor, as the poet's life must go in an absurd world.

If you're looking for something special for the holiday table, Meg Favreau has some suggestions from her collection of 1970s and 1980s locally printed cookbooks. These books, she says, are "a window into what communities actually eat – not the idealized version of the area’s cuisine you see in a “real” regional cookbook." Recipes for eggless applesauce squares, the "ribsticker," and gumdrop bread can be found on the article's original website.

'So I’m not going to write a review about 'Suffragette', because I’m no longer going to legitimize films that refuse to acknowledge the existence of people of color. And neither should you'.

In the 1980s and 90s, science rediscovered the existence of umami and in 2002 identified its taste receptor. And, as they say, the rest was history. Not only has umami been universally recognized in sensory science, it’s become the darling of professionals looking to enhance the taste of savory foods. Umami can be leveraged, not just for tastier foods, but for healthier ones.

The series is a nice reminder that although comic books are derided as a kids’ medium, their supernatural setups can provide us with clarifying thought experiments that allow us to approach our present dilemmas with fresh perspectives.

At the turn of the 20th Century Czech immigrants flocked to the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen on the city's near west side attracted there by the offer of jobs. Mississippi-based poet Philip C. Kolin depicts their hopes and realities in a newly-published chapbook.

The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren't sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. M15 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives.