Portside

Is contemporary altruism the new activism? Or is it what writer Teju Cole once called an iteration of a "White Savior Industrial Complex"? Ashley Karlin takes up these complicated questions in this review of Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, by scientist-turned-Buddhist philosopher Matthieu Ricard. The answers, she suggests, may have as much to do with questions of power as with the desire to do good.

Prior to the Boston Globe’s investigation, the sexual abuse of minors by priests was one of the Catholic Church’s worst-kept secrets. Spotlight's telling of the Church’s sex abuses reminds viewers how good, honest journalism has the power to transform a community.

Food scientists are trying to figure out if very faint scents can trick your brain into tasting something that isn’t there.

Plenty of shows can self-reflexively comment on Hollywood’s systemic diversity and race problems, but Master Of None does so within an episode that simultaneously practices exactly what it’s preaching, which gives the show legitimacy.

Pay attention to your DNA. The idea that you can't go home again assumes a different aspect in California poet Rebecca Foust's rendition: "Kansas one day will turn out to be Oz/and Oz Kansas."

Portside is proud to bring our readers a full chapter from the book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Periodically Portside will be sharing with our readers chapters and excerpts from books we feel are noteworthy. What better way to launch, than a book about socialism-in the USA. Ron Reosti's chapter - A Democratically Run Economy Can Replace the Oligarchy - argues we can democratically design and control an economy that satisfies the needs and desires of the people.

This new book traces the antiwar work of visual artists in the United States over the last eighty years. Paul Buhle offers some useful context for understanding this widely varied scope of creative activity as it ranged from antifascist paintings and murals to the poster art of the Vietnam War years to the politically engaged art of the current era.

'This Changes Everything', which re-imagines the vast challenge of climate change, is directed by filmmaker Avi Lewis and inspired by journalist Naomi Klein’s international best-selling book by the same name. Over the course of four years, the pair traveled to nine countries on five continents to profile communities on the front lines of the climate justice movement.

Between 1886, when the first American suffragist cookbook was published, and 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote, at least a half-dozen cookbooks were published by suffragette associations in the country. They came garnished with propaganda for the Great Cause: the fight for getting women the right to vote. The suffrage cookbooks came garnished with propaganda for the Great C

Donald Trump’s highly touted and almost certainly inappropriate hosting gig on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” turned out to be an anemic and halfhearted dud.