Portside

He said, she said: The effects of sexual exploitation of women on campus depends on the credibility of one's point of view. Francesca Bell's poem "Committee Work" unveils this not-so-delicate dialogue.

If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.

Risk is an incredibly gripping work, one made with an unprecedented level of access to Assange, but for all its intimacy, it still struggles to nail down its target. Instead, it’s more a story of Poitras herself, and the evolution of the movie she set out to make about Assange, who founded Wikileaks in 2006.

The author of The Potlikker Papers discusses paying down a debt to the black and immigrant cooks of the South, and what it means to be an active Southerner.

“Guerrilla” is a who’s who of 1970s radical movements, and by Episode 2 a flow chart is required to keep up with the revolutionary networks at play: The Weather Underground. Black Panthers. German Marxist-Leninists. Rhodesian revolutionaries. The Front de libération du Québec (yes, even Canada was radical in those days).

Worried about the Great Wall separating Mexico from the USA? California poet Amy Meier offers a mild antidote to your fears.

Here is an extraordinary anthology by contemporary working class poets.

For the author of the work under review--much heralded by the reviewer--Czech novelist Franz Kafka was no chronic pessimist or dour, fatalistic misbeliever in human emancipation, but a consistent partisan artist siding with the humiliated.

In HBO's film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn about the miraculous clump of cells that changed medical science forever before really learning about the person who made and was killed by them. In 1951, a 31-year-old African American woman named Henrietta Lacks learned she was dying of cervical cancer. She sought treatment from a then-segregated Johns Hopkins Medical Center where a piece of her tumor was removed without her knowledge for ongoing research.

Gordon Shepherd’s compact Neuroenology is a straightforwardly didactic exercise, tightly focused on wine. It's a companion to his previous work, Neurogastronomy (2012), a well-received study of “how the brain creates flavor,” mostly about food. Lots of wine drinkers, and even wine writers, don’t know some of the facts about wine sensation that Shepherd wants us to learn.