Portside

Using synthetic biology, scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs are working on a series of cutting-edge projects to affect the future of food.

Most international political thrillers rely on the interplay of fantasy and reality, using real countries and familiar politics in the frame of a fictional narrative. What makes CBS’s Madam Secretary unusual, even within that context, is that its episodes actually borrow from recent international events, relationships, and histories. The show’s universe can often feel like a surreal look into a parallel reality.

James Scruton dedicates this poem about his own white-collar labors to the late Philip Levine, the poet who celebrated working-class people who spent their lives “digging or pounding…wrenching or drilling.”

Socialist thought is re-emerging at the forefront of the movement for global ecological and social change. In the face of the planetary emergency, theorists have unearthed a powerful ecological critique of capitalism at the foundations of Marx's materialist conception of history. This has led to a more comprehensive conception of socialism rooted in Marx's analysis of the rift in "the universal metabolism of nature" and his vision of sustainable human development.

This ethnographic study of America's gun culture focuses on Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and it both confirms and challenges aspects of received wisdom about our country and our firearms.

The movie is also a Hollywood rarity - a boxing movie with a black hero. It is bizarre, though hardly surprising, that a sport dominated for decades by African-American and Latino athletes looks more like ice hockey on screen. And Creed, embeds its drama in the perils and pleasures of black life in America. Adonis is a complex character with a complex fate. He is at once a rich kid and a street kid, the proud carrier of an illustrious heritage and an invisible man.

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I am excited to announce my new partnership with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a team of scientists, economists and politicians working towards transforming our current food system into one that endeavors to grow food that’s healthy, green, affordable, and fair.

From ethically dubious telenovelas like El señor de los cielos to brutally insightful features like El infierno, Mexican media has become in many ways a reflection of the violence that has racked the country since the Cártel de Juárez took over the coke game from Pablo Escobar back in the 1990s.

"in a world where war is the natural state of affairs," writes the New York poet David Lehman, the unthinkable surrounds us all--the ones with "dough," "the refugee who cannot lost his German accent," even those whose aim is "to live at peace."