Portside

This new book argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was the first of the USA's modern sociologists. Du Bois's empirically-based studies of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are models of sociological research. Aldon Morris details this legacy, which academic Sociology still does not universally acknowledge. In this review, Monica Bell considers the significance of Morris's argument.

The Oscars aren’t just a competition for cultural value: They double as an assessment tool that helps pick the industry’s economic winners and losers.

A farmland mapping project by a UC Merced professor indicates that most areas of the country could feed between 80 percent and 100 percent of their populations with food grown or raised within 50 miles. The study immediately generated comment, including positive accolades from author and influencer Michael Pollan (also a UC professor). Many have noted the importance of the study in filling a research gap about local food.

The sitcom aired a powerful episode centered entirely around a family discussion of race and the criminal-justice system—a too-rare event for network TV.

Tom Karlson is not inhibited by the cliche Do not speak ill of the dead but it's still true that a certain justice of the Supreme Court is still dead.

Harper Lee's classic novel was one of hope, young hope. Her last, Go Set a Watchman, a sad acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial hate in my home state of Alabama, reveals that Atticus turns out to be a Kluxer! An example of how America, especially the American South, has yet to confront, admit, and rectify the original sin of legal racialism enshrined in our founding documents - three fifths of a person.

Some 85% of African American eighth graders cannot read at grade level, yet only seven percent of teachers are black and less than two percent of all teachers in our country's schools are black men. Former teacher Alvin Irby started Barbershop Books, a nonprofit, in response to this crisis. It brings books to barbershops in black communities, in a fight to raise literacy levels among black boys. The information below comes from the group's website.

"Son of Saul has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s a clear favorite at the Oscars. It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead." - Christopher Orr

Although Cuba is a fertile tropical place, post-revolution shortages and rationing and complicated bureaucracy have not been beneficial to its culinary traditions. As diplomatic relations thaw, restauarants and a variety of food places are competing for the tourist trade.

As the rightly acclaimed television series Downton Abbey unspools its final episode some fans have criticized the producers decision to devote so much time to a debate about the future of Downton’s Cottage Hospital. But underneath the repartee lies a serious and persistent issue: what should be the relationship of the community to the emerging age of a high tech, highly capitalized and highly specialized medical system?