Portside

Sicario proceeds from one nail-biting scene to the next making it increasingly clear that this is a story about the merger of the tactics of the war on terror with the war on drugs, and it makes that merger look frankly terrifying -- a grisly bomb blast, bodies hung from a bridge in Juarez that seem intended to remind us of U.S. contractors in Fallujah and a secret mission to Mexico that is essentially an extraordinary rendition, with all the imagery to match.

There is growing interest in the food world for pre-reservation Native American traditions and reviving the culinary landscapes of Native American microregions around the country.

Even as mainstream outlets start to pay more attention to Latino viewers and with new frontiers popping up on cable, things are changing as rapidly on television for the Hispanic audience as they are for everyone else. What seems to be a new constant, however, is that the focus on this market is certainly going to grow.

The Persian poet Majid Naficy fled Iran in 1983 to live in exile in various places, currently in Los Angeles. His poetry here addresses the sense of loss, the urge to create roots.

Scott McLemee predicts another round of slamming/defending Nazi-tool philosopher Martin Heidegger with the forthcoming English publication of his The Black Notebooks...l'affaire Heidegger has been recycled on at least three or four occasions. It's as if the shock of the scandal was so great that it induced amnesia each time. Trashing Heidegger distracts us from our own appalling national stupidities and our galling national avarice -- our own little darkenings.

It may seem as if Christian conservatism, as a social movement, has always been with us. However, as Kim Phillips-Fein observes in this review of Kevin M. Kruse's history of the phenomenon, much contemporary conservative Christian discourse reflects "specific politics of the post-New Deal era, and the effort to shore up Christian commitments to capitalism as opposed to the welfare state."

Two twenty-first century phenomena have changed the way moving pictures are made and perceived. The first is the accelerating use of digital technology and the inexorable rise of a cyborg cinema that, by combining animated and photographic images, compromises the direct relationship to reality that had long been the medium’s claim to truth. The second is the trauma of September 11, 2001, which for many provided the ultimate movie experience that was more than a movie.

Smaller tableware 'could help reduce over-eating and obesity.' Shrinking the size of plates, knives, forks and glasses could go some way towards tackling over-eating and obesity, a study suggests.

Scholarly interest in Joss Whedon’s cult classic points to the growing belief that TV shows deserve to be studied as literature.

We've become inured to civilian bombing, collateral damage, refugees on the road--the consequences of warfare--but it wasn't always so. As poet Cintia Santana depicts the World War II bombing of a scholarly library, she leads us to "the shock of light."