Portside

'Show Me A Hero' serves as a reminder that some of the worst segregation in America persists above the Mason-Dixon line.

Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-born Somali poet based in London, addresses the terror and desperation of migrants forced to leave their homes seeking safety, shelter, hope even in strange and often inhospitable lands. Hers is a language of experience and insight, capturing the tension of the current crisis of uprooted people. .

New books and research in African American history and culture. Recent or soon-to-be published books, which the African American Intellectual History Society feels would be of interest to readers. Regrettably the cost for some puts these out of reach of many - but there is always your public or school library. Suggest that these be ordered.

Centered in the homeless community in New York City, 'Time Out of Mind ' makes no excuses for Hammond's (played by Richard Gere) homelessness, and it avoids the Hollywood trick of pretending he's a man wronged, that in his case there's been a mistake. Instead, it asks us to accept him as a man, period, one of the millions who have found no purchase in the economic systems we're born into.

The Times buried the real story: active collusion between the agribusiness and chemical industries, numerous and often prominent academics, PR companies, and key administrators of land grant universities for the purpose of promoting GMOs and pesticides.

The comedian sneaked politics and policy—along with Captain America and Oreos—into his CBS debut.

Tanya (Hyonhye) Ko, a Korean-born Los Angeles poet, reveals the complications of immigration to the US from the point of view of a child, now an adult, who must sort out fiction from fact.

I celebrate Radical Reconstruction, a brief moment of glory, no matter how blindly and halfheartedly we, as a nation, did it. Did Reconstruction end racism? No. Does that make it a failure? No again. Considering it a failure is like considering the civil rights movement a failure because it only abolished segregation and not racism.

Many food and beverage marketers have started playing the clean label and sustainable card. Such terms as “artisan,” “clean,” “earth friendly,” “local,” “pure” and “simple” are being used on product packages and web sites. Avoiding ambiguity is a key issue for staying out of legal trouble.

The worldwide cultural revolution initiated by the invention of records and record players has been vast and helps define what it has meant to be both "modern" and "post-modern." In this new book, Michael Denning surveys the scope and breadth of this revolution. Noise Uprising, says reviewer Tim Barker, "offers an ambitious, if somewhat speculative map of the connections" between the dizzying array of styles and genres of modern popular, vernacular music.