Portside

California poet Charlotte Muse tries to enter the mind of a person capable of committing torture, justifying torture, an issue from the George W. Bush era that refuses to fade away.

Max Blumenthal, whose book The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza allows the young men and women of Gaza to speak, offers a gripping and unembellished look at the misery on the ground in the Gaza Strip during the Israeli government’s homicidal Operation Protective Edge in summer 2014, the third war in this tiny stretch of land in the last six-and-a-half years.

"Humans are the most curious among animals," writes Caspar Henderson in this review of Alberto Manguel's meditation on inquisitiveness. "Even very young humans are better" than other animals, even the smartest ones, "at noticing the novel, the accidental and the serendipitous and at using that experience to imagine new opportunities.' Henderson's review is a kind of "three-cheers" for this special quality that is among those that distinguish our species.

Based on a true story, 'Jimmy’s Hall' is about Jimmy Gralton the only Irishman deported as an illegal alien from Ireland, the land of his birth – without so much as a trial! Of course Gralton’s true crime was to fight against the reactionary church, aristocratic landowners and narrow nationalism by setting up a hall where ordinary people could dance to jazz music, study art and pursue a more class conscious politics during the Depression.

USA’s new hacker drama is a surprise hit that deserves attention for its subtle critiques of gender norms and masculinity.

On July 27, 1919, the appearance of an African American swimmer near a white beach provoked a citywide pogrom in Chicago. Poet Renny Golden depicts the incident and a wade-in that integrated the shores during the 1960s.

Looking back after 50 years at the few pros (the real lack of jobs) and the many cons (an over-reliance throughout on allegedly debilitating cultural factors) of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's explanation for high African American poverty rates in his Report on the Black Family and Poverty.

In this look at three new and “valuable contributions to our cultural thinking and political thinking on today’s feminist movement,” Rinku Sen finds much to praise; however, she criticizes these authors because they “treat these two realms as largely disconnected from each other.” That’s too bad, Sen adds, because the movement is strongest “when cultural and political interventions reinforce each other.”

Directed by the popular Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis and written by Arab-Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua, 'A Borrowed Idenity' chronicles a young Arab-Israeli man’s painful coming of age--detailing Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. At its best, 'A Borrowed Identity' concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.

Dietary guidance that’s targeted to your precise genetic makeup is the wave of the future, says nutrition scientist Jeffrey Blumberg.