Portside

Paramount Plus' 1950s-set series 'Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies' is filled with progressive Gen-Z values. Their struggles derive from not only the misogyny they come up against, but the discrimination they face thanks to their cultural identities.

Schools may be in trouble, assesses Vermont poet Ann Fisher, but not the fault of students who create their own “precipitation” despite “all the measured wisdom/ we’ve provided.”

Dylan, writes reviewer Foye of this new coffee table-size book, "is sweeping out the ashes from the cave of a long career. He is casting a light on the Jungian shadows of popular song, examining both mechanics and metaphysics."

Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.

Alon Shaya believes food can help people connect; sharing a meal is a powerful tool against the rising hate against Jewish people and everyone else. “Through cooking, you can share these stories with the goal of stopping prejudice and ending hate."

Amazon's remake of Penny Marshall's classic movie is an exploration of sexuality, friendship, and baseball. It deserves more than just a four-episode wrap-up.

Ukrainian refugee poet Oksana Maksymchuk depicts life in exile as “an endless cellar/that’s now her mind.”

Staughton Lynd seemed like a personal force almost more than a person within the antiwar movement of the 1960s. My Country Is the World largely and usefully recounts the controversies that came with his rise in the peace movement of the middle 1960s

This book, writes reviewer Wendland-Liu, shifts the geographic focus of "origins of capitalism" debates from Europe "to the motion, spaces, circuits and conflicts in multiple global sites and stages of economic production relations."

A new documentary by Alain Gomis turns footage from an interview with Thelonious Monk into a commentary on the submerged violence of the star-making process.