Portside

Once in a while, we – the volunteer moderators of Portside – take the opportunity to talk directly to us – the entire Portside community – about how we see things and how you can pitch in. (Tuesday is Giving Tuesday) Our thoughts, in brief:

Thanksgiving Day is surely an American holiday, even for some subversives who defy the US government--at least on TV!

I am no longer willing to endorse a cultural norm whereby artists & artist-educators passively participate-in, and benefit-from institutions born and bolstered through the justification..or practice of exploiting and destroying Black and Native life

During his lifetime, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American, was among the most famous poets in the United States. It is one of the great paradoxes of the early Jim Crow era. This biography sheds new light on the writer's life and work.

For generations, entertainment media has invisibilized and/or stereotyped Black and Indigenous people with origins across Latin America, just as its Spanish and mestizo white supremacist leaders have done in this region throughout history.

The world of plant-based alternatives is vast; for every new vegan option on store shelves, there’s a “conventional” producer wondering about the comparisons people will make between their two products; even the labels defined by the FDA are in flux.

Hugo Blick’s revelatory series is a gorgeous, glorious new take on the old west – a lawless land where no one can hear you, or anyone in your way, scream. What matters is that the dehumanization and massacres of the Native Americans, upon whose suffering the New World was built, is not forgotten but ever present.

Poet Lynn Melnick captures a moment traumatic violence, what she calls “inauguration,” and its lasting effect: “there was always dread.”

Narrative story that reconstructs the astonishing resistance to Victor Orbán's authoritarian power-grab against universities in Hungary: students and faculty at the Academy of Theater and Film in Budapest occupied the school for 71 days...

This book's author, writes reviewer Maiello, believes the tale of the shifts in U.S. party politics "is best told as a struggle among people to build the majorities necessary to win elections and to pass meaningful legislation into law."