Portside

Studies show that investments in public art can improve street safety, provide tourism and new jobs, and combat social isolation and anxiety. "A city that is vibrant and thriving has art right at the center.”

Historical scholarship is looking anew into the ways that slavery was intertwined with the movement that created the American Revolution. Here is one of the most recent forays into that line of inquiry.

In 1981, Warren Beatty directed Reds, a retelling of John Reed’s classic firsthand account of the Russian Revolution. The film still stands up today as one of the greatest and most faithful depictions of revolutionary politics.

The threat to the survival of our democracy is clear: a would-be dictator and a cultist political party. A truly multiracial, inclusive, radical democratic movement that has a vision beyond capitalism is key. You can help.

You can still buy the actual fruitcakes served at British Royal weddings though some have survived long past their shelf life.

The 10-episode comedy "Harlem" from Tracy Oliver, which follows four thirtysomething black friends in New York, invites comparisons to Issa Rae’s superior Insecure

California poet Jodi Hottel discovered her changing identity after her Japanese American family was shipped to an internment camp during World War II.

Reluctant Reformers addresses what I think of as the tripwire of U.S. politics: race. But it does so by examining how several social movements, including abolition, women’s suffrage, populism, progressivism, labor, the socialist and communist left..

Whatever their promises, one problem with Utopias is that the creators of such communities tend to bring with them the values and habits they thought they were leaving behind. Reviewer Namakkal discusses a book about one such settlement.

First Wave wants us to feel a sliver of the same fury and impotence and eventually, occasionally, mercifully, even the same catharsis that frontline workers were confronted with every day when this nightmare was at its worst.