Portside

With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Fifty years after his assassination, this poem honors El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (aka Malcolm X)

Popular culture may be getting more diverse in terms of gender and skin color, but it's still mostly flat in presenting diverse human qualities and differences. Few characters play against type, which makes the exceptions all the more remarkable. Part of the power of characters playing against type is simply their insistence, humorous and without qualified explanation, of their existence. In other words, like most of comedy, its power is better experienced, not explained

Last week Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. It had been nominated in both poetry and criticism, the first book to be so doubly nominated. A bold, book of experimental writing that takes on the "invisible" practices of everyday person-to-person, interactive racism, Rankine's book is as illuminating as it is, at times, wrenching. Here Parul Sehgal guides us through this outstanding work of contemporary literature.

"India’s Daughter", Leslee Udwin's stirring documentation of the brutal rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, has been banned by the Indian government claiming the film is an international conspiracy to defame India and incites violence against women. The efforts to suppress the film are backfiring, creating what is being called an 'Arab spring for gender equality in India'.

3D food printing is still in its initial stages of research, development, and practical implementation, but major companies and national organizations are already making headway into making the technology a reality in the near future.

In criticizing capitalism for mass consumption instead of exploitation, The Americans uses Soviet characters to valorize austerity.

Ostriker's poem touches the heart of violence against women in a patriarchal culture.

The inevitability of the presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton often focuses on her gender and her twenty years as a Washington insider. Two books under review, Hard Choices, by Clinton herself, and HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes, give insight into both the 2016 elections and what a Clinton presidency would mean.

Eleanor Marx Aveling, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, was renowned in her time as a revolutionary activist and champion of modern culture and literature. Julia M. Klein takes a look at a new biography of this once famous, but now little-known, figure.