Portside

The food activist group, Eco Practicum, came together for five days in New York City for the third annual program produced in partnership with Our Name Is Farm, a training aimed at building “effective advocacy for a better food system.”

The CBS drama’s dramatic finale brought a sad but fitting end to a show that has always been a little bit awkward about its female friendships.

"The mothers are on their own," writes the poet/translator Kathleen Weaver in her homage to the women who courageously challenged dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere who had "disappeared" their children.

In left labor circles, it's been a settled question that the Haymarket martyrs, victims of ruling class justice, were framed, and May Day's radical origins are based on remembering the martyrs. The author of the books under review, using a close reading of the trial record, supports the court finding that the accused anarchists conspired to murder police during the epochal 1886 labor demonstration in Chicago. The reviewer strongly disputes the author's conclusions.

Michael S. Harper, who died on Saturday in Rhinebeck, N.Y. at the age of 78, was a major American and African American poet. He was a writer of complex poems that combined history and memory with a deep network of African American cultural, folkloric, and musical allusions and symbols. This brief biography of Harper is from the Poetry Foundation's website. A generous selection of Harper's work can be found on the Foundation's website.

In his praise of Julie Dash's “Daughters of the Dust” during its initial theatrical release in 1992 critic Stephen Holden called it “a film of spellbinding visual beauty.” Now restoration of the film aims to bring more of that beauty to the forefront. The Cohen Film Collection announced that it has completed a digital restoration of “Daughters of the Dust” and plans to release that version theatrically this fall.

Simran Sethi's book, "Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love," is a call to arms: a warning of the dire consequences of what she sees as a disturbing lack of diversity in the foods we eat.

“Saturday Night Live” veteran Dana Carvey resurrected his “Church Lady” character in a surprise appearance last night following Donald Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee this week.

The English poet John Daniel provides a perfect Mother's Day memory of his hard-working Mum, Violet Daniel, who defied the usual expectations of mothering. Happy Mothers Day!

The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.