Portside

The Guardian is known for it's best of laundry lists. A recent list of the 100 best English-language novels came with a demurrer from culture columnist Rachel Cooke, saying in effect: The ladies not meant for spurning - and that just 20 books by female authors in a best-of-100 list covering a 300-year period--especially in a listing of authors of fiction--is incomplete bordering on bizarre. Cooke elaborates on what should be on, and what she says can surely be removed.

Today's conflicts in the Middle East is often played out in a language laden with stereotypes. This can also be true of how history is told and understood. Hasan Suroor offers a glimpse of history that breaks through these barriers, in a review of a new book by Seem Alavi. This book focuses on Islam and nationalism in colonial India, but it also offers a nuanced view of relations between Muslims and the West that contests received wisdom.

it's possible that Pixar’s obsessiveness about work and employment has somehow been effaced in the public eye by the imaginative diversity of their films’ settings: ant colonies, space, the ocean, a bizarre alternate-world inhabited by sentient vehicles, and so on. But in Inside Out, for the first time, the ground beneath Pixar’s ideological feet comes into view, and it’s the Bay Area, California.

Coca-Cola is indirectly spreading a controversial message that to lose weight, the food and beverages you consume don’t matter so much as long as you exercise.

Angélica Rivera may have dazzled on the TV screen, but her shady relationship with a government contractor has wreaked havoc on her husband's presidency.

This three-part poem by Canadian poet Morgan Christie addresses a violent racial encounter, the response, and the consequence once upon a time, but something that seems contemporary.

Dedicated to Frieda Kahlo, Linda Rodriguez's poem celebrates the spirit of revenge, the immortality of the Mexican painter's suffering and triumph.

Perhaps in no U.S. city is the wreckage wrought by today's capitalism better seen than in Detroit, the once mighty auto metropolis now morphed into a showcase of post-industrial abandonment. New signs of rebirth and redevelopment there are fraught with contradictions, as artists and gentrifiers engage in what Dora Apel calls "ruin lust." Here, Scott McLemee reviews Apel's take on the (former?) Motor City and post-industrial tourism and aesthetics.

Since the year 2000, Chris Molanphy reminds us in his review of this history of digital music by Stephen Witt, "the recording industry’s revenue has more than halved and music consumption has undergone a definitive realignment." How did this happen? At least part of the story has to do with the story Witt tells. It's a story of how music traders, engineers, rogue industry executives, and music hobbyists all came together to create massive disruption.

'The Wolfpack' concerns a large family that, self-isolated for years in a New York City housing project, developed its own tribal culture largely based on Hollywood blockbusters. 'The Tribe', is a fiction film set mainly within the dog-eat-dog confines of a Kiev boarding school for hearing-impaired adolescents and played out entirely in sign language by amateur, similarly impaired actor.