Portside

British director Steve McQueen adapts Solomon Northup's remarkable account of being kidnapped and sold into slavery for a dozen years in the middle of the 19th century. The material is inherently suspenseful and harrowing, since Northup provides a detailed account of slavery's brutal nature in the Deep South. But it's Fassbender's penchant for creating disquieting atmosphere that's well positioned to make this spectacular survival tale come to life and possibly provide one of the more accurate recreations of slavery life in America. (Take that, "Django Unchained." [Eric Kohn, indiewire.com]

Flash mob in Amsterdam department store De Bijenkorf. The music is from Giuseppe Verdi's (1813 - 1901) opera La Traviata. From Dutch TV program NTR Podium (2-10-2011).

In 2012 Ewen Callaway travelled to Northern Nigeria to learn more about the global polio eradication effort. Nature Video joins him on the search to find one of the virus' last remaining strongholds in remote nomadic communities that the vaccines couldn't reach.

Juan Cole: Not an endorsement, but this cover by secular leftists of Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 “I will Survive,” with satirical Arabic lyrics (translated in subtitles) about the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis in Egypt since the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak gives a window into the grievances and disappointments of the youth who made the January 25, 2011 revolution.

President Obama wants to repeal 60 words of eternal war-justifying deliciousness, but Senator Lindsey Graham would rather broaden Obama's war powers. 

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, talks with Rachel Maddow about President Obama's announcement of a sea change in U.S. counterterrorism strategy and the suggestion that we are at the beginning of the end of the war on terror.