Portside

Much of Anne Fontaine’s blistering film “The Innocents” is set within the walls of a Polish convent in December 1945, just after the end of World War II. What at first appears to be an austere, holy retreat from surrounding horrors is revealed to be a savagely violated sanctuary awash in fear, trauma and shame. The snow-covered, forested landscape of the convent is photographed to suggest an ominous frontier that offers no refuge from marauding outsiders.

American bureaucrats, seed sellers, food company executives and farmers seek the prizes that are likely to come if the United States ends its trade restrictions against Cuba.

Without Indigenous resistance, the intended genocide of the Native peoples by the settlers would have completely succeeded.

A coalition of local community organizations have launched an ICE Free Zones campaign.

For the state’s first hundred-plus years, certain unspoken rules governed California politics. In a state where agriculture produced more wealth than any industry, the first rule was that growers held enormous power.

Can you stomach any more bad news? Here goes… While raising the minimum wage will certainly help to reduce some of the burden on workers, they still won’t be able to “afford” rent by the government’s standards.

In this very small volume of messed-up corroded metal you have packed in there enough knowledge to fill several books telling us about ancient technology, ancient science and the way these interacted with the broader culture of the time.

The struggle for independence upset the “politics of deference.” The colonial elites, explains historian Clement Fatovic, found it “more and more difficult” to reconcile “great disparities of wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution.”

Culinary historian Michael Twitty is on a journey to discover himself, through the food of his ancestors. Joe Yonan talks to him about history, identity, and what exactly goes into a kosher soul roll.

An Iraqi politician once said that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.