Information is power. Our mission at Portside is to seek out and to provide information that empowers you -- that empowers the left. Every day we search hundreds of sources to connect you with the most interesting, striking and useful material. Just once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help.

 

Archives

For posts before June 2012, please follow these links to our archives.

Never Again

David Alpaugh Verse Daily
For California poet David Alpaugh, despite the promises of peace or justice, the violence of war lives on.

The Post-Trump Future of Literature

Viet Thanh Nguyen New York Times
What will writers do when the outrage is over? Will they go back to writing about flowers and moons?

Strongmen

Charles Kaiser The Guardian
Ruth Ben-Ghiat delivers a superb examination of how close the US came to fascism – and how it has propped it up before.

The Customer Is Not Always Right

Khushbu Shah Food & Wine
Customer entitlement at restaurants is at an all-time high, making work unsafe and unbearable for many in the industry. The way we think about hospitality needs to change.

Speaking of Disinformation

Rebecca Starks Rattle
“I was trying to understand, on a smaller scale than national politics,” writes Vermont poet Rebecca Starks, “how an obvious falsehood can seem obviously true to someone else.”

Caste Does Not Explain Race

Charisse Burden-Stelly Boston Review
The recent publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s widely acclaimed Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents returns to caste to explain U.S. racial hierarchy when wealth polarization, racial strife, and white supremacist revanchism are again on the rise.

The Rise of Fascism

Geoffrey Jacques Portside
Here is a history of fascism in Europe that may be helpful as we consider this troubled, and troubling, moment.