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.

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October 22, 2020

“No Coloreds:” Racism in Britain has a Long if Contested History

Angelique Richardson London Review of Books

The British abolished slavery decades before it ended in the United States, but racism still pervades the United Kingdom’s everyday life. The essay below looks at how and why.

October 21, 2020

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty

Liza Featherstone JSTOR Daily

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s book, first published in English 50 years ago, urges viewing students as interlocutors or partners in the learning process.

October 20, 2020

Don’t Watch Hillbilly Elegy — Listen to Dolly Parton Instead

Marianela D’Aprile Jacobin

Netflix announced the forthcoming movie adaptation of JD Vance’s reactionary, victim-blaming book Hillbilly Elegy yesterday. But why would anyone seek answers about life in Appalachia from a right-wing former venture capitalist?

October 19, 2020

Eudora Welty’s Crab Casserole

Caroline Sanders Garden and Gun

The famous Mississippi writer’s smashing party recipe--a story in itself.

October 18, 2020

The Good Lord Bird Is a Historical Epic That Speaks of and for the Present

Matt Zoeller Seitz Vulture

The story is told through the eyes of a young, educated teenage slave (Joshua Caleb Johnson) who dresses like a girl at Brown’s request (for his own protection, supposedly) and is given the nickname “Onion.”

October 16, 2020

The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances

By Martín Espada Poem-a-day

Martín Espada gives an eloquent elegy to Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, a Puerto Rican abolitionist and revolutionary who addressed issues of pandemic and racial oppression.

October 15, 2020

An Arrest in Canada Casts a Shadow on a New York Times Star, and The Times

Ben Smith New York Times

Almost singular these days, the Times media critic does a salient institutional self-criticism of a wayward reporter and the indulgence of top management in fostering a string of poorly sourced when not fabricated international news stories.

October 14, 2020

Ballad of an American

Gregory N. Heires Portside

This book on Paul Robeson is the first-ever to be presented as a graphic biography.

October 13, 2020

'They Refused to Act': Inside a Chilling Documentary on Trump's Bungled Covid-19 Response

Adrian Horton The Guardian

Totally Under Control recounts the early days of the pandemic in the US, revealing in clinical detail a disastrous federal response to a preventable crisis

October 13, 2020

The Most Heartbreaking Part of Alex Gibney’s COVID Doc Is How Close We Came to Getting It Right

Sam Adams Slate

Totally Under Control takes viewers back to a time when the pandemic could still have been contained.