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.

How to Raise Crickets for Food

Brian Barth Modern Farmer
If you don’t want to eat crickets, any chickens, ducks, turkeys, or pigs in your life will happily chow down
Crickets and other insects are a vastly more sustainable form of protein than livestock as well as an ideal protein source for urban homesteaders.

Murphy Brown Is Back and Ready to Take On Donald Trump

Jen Chaney Vulture
Unlike the most recent Roseanne, which was a largely political series that frequently tried to bill itself as something other than that, Murphy Brown declares its intentions to challenge the current Republican Establishment.

Eternal Recurrence

Deborah Landau American Poetry Review
“what’s so neo/about neo-nazis,” asks the poet Deborah Landau. And maybe it’s time to do something!

Distant Early Warning of Worse to Come

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
Masterpiece or not, William S. Burroughs' "The Revised Boy Scout Manual": An Electronic Revolution fills a puzzling lacuna in the Beat author's bibliography, and offers an foretaste of the viperous Age of Trump.

Bringing Farming Back to Nature

Daniel Moss and Mark Bittman New York Times
Agroecology, which places ecological science at the center of agriculture, is a scrappy movement that’s taking off globally
Agroecology isn’t rocket science. It simply takes full advantage of nature’s assets, drawn from the farm itself and surrounding ecosystems, to grow food

How The Purge Intricately Explores Black Female Rage

Candice Frederick The Week
Rather than focusing on violence by white citizens, this time around one of the killers is a black woman, whose rage is just as lethal as her white counterparts' — and it's aimed directly at everything they represent.

The Death of Free Speech

Clint Margrave Chiron Review
At a time when our Bill of Rights is endangered, Los Angeles poet Clint Margrave offers some wisdom on the matter of free speech.