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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November 5, 2019

Interview with John Sayles: "If They Can Do It by Busting a Union, They’ll Do It”

Dan Kois Slate

John Sayles on his labor-uprising masterpiece Matewan, as it enters the Criterion Collection.

November 4, 2019

The Festival Industrial Complex: How food festivals hurt the chefs they’re meant to help

Hannah Raskin LA Times

Food festivals sometimes hurt instead of help.

Food festivals are more popular and more elaborate than ever, but what’s not apparent to ticket buyers is that their growth has often been at the expense of the restaurants and chefs they’re supposed to promote.

November 3, 2019

Netflix To Bargain With IATSE For First Companywide Film & TV Contract

David Robb Deadline

Netflix has agreed to negotiate a first companywide contract with IATSE, the union representing the industry’s below-the-line workers.

November 1, 2019

The Burying Ground

Joseph Zaccardi Weight of Bodily Touches

An encounter with the mutilated statue of a freed slave leads the California poet Joseph Zaccardi to consider the names of those left nameless.

October 31, 2019

Renewing the Legacy of Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui

Gregory N. Heires Portside

A review of the first English-language biography of one of Latin America’s most important, innovative, and enduringly relevant, Marxist thinkers.

October 30, 2019

Rethinking U.S. Election Law

Erica Frazier. LSE Review of Books

This is an excellent and engaging read that exposes the structural flaws in the US government system and provides tangible, achievable proposals to address them, writes reviewer Frazier.

October 29, 2019

‘The Lighthouse’ Review: Dark Nights, Troubled Souls, Hairy Men

Manohla Dargis The New York Times

Based on the famously unfinished short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the filmmaker conjures madness and dread for this period piece about two lighthouse keepers' inner and outer darkness.

October 28, 2019

The Saccharine History of Candy Corn

Rebecca Rupp National Geographic

Halloween has a centuries’-long tradition of costumes and scary stuff, but the door-to-door visitations for collecting candy started after the end of WWII sugar rationing, in the late 1940s.

October 27, 2019

Rachel Maddow And Time's Up Both Slam NBC For Its Treatment Of Sexual Harassment Issues

William Hughes AV Club

The organizers of Time’s Up have called upon NBC to state that people are allowed to talk about their experiences freely, regardless of any past NDAs.

October 26, 2019

I Confess

Pauletta Hansel Rattle

With the great frustration of politics in our times, the poet Pauletta Hansel concedes that the worst thoughts inevitably, spontaneously, come to mind.