Portside

Fences was not alone among Oscar nominees this year in representing working-class life in uncharacteristically sympathetic and insightful ways. Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight, and even Hell or High Water all have extraordinary moments of insightful observation like this. Though each falls under more common rubrics, each is alive to the complexities and bravery of living life within insuperable limits.

Caveats aside, the evidence thus far cautions against making too much of Trump’s success at wooing union households. What these results do suggest is the need for Democrats going forward to craft a message and groom candidates that might reverse waning enthusiasm among this core constituency.

It takes more than one clown to make a circus.

Olio, by Tyehimba Jess, has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It is an outstanding book that visits, and reimagines, a deeply influential yet far too little examined African American cultural moment. This is a powerful, innovative work of verse created by one of this country's best contemporary poets. Here is a review.

The building trade unions are basically pro-Trump. They like his positions on infrastructure including his position on building the Keystone Pipeline. His withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is viewed favorably. Many of the public service unions are very much opposed to what they they perceive as his anti-worker agenda.

Director Larraín has stated that the way Latin Americans think is shaped by poetry, by metaphor, and that his film is partly concerned with the power of poetry to move and influence. We are shown Neruda’s huge influence, as a communist poet, over his natural constituency: the ordinary working man... But what we do not see in the film is the immensely moving capacity of poetry to break down barriers between people of diametrically opposed political beliefs.

War whoops; Killing O’Reilly; Neutering net neutrality; Hacker power; Chipped; Net on the bubble

Mélenchon’s election campaign has galvanized the Left by doing what Hamon couldn’t — making a clean break with the political center. In France, history is back. Here as elsewhere, the social tectonics of the great economic crisis of 2008 are doing their work. The routine presidential stables are recomposing at great speed. They are realigning political forces around the three options (Three Monsters) nestled within the infra-world of our political modernity.

Through a very clever and subtle weaving together of archival footages, interviews, stereotypic images from racist advertizing from the thirties and forties, and from contemporary TV, we are provided with a historical context and an incredible graphic depiction of the momentous civil rights movement that swept the American south in those years, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the courageous fight to integrate the educational system, the voter registration drives, ...

Recently, US airstrikes have claimed the lives of 200 civilians in Iraq, dozens were killed in separate strikes supposedly aimed at Islamic State in Syria and several more women and children died in a raid gone awry in Yemen. Those are just a few examples of the many attacks – launched under the pretext of defeating Isis – that wreaked havoc on civilian populations as the US military ramps up its bombing campaigns in multiple counties.