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.
Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman continues Hollywood’s obsession with the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. We’re more concerned with what happened to Teamster working conditions under his son, James P. Hoffa.
Nike and Kaep; Confederacy North; Wages of #MeToo; SCOTUS bait and switch; Chapo Chaps; Requiem for The Voice
300 powerful women in Hollywood have announced a new group called Time's Up to lead a national campaign against the systematic sexual harassment of women from Hollywood to working-class communities across America.. Among those taking part are actresses Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, Meryl Streep, Ashley Judd, Natalie Portman, Eva Longoria and Kerry Washington, as well as producer Shonda Rhimes, Universal Pictures chairwoman Donna Langley, and lawyer Tina Tchen. (Daily Beast)
Unions are the best vehicle to halt workplace harassment. But the Weinstein revelations show the Screen Actors Guild has failed its membership.
Seth takes a closer look at how powerful men in entertainment and politics - from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump - abuse their power to silence, bully or coerce.
The gig economy is a disaster for workers. Hollywood’s unions can help them learn to fight back.
Clancy Sigal died Monday night at 90. He wrote "Going Away" in the midst of the McCarthy period. It is a soul-searching memoir filled with fascinating characters. He chronicles the battles over racism at a time when the modern civil rights movement was just getting started. The novel became something of a cult favorite among the baby-boom generation of radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, and has remained in print and popular among subsequent generations.
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.
Occasionally entertainment and politics intersect. Sunday Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States. She made the powerful point, which is that no human experience is really foreign to us as human beings if only we can find the tools to understand it, emotionally and intellectually. And Trump does not.
Three big films were set in Los Angeles this year but none casts light on the city’s millions of Latinos
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