In Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry, author Kathleen McLaughlin finds the industry’s brisk expansion, heavy churn of donors, and intentional placement of clinics in low-income areas alarming. “It is an industry that exploits the United States’ lack of protections for the poor and the working class, in the service of global medicine and profit.”

The ILGWU’s “Look for the Union Label” campaign emphasized that union workers made livable wages that supported families. But the globalization of corporate trade was too powerful. American manufacturing—not just in the garment industry—dried up, and union membership dropped drastically. Read PDF here. Republished in Northwest Labor Press.

At-home DNA kits, popularized by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, have sold millions of kits since becoming popular in the 2010s. While some consumers welcome the revelations of their tests, others uncover more than they bargained for …

The Silver Jews and Purple Mountains frontman, who died Wednesday at 52, drew listeners in with his country-tinged blend of humor, poetry, and existentialism.

Part Linguistics 101, part social history of the internet, Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet revels in digital language deconstruction, exploring not just the evolving language of online informal writing—tweets, text messages, Instagram comments, etc.—but also providing cultural context for what these new modes of writing mean.

Living in fear of spoilers or being afraid you’re not experiencing a cultural touchstone the “right” way is just another way to feel anxious. Game of Thrones is great, but it isn’t perfect, and it’s ridiculous to act like shuffling the deck a bit ruins the game entirely (hello, Star Wars). It’s 2019: Donald Trump is still president, the sea levels are still rising, and you can watch TV however you want to. 

“Lewenthal wanted art accessible to wider people and not just wealthy New York art dealers,” says Chyna Bounds, who curated the PAM exhibit. “He wanted to take these fine arts outside of the museum context and the white-walled gallery context and present them in a new way so that anyone could buy [them].” 

America heads into its showdown against Canada with an Olympic gold medal on the line. A win would only add to the résumé of a group of women who will be remembered for something more: changing the very future of their sport, and sparking a movement for gender equity.

Dressed in a simple but elegant red caped dress, Tagaq came onstage barefoot. When she talked, her speaking voice was sweet and generous. She introduced Jean Martin, “who will be doing contemporary drumming,” and Jesse Zubot, “who will be doing contemporary violin,” before pausing and adding wryly, “And I will be doing some contemporary throat singing... Isn’t it funny how indigenous cultures are always expected to be static? And in a museum?”

MU/巫, Dohee Lee’s TBA: 17 performance, is a six-part journey. Using vocals, loops, dance, percussion, costuming, video, and technology, Lee moves through different acts—at times forlorn, animated, elegant, and ravaged.

"Public access television” usually conjures mediocre musicians and unhinged political pundits, TV color bars and bleeding type on a low-quality picture. But based on the scene Saturday night at Open Signal, the future of public access is anything but uninspired. I sat down with Open Signal’s new executive director, Justen Harn, the night before the open house.

“It’s definitely a time in this country when it’s important to give visibility to marginalized voices. And then for us, as artists of color, to come together and form a community,” says Portland writer Dao Strom. De-Canon, a visibility project, aims to do just that—build community online and off—while showcasing literary work by writers of color that, according to the project’s website, is “inclusive, diverse, and multi-storied in their approach to representation.”

“There’s something decidedly disarming about an Airstream trailer,” says Justen Harn, executive director of Open Signal. We’re outside the portable podcasting studio Stream PDX. The shiny, cylindrical trailer sits like a giant, space-age toaster on NE MLK in the "backyard" parking lot of the digital media nonprofit formerly known as Portland Community Media. Looking at it is like looking at a dog or baby: It’s so unaware of its adorable goofiness you can’t help but smile.

The power went out at five the next day. Sean had just navigated to the Rocky IV’s Soundcloud when he heard a tell-tale click and the living room flickered dark. His laptop screen glowed dully and he stared at their track list, completely unclickable.

“Power’s out,” said Jason, emerging from his bedroom. “I’m going to Teddy’s.”

Sean shut his laptop and walked toward the window. He pulled the blinds up, like the dark outside could light up the dark inside, just a little. Nothing moved outside except for the snow, which fell in sheets.

Had Anna Biller's The Love Witch come out in 1965, it would be part of the feminist cult-film canon. The vampy Elaine (Samantha Robinson) destroys the men in her life with sex magick (!) by more or less seducing them to death. She’s unapologetic about her passion and her witchy tendencies, she makes sexy (but murdery) paintings, and she inters a bottle of her own urine and a tampon with a dead man.

The comedian, who co-hosts the 2 Dope Queens podcast with Jessica Williams and who’ll be in town at Live Wire! Radio this week, grew up on episodes of The West Wing and Inside the Actors Studio. She’s harnessed the power of pop culture in her new book You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain.

Writer/director Maya Vitkova’s debut premiered at Sundance in 2014, the first Bulgarian film to do so, and Vitkova captures the private moments of women that are rarely acknowledged, let alone shown in movies: the squicky sounds of Boryana’s abject douching echoing off the bathroom walls; her water breaking and slowly dripping off the hem of her dress; her pregnant body in a bath, blood blooming slowly from between her legs. These scenes are intimate and thoroughly unsensationalized, shot with a reverence sorely missing from most films.

Since Bad Moms is a film about women made by the men who wrote The Hangover, it’s motherhood through bro-colored glasses: Drinking sequences, the word “vagina,” and blunt-force impact are mined for laughs, and just as modern moms are hamstrung by a lack of paid maternity leave and gender double standards, the film’s potential for revenge-flick fun or bawdy escapism is curbed through shallow sentimentality.

As Tickled begins, co-director Farrier introduces himself as an offbeat reporter who’s found his next “wacky” story—a video of young men in Adidas gear stoically eliciting giggles from an unlucky but ebullient athlete on a wrestling mat. But when Farrier reaches out to Jane O’Brien Media—the creators of the video—he’s hit with crass emails, threatened with lawsuits, and told, in no uncertain terms, to stop digging. When Farrier deadpans, “This tickling wormhole was getting deeper,” it’s hard to tell if he’s joking.

A Northeasterner with a book about the South, Hillyer is always assessing the present in terms of the past. In her decade of living in Portland, she's been on the board of Know Your City, devised a walking tour of Old Town history, and lectured for Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project. She currently teaches history at Lewis & Clark. Here's what she told me about density, affordable housing, and equal access to public space in Portland.

In the 1960s and '70s, female comics artists were turning out pages alongside R. Crumb and Robert Williams, but were alienated by sexism, both on the page and within the culture of underground comics. Wimmen's Comix was their response—a collectively run feminist alternative comic that ran from 1970 through 1992, in one form or another, with more than 100 contributors.

You won’t be hard pressed to find a Christmas album in the country section of a record store or on Spotify. But that’s mostly because almost every recording artist has put at Christmas album (or two) in the past 10-15 years. But, anyone looking for winter wonderland vibe that’s a less sugarcoated and more honky tonk heartache, you’ll have to dig a little deeper. Country Christmas songs have their own canon, and while many country collections stray toward somber hymns, moral monologues, and Christmas standards that have been covered ad infinitum, there’s plenty of fun stuff too to add some swing up your Christmas party.

Performance artist Nao Bustamante has wrapped her nude body in packing tape and climbed a shaky ladder in a pair of chunky heels and a face full of makeup (America, the Beautiful). She’s encased her head in a bag of water—flashing a distorted, troubling smile at the audience—before she rips it open, water everywhere, so as not to drown (Sans Gravity). And in one of her earliest performances, she has strapped a burrito, dildo-style, to her crotch and invited white men from the audience to kneel and take a bite as penance for colonialism (Indig/urrito). For more than two decades, Bustamante has performed daring, playful, and often uncomfortable work addressing the body, pop culture, and global politics for audiences across the world. 

Hop Along wasn’t a band I was ready for—every track on their latest album, Painted Shut, gutted me. At first listen, the songs from this Philly four-piece sound like rallying anthems. A lot of that sound is thanks to vocalist and guitarist Frances Quinlan. In each tightly syncopated track, Quinlan’s voice—at times a powerful rasp, in the same stanza a hopeful, soaring sound—was captivating in a way I hadn’t heard since I can’t remember when. 

Whereas Carter recasts fairytales from within, eschewing the well-tread trail for a more serpentine, darker path, Link rips them open and turns them inside out, then augments them with humor, magical realism, nighttime logic, pop culture, and good old-fashioned angst. 

You organize membership applications and Barnes & Noble bookmarks, you call people and tell them that the book they ordered is in. It almost feels like an office job, the kind you expected to land after getting a degree in communications. You straighten the stuffed animals and chocolate-bar display. Eventually, there is little to do but pick stray rubber bands off of the green carpet. You think about the chocolate bars, how it would be so simple to take one, how they couldn’t possibly set off the alarms by the two entrances. You think about this even though you don’t really want a chocolate bar.