Elizabeth Flock

What compels the Hindu right's volcanic reaction to Valentine's Day? Some of its members have protested that the holiday is the product of a 'rotten imported culture' from the West.

Every Valentine's Day, I pretend I don't care. Like many of us, I say I don't want the flowers or chocolates or a homemade card. How cheesy. I pretend that it's over-the-top to want the person you like to make you a ridiculously nice dinner, or do some showy gesture, ala John Cusack with the boombox in 'Say Anything.'

There was a time when poetry often made its way to vinyl; take a deep dive, for example, into the beat poets' countercultural albums of the 1950s to '80s.

Buckhannon, population 5,639, is a deeply conservative town and long has been. While coal is its past, oil and gas are its likely future. It's a town where guns are sold at yard sales, where Pentecostal churches are nearly as common as restaurants, and where distrust of Hillary Clinton is visceral and deep-seated.