We don’t know if you’re in the habit of reading the venerable Christian Science Monitor, but they’re a reliable source of what remains real news, and many of their features and backgrounders are fascinating, as well. Just this week, they ran an interview with Matty...
As with sports and hip-hop rivalries, we enter the holiday week with a good-natured “throwdown” on which coast, and its culture, gets more of the credit for creating Christmas in the U.S. as we have come to know it. The New York Times starts out by allowing that while...
Happy short week! It’s become something of a tradition here on the AVPS end of things to get our blog post and newsletter out early during Thanksgiving, which of course is a week rich in traditions (including traditionally rich foods!) The thing with “traditions” is,...
Happy May Day! In the U.S., it conjures up images of May Poles and spring love. In Europe, it’s marked with parades and marches, and is still something of a “worker’s holiday,” as it was here in the 19th Century. It was the original “Labor Day,” until the one we have...
The holidays are here, and we know you’ll have plenty of happy/merry distractions that will keep you from perusing all your blog news here at AVPS, as well as taking you from all your other “regular” rounds. But before we lose you to holiday merriment, a quick spot of...
In the spirit of the holidays, we’ve stayed away from some of our “hard news” offerings in this space, to report on more thematically consistent topics, like the history of Christmas gift-giving, or this week — a history of New Year’s itself. For example, did...
