News
by Chris Goudreau | Mar 13, 2017 | Articles, News
So, you’ve decided you want to get arrested at a protest. You want your arrest to make a political statement, but would also like to face as little physical harm as possible during the course of your arrest. Bill Newman, director of the Western Regional Office of the...
by Chuck Shepherd | Mar 13, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird
In February, two teams of South Korean researchers announced cancer-fighting breakthroughs by taking lessons from how two of medicine’s most vexing, destructive organisms — diarrhea-causing salmonella bacteria and the rabies virus — can access often-unconquerable...
by Amanda Drane | Mar 13, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Music, News, Newsletter
Vanessa Carlton may be best known for playing piano on the back of a truck while singing her hit song “A Thousand Miles,” but that doesn’t mean she’ll play just anywhere. The artist has standards — and they’re apparently higher than at least what one Northampton venue...
by Hunter Styles | Mar 6, 2017 | Articles, Featured, News, Newsletter
Early last month, the Greater Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts announced a new brand identity: West Mass. The groups spent $80,000 on the campaign, hiring Oklahoma-based agency Cubic Creative...
by Chuck Shepherd | Mar 6, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
Despite California’s 2015 law aimed at improving the fairness of its red-light cameras, the city of Fremont — population 214,000 — reported earning an additional $190,000 more each month last year by shortening the yellow light by two-thirds of a second at just two...
by Chance Viles; Photos of Dufree Conservatory also by Chance Viles | Mar 6, 2017 | Articles, Featured, News, Newsletter
Container gardening, for the uninitiated, is exactly what it sounds like: planting vegetables, flowers, herbs, and fruits in containers as opposed to soil in the ground. It’s also exactly as easy as it sounds.It’s also something anyone can do anywhere. No land? No...
by From Our Readers | Mar 6, 2017 | Articles, Letters from our Readers, News
Diversity in Metal?Comments on WMass Metal: The Valley’s Diverse Scene Rises Again at valleyadvocate.com.Jenna Weingarten: How are you going to write a headline that says “diverse” in it and feature a bunch of white people and men? As someone in a Western Mass punk...
by Kristin Palpini | Mar 6, 2017 | Articles, Featured, News, Newsletter
One of the first hurdles to planting a garden is the land: often hard, rocky, compact, dusty, weedy, and dry.Tilling the soil — churning up the ground to mix the dirt and soil layers and soften up the plot for easier digging and root growth — is hard work even if you...
by Kristin Palpini | Mar 6, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News, Newsletter
This time, when I went to Mary Jane Makes Your Heart Sing last Friday, I didn’t have to wait in a line to get in. I also didn’t get any weed when I left.For nearly two months, Mary Jane Makes Your Heart Sing operated like a weed club. Located in a strip mall on Page...
by Kristin Palpini | Feb 27, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News, Newsletter
Is it an acceptable level of risk for a child to live in an 80-year-old apartment building that hasn’t been renovated in as many years with a heating system from the ’60s, electrical wiring for the ’70s, and battery-powered smoke detectors that have been in place...
by Chuck Shepherd | Feb 27, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird
Although discouraging the marriage of children in developing nations has been U.S. foreign policy for years, a data-collecting watchdog group in America disclosed in February that 27 U.S. states have no minimum marriage ages and estimates that an average of almost...
by Kristin Palpini | Feb 27, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter, Wellness
Emotional Freedom Technique and what it’s all about If anxiety made a baby with a hive of buzzing bees, you’d get me.Hi, I’m an extremely nervous person. My tendency to worry works out great when reporting and I just can’t let a question go, but it’s a burden...
by Chance Viles Photos by Jason Murray | Feb 20, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Music, News, Newsletter, Uncategorized
Wesley Jillson has been a part of the local metal music scene since the ’80s. He saw Western Mass area metal rise to national prominence in the ’90s, then fade away by 2010.At the fifth annual Promoterhead show at the 13th Floor Music Lounge in Florence in early...
by Kristin Palpini | Feb 20, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, Featured, News, Newsletter
Online ads for an upcoming Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book The Handmaid’s Tale got me thinking: it’s really about time I read this classic dystopian novel.The story takes place in a near-future New England. A militia of religious conservatives take over...
by Kristin Palpini | Feb 20, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Featured, News, Newsletter, O Cannabis!
Standing outside a strip mall in Springfield, I pull on the handle of the double-deadbolted door of a storefront with dark windows and a paper green arrow that says “Herbs” hanging under the company sign, but it doesn’t budge.I can hear men inside talking and...
by Chuck Shepherd | Feb 20, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
San Francisco’s best-paid janitor earned more than a quarter-million dollars cleaning stations for Bay Area Rapid Transit in 2015, according to a recent investigation by Oakland’s KTVU. Liang Zhao Zhang cleared almost $58,000 in base pay and $162,000 in overtime, and...
by From Our Readers | Feb 20, 2017 | Articles, Letters from our Readers, News, Newsletter
Facebook Love Response to “Love Trumps Hate: Transgender women find romance in an insane world,” Feb. 9-15, 2017.Melissa Robinson Ferris: I’ve known Bri since our sons were in grade school together 10 years ago! It’s wonderful to see her looking so well and sounding...
by Hunter Styles | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, News, Newsletter
At the bottom of the stairwell behind my apartment building, a baby stroller sat for weeks. Every time I carried a laundry basket down the back steps, I had an opportunity to read the cardboard sign strapped to the side of the stroller. In rigid capital letters...
by Chuck Shepherd | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
On Jan. 31, doctors at Stanley Medical College and Hospital in Chennai, India, removed a live, full-grown cockroach from the nasal cavity of a 42-year-old woman whose nose had been “itchy” earlier in the day. Two hospitals were unable to help her, but at Stanley, Dr....
by Chris Goudreau | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, Featured, News, Newsletter
Juan is a 40-year-old Springfield resident who is married with two children under age seven. He works construction jobs when he finds them across the state and had just arrived back in the city after working a job in Marlborough when he spoke with the Valley Advocate....
by Kimya Hedayatzadeh | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
Not many people would characterize the town of Amherst as poor. The downtown is interspersed with homey coffee shops, ethnic cuisine, fine dining, boutiques, and independent cinema. But behind the hip shops and $4 coffees is a growing homeless population. Though firm...
by Advocate Staff | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
It’s cold and the icy, black slush is up to your knees. The wind rips across the thick white fields of snow, stabbing tiny icicles through your coat. Breath in and the hairs in your nose freeze. This is February and it’s lovely.Bye, Bye ResolutionsBy the time February...
by From Our Readers | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, Featured, Letters from our Readers, News, Newsletter
What is Trump Doing in Holyoke?As a teacher at Holyoke High School, I applaud your positive news piece about the students at Holyoke High School working to bring about more awareness to stop violence in our school community (“Between the Lines: What Do You Expect From...
by Yana Tallon-Hicks | Feb 13, 2017 | Articles, Columns, News, Newsletter, The V-Spot, Wellness
I’m a 19-year-old male college student. I just started to masturbate, but I don’t know how other people will react if I get into a relationship with them and tell them about this. I would like to know how to be fully comfortable with pleasuring myself as well as see...
by Kristin Palpini | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
In a warm cottage at the end of a dirt road in Jacksonville, Vermont, Brianna Harris and Amy McNeil discuss the “creepy” side of their relationship.The couple, a ski resort grounds keeper and an engineer who have been together for seven years, exchange knowing...
by Advocate Staff | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
Feel like makin’ love? You could bang along to the radio Top 40, Advocate reader, but that’s probably not your style. If you’re not into Selena Gomez, Ed Sheerhan, or Calvin Harris — ugh — we’ve got you covered with alternative love songs. Because metal heads, rude...
by Chuck Shepherd | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
Field work is always challenging, explained Courtney Marneweck of South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal in a recent journal article, but studying the sociology of a white rhino’s dung meant developing a “pattern-recognition algorithm” to figure out “smell...
by Kristin Palpini | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, News, Newsletter
The Trump administration’s order that all presentations and publications by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency be vetted by political appointees before their release to the public sent a shot of pain down my neck.Doug Ericksen, the EPA’s communications director...
by Chance Viles | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
If you have a cellphone and the ability to access the internet,no one has to celebrate a Valentine’s day alone anymore. Now there is a separate outlet for specific needs to accommodate the growing culture of online dating. Want to find a date that definitely is into...
by Naila Moreira | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Down to Earth, News, Newsletter
Nurturing. It’s so often a feminine term, bringing thoughts of mothers, sisters, daughters; of Gaia, the Mother Earth. For a synonym, my thesaurus gives me “motherly.” It’s a term linked, too, with gentleness and tenderness, which in turn are associated with...
by From Our Readers | Feb 6, 2017 | Articles, Letters from our Readers, News, Newsletter
Heroin Coverage Doesn’t Go Far EnoughThe reality is no one knows “how to get off heroin,” if that is defined as the final product of a treatment that has proven, predictable efficacy in creating long-term remission from opioid use disorders (“How to Get Off Heroin: An...
by Jenny Bender and Amanda Herman | Jan 30, 2017 | Featured, News, Newsletter
Editor’s Note: This week, we are delighted to collaborate with Jenny Bender and Amanda Herman, two active community members (one writer, one photographer) who set out this past year to do a citizens’ oral history project on our Muslim friends and neighbors. This...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 30, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
Wash and Dry (Easthampton) Wanted to comment on the man I saw at the laundromat in Easthampton on Tuesday afternoon. you have beautiful blue eyes. We were folding our clothes at the same time. Hopefully you will read this, I would love to hear from you. Jan. 24, 2017...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 30, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, News, Newsletter
The first time I watched “Holyoke High Fight! Stop Violence,” I expected to see a video of a couple kids beating on each other or a message from a parent-teacher association pleading for peace.“Couple high school kids from Holyoke,” said an email from a colleague who...
by Amanda Drane | Jan 30, 2017 | Articles, Columns, News, Newsletter, Third Eye Roaming, Wellness
Brian Leaf wants you to pass gas, audibly, in yoga class at least once.Why, you might ask? He says the practice reacquaints you with your humanity.The barrier-breaking suggestion is one of many in a new book written by local author Leaf, The Teacher Appears: 108...
by From Our Readers | Jan 30, 2017 | Articles, Letters from our Readers, News, Newsletter
One Week. Still Alive.My liberal friends are freaking over the prospect of the 45th president. But to be fair and balanced, I’ve decided to give the new president a chance. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I think I’m going to enjoy the “post-reality era”...
by Chuck Shepherd | Jan 30, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
Schools’ standardized tests are often criticized as harmfully rigid, and in the latest version of the Texas Education Agency’s STAAR test, poet Sara Holbrook said she flubbed the “correct” answer for author motivation — in two of her own poems that were on the test....
by Warren Johnston | Jan 30, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Food + Booze, News, Newsletter, The Pour Man
Broadside Paso Robles Cabernet Sauvignon; $12.99 Although it might be hard to tell from our contradictory weather these days, we’re in the dead of winter, a season that cries out for deep, rich red wines full of dark berry and plum flavors. Cabernet Sauvignon is one...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 23, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
My impression of the Women’s March in D.C. was one of amazement, relief, and hope. At first, the prospect of joining the march was intimidating. I was unsure of my safety, of how the opposition would react toward the protest. We arrived at the rally site...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 23, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
From the Daily Hampshire Gazette editorial board Shortly after Donald J. Trump gave his inaugural address Friday, the Rev. Franklin Graham described the rain that began when our nation’s 45th president stepped to the podium as a symbol of blessing. After hearing...
by Chuck Shepard | Jan 23, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals finally pulled the plug on Orange County, California, social workers who had been arguing in court for 16 years that they were not guilty of lying under oath because, after all, they did not understand that lying under oath in...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, Food Booze and Beyond, News
Everyone has a favorite dive bar — a place you can go in your old jeans and sweater, have a beer for under $3 and watch some Jeopardy! with townies looking to unwind.Dive bars — and we use the term lovingly — tend to be physically and metaphysically secluded. Signs...
by Michael Majchrowicz | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
Downtown Northampton now boasts a new recovery center aimed at providing addicts and loved ones with emotional support.The Northampton Recovery Center at Edwards Church, 297 Main St., which officially opened Monday, was a project that was roughly eight months in the...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, Arts, Between the Lines, News, Newsletter
A painting depicting police officers as feral pigs has been ordered removed from the Capitol after months of controversy and a tug of war over whether the art should be on display. What do you think? As I write this on Monday, Donald Trump is yet to be sworn in as...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
If you’ve never checked out Craigslist’s Missed Connections section, you really should. Like all geographic designations on the forum, the Western Mass list is full of wistful near-meets and longing. Below is a compilation of “missed connection” items from...
by Chuck Shepherd | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
The salary the Golden State Warriors pay to basketball whiz Stephen Curry may be a bargain at $12 million a year, but the economics is weirder about the prices Curry’s fans pay on the street for one of his used mouthguards retrieved from the arena floor after a game....
by From Our Readers | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, Letters from our Readers, News, Newsletter
More WishesIn response to Hunter Styles’ “Between the Lines: Our Wish List for 2017” posted on Facebook.James Moses: “In the meantime, we’re trying to wish Hillary out of the woods and back into her pantsuit. Maybe the Clintons should relocate from Chappaqua to...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
Day One On the first day of a Donald Trump presidency, Saturday, Jan. 21, the streets of D.C. as well as cities and towns across the country will be jammed with women and their allies demanding that leaders protect the rights of women through the Women’s March on...
by Warren Johnston | Jan 16, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Food Booze and Beyond, News, Newsletter, The Pour Man
For more than three decades, New Zealand winemakers have been known for producing some of the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world.Until recently, however, the Kiwi producers haven’t been bringing home international accolades for their Pinot Noir. The country’s...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 9, 2017 | Featured, News
If you’ve never checked out Craigslist’s Missed Connections section, you really should. Like all geographic designations on the forum, the Western Mass list is full of wistful near-meets and longing. Below is a compilation of “missed connection” items from...
by Kristin Palpini | Jan 9, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
So, you want to get off heroin; now what? If it’s an emergency, go to the hospital. If you’re lucid, get to a detox center. If you’re Section 35 court ordered to get clean, the state will place you in a bed put aside specifically for Section 35ers.After...
by Peter Vancini | Jan 9, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter, Scene Here
As temperatures dip and the ice thickens on Heritage Park in East Longmeadow, ice skaters and hockey players of all ages lace up their freshly sharpened skates and brave the cold to carry on a generations-old winter tradition. Just ask Ryan Morton. He used to play...
by Chuck Shepherd | Jan 9, 2017 | Articles, News, News of the Weird, Newsletter
Russian producers are planning the so-far-ultimate survivors’ show — in the Siberian wilderness for nine months with temperatures as low as minus-40-degrees Fahrenheit, with 30 contestants selected after signing liability waivers that protect the show even if someone...
by From Our Readers | Jan 9, 2017 | Articles, Letters from our Readers, News, Newsletter
Love for the Advocate Cheers to the Valley Advocate writers and staff for excellence in informative journalism covering topics with both local and universal appeal. Particularly notable in recent months was the “Extra Credit on Question 2 — Follow the Money” article...
by Hunter Styles | Jan 9, 2017 | Articles, Between the Lines, News, Newsletter
Our annual December Halos and Horns issue of the paper, which sums up staffers’ thoughts on who in the Valley (and the world) has been naughty and nice for the past year, only allows us to look backward. But with a new year rolled out before us, Advocate writers...
by Naila Moreira | Jan 9, 2017 | Articles, Columns, Down to Earth, News, Newsletter
My first container of compostables was beautiful. Inside a repurposed chipped ceramic crockpot lay a smorgasbord of broccoli stems, wilted lettuce, carrot shreddings, sprouted potatoes, onion skins, outer cabbage leaves, asparagus ends, and tomato stems. It looked...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 6, 2017 | Articles, Blogs, News
Each week, the Advocate staff assembles for an AdvoChat, where we bat around thoughts on a subject in the news. The chat is lightly edited. dave.eisen (Dave Eisenstadter, web editor): Kristin, you’re working on a piece on addiction (EDITOR’S NOTE: here it...
by Advocate Staff | Jan 3, 2017 | Articles, News, Wellness
It’s a classic dilemma. The upcoming holidays prompt intense fits of eating followed by the guilt of said eating with promises of a better life for the New Year. New Year’s Eve cues New Year resolutions, and many choose fitness as their goal, making a...
by Peter Vancini | Jan 3, 2017 | Articles, News, Newsletter
Between 2013 and 2015, the number of opioid-related deaths state- wide surged from 918 to 1,578 — an increase of over 70 percent in two years. The opioid crisis in Massachusetts has reached epidemic proportions, according to the findings of a report out this past...
by Advocate Staff | Dec 27, 2016 | Articles, Arts, Film, Leisure, Music, News, Newsletter, Stage
How Does This Work? Who on earth do we think we are, doling out judgement left and right? Find out here. The List HALOS // The People of East Longmeadow — For creating a seven-member Town Council in the wake of a coup on the now-defunct three-member Board of...
