Quotes from Elizabeth Flock

When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went - songs she loved, like 'Begin the Beguine' by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.

When Neil Young caught two women incessantly texting at a concert in 2012, he began mock typing on an invisible phone on stage until the women noticed and apparently left the show.

In Mumbai, I found, people practiced a showy, demonstrative kind of love, one unafraid of affection or emotion.

Showy displays of love don't come naturally to everyone. They don't come naturally to me. They also come with a risk: a risk of rejection, being made to feel silly, or making yourself into a spectacle.

Xenophobia is defined as the uncontrollable fear of foreigners. That fear should not dictate the immigration dialogue any longer.

The Food Stamp Challenge, which challenges higher-income families to live as if they are on food stamps, estimates that a person on food stamps has a budget of about $1.25 per meal. In other words, a family on food stamps must buy an entire meal per person for less than the cost of an average cup of coffee.

India has a long history with devotional, even obsessive love, be it for a personal god or for your lover.

Just a decade after 'Living in Bondage,' Nollywood films, made in some 300 languages, were being watched in both urban and rural areas, distributed on both the streets and online, and finding their way into international festivals.

Founded by a Mormon couple in Utah in 2012, The Color Run has proved to be a brilliant idea.

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.'

The Museum of the Bible, the sprawling, 430,000-square-foot tribute to the good book, has been dogged by controversies long before opening day. It's been criticized for not including enough Jesus, for excluding various religious traditions, and for being evangelical propaganda.

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.

There is no denying that unhappiness - even violence - exists in some arranged marriages. Or that some arranged marriages are borne out of cruelty. And part of that six percent global divorce rate can be attributed to the powerful stigma against divorce that's present in countries where arranged marriage is common.