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The first night of Hanukkah falls on Sunday, Dec. 14.The first night of Hanukkah falls on Sunday, Dec. 14. The history of Hanukkah Hanukkah, or the Festival of Lights, celebrates the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Hanukkah (also spelled Chanukah) is a Jewish holiday that lasts for eight nights, usually in November or December. This year, it begins at sundown on Sunday, December 14, 2025 and ends with nightfall on Monday, December 22, 2025. Here is what you need to know about Hanukkah. What is Hanukkah? Hanukkah starts on the 25th of Kislev, a month in the Hebrew...

It’s easy to be a Scrooge about Christmas movies, especially these days. Streaming platforms have shamelessly muscled into the Hallmark market, churning out quick, cheap holiday romcoms with C-list casts every year, hoping to land on something so irresistibly cheesy it briefly becomes a seasonal phenomenon. Put that cynicism aside, however, and most of us can admit that we all have at least one movie we return to every December – the one that allows us to embrace nostalgia unapologetically and lets us know that the most wonderful time of the year has arrived. It doesn’t have to be schmaltzy...

When the inscrutable Dr. Lao (Tony Randall) and his mystical Chinese medicine show roll into the Wild West settlement of Abalone, Arizona, he ends up in the middle of an ongoing feud between a ruthless land baron, Clint Stark (Arthur O'Connell), and an idealistic newspaper editor, Ed Cunningham (John Ericson). The shape-shifting Dr. Lao soon weighs in on the battle, as well as the problems of widowed librarian Angela (Barbara Eden) and her ambitious young son, Mike.

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading. Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times. Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future,...

Children as young as five are being taught "abortion is a superpower" in a new book. "Abortion Is Everything" by Amelia Bonow and Rachel Kessler is billed as a non-fiction book, and will begin shipping to purchasers in January 2026. It is being promoted by pro-abortion group Shout Your Abortion (SYA) - which hails the tome as a way to "empower parents and kids". Elsewhere, children between five and eight years old are taught "about what abortion is, how it might feel, and why people have abortions". "Abortion is a tool that allows human beings to shape our destinies, and...

Since the late 19th century, school yearbooks have been a ubiquitous and mostly unchanging element of American school life. Decade after decade, they deliver a predictable mix of class, club, and team photos, cheesy graphics, and cringey comments. But the most consistent feature of yearbooks may be what they don’t include—references to political upheaval or resistance movements. As public schools across the United States face heightened censorship and the threat of funding losses for noncompliance, school yearbooks remind us that there is nothing new about political censorship in schools. A few rare examples also reveal that there some students and...

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs an introduction, as I expect everyone in the world has read it, or has seen the film starring Gregory Peck. (If you haven’t read it, perhaps you should.) Lee, incidentally, went to visit the film set, and had this to say about Peck: “an inspired performance. In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.” If that seems a tad clichéd and not especially insightful, then I’m afraid to say that this is the general tenor of the nonfiction pieces in The Land of Sweet Forever , alongside eight previously unseen...

(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City.

Men aren’t vanishing from fiction. The truth is more complicated (Cannot be posted due to FR rules.)

President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that Americans may "not even have income tax to pay" in the near future, saying tariff-driven revenue could allow for the historic elimination of the federal income tax under his tenure. Trump told a press gaggle after his cabinet meeting that "at some point in the not too distant future you won’t even have income tax to pay," arguing that revenue the government is collecting under his administration is now "so great… so enormous." "Whether you get rid of it or just keep it around for fun or have it really low, much lower than...

Avatar: Fire and Ash has had its first few screenings for press on Monday, and the early reaction suggests James Cameron can celebrate yet another billion dollar box office mega hit. While official critics reviews for Fire and Ash are embargoed till closer to the film's Dec. 19 release date, 20th Century Studios allowed press to release social media reaction to screenings this week. The third installment in Cameron's groundbreaking Avatar series, sees the action return to Pandora after the events of 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water, and introduces the "Ash" people, fire-themed Na'vi clan. Fire and Ash stars...

A graduate assistant was removed from her position amid investigations into a contested discrimination report filed by a disgruntled student who repeatedly referenced the Bible in an essay response to an article about gender stereotypes — for a course taught by a transgender instructor. In her essay, which was supposed to cover “how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender,” University of Oklahoma student Samantha Fulnecky presented a Biblically-fueled tirade against the notion that there are multiple genders. The psychology course’s professor, graduate student Mel Curth, who uses “she/they” pronouns, failed Fulnecky on the grounds that she neglected...

These are some texts my mother has sent me: ‘They found a mole on my back . . .’ ‘I think Janet may have been contacted by ISIS . . .’ ‘Madeline, the guest room is haunted . . .’ For the reader’s peace of mind: the mole was benign, Janet has not been contacted by the Islamic State and the guest room, well, that remains to be seen. I’ve always accepted my mother’s overuse of ellipses as an idiosyncrasy of an elderly texter. But she doesn’t reserve the ‘. . .’ for ominous messages. When I told her the...

A new research project by Israeli and international scholars has digitally transcribed the texts featured in hundreds of thousands of fragments from the celebrated Cairo Geniza, as well as thousands of additional Hebrew manuscripts, the National Library of Israel announced on Monday. The project, dubbed MiDRASH (which is meant to loosely correspond to Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script), was launched in 2023 after securing a €10 million ($11.5 million) grant over six years from the EU’s European Research Council (ERC). Virtually all the 400,000 fragments from the geniza have...

A staff member at a Buddhist temple heard a knock while explaining to a relative how to get a death certificate.A 65-year-old Thai woman has just experienced everyone’s worst nightmare: waking up in a coffin. On Sunday, the Wat Rat Prakong Tham Buddhist Temple outside of Bangkok posted a video of a white, open coffin in the back of a pickup truck. Inside is an extremely thin woman dressed in an orange skirt and a white top, clearly moving her arms as bystanders watch in shock. Emergency workers then move her onto a gurney and load her into an ambulance....

Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho too! Stephen Curry looks darker than usual? This advert is effective in bringing in black buyers and white sports bros. Googoo gets creative You tube put this in my feed for whatever reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pONa8nrKxlU

Leftist ideology is so patently sick and wrong that recruitment focuses on children too young to have developed a sense of moral revulsion. The idea is that attitudes implanted in defenseless minds at a very early age can lead to a lifetime of voting for Democrats. That’s why the liberal anti-sacrament of abortion is promoted via books aimed at children as young as 5 years: Amelia Bonow, the abortion activist most well-known for creating the “Shout Your Abortion” social media movement, has published a children’s book about abortion… The book is entitled Abortion Is Everything. Marketed toward children from ages...

The woman Larry Summers asked for advice on how to get “horizontal” with in emails to Jeffrey Epstein is a high-flying economist, The Post can reveal. The ex-Treasury Secretary was referring to Chinese macro-economist Keyu Jin, 43 — then a tenured London School of Economics professor and Harvard graduate — and daughter of a top Chinese associate of President Xi Jinping. In several messages from 2018 and 2019, married former Harvard president Summers, 70, confided in his “wing man” Epstein about a woman he was chasing and delivered blow-by-blow updates of his pursuit. Jin Keyu speaking at the World Economic...

The central theme of The Cherry Orchard is that of social change. Written in the early 1900s, the play depicts a Russia on the brink of revolution. As the aristocracy’s power wanes, former serfs experience freedom, and a burgeoning middle class takes root, the central characters of the play—representative of the upper, middle, and lower classes—find themselves struggling to negotiate their relationships, loyalties, and anxieties about the changing socioeconomic landscape of their country. Through The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov dramatizes the concerns of several social strata, showing how the emergence of a middle class in Russia disrupted and negatively impacted the...

Rep. Brad Sherman blamed Elon Musk’s X algorithm for serving him saucy pictures amid a potential scandal involving him scrolling through softcore pornography in public. The 71-year-old California Democrat was photographed looking at pictures of lingerie-clad girls on his tablet while on a flight. The pictures of Sherman were posted to X by the Dear White Staffers account, an account made of a “group of Capitol Hill staffers working to expose poor working conditions.” The images were later reposted by Donald Trump Jr.