#cultural-traditions

#cultural-traditions

The frontier myth has proven to be one of the most powerful and enduring stories in American history, erasing or altering the history of people of color and women in the West.

The Korean wave or hallyu that brought the country's culture to the world has now well and truly engulfed Latin America.

Swedes celebrate the day before on Holy Saturday, with Easter services in the Swedish church often taking place in the evening. This tradition reflects a broader cultural practice of marking holidays the evening before the main day.

Keepers of the Steps, the living archive and cultural program at the United Irish Cultural Center dedicated to preserving generations of Bay Area Irish dancers, teachers, and families. Through stories, images, and lived experience, we'll reflect on how dance carries lineage, identity, and community forward.

I grew up in a Mexican household where food was our love language - but there was also stigma and very little guidance around diabetes. When my aunt, and later my mom, were diagnosed, it took time to understand what healthy eating could look like for them. That's why this partnership means so much to me. Our culture and our food are not the problem - they're part of the solution.

Letting our dogs lick the dishes before we put them in the dishwasher!

Here dwells the indigenous Tzotzil community which has kept a pastoral way of life against the march of time. Apart from the odd forest ranger and passerby, Ruvalcaba's film focuses almost entirely on the Tzotzil women. Together, they tend herds of sheep which they still shear by hand, and use traditional tools for spinning yarns and natural dye for fabrics.

The festival of Pailhasses is one of France's most ancient carnival traditions. Celebrating the end of a longstanding rivalry with a neighbouring village, it has for more than 700 years allowed villagers to release frustrations before Lent. Its rituals are about strength, chasing and some form of attack. It is also notoriously secretive.

The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.

We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?

Country of origin labeling became mandatory on all international products entering the United States in 2009. The goal was to ensure American consumers knew where the products they were buying came from, enabling shoppers to make informed buying decisions. These products include everything from Mexican avocados to French wine to pasta from Italy, with the latter thankfully safe from recent U.S. tariffs. However, does the location a product comes from actually matter?

Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese Lunar New Year and Spring Festival, is one of the world's biggest holidays. The 15-day celebration is not only observed in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and other Asian countries but by 2 billion people worldwide. That said, there are other Asian countries with their own, distinct Lunar New Year traditions, and like China's, they've been around for thousands of years.

In Italy, the most common topic mentioned as a source of national pride was culture and the arts. These were cited by 38 percent of respondents, more than any other place. An Italian woman who took part in the survey said she was proud of 'the works in the churches, paintings, sculpture ... most places in Italy have something beautiful.' An Italian man said that 'Italy is an open-air museum.'

Part of the answer lies in the visceral nature of the game. Unlike chess, football is physical to the point of absurdity. Grown adults in body armor crash into each other over what is essentially a leather egg. There's drama in every play. You don't need a PhD in physics to appreciate a one-handed catch while somersaulting over a defender like a caffeinated acrobat.

His investigation began after identifying recurring giant T-shapes, three-level indents, and step pyramids carved into ancient stones worldwide. 'These specific symbols that are built in different size proportions, and the symbols are found in ancient stones around the world, are not supposed to exist; no cultures are supposed to have any cross-platform,' LaCroix explained. The symbols appear in locations ranging from Turkey's Van region to South America and Cambodia.

I noticed this shift in my own life when I started having dinner with my partner most nights, phones deliberately tucked away in another room. We made this change after too many evenings disappeared into "just checking one thing" that turned into hours of parallel scrolling. The difference was immediate and profound. Conversations went deeper. We actually looked at each other. Time seemed to stretch in the best possible way.

Tattoos and fermentation rarely appear in the same conversation, yet across the world, they share a quiet kinship. Both are practices of transformation, crafts that reshape raw material over time through care and relationships to the land, the spiritual, and the community. Tattooing inscribes identity and ancestry onto skin, while fermentation preserves, nourishes, and binds communities through shared taste and ritual. Both create change, brewing something more than themselves through embodied knowledge passed between generations.

This is the time of year when my kitchen starts to tell the truth about who I am. Scottish crab, fresh from Tarbert, is lowered gently into a bubbling chilli bath of sambal and egg to become chilli crab, scooped up with steamed mantou buns and eaten messily with friends and family. Oysters from Lindisfarne are deep-fried in a light cloak of rice and corn flour, fished out of the wok with long chopsticks and dipped into sweet chilli sauce.

The Irish government will give 2,000 artists unrestricted weekly stipends in a program officials described as a "recognition, at government level, of the important role of the arts in Irish society." After a successful three-year pilot, the Irish government made its basic income program for artists permanent. Similar pilots have been launched here in the United States, but they're supported primarily by the nonprofit sector.

Last February, master of ceremonies Dennis Bowen (a Seneca elder) welcomed the reigning champion into the 2025 World Championship Hoop Dance Contest arena at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Thousands of spectators joined them to watch more than 100 dancers compete across the two-day event. Bowen announced Josiah Enriquez's (Pueblo of Pojoaque, Navajo, Isleta) accomplishments as a top place finisher several years running in the teen division and as the surprise winner in an unprecedented tiebreaking round in the adult division the year before.

When I enter a museum, I'm not looking for what's on the walls, I'm looking at what's behind them.