The night before Valentine’s Day, the Cat in the Cream filled with excited OSLAM fans. The large audience spilled onto the floor; friends huddled in from the cold with coffee and cookies. OSLAM is best known for its gripping political and emotional poetry, but the group’s Feb. 13 performance focused on love and positivity. In keeping with the romantic theme, the group also held a “Date a Poet” raffle where, for $1, audience members could win the chance to go on a friend date with their favorite...

If there’s a holiday that’s further out of touch with the reality of what it celebrates than Valentine’s Day, I haven’t found it yet. While the marriage of the commercial and the emotional is a trend far from alien to American holidays, this connection is more contrived and unwarranted with V-Day than any other. Though it would be an exaggeration to claim that Valentine’s Day is a year-long source of worry, its adverse consequences are often ignored in favor of narratives that fit the bill of a romantic February 14. Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love, which is not bad in and of itself. Yet the ubiquity of hearts and roses and the rhetoric of the importance of public displays of love have transformed...