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'Women In The Wild' Features Moms Breastfeeding Outside To Spread A Message About Confidence

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Photographer and mom of four Erin White was having a hard time breastfeeding when a creative project gave her the boost of confidence she needed.

Inspired by an image by Stephanie Karr Studios, her local breastfeeding community in Kaiserslautern, Germany wanted to create their own group nursing photo, and White volunteered to be the photographer. During the photo shoot, many women shared their stories about breastfeeding, body image, and loss. "There was so much wonderful energy between all the mamas and babies!" she told The Huffington Post.

breastfeeding

After sharing the group photo on social media, the photographer says she received "a huge outpouring of emotional e-mails and comments from mothers across the world." Moved by the women's enthusiasm for normalizing breastfeeding and promoting body positivity, White decided to expand the project, photographing mothers and including their stories with the images.

With help from her associates Liliana Taboas and Megan Flanagan, her project -- titled "Women in the Wild" -- includes 51 mothers from different parts of the world. "They are so inspiring and real and relatable," White said.

women in the wild

For each session, the photographers explained the message and asked the mothers to wear what made them feel most comfortable. While some remained fully clothed, others stripped down to their underwear. "I see a lot of women decide to go more nude once we are at the shoot and they see other mothers doing it," White said. "It gives you a feeling of strength I think. You’re completely vulnerable, but there’s a whole group of you so you find confidence and power standing with your fellow mothers for a cause."

The photographer hopes the participants get a sense of confidence and healing from the series. "The first year or two can be so hard as a family, the last thing [a mom] should be stressed about is her body image," she said, adding, "I hope people will get a sense of the natural beauty of a new mother and stop tearing each other down. I hope it helps people see breastfeeding as a natural act of feeding a baby, rather than a sexual act to be hidden."

This summer, White hopes to photograph many more mothers as she travels throughout the U.S. For more information about the ongoing project, visit her website and Facebook page.



H/T BabyCenter



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The Paradox of The Famous Feminist Man

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"Magic Mike XXL" has only been out for a week, and already it has generated dozens of articles and online discussions about how, despite appearances, it's actually the "most shockingly feminist movie of the summer." It's been commended for challenging ageism, sexism, fatphobia and slut-shaming, all whilst (subversively) objectifying the male body. Even feminist writer Roxane Gay tweeted her unabashed love for the film, a stamp of approval that led to its star, Channing Tatum, being asked to talk about his own feelings on feminism.  


 In the July 8 interview with Daily Life, Tatum Admitted: "'Feminist' is like a hard word for me to throw around. I would love to say I'm a feminist but I don't study feminism, so I can't just go, like, 'Yes, I'm a feminist!'"


He added, "But I'm very pro-feminism. I wanna talk to [Roxane Gay] about the Magic Mike show."


Tatum's answer has been commended, and rightly so -- he was honest about his unfamiliarity with feminism, but clearly eager to learn more from those who are. He didn't dismiss feminism, but he didn't lay claim to something he knows nothing about. But the flurry of excitement online that followed his remarks was striking -- dozens of write-ups congratulating Tatum on wanting to be feminist sprang up, one choice headline reading: "Pro-feminist Channing Tatum Is A Great Cook."


Feminist male celebrities are hot right now.


 As feminism becomes more widely discussed in the mainstream, it's exciting and gratifying to see popular male stars (and men in general) who seem to "get it." So when John Legend insists that "all men should be feminists," or Mark Ruffalo speaks out about abortion rights, it's newsworthy. At The Huffington Post, we absolutely highlight famous men who prove you don't need to be a woman to be a feminist.


But is the collective enthusiasm over famous feminist men a bad thing?


Not inherently. Allies are important, and for better or worse celebrity male allies to feminism, even tangentially, can be positive. These men, who occupy spaces of privilege that feminist activists often do not, likely have access to populations that wouldn't be hearing about feminism otherwise. However, where the danger always lies is in the possibility that the voices of privileged allies will erase those of the oppressed. In an essay for Salon, BitchMedia co-founder Andi Zeisler called for an end to "fawning" over male celebrity feminists, arguing that "by celebrating pronouncements [by male celebrities] that, in most cases, are simply common sense, the media is also reifying the belief that an idea becomes legitimate only when it is voiced by a man." 




Take Tom Hardy, for instance. He's complex, intensely talented -- and considered by many to be a total hunk. He's been lauded for having a long "feminist history" consisting mostly of interviews in which he's said things like "writing for women and films for women could be much better." While Hardy's views on gender and Hollywood are often refreshing, they're certainly nothing groundbreaking -- actresses like Cate Blanchett, Rose McGowan and Zoe Saldana have long been vocal about inequalities in the industry. So how do we toe the line between highlighting how great his opinions are without over-emphasizing their overall importance?


After all, like Tom Hardy, many of the male actors who've been celebrated for being feminist have never actually explicitly said that they're feminist. But for the female stars who do proudly claim the label, there's praise but it's often accompanied by an intense level of scrutiny. 


Eva Wiseman of The Guardian has pointed out that the backlash against feminist stars like Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham feels somewhat disproportionate. "The higher we hold them," she wrote on July 5, "the further they fall. In our culture, when we find a [female] feminist star we love, we hype them all the way to an inevitable backlash."


While I'm dubious about whether criticisms surrounding the way Schumer handles the intersections of race and gender in her comedy are merely just "backlash," it's fair to say that the same standards and demands aren't applied to men. Emma Watson stands on a UN stage to give a speech about the importance of male allies, and both her message and knowledge of feminism is questioned. Beyonce calls herself a feminist, and is accused of being too sexual and inauthentic. Few male celebrities, with the exception of someone like Joss Whedon (a writer/director, not an actor), are ever deemed "bad feminists" -- no matter what they say or do. 


"This isn’t a men problem. It’s a media problem," Zeisler writes later in her essay. But it's also the problem of celebrity. As issues of race and gender have become more central to discussions of pop culture, we've entered an era where we're thinking about the merits of the media we consume not only based on their artistic quality, but how feminist or un-feminist they are. 


 It's a strange qualitative system that's trickled down to how we feel about our celebrities -- "Pro-feminist Channing Tatum" becomes just another part of the actor's good-guy persona, another reason to like him, but what does it actually mean? Why do we keep asking stars if they're feminists in the first place?



Hi. This is a photo of me from my bodybuilding years, circa 2010. And these are the nipples of @mileycyrus and @...

Posted by Matt McGorry on Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Over the last year, "Orange is the New Black" actor Matt McGorry has become the face of male feminist allies, and has been vocal about gender equality. He's imperfect, but a good example of a male celebrity ally who is outspoken about his feminism but also willing to take a step back in order to let the voices of women actually be heard. This is key. 


While celebrating male stars who say decent things about women or explicitly state they are feminist is fine, it's important that our enthusiasm doesn't erase feminist thinkers and blur the complexities of feminism. It's something we think about actively at The Huffington Post, and we know that other newsrooms are grappling with a similar balancing act. 


While male-identified allies are a wonderful thing, co-opting the feminist movement while doing nothing to push that movement forward besides saying one or two nice things about women isn't. We should be discerning about the voices we choose to elevate and the way we choose to elevate them. It's not about the buzziness of the word "feminism," but the ideas behind it. 


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11 Baby Names That Are Related To James

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Among the classic boys’ names, James stands out as one of the most enduring, likable and versatile, and is still stylish after centuries of popular usage. Here are some of the many nicknames and variations of James, including his charming international counterparts.

James

james brown

Before listing the nicknames and variations, let's take a look at James itself. James’s accomplishments are too numerous to mention, but among them are being voted America’s favorite boys’ name, and belonging to more U.S. presidents than any other (six). It’s been a British royal name for centuries, was the most popular name in America for 13 straight years and is still in the top 10 in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Scotland.

Jim

jim morrison the doors

There have been scores of notables known by Jim -- Jims Henson, Carrey, Morrison, Jarmusch and Parsons, to name a few -- as well as fictional Jims in Huckleberry Finn, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Jim was a Top 100 name in the 1900s, the 30s and 40s, and briefly in the 60s.

Jimmy

jimmy fallon

Late night TV is dominated by the two Jimmys -- Kimmel and Fallon, both of them named after their fathers named James. Since so many baby James are called by their full name these days, Jimmy begins to sound like an affectionately quirky relic.

Jimbo

jimbo fisher

Though it is the actual given name of football coach Jimbo Fisher (a junior), Jimbo is the nickname of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and there have been characters named Jimbo on "The Rockford Files," "The Simpsons" and "South Park."

Jamie

jamie foxx

The originally Scottish Jamie had an impressive run as an independent name for both boys and girls in the 70s and 80s. Among its current prominent bearers are Jamies Foxx, Oliver, Cullum and Dornan.

Jameson/Jamison

chynna phillips baldwin

This patronymic version is rapidly climbing for boys (and sometimes girls). It’s currently at Number 159 in the Jameson spelling AND 440 with an I. Actor Jameson Parker was born Francis Jameson. Chynna Phillips and Billy Baldwin have a daughter named Jameson.

Seamus

devon murray

This Irish form of James, with more substance and verve than cousin Sean, became familiar via acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney, as well as Harry Potter’s wizard friend Seamus Finnigan. It joined the U.S. popularity ranks in 1995.

Jacques

jacques cousteau

This version of both James and Jacob is an evergreen French classic, familiar to American kids via the song "Frere Jacques." Sometimes used as a snooty character name in animated films, it had a brief moment of U.S. popularity around 1970.

Giacomo

giacomo casanova

The Italian form of James has a long and noble heritage, ranging from opera composer Puccini to ladies’ man Casanova to poet Leopardi. Still a Top 20 name in its native land, it has never ranked stateside. Sting is one non-Italian who used it for his son.

Hamish

craig ferguson

Hamish is the Scottish form of James (and a Yiddish word for homey) that has never found its footing here, but we think it would make a fabulous choice for parents with Scottish roots. It’s the middle name of Craig Ferguson’s son and of Sherlock Holmes’s Watson, and a current bearer is versatile actor Hamish Linklater.

Jimi

jimi hendrix

This spelling is tied to a single celeb -- tragic guitar genius Jimi Hendrix, whose hip surname -- along with other early rock greats Lennon and Jagger -- has caught on with baby namers to the point of reaching Number 546. Jimi, on the other hand, has never reached the Top 1000.

Jem

jem singer

The full name of the To Kill a Mockingbird boy character is Jeremy, but Jem is primarily an old-school nickname for James. And if so many of the novel’s other names have caught on -- Atticus, Scout, Harper -- why not Jem, with its jewel-like sound?

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'Boulevard' Star Roberto Aguire On Working With Robin Williams In Last Dramatic Role

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It can be a long road to acceptance, particularly when it comes to who you are.


That sentiment is what drives Robin Williams’ character Nolan Mack in the Dito Montiel-directed indie film “Boulevard.” The 60-year-old bank officer has led a lonely life despite his long childless marriage to his wife Joy (Kathy Baker). The couple lack intimacy, not for a lack of love but because Nolan is gay -- a fact he has spent most of his life repressing.  


Mexican-American actor Roberto Aguire comes in as Leo, a hustler whom Nolan pays for companionship, not sex, as he tries to come to term with his sexuality. The 27-year-old actor spoke to The Huffington Post ahead of the film’s nationwide release on Friday. Aguire opened up about what it was like to work with Williams in his final dramatic role and why he feels Latino actors shouldn’t be limited by the ‘Latino’ label.


 


“Boulevard” deals with Nolan trying to come to terms with his sexuality after a lifetime of suppressing it. And you portray Leo, a character that becomes a catalyst for all of this. What drew you into the script the most when you first read it? 


[Screenwriter Douglas Soesbe] has a beautifully fluid way of writing dialogue that almost sounds like poetry. So when I read the script, immediately it captured me. I thought it was a story that had to be told.


 There is so much of this topic, especially right now, that’s prevalent in America. But it’s also very hidden in America. I think if you talk to anybody they know a person or they have an uncle, a brother, a son, a cousin who is in a later stage in their life who is coming to terms with who they really are. I think that story has to be told, it has to be shown that it doesn’t matter if you get to a later stage in your life, you can always make a change. You always deserve to find happiness, so that was the second thing that drew me to the script.


 


And Leo also kind of suppresses the reality of being in the dangerous world of male prostitution.   


Leo is this beautiful character who is so complex and so complicated within this dangerous world that he lives in. I don’t think he’s a run-of-the-mill hustler [laughs], to put it that way. He kind of sticks out because he has this innate and hidden sensitivity into life, and almost like [a] childlike innocence that when you see him you just want to give him a hug, you just want to tell him that it’s going to be OK. You just want to tell him to get out of that situation.


But for some reason, he’s stuck and he can’t get out -- very much like Nolan’s trapped in something that they’re just not happy with. But I think in Leo’s case it manifests itself in a physical danger and an emotional danger that he’s had to shut down in order to deal with.


 


“Boulevard” was Robin Williams’ final dramatic performance. It’s been almost a year since his death on Aug. 11, 2014. When the news broke many who only knew him through his films mourned him like the loss of a close friend. As someone who had worked closely with him relatively recently, do you recall how you felt the moment you found out?


Yeah, I was in my apartment in Los Angeles and I just remember feeling numb. I think the way you just described the general reaction to his death, which was "the mourning of a close friend," is a testament to who he was. He had this ability to be able to touch people through every character that he did. Whether it was a dramatic role or a comedic role, after you watch[ed] one of his movies it was like you knew Robin Williams, you knew who he was.


The great thing about Robin is, after you had the chance to meet him, that’s exactly who he was. He was this kind, generous, enormous soul who loved to interact with people -- be with people, to show people who he was. I think it speaks so highly of him and his humanity to see the kind of reaction that people had. Everybody around the world just united in this outpouring of love for Robin, and that’s beautiful to see. I think it’s so sad that we all lost such a genius of our time and such a humble and beautiful human being. But it’s beautiful to see how much people loved him, both the people that were close to him and the people that only knew him through his movies.


 


Robin had a very long and successful career both in comedy and drama. What was your biggest takeaway as a young actor working with such a legend?


So much. [laughs] It’s like a young writer saying, "I sat down with Ernest Hemingway and I learned one thing." It’s like, no way. There’s so much -- just to see the level of dedication was amazing. You’d think that a veteran actor working on a small independent project shooting over 22 days would maybe say, ‘you know what, I can maybe phone it in’ or ‘I can take a step back and cruise through this.’ I mean he could have easily with his talent; I think the movie would have still been great. But he showed up 120 percent in every single scene, there wasn’t a single scene that he wasn’t blowing everyone away with his performance. It didn’t matter how small the scene was or how emotionally trying the scene was.


That’s amazing for a young actor to see, that drive [and] that dedication. I think nowadays there [are] a lot of young actors who are very lazy... celebrity-dom has made them lazy because they don’t have to be much of anything to just get in front of a camera and be a personality. To create a fully formed character full of life, struggle and humanity is tough. It’s not easy, and to see someone like Robin do it so effortlessly yet so meticulously precise[ly], it’s truly inspiring.  



 


As a young Latino actor it can be particularly hard to get your foot into this industry. Many find great roles in indie films, like Gina Rodriguez in “Filly Brown.” Where do you hope this opportunity will take you in your career?


I hope that it just opens more doors. It’s interesting, I think as a Latino actor the biggest challenge is being called Latino because immediately the world has a perception of what that means. A Latino actor can’t play this and a Latino actor can’t play that because they’re Latino. Well, no. And I think Gina Rodriguez is a beautiful example of it. We can play anything we want to play. Just as an Aussie can play an American or a Scot can play a Frenchman or a Peruvian can play the world’s leading neurologist, I think Latinos can play anything. We can be anything that we want to be; we can be any role.


I can tell you the huge difference between a Latino and [puts on a Scottish accent] a person from Scotland is you’ll never think that person from Scotland can’t do anything. I put on a Scottish accent and people are like ‘whaaa happened?!’ But it shouldn’t be mind-blowing. Latinos can do anything. I think that’s the biggest issue we’re facing right now, it’s Latinos being labeled as Latinos and being limited by it, as opposed to being labeled as Latino and being empowered by it. I hope that “Boulevard” is able to open a door for me to say, "I’m a Latino actor and I can be a chameleon, I can be anything you want me to be.”  


 This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 


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Drake Is Miley Cyrus, Oprah And Literally Everyone In 'Energy' Video

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Drake has a lot of energy. So much that he's decided to parody practically every major celebrity, plus the POTUS.


The rapper dropped his new music video for "Energy" off his mixtape "If You're Reading This It's Too Late" on Friday during Zane Lowe's Beats 1 Radio on Apple Music. In the hilarious video, directed by Fleur & Manu, Drake parodies pretty much everyone in pop culture.


There's "Wrecking Ball" Miley Cyrus:



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Oprah during Tom Cruise's famous couch jump:



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Justin Bieber in his Calvin Klein ad



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And so much more including LeBron James, Rob Ford, Kanye West in his "Bound 2" video, President Barack Obama, Floyd Mayweather and O.J. Simpson during the 1994 freeway chase. (Prayer hands emoji.) Let's just throw out all the history books and show this music video instead.


Drake also debuted a new track, "My Love," with "Hold On, We’re Going Home" collaborators Majid Jordan, which you can hear on Apple Music and below on SoundCloud.




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Powerful Ads Show What Your Child Sees When You're Addicted To Your Phone

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A new Chinese ad campaign illustrates the way smartphones can affect family life and relationships.  


Titled "Phone Wall," the campaign by Ogilvy & Mather China is a literal representation of the barriers to human relationships that screen addiction creates. 



 "Pulling out a phone during a conversation is like erecting a brick wall between two people," Juggi Ramakrishnan, Executive Creative Director (ECD) of Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai, told The Huffington Post. "We want people to see this and rethink their relationships with others and their phone in a different light."


The campaign is for the Center for Psychological Research, Shenyang, a government body focused on raising awareness around social issues and causes. Ramakrishnan says screen addiction is a growing issue in China. "This is a definite pressure point that Chinese society is facing on its path of rapid development," he said, noting that smartphones and social media seem to permeate "all aspects of everyday life" -- from shopping to business to social interactions.


This pervasiveness has the potential to be especially detrimental to families with kids, says Ramakrishnan."There is an alarming trend of parents ignoring their children of all ages, paying more attention to their phones and tablets than their immediate surroundings." 



Consequently, children may feel they aren't getting the attention they need. "Children who need their parents’ responsiveness when they are angry, sad, frustrated or excited, now find they must compete for it," he continued. "It’s almost like dealing with sibling rivalry. Except that the rival is a new electronic device. This trend, if unchecked, can lead to psychological problems."


Ramakrishnan also noted that addiction to mobile devices can put a strain on romantic relationships as well, as partners may become less responsive to each other's feelings and have fewer meaningful interactions. 


Ultimately, this campaign is meant to spark conversations about smartphone addiction. "The objective is to get adults to rethink their relationship with screens," the ECD said. "And to get them to put down their devices when they are with other people; be it their children, their friends or their partners."


"The people in our lives should get priority over devices."



H/T BoredPanda


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The First 'Fear The Walking Dead' Trailer Is Here, And Totally Terrifying

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Finally, we got our first full look at "Fear the Walking Dead."


The first trailer for the "Walking Dead" companion series debuted at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, and it's pretty terrifying. Remember, the spinoff takes place before the events of "The Walking Dead," and shows the zombie outbreak as it begins to happen. Kim Dickens' Madison and Cliff Curtis' Travis, along with the rest of Los Angeles' citizens, are first introduced to the possibility of zombies in the trailer, and it's too startling for them to even believe. Here's what else we learned about the new show:








Before this, we only got a few brief teasers  and promos for the new prequel series. In addition to Curtis and Dickens, the new spinoff will star Frank Dillane, Alycia Debnam Carey, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Ruben Blades and Mercedes Mason. Expect the new show to have lots of "psychological tension," as promised by showrunner Dave Erikson.


Before the new "Fear" trailer debuted on Friday, AMC also released the first trailer for "The Walking Dead" Season 6


"Fear the Walking Dead" premieres on Aug. 23 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC. 



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Little Girl's Viral Paint Mishap Sums Up Life With Toddlers

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A Colorado mom was in for quite a surprise after she left her toddler alone in the living room for a few minutes.


Victoria Farmer was breastfeeding her infant son in the next room when she noticed the house became "scary quiet," she told FOX31 Denver.


When she went to check on her daughter Anistyn, she found the 2-year-old covered in white paint, looking like an ancient Greek statue.




In her interview with FOX31 Denver,  Farmer explained that she'd been doing some home improvement late into the previous night, and when she was finished, she couldn't get the paint bucket lid to fully seal. Exhausted, she went to bed and left it partially open -- which was just enough for Anistyn to take a dip.


“It looks like she just climbed right in and went for a swim,” the mom wrote on Facebook when she shared a photo of the toddler. Her post quickly made its away across her friends' social media feeds and beyond. On Life of Dad's Facebook page, the image was shared over 25,000 times. 


Farmer told 7News Denver that she and her sister quickly washed the paint off the little girl, but cleaning the little white footprints off the floor was a much more challenging endeavor. "I look like an irresponsible parent, but she's just really quick," she added.


At the end of the day, the mess is pretty adorable. But maybe don't try this at home.


H/T Yahoo


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Yes, Stannis Baratheon Is Dead, And You Won’t Believe Why 'Game Of Thrones' Didn’t Show It

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A lot of people were killed off in the "Game of Thrones" Season 5 finale, but fans were still left speculating whether or not all of those deaths were set in stone.


Now the official word is in: yes, Stannis Baratheon is, in fact, dead. He's not sorta dead or maybe dead -- he's flat out gone. "Mother's Mercy" director David Nutter confirmed the death to Entertainment Weekly at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. “From the very beginning, and [through] the script process, that was the intent -- he’s dead,” Nutter said.



In the Season 5 finale of the HBO series, Stannis (Stephen Dillane) was seen wounded and defeated after his battle against Ramsay Bolton. Brienne approached the Lord of Dragonstone to fulfill her vow to end his life after he caused Renly's death. But before "Thrones" actually showed Brienne's Oathkeeper fall on Stannis, the episode cut away to a scene with Ramsay. This led many fans to speculate whether or not Stannis was actually dead, and if so, why didn't the series show his actual murder?


Apparently, showing the actual death scene felt "gratuitous." Excuse us for a moment while we spit out our wine. For some reason, showing Cersei forced to walk naked in public wasn't "gratuitous," nor was showing Sansa Stark's clothes ripped off by Ramsay before she was raped by him, and seemingly, neither was showing Theon's repeated torture scenes.


 




Sorry, Nutter, but if every other violent or grotesque scene ever displayed on "Thrones" is acceptable -- and there are a lot -- then showing one more male character murdered by the blade of a woman's sword is certainly not anything close to what one would consider "gratuitous." Let's also not forget that this same man who was killed off also had just recently allowed his young daughter to be burned alive. If HBO could include Shireen's screams and cries as she burned offscreen, they could've at least given fans the satisfaction of watching Stannis be defeated. We have one word for you, Nutter:



tv show gifs

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Meet The Man Who Wants To Bring Back Your Childhood, One Game At A Time

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Old-school video games are the new big thing. Entirely new titles like "Axiom Verge" emulate the style of Super Nintendo games, and most modern systems or smartphones let you purchase versions of classic titles to play whenever you want. Want "Galaga" on your iPhone? It's all yours.

But unless you're into vintage consoles and outdated televisions, it's not so easy to play genuinely old video games. Modern releases are usually cleaned up in some way, with glitches or graphical quirks removed, features added or controls changed. If those rough edges are smoothed over in a new release, then it could be argued that it's not a pure version of the game.

Enter Frank Cifaldi. He's the head of restoration for Digital Eclipse, a company devoted to accurate restorations of classic video games and developer of the upcoming "Mega Man Legacy Collection." That game includes new features, sure, but its main appeal is the reproduction of the six original "Mega Man" games, which you may remember from the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late '80s and early '90s.

The Huffington Post talked to Cifaldi about why old games are worth saving and what the future holds.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.


Gameplay in the original "Mega Man 3." (Source)


Tell me a little bit about what you're trying to do with video game restoration.

Frank Cifaldi: What I'm hoping to do at Digital Eclipse is commercialize video game restoration. Now that might sound kind of gross or nasty, because "commercialization" is kind of a weird word, but I think we can all agree that preserving video game history is important. It's an art form. It's something that's recognized by the Smithsonian and MoMA [Museum of Modern Art] now. I think we can finally stop the stupid "are video games art?" argument and move on, and figure out how do we properly preserve this art and make sure it's around.

When I say restoration, I mean that we want to restore these old games into a playable state that is, first, as accurate as we can get it to what the artists intended at the time, and second, into a state where it's not that difficult to keep it running on emerging platforms as they come out. Typically, when you port a game to a system, on a technical level, you've made the game run on that system, and if you want to do it on another system, you're starting over.

Tell me a little more about that.

FC: Every new hardware platform is completely different from anything before. You don't have that problem with any other medium. Film, it's audio and video. You scan that audio and video, and if you do it right, it's safe for any emerging platform, or any format. Even if we double the resolution of Blu-Ray someday, that film is safe. It's available and playable. Books are even easier. You're just scanning text.

There's no equivalent of scanning a video game.

What we're developing with the Eclipse Engine is a virtual environment where we get the game running in our core technology and put the porting not on the game side, but on the engine side. So, in theory, when PlayStation 5 comes out, we will get our tech running on PlayStation 5 by porting it over, and it won't be that difficult then to get "Mega Man Legacy Collection" running on that platform, if Capcom [the "Mega Man" games' original publisher] wants.

So, we're not talking about a new version of the game. You're really trying to restore that original video game -- it's not a rebuild or something like that.

FC: We're simulating the environment that it ran in at the time. It's kind of the George Lucas argument. Once a work has been established, can you go back and alter it and go to sleep at night? I think not.

Especially with something like "Mega Man" for us, we didn't create the original games. Our philosophy is, altering anything in the original games, even if it's a minor bug fix, that's not our place in this world. It's not for us to decide that. We can't decide if some slowdown was intentional, because a lot of that is programmed in. We can't decide if that bug fix that we could easily do is what they would have wanted. And even if it was what they wanted, I would argue that you can't fix it now. It was already out there. And if we're taking preserving games as art seriously, then we can't decide to change them to fix them.


Gameplay in the original "Mega Man" (Source)


So, we're talking about fundamentally different hardware than the game was originally released on. We're not talking about a cartridge, we're talking about a digital download or a disc. How does that affect what you do?

FC: There's always going to be compromises. That will be true of any medium that's being translated to something else. Our approach at Digital Eclipse is focus as much as we can on artistic intent.

For "Mega Man Legacy Collection" specifically, artistic intent with the pixel art itself: There are two arguments here. One, that the pixel art was meant to be seen as proper, sharp pixel art -- like razor-sharp, you're seeing every pixel and there's no color bleed. The other argument is that the artist drew these graphics with the limitations of CRT TVs in mind, knowing that that color bleed would happen and creating artistic effects by utilizing those limitations. In "Mega Man," if you switch from "filter off" to "filter television," you can see this subtle hue change and shadowing that happens in the characters' faces. Was that intended? We don't know. So we leave both in.

There's not an ultimate answer. So we have to interpret. And the best interpretation is, what did it look like at the time, and can we reproduce that?

We're making a statement with this game. We're saying, this is how you do this.

This is like a time capsule. I look at this and imagine the Oculus being able to recreate the experience of sitting in an old living room with the original "Mega Man" in front of you in virtual reality.

FC: I've seen at least one Oculus demo that lets you create your own virtual arcade basement. And you put in the original arcade cabinets, and there's a TV in there. You can pick a Game Boy up off of the table and play it. Do I think that's the future for games? Possibly! I could see us going in that direction.

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Here's An Amazing 'Game Of Thrones' Audition Tape Reel

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If you ever doubted HBO's casting decisions for "Game of Thrones," you definitely won't now.


During Friday's "Thrones" panel at Comic-Con International: San Diego, HBO shared a composite of the cast's audition tapes. The reel shows auditions of everyone from Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) and Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell) to Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell). And there's a great clip of Kristofer Hivju (Tormund Giantsbane) eating a carrot.


The video also features the origin of one of the best "Game of Thrones" lines in history: "You know nothing, Jon Snow."


In other "Game of Thrones" Comic-Con news, director David Nutter confirmed that Stannis Baratheon is indeed 100 percent dead. Nutter also confirmed Jon Snow's death to President Barack Obama. So yes, it's a sad day in the Seven Kingdoms.


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The Subtle Language Of Sounding Gay

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David Thorpe has a "gay voice." For the filmmaker's latest endeavor, an autobiographical documentary, he embarked upon a long-delayed confrontation with his own "internal homophobia." He was in his early 40s, recently single and he was bitter about "sounding gay." 


For the project, Thorpe sets out to change the way he speaks. He meets with a Hollywood voice coach and a speech pathologist. "Do I sound gay?" he polls strangers on the street in Times Square, echoing the title of the film.


Often humorously, the film explores the origins of an effeminate manner of speaking, taking an unexpected approach rooted in the study of linguistics as Thorpe learns about his own speech patterns and acoustics. It's hilarious, thought-provoking and ultimately heartening. Thorpe dives deep into issues of self-loathing, stereotyping and the idolization of hyper-masculinity.


 "I'm embarrassed to say this but sometimes somebody will say, 'I didn't know you were gay.' It's like, why does that make me feel good? I hate myself for thinking that," says author David Sedaris in the film. (Sedaris first broached the topic of "sounding gay" in his essay "Go, Carolina" from Me Talk Pretty One Day.) "It's very disturbing I thought I was beyond that. Whats the problem if somebody assumes that I'm gay when I open my mouth. Why do I have a problem with that?" 


 The film works to detach shame associated with the "gay voice," and replace it with pride. But where did the shame come from? Why do gay men demean other gay men for their perceived effeminacy? Dan Savage nails it: “Misogyny,” he says. “They want to prove to the culture that they’re not not men -- that they’re good because they’re not women. They’re not like women, they don’t want women, they don’t want to sleep with women, they don’t want to act like women. And then they’ll punish gay men who they perceive as being feminine in any way.” 


Savage's assertions could be the foundation of an entirely separate documentary. But for gay men and boys who face the brunt of criticism and violence at hands of their straight counterparts, punishment is a constant consideration. Thorpe notes that voice can give away sexuality long before a boy has the courage to come out, exposing him to consequences. "I think that there are a lot schools where kids feel safe and are able to be gay and express themselves, but I don't think that's always the case," said Thorpe, adding: "It's a heavy burden for young people to bear."


"Do I Sound Gay?" endeavors to show how Thorpe, once a child with a similarly heavy burden, comes to terms with the complexities of his outward identity. Ultimately, he recognizes the importance of being part of a greater "chorus of gay voices," because what's so wrong with sounding gay? "If you can't handle the answer," he says, "that's a question you've got to ask."




 


"Do I Sound Gay?" opens July 10 at IFC Center in New York City.

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Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill & Harrison Ford Reunited At The 'Star Wars' Comic-Con Panel

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The "Star Wars" panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday brought together a handful of original cast members.


Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford joined several other actors from the franchise on stage. It marked Ford's first public appearance since the actor was injured when his plane crash-landed in MarchFisher and Hamill had previously reunited at the "Star Wars" Celebration event earlier this year alongside former co-stars Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels, but it was truly a treat to see Luke and Leia with Han Solo.







And for the record, Ford says he's feeling "fine":





Although "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" director J.J. Abrams said the new trailer won't debut until the fall, a behind-the-scenes reel was shown during the panel. The video featured a look at "The Force Awakens" cast on set, including Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Lupita Nyong'o.




A few key details about the upcoming film also were revealed on Friday. Adam Driver, Domhall Gleeson and Gwendoline Christie all came out as members of the Dark Side during the panel. While we knew Driver will play a bad guy named Kylo Ren and Christie will play Captain Phasma, we learned that Gleeson is also an evil character. The "Ex Machina" star will play General Hux, who's in command of Starkiller base, a new location that's an homage to Luke Skywalker's original last name in the "Star Wars" scripts





It was also confirmed that Simon Pegg will indeed be in "The Force Awakens." However, we won't see his face, since his character will be hidden in a costume. 


"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is out on Dec. 18.


 


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'Black Mirror'-Inspired Photography Exhibition Proves Reality Can Be Stranger Than Sci-Fi

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"If technology is a drug -- and it does feel like a drug -- then what, precisely, are the side effects?" Charlie Booker, the creator of British television series "Black Mirror," asked upon its release in 2011. 


This summer, Aperture Gallery’s annual open-call exhibition, also titled "Black Mirror," evokes similar questions to the cult TV show: What happens when reality echoes the trajectory of sci-fi narratives, and even outpaces them?



For the uninitiated, "Black Mirror" is a dark, satirical sci-fi series which gained heightened popularity in the U.S. following its release on Netflix. Each episode paints a distinct picture of a nightmarish future, revolving around a contemporary technology hyperbolized and turned rotten.


For example, "The Complete History of You" takes the masochistic ritual of stalking a lover's Facebook timeline to the extreme, when small devices called "grains" are surgically implanted into people's heads, allowing them to record and replay memories at will. Any lie can be proved wrong, any secret can be dug up, and huge chunks of real life can be spent in a passive mode of viewing. 


"We routinely do things that just five years ago would scarcely have made sense to us," Booker added. "We tweet along to reality shows; we share videos of strangers dropping cats in bins; we dance in front of Xboxes that can see us, and judge us, and find us sorely lacking. It's hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn't somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That's pretty much all we have left."


The series title "Black Mirror" refers to the dark, reflective surfaces that emerge on our various screens when they're turned off. However, as Aperture points out, photographs have also been referred to as mirrors throughout the history of the medium, and often such mirrors reflect what's dark and what's black. Aperture's callout received over 500 entries, from which 24 were chosen, all representing in some way the dystopian present that out-weirds so many futuristic predictions.


"As today becomes tomorrow and photography increasingly surrounds us, perhaps this medium provides our best gauge of where we are headed," Michael Famighetti, editor of Aperture magazine, explained in a statement.



Many of the selected photos revolve around hyper-contemporary phenomena, from Bitcoin to e-cigarettes. Photographer Sarah Meyohas' "Red Speculation" depicts a mirrored echo chamber framing a woman's legs and red stilettos, the image reproduced ad infinitum, receding into a tunnel without end. Yet a key aspect of Meyohas' artmaking is in the valuation of the work, established via a cryptocurrency of her own creation entitled "BitchCoin."


The invisible coinage allows others to invest in Meyohas as an artist, buying square inches of her current and future artworks. "I think artists need to consider themselves as value producers rather than painting makers," the artist said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "And that's where the critical discourse should lie."


Artist Farah Al Qasimi, who splits her time between Dubai and New York, photographs the unassuming cracks in Dubai's glittering facade, while Italy-based Fabrizio Albertini navigates the life of an Italian border-worker -- one who resides in the area between two countries and must cross the border daily to traverse from home to work.


Spanning themes including capitalism, utopian architecture, environmental decay, science fiction, life off the grid, and a general unease as we catapult into the future, "Black Mirror" is sure to give you all the sleepless nights and nervous stomachaches of its TV namesake. With its provocative imagery gleaned from a young, international set, and its nuanced understandings of the precarious place between today and tomorrow, we could suggest few better ways to freak yourself out. 


"2015 Aperture Summer Open: Black Mirror" runs from July 16 until August 13, 2015, at Aperture Gallery in New York.


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Why You May Not Have Ever Seen An Original Frida Kahlo In Real Life

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Frida Kahlo is having a moment. Equal parts art-world underdog, feminist icon and object of kitsch, Kahlo's legacy seems as miraculous as her too-short life.


Having lived in pain, barely surviving a bus accident at age 17 that left her unable to conceive, Kahlo died -- according to her best-known biographer, almost certainly by suicide -- 61 years ago to the day at age 47. A passionate woman, colorful metaphorically and not, she was known as much for her famous marriage to painter Diego Rivera as for the affairs she conducted outside of it. 



But much of the vibrant work she left behind, even in light of her recent popularity, is difficult to come by. Outside of a computer screen, a postcard or a novelty tee, that is.




Museums are trying to keep up with her fans. Several recent and upcoming exhibitions boast Kahlo's name -- usually alongside Rivera's -- but to provide more substance often rely on letters, sketches and other artifacts. The New York Botanical Garden even recreated her garden, in addition to displaying a small handful of paintings.


"Look How Many Works By Frida Kahlo We Were Able To Get" could be the title of most Kahlo-inspired exhibitions, one art dealer remarked to Artnet. As for private collectors, only about 60 works have made it to the auction block in the past two decades, according to an Artnet investigation.


With all our love for Frida Kahlo, why does her work seem so elusive?


Most importantly, Kahlo was not a prolific artist, explained Axel Stein, Sotheby's head of Latin American art. Due to her long list of health problems, "she had a lot of time on her bed," Stein told The Huffington Post. "That's why [many works appear in] small format. She had a whole stretcher built specially so she could paint on her bed." Kahlo was very particular, only completing around 130 paintings and an additional hundred or so drawings. (Biographer Hayden Herrera estimates 200 total works and Stein gave a range from 200 to 250.)


Compounding the issue of volume -- particularly for private collectors -- is the fact that Mexican patrimony laws prohibit much of her work from leaving that nation. Estimates are difficult to assess, but Stein ventured a guess that about 75 percent of Kahlo's work resides in Mexico.  



"Whatever she painted in Mexico, usually stayed in Mexico," Stein said. As a distinguished historical figure, Kahlo's works are designated "artistic monuments" by Mexico's National Institution of Fine Arts (INBA), and held in private collections. They may only be exported from the country temporarily, and cultural non-profits -- including most U.S. museums -- must request permission from the INBA to allow specific works to travel internationally. (Other for-profits must also post a bond to ensure safe return.) Despite how intimidating that all may seem, chief curator Bonnie Clearwater of the NSU Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, which put on a recent Kahlo exhibit, says the process was relatively painless.


The other portion of her body of work -- those paintings completed outside of Mexico and exported before the law went into effect -- can move about without so much bureaucracy. And Kahlo did paint when she visited the U.S. several times with Rivera, spending time in Detroit, Chicago and parts of California, as well as when she traveled for certain medical procedures.


Although they don't number many, private collectors the world over have come to own original Kahlo works. But it's not always easy getting them to museums for the public. Of the two largest Kahlo collections -- that of Jacques and Natasha Gelman, with 11, and Dolores Olmedo, with 25 -- only the Gelmans' paintings are available for nearly full-time lending. The Vergel Foundation, established after Natasha's death in 2002, has booked shows in Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Sydney, Madrid, Vancouver, Poznan and Milan until 2018. The Dolores Olmedo Museum, which houses Olmedo's collection in Mexico City, also lends paintings for exhibition, but is chiefly interested in keeping its works on its own walls, Vergel Foundation President Robert Littman told HuffPost.


"It's hard to organize a Frida Kahlo show without the Gelman pictures and the Olmedo pictures, because those are the principal lenders," Littman explained. 



Other collectors may not be so generous. Madonna, for instance, repeatedly rejected requests to lend a Kahlo to the DIA for its recent exhibition. Littman noted another collector, in Argentina, who also steadfastly refuses to share his paintings. Others may be convinced, with some wishing to remain anonymous.


But if auction houses are any indicator, people want to see a lot more Frida Kahlo. Stein told HuffPost about a particular piece, "La venadita," depicting Kahlo's head atop the body of a small deer running through the woods with arrows piercing its body. In 1985, the work carried an estimated value of $175,000 to $200,000.


"The other day someone called the office and asked about that painting, if I knew where it was," Stein said. "Because he was happy to pay $7 million."


If that buyer succeeds, it would be a new record purchase for a Kahlo painting, the previous having been set with her self-portrait "Roots" in 2006 for $5.6 million.


"It's astonishing," Clearwater noted, "to see how her work continues to grow in popularity and how viewers truly connect with the paintings."




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Aatish Taseer Talks Sanskrit, The Dangerous Power Of English, And His New Novel

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Language is the warp and weft of a novel, but in Aatish Taseer's new novel, The Way Things Were, it's more than the material: It's a character. It may even be the hero. It's certainly, at the very least, the love interest. 


Though the book was written in English, the language to which I'm referring is Sanskrit. Taseer has studied the language for "seven or eight years," he told me last week, when we sat down in a remarkably noisy Manhattan Teavana to talk about his latest book. "It was not research for the book," he hastened to point out. "It was like… the other way around." 


Reading the novel, it would be difficult to draw any other conclusion. The book follows Skanda, a student of Sanskrit, in the year after his father's death. As his mother, Uma, and his father, Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, have been long divorced after a passionate but brief marriage, Skanda must return to India to take care of the funeral arrangements. Toby, a renowned Sanskritist, imbued Skanda with his all-consuming love for the language, a romance that became the central one of Toby's life.


Taseer conveys this passion for the language without any sense of stilted, academic remove. The reader is frequently plunged into sidebars and dialogues that tenderly unwrap the layers of linguistic complexity hidden within a Sanskrit phrase, or the long line of cognates to which a Sanskrit word can claim relation. 


This taste of the wonders of what has been called the most perfect language doesn't exist in an ivory tower, however. As he continues his Sanskrit studies, Skanda must reckon with India's recent troubled history, his own parent's fractious marriage and the unacknowledged effects on his own childhood, and the inextricable complicity of the language he loves.


We talked more about the power of language, the complexities of Indian politics, and his own writing process:



The title of the book, The Way Things Were, it comes out at a certain point, derived from the Sanskrit word for history, a compound meaning “The Way indeed that Things Were.” What kind of history did you want to document in the book?


I think what I was interested in was the weight of the past on different characters. Even the structure for me was very important. I needed this surface narrative in the present, which was very still, and then you could feel a flood of events coming up from below. 


So it was more in the way almost as a mechanism that I was interested in history, and so that’s why the title came as a kind of gift, because it covers talk, legend, history, everything -- it’s a very old word for history.


In some ways I’m dealing with those places where there’s a kind of intractable history. It’s something that I find Americans understand very little. Because even sometimes you feel, with wars that have been fought, people find themselves in situations where they can’t understand why, if certain situations were to change, these people couldn’t just get along. And actually the old world is full of intractable history.


It’s funny because more and more we’re seeing that even our own North and South can’t really get along all that well.


Yeah.


And that’s such recent history.


Actually it’s funny you say that because the South is one of the few places where I feel, in America, the evidence of intractable history. And it’s there in Faulkner, you know. You can feel when you’re reading Faulkner that these people, just out of mad irrationality, are not going to give ground. 


I was going to ask about the weight of history, and how much it seemed to be hanging on Skanda and Uma and Toby throughout the book, and how Uma tries to just free herself from it. Even Skanda seems to feel, now that his father is gone, that he can just look to the future. Is it possible to escape history, or is it even desirable to do so?


I think if you face it, squarely, it is possible to free yourself from it. I think that’s the whole exercise, the whole paralysis that we find Skanda in, is as a consequence of his never having faced the past, of it having lived in him, and of it having caused a kind of pain, but never having been addressed. This process that we’re going through in the book, where on one hand you have the narrative unfolding and on the other you have this kind of waiting or purgatory that Skanda’s in, is, in a sense, a kind of facing up to the past. 


Uma’s approach is like a more violent approach. It’s the approach of clean breaks. I think that if you do it in that way, probably, you pay a price. Probably on the level of your humanity, on the level of your sensitivity.


And you can feel that actually with certain societies as well where there hasn’t been that reckoning with the past, and it keeps coming up, it keeps surfacing in certain forms.


You wrote an article about English and how it’s destroyed Indian literature. How do you think India’s forced adoption of English has affected its perception of its own history?


Generally history in India is a very tricky business. Sanskrit literature... there are plays, there are a number of different literary forms. The one thing that there’s no literary equivalent of is, like, the Chinese Annals or the Arab Histories or Tacitus or Herodotus. There’s no history writing tradition. So in some ways, India has always, for its history, looked to the accounts of foreigners.


Language has obviously made it difficult, because five percent, I think, of India speaks English. So imagine, if you met an Indian who speaks English, you’re speaking already to a tiny, tiny superclass. It’s complicated because it’s a country where everyone speaks very different languages, so there has to be a unifying language, but English is also invested with power.


And you write in English, so is that a choice that you made, or do you feel like there isn’t really a choice?


Yeah, it was a choice that was forced on me. Actually, my grandfather was an Urdu poet, and there was a little period where all the different languages of India were going through a period where it seemed like they were flourishing. There might have been a subsequent generation of a substantial reading class built up in these languages. But almost at that exact moment, all of the people of that generation sent their children to public schools and convents, and they all received a kind of English education which was the detriment of any Indian language, so… by the time you come around to my generation, a clean break has occurred. 


So the only way for a writer -- it’s not even a question of money -- the only way to be writing to an audience that’s actually listening, a reading public, you have to write in English. I think of myself as almost no less than Ibsen or Joyce, writing into a tradition of exile, of cobbling together an audience in places like America, England, South Africa, Australia, India. I don’t think I can rely on any one country as a place I can write into. 



Do you think there’s a way for India, at this point to develop a modern literature in those Indian languages?


I think the movement now is all in one way. It’s an impossible stream to channel. Never mind the power of America, which would influence the position of English in the world, but even at times when political power has broken, the language has continued to move. In India, the movement is all towards English, and unfortunately towards a very dead, not a very vibrant language. 


There’s a moment in the book where Toby predicts at the time [when] a place’s linguistic needs would be the most -- it really needs to express itself -- the means are totally inadequate. It finds a borrowed English or a language of clichés, a language that doesn’t have that deep tissue of familiarity. And there’s a lot of other writing coming out that has that quality. There isn’t that deep sense of fluency, but it’s the only language in some ways as well.


We see the possibility of linguistic redemption in the book through Toby and it fails. He feels he’s placed his hopes in a class of people who are unable to replicate his ideals. I wondered if, in the end, there’s an idealism we place in language that can’t be borne through.


Toby’s not a man of revivalism. Right now in India there’s a whole politics of trying to revive Sanskrit. There’s a lot of revivalism the way Erdogan is trying to do with Ottoman Turkish. It’s not an intellectual endeavor. They’re trying to advance a certain kind of politics, a sort of nationalistic politics, using the symbols of the past. Which is in some ways a danger that this book is very alive to, in the character of someone like Maniraja. 


But Toby’s dream was founded in the intellect and the idea that basically the genius of a people, a language… some grain of it would come into the future and fertilize the present, and would be something more along the lines of a profound rebirth or an awakening. That never happens.


Every time someone in some way becomes a victim of the violence of this place, you see Toby is almost blinded by his naiveté. It’s a very attractive vision, but he doesn’t see the place he’s living in. He doesn’t see it clearly.


The idea of Sanskrit as a language of India is punctured at a certain point when Uma tells Maniraja that people never spoke Sanskrit, it was just a language of the super-elite. But Toby also has this sense that Sanskrit was this language of the people, if not in such a commonplace sense. So is it an illusion, in a broader sense, that there’s a true Indianness to Sanskrit that extends to the whole of the people?


Sanskrit has a very interesting role in that respect because it was always a high language, and it became the origin of almost all of India’s languages, like Latin was in Europe. In some ways there’s never been a more formal language. 


So there’s a lot about the classical world that was not fair or just, but that was still marvelous, that was full of many things to inspire the intellect and to create a feeling of wonder, and Toby was very much lost in that sense of it. He doesn’t have a program. Whereas Maniraja is not interested in the past for the sake of the past. The past has to serve a program. It has to be in the employ of the present.


I wanted to talk about the “drawing-room class” [the educated upper-class], where the novel is mostly set. A lot of them have ideals for India, but they’re not in dialogue with the majority of the country. Is that an inherent problem in terms of achieving or realizing those ideals?


Yeah, I feel like the class has grown more and more isolated.


Sometimes it feels like people accuse blue America of having no awareness of red America, but blue America is a substantial thing in its own right! The two sides are somewhat evenly matched. In India we’re looking at this tiny population dreaming in the cities or dreaming in one part of the city, and this swell of people on the other side who are completely going in another direction. 


The election, from an American perspective, created a lot of dismay. There was a lot of suspicion about Narendra Modi as a figure, a lot of controversy. You wrote a little bit, in this article, about some possible false optimism about the election and how much he’d be able to change. What do you think about him as a figure and what he represents?


Because I covered that election, I’d like to make a separation. It was a very hopeful election, and it’s odd when you’re covering an election not to capture its mood, which was a mood of hopefulness. And [people] invested this man with their hope. On that side of it, it’s very moving when that happens, and just as you think of the Obama election, you can’t be blind to the fact that you’re traveling in that environment.


I have to say that Modi himself has come to seem to me like an increasingly buffoonish figure. I feel like he’s kind of channeled quite an ugly homogenizing spirit. There’s a sort of majoritarianism, even from little things, like these yoga days to beef bans to the ugliest rhetoric that’s come out of his ministers.


I had reservations about it then, in fact a lot of my dispatches from that time are full of reservations, but it’s been, even by those standards... he’s been kind of a disappointing figure. And the book kind of anticipates that. I feel like there’s that kind of man who comes out in Maniraja is, in a sense, the man of the future, and there’s no hiding the disappointment I feel related to the advent of that kind of personality.


The idea of linguistic unity is really important throughout -- cognates, for example, they signify global unity. But it seems like a lot of the time, language is more divisive than not, both personally and being used as a symbol of something politically divisive. Is this more of a failure of language itself, or of us?


Well, of us. We invest it with all kinds of -- you’ve seen, obviously, the way that language can be invested with politics. And it’s exactly as you said. There’s on one hand the kind of tragedy that when you probe it, it’s full of an underlying unity. And yet, in so many ways and forms, they’re like, "Ah, this person doesn’t speak English, he’s obviously of a lower class." It’s weaponized. And this is very true of India. Because of the partition, language became co-opted by religion.


I, for instance, because my father’s Pakistani, if I used a certain word for a certain thing, people have immediately understood a whole set of things about me. I remember at one point, when I first went to see my father in Pakistan and I crossed over the border, they were like, “Why are you coming?” And the language is interchangeable between Indian and Pakistan. So I said, “I’m coming for my sister’s birthday.” But I used a word for birthday that only an Indian could have used. And they knew. So there was this hushed silence. And then a man, from behind the room, used the Urdu word -- both words were understood, but he was basically like, “You’re not a Pakistani, because you used that word.”


I know your family in Pakistan has been really deeply affected by the religious conflicts there, and in Noon, you graphically get into the riots and violence. In The Way Things Were, the violence is in the background, and muted, but we’re looking at the roots of where this kind of violence comes from. Was it revealing for you to look at this kind of violence from behind the scenes, in a way?


I wrote Noon before my father was killed. And he was killed in that way, and my brother was kidnapped, and there was a year of all sorts of that violence. Too much to get into. But I think I felt, in myself, a kind of passivity that had come over me. And so Skanda’s passivity is very much, I think, part of the kind of mood I was writing out of. And I suppose I was done with that kind of violence. This book was the first book that I wrote after that had happened, and I was very withdrawn, and perhaps some of that has become part of the fiction.


Are you working on anything right now?


A book of nonfiction.


What’s it about?


It’s… I don’t want to say yet! It’s given me a lot of joy though, because I started life as a journalist, and it’s really nice to be out in the world again and to have real material in the world, and not just to be spinning your guts at home like with novels.


Do you prefer writing nonfiction generally?


No, I mean -- if a novel, especially like this one, takes hold of you, there’s nothing more perfect, in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than those two years that I was writing this. It really kind of seized me. But it’s very tiring and it’s very nice not to force fiction. If it comes in that way, then one submits to it, but with nonfiction, you’re not stewing in it.


This interview has been edited and condensed.


 Correction: A previous version of this article contained an error in one instance of the title of The Way Things Were. The post has been updated to correct this.

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These Powerful Photos Around The World Show How Urgent It Is To #EndPoverty

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A new photo campaign highlights the power of images in telling critical undertold stories.

Through a hashtag challenge #EndPoverty, National Geographic is asking users to submit a photo that illustrates how they see poverty. To partake in the challenge, participants must register with National Geographic’s photo community, Your Shot, and upload a photo using the hashtag. As the project develops, images are added to a running slideshow.

“Photographs are powerful. They can bring attention to a problem,” Nat Geo wrote on the challenge’s webpage. “Maybe they can even help end poverty.”

So far, photographers have captured and hashtagged shots including a black and white photo of a smiling little girl playing in a field of flowers in Cholula, Mexico; another image captures an Indian man ladling bright yellow curry out of a massive pot and into a plastic bucket.

The campaign raises awareness for people living in poverty and without access to resources like clean water and education.

According to the United Nations, extreme poverty has dropped dramatically over the past two decades. In 1990, 1.9 billion people globally lived in extreme poverty -- that number declined by more than half by 2015, with 836 million people living in extreme poverty, the U.N.'s recent 2015 millennium development goals report found.

"The [millennium development goals] helped to lift more than 1 billion people out of extreme poverty and make major inroads against hunger,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement. “They have enabled more than 2.6 billion people to gain access to an improved drinking water source -- and more girls to attend school than ever before.”

Below are some of the top photos in the Nat Geo challenge, which began last Wednesday and runs through July 22.




dipayan bose national geographic your shot
Worker and his World
Dipayan Bose





rui caria national geographic your shot
Weaver
Rui Caria




valerie cheung national geographic your shot
Pouring Grain
Valerie Cheung




debasish ghosh national geographic your shot
Onion Harvest
Debasish Ghosh





hafiz national geographic your shot
Fetching Water
M. Hafiz




antonio pellicano national geographic your shot
Leather Dry
Antonio Pellicano





raja subramaniyan national geographic your shot
Helping Hands
Raja Subramaniyan




christina sussman national geographic your shot
Morning in the Calcutta Flower Market
Christina Sussman

National Geographic is partnering with the World Bank Group on this challenge. Selected photos will be exhibited at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.

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This Abandoned Romanian Casino Definitely Looks Haunted

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Photo credit: Romain Veillon


If vampires exist, this is where their king vacations.


Perched on the coast of the Black Sea in Constanta, Romania, the Casino Constanta -- once known to the world's rich and royal as the most magnificent building in Romania -- is a hauntingly beautiful shell of its former self today.



It opened in 1910, commissioned by the Romanian King Carol I and designed by architect Daniel Renard as a monument to the roaring Belle Époque period, but the tumultuous events of the 20th century pitched the casino into different eras.


During WWII, Casino Constanta was used as a hospital and was later refurnished as a restaurant. It was finally abandoned in 1990 when it became too expensive to maintain, but last year the Romanian government announced it would set aside 9.5 million euros to restore it, with renovations slated to begin later this year.


Photographer Romain Veillon explored the structure on a recent trip and took these haunting photographs.


It's unclear what the Casino Constanta will become next, whether it's a museum, wedding hall or reinstated as a casino


And if you like staring at treasures like the beautiful ruins below, check out these eerie photos of abandoned places around the US.


H/T Bored Panda



Also on HuffPost: 


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Watch Out, Wonder Woman, Female Superheroes Are On The Rise

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Source: Vocativ


 


 In 1941, the world was introduced to Wonder Woman, a warrior princess clad in a mini skirt, strapless top and knee-high boots. Equipped with her famous Lasso of Truth and some weaponized jewelry, Diana of Themyscira was the first widely recognized superheroine -- a much-needed addition to the hypermasculine realm of comic fiction. But, compared to the men of superherodom, she wore decidedly less clothing and decidedly more bondage-inspired accessories. 


Fast forward nearly 75 years, and a lot has changed in terms of women warriors. In 2013, we met an all-female X-Men crew, along with an impressive Muslim-American Ms. Marvel named Kamala Khan. In 2014, a female Thor took the comic realm by storm, followed by a new and improved Batgirl costume. In 2015, we heard whispers of an all-female Avengers-esque team, shortly before Marvel published Silk, the story of an Asian-American teenage superheroine named Cindy Moon. Note: none of these characters wear tiaras.


 


See also: Superhero Diversity Hasn't Advanced In A Single Bound


 


According to research conducted by Vocativ's Tracy Clark-Flory and Tal Reznik, the Marvel and DC universes have come a long way on the path to gender parity in comics since Wonder Woman's first appearance decades ago. "Female superheroes are breaking comics’ glass ceiling," their new article asserts.



Source: Vocativ


 


Clark-Flory and Reznik explore how, in the past, comic generators like Marvel and DC were hesitant to give ladies their own comics, largely due to the fact that comic book readers were believed to have been primarily men and boys. (Recent polls have, of course, proved this assumption to be less than illuminating.) As a result, they estimate that the comic world encompasses three times as many male characters with their own series as women -- 118 versus 38. Comic historian Tim Hanley similarly asserts that men outnumber women on Marvel and DC covers by a factor of three.


However, since 2000 alone, Marvel has added 18 women-led titles. And these women, like Ms. Marvel, tend to don costumes far removed from Wonder Woman's 1960s bodysuit. A roundup of data from 1941 to 2015 shows that in the year 1994, nine male characters entered the canon, compared with only two female. Sixteen years later, in 2010, the spread was six male characters to four female characters, a small but significant jump. Women characters are starting to get their own series faster than the men, too: According to Vocativ, it takes a female superheroine about 15 years to get her own title, while it takes male characters 18. 


Audiences seem to be responding to the shift. For example, the female Thor has outsold its male counterpart by 30 percent.



*For the sake of comparison, only characters from Marvel’s “main” universe, Earth-616, were analyzed, and they were only scored as having received their own books if they didn’t share it with another character, if their name was featured in the title and if it ran for at least two issues. The analysis relied on Marvel’s internal data, which may be incomplete in places.



Source: Vocativ


 


Perhaps most important, Vocativ's writers point out that before the likes of lady Thor and Cindy Moon, the most popular superheroes tended to be white men, while the creators tended to be ... white men. DC and Marvel, Hanley asserts in his own research, are slowly hiring more women capable of writing relatable story lines centered on female superheroines. And this is important.


FiveThirtyEight's Walt Hickey crunched his own numbers last year, concluding that the new characters being introduced into Marvel and DC series still don't reflect reality --  women make up half the population, he asserts, and comic books hardly adhere to this fact. Yet, Hickey agreed that an attitude shift was occurring on the side of creators. Writers are acknowledging the existence of misogyny in the industry, and have made strides toward including women and LGBT characters into their series.


Ultimately, the key to changing the way underrepresented demographics are portrayed on the pages of comic books likely lies in the efforts to get more women and minorities writing, illustrating and producing comic characters. Maybe then we'll see female characters with realistic costumes and realistic body types.


Check out Vocativ's full article here.


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An Artist's Before-And-After Drawings Show What Happens When You Actually Stick To Your Dreams

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Noah Bradley is a 26-year-old artist finally surpassing the 10,000 hours mark for working his craft to perfection. Over the weekend his collection of drawings showing his progress from a 14-year-old with a dream to a master artist went viral, which as Bradley told The Huffington Post, has led to many aspiring artists reaching out to him about their own paths to "pursuing art."


"Learning that my story served as some amount of inspiration for people to pick up a pencil just warms my heart," Bradley told HuffPost. "I couldn't be happier."


Bradley transitioned from someone who wanted to be an artist to someone who fulfilled his dream.


Bradley started as just a "hobbyist" artist in 2003.








 


In 2006, right before his 18th birthday, Bradley decided that becoming an artist was what he wanted to do with his life.




Bradley explains in his blog:



The reason I decided to become an artist has nothing to do with what would make me the most money, or what I was “talented” at, or even what I necessarily always enjoyed the most. It was simply something that, in my gut, I just knew was the right choice. Without anything better to go on, that’s what I relied on.


 


From this moment, the fear began. I have spent every day since, with some variance, utterly terrified of failing. Of not being good enough. Not making enough money to support myself. Being a horrible, embarrassing failure.


 


And it was this fear that propelled me to improve.





 


He got into Rhode Island School of Design, but had to turn it down because of the high cost of tuition. So he decided to delay his attendance, work harder and apply for a scholarship instead.








 


The next year, Bradley received a $20,000 annual scholarship to RISD and accepted the offer, taking out loans to cover the rest.




 


After a year, with a rising tuition cost, Bradley decided to transfer to his home state and attend Virginia Commonwealth University, from where he'd eventually end up graduating.












 


Now that his skills were becoming more refined, Bradley worked on his professional portfolio.








 


Bradley was getting paid for his work, but he always had a dream to draw for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. At 22, he got the commission.




 


His next dream was to work for the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, a goal Bradley also achieved at the age of 22.




 


Along with his professional work, he began creating his own unique fantasy world. Called "The Sin of Man," the series really started taking off when he was just 24.








 At the end of his post, Bradley gave some advice for other aspiring artists:



If I can leave you with one piece of advice that I have acquired over all of these years, it’s to always find some degree of pride in what you have accomplished so far. Be thankful for every accomplishment, no matter how small. Be proud of yourselves. Not to the point of pride, but rather to encourage and motivate.



Bradley concluded:


"Because if you just keep going, eventually you’ll find yourself somewhere."






 


If you want to attempt your own progression, Bradley started his set of classes called Art Camp.



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