These cops are fabulous!

For Brighton Pride last weekend, the Sussex police department got in the spirit by giving their service vehicles a full rainbow makeover.

About 160,000 people took to the streets of the southeast England city on Saturday for their 25th Pride parade, BBC reported, described by Brighton Pride director Paul Kemp as "a celebration [that] brings in a lot of people from all over the world." This year's event was especially exciting because of its 25th anniversary and a new parade route that went along the city's seafront. 

During the colorful parade, the Sussex police department encouraged people to take pictures with the decorated vehicles. 

Though they certainly provided terrific photo ops, the Sussex police -- above all --provided safety and support. 

"This was an excellent opportunity to show our continued steadfast support for LGBT communities," the department wrote on their Facebook page. "Pride is one of the biggest events that takes place in Brighton and Hove each year and Sussex Police play a large role in policing the event and ensuring that those attending are kept safe."

Leading up to Saturday's festivities, the Sussex police issued safety tips for the celebration, and during the parade, set up a booth staffed by officers giving out goodies. 

This police squad is something to be proud of!

Also on HuffPost:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Facing discrimination every day is a tiring, never-ending battle that all too often goes unnoticed. 

"I'm tired of being the angry black woman."

"I'm tired of being told I'm too skinny for a guy." 

"I'm tired of men thinking they have the right to catcall me." 

The series deals with stereotypes of different identities including race, gender, sexuality and body image.

"Growing up, in a mostly Caucasian area, I had not [realized] until I was much older that the image of a black boy or man is often one of anger or aggression."  

Scroll below to see the Akpan's and Evans' riveting images. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

George R.R. Martin is a fan of New York football, which is unfortunate, because that also means he's a Jets guy. It's not like he had a choice though: He was born in New Jersey and, by geographic birthright, the team was forced down his beard. 

Martin, who's currently traveling around the East Coast, returned to his birth state on Wednesday to take in a most unholy sight: New York Jets training camp. 

On Monday, Martin was in New York City sporting a Jets cap and all black everything. This is, undoubtedly, a disappointing sight for fans of A Song of Ice and Fire. 

Instead of finishing up The Winds of Winter so HBO can turn it into something digestible for millions of people every Sunday, this guy is out here rooting on the Jets in the streets, at training camp and in life. 

His Jets fandom, however, has been a major point of contention in his life, as evidenced by his November 2014 blog post morbidly titled "Jets Crash Again." His piece, which had an "annoyed" mood status attached to it, has a lede that's been restated in loads of different ways on "Game of Thrones." Just replace "Jets" with "Lannisters." 

Life is meaningless and full of pain. Watching the Jets week after week has become an exercise is (sic) masochism.

Suddenly, the outrageous character deaths in his books make sense. 

Once a Jet, always a Jet. And, oh, the Lannisters always pay their debts. That's George R.R. Martin's Wednesday, everybody. 

 Also on HuffPost:

For a constant stream of entertainment news and discussion, follow HuffPost Entertainment on Viber.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

What is the deal with the office? The inexorable rise of the office workspace has occasioned an almost bizarre level of cultural fascination with the environment. “Dilbert.” “The Office” (U.K.). “The Office” (U.S.). “Better Off Ted.” “Office Space.” Recently, an Australian teenager created a Facebook group called Generic Office Roleplay meant to, as Digg put it, “ridicule the banality of office life.” The group quickly exploded in popularity.

Fiction, never the last to arrive, has taken its own cracks at office culture -- think of Joshua Ferris’ dark office comedy And Then We Came To The End, which crystallizes the temporary hive-mind that can arise in workplaces through use of a collective first-person narrator. Think of Dave Eggers’ The Circle, which dramatizes the creep of new tech conglomerates, like Google, from the inside.

There’s something different, however, about Helen Phillips’s debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, something a little more uncanny and Kafkaesque. Even her insistent use of the vaguely antiquated term “bureaucrat” instead of the more casually dismissive “office drone” or “pencil-pusher” imbues the enigmatic employees who lurk amid her halls with an alien mystique. What’s more, it subtly reminds us that these cheese-sandwich-eating, brown-cardigan-wearing employees comprise something far more powerful and recognizable than their individual roles: a bureaucracy.

We enter this bureaucracy with our heroine, drab and desperate Josephine. She and her husband, Joseph, have recently moved to the city from what they term “the hinterland” in hopes of finding decent work. Joseph has only recently found an office job while Josephine has been searching for months. Interviewed by a featureless, impersonal administrator with halitosis so pungent no number of breath mints can quell it, Josephine leaps at the job she’s offered despite the life-sapping atmosphere, off-putting supervisor, and demanding yet dull data entry work.

Day after day, Josephine sits alone in a dingy, claustrophobic room, checking a searchable Database against stacks of files in her inbox, adding a date to each Database entry for each file checked. The file, aside from a name at the top, contains nothing but strings of incoherent numbers and letters, which she’s instructed to ignore. The task is an office worker’s nightmare; no wonder Josephine starts to notice, uneasily, claw marks on the wall.

In the grungy, infested sublets she and Joseph take shelter in, she thinks she can leave the office behind -- relax into the uplifting love they share and allow his small gestures (candles with dinner, a specially prepared dinner) to wash away the bone-deep unease of the work day. When Joseph himself starts to pull away, finally not coming home one night, it seems as though the rot of her office is taking hold of every part of her life. She’s pursued at every sublet by missed package delivery notifications from an unknown sender. She suspects she’s being followed. Finally, desperate, Josephine realizes the chilling truth behind her mundane data entry work, and must resort to unforeseeable extremes to salvage her life and the life of the one she loves most.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the sort of odd, sly, chameleonic novel that vexes genre categorizers and draws comparisons to Atwood and Murakami. It satirizes office culture to the point of horror; it draws us into a heartfelt love story; it creates an alternative, sci-fi-inflected universe that sounds a lot like Brooklyn, if Brooklyn had more creepy secret technologies. (Or does it??) Phillips plays with language, with the anagrams and words-within-words that show meaning can be hidden in plain sight. By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture.

It also vacillates between tonal perfection and unexpected off-key notes. Josephine, a classic everywoman, typically thinks and speaks in a relatable mode, a warm, awkward human thrust into a coldly analytical world. She defies her supervisor to tack up a calendar on the wall, a pathetic gesture at personalizing her space familiar to any cubicle-dweller. When Joseph doesn’t come home, she leaves him a voicemail informing him she’s “kind of freaking out.” Yet Josephine’s very first voiced thought, “Oh, perfect, the interviewer’s appearance probably deterred other applicants!” reads falsely as a real, human inner voice. The line, structured more for exposition than inner reflection and verbalized in crisp, narration-style language, strikes a clunky note all the more jarring in the midst of an alluring first page. Phillips usually handles more deftly the challenge of humanizing her protagonist in the midst of such a distorted, inhuman alternate world. 

The slim, conceptual novel also confronts a dilemma of the form: How to resolve the narrative conflict without collapsing the complexity of the central conceit? At times Phillips’s denouement does seem rushed, a flattening of the uncanny world she’s created into a suspense thriller chase scene. Resolution, not ambiguity, takes the lead toward the finish line, though it doesn’t dim the lingering, unsettling images of modern soulless bureaucracy Phillips so masterfully brings to life. And perhaps, after all, the world is much simpler than we'd like to think it is, she seems to suggest. That might be the most profound and horrifying conclusion of all.

The Bottom Line:

A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant, fable that melds mystery, sci-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity. 

Who wrote it?

Helen Phillips is the author of a book of short stories, And Yet They Were Happy. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, BOMB and more, and she’s been awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she was inspired to write The Beautiful Bureaucrat, her debut novel, by her experiences at a data-entry job.

What other reviewers think:

The New York Times: “Helen Phillips deftly interrogates this existential divide in her riveting, drolly surreal debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat.”

The New Republic: “In Helen Phillips’s debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, the drama isn’t interpersonal -- it’s driven by the enigmatic nature of work itself. Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry, Phillips’s book evokes the menace of the mundane.”

Who will read it?

Fans of literary science fiction, conceptual literature and suspense, particularly readers who love Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami and similar writers.

Opening lines:

“The person who interviewed her had no face. Under other circumstances -- if the job market hadn’t been so bleak for so long, if the summer hadn’t been so glum and muggy -- this might have discouraged Josephine from stepping through the door of that office in the first place. But as things were, her initial thought was: Oh, perfect, the interviewer’s appearance probably deterred other applicants!”

Notable passage:

“‘The work suits you, does it not?’ The Person with Bad Breath said.

Emboldened by this note of kindness, by the slight vulnerability evident in the fact that her boss’s shirt collar had flipped up in the back and was not lying impeccably beneath the gray jacket, Josephine found herself confessing: ‘I wonder about them.’

‘About whom?’ The Person with Bad Breath inquired, as though it wasn’t obvious. ‘Oh, them.’ Now moving for the door, reaching for the knob, almost gone. ‘It is better never to wonder about them.’”

The Beautiful Bureaucrat
by Helen Phillips
Henry Holt, $25.00
Publishes Aug. 11, 2015

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

 Also on HuffPost:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In the midst of the recent Planned Parenthood controversy, Cameron Esposito has some feelings on the matter -- some very strong feelings. 

The comedian recently took the stage to explain why Planned Parenthood is absolutely vital to everyone, not only women. Using a standup performance to drop some knowledge, Esposito explained that abortions only make up 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. The other 97 percent includes breast exams, sex education, HIV testing and many more important health services. 

The fact that anti-abortion supporters are trying to defund Planned Parenthood because it offers abortion services is "insanity" Esposito said. "Women deserve access to abortion services. We f**king do because we’re not incubators."

She explains that when we give women the right to choose we actually help stop the vicious cycle of poverty. “If you don’t want to pay for health care for people that live in poverty, then you should help women who live in poverty to not have children that they are not able to provide for," Esposito says. "That is how you personally will not have to pay that bill.”     

"If you are pro-life you should be pro-women’s lives," she says. "The women that already exist and aren’t piles of cells."

Esposito finished on a strong (and hilarious) note: “If you are a guy and you are against Planned Parenthood and you sleep with women -- I hope to god it is infrequently.” 

Also on HuffPost: 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Mindy and Danny. Hannah and Adam. Alex and Piper. Cookie and Luscious. Olivia and Fitz. I have a deep affection for all of these fictional couples, but even the best of on-screen romantic pairings have nothing on Rachel and Quinn, the morally ambiguous antiheroines on Lifetime's critical darling, "UnREAL."  

The second-to-last scene of the show's first season finale, says it all:

"I love you. You know that, right?," says reality TV producer Rachel, collapsing on a lawn chair after producing a brutal, live finale episode.

"I love you too," responds Quinn, her boss and partner-in-legal-crime. "Weirdo."

On a show full of faux romance, dedicated to stripping away the artifice of the fairy tale myth we buy into when we watch shows like "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette,"  one might make the mistake of thinking that "UnREAL" is devoid of true love.

But, romance is real: It just manifests itself on "UnREAL" as the -- platonic -- love between two fascinating, complicated, powerful women. 

In an interview with Variety, "UnREAL" co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro said as much pretty explicitly: 

Rachel and Quinn are the primary relationship in this show. They’re the love story, they’re everything.

We're so used to seeing shows -- even ones with complex, groundbreaking female protagonists -- where relationships with other women are all but absent. It's refreshing to see intimate friendships between women treated as the main event, instead of a side piece to the heterosexual action.

In the finale, we see both Quinn and Rachel's ill-fated romances blow up in their faces (with Quinn directly contributing to the end of Rachel's dalliance with "Everlasting" suitor, Adam). And instead of sinking into their despair with a pint of ice cream and tears, they both wipe off their runny mascara and get back to the business of being damn good at what they do: producing intoxicating reality television. Because if there's one thing Chet, Adam and Jeremy can never match Quinn and Rachel in, it's their professional competence. 

Quinn and Rachel are not traditionally "likable," as so many female characters on TV have to be. They are not characters who are always easy to root for, they are not always good to each other, but because they are so damn interesting, you end up wanting them to find some semblance of happiness anyway.

As someone who is a sucker for the fairy tale fantasy on-screen -- even though I intellectually know it's complete and utter bullshit -- I expected to feel a little bit disappointed that every romantic pairing went to hell during the finale. As Roxane Gay put it in a New York Times op-ed about "The Bachelor" franchise:

The real shame of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” of the absurd theater of romantic comedies, of the sweeping passion of romance novels, is that they know where we are most tender, and they aim right for that place.

But the "UnREAL" finale tapped into something even better: the underrepresented, but just as epic, deeply relatable love story that exists between two female friends. So when I watched Rachel and Quinn team up to "produce the greatest finale in 'Everlasting' history" -- and pull it off with flying colors -- it truly felt like a happy(ish) ending. 

For many women, the relationships that endure -- through dates and breakups and marriage and job changes and children and divorce and loss -- are female friendships; intensely beautiful, sometimes twisted, deeply loving friendships.

The allure of seeing "behind-the-scenes" of a reality show might be what drew many viewers to "UnREAL" initially, but it's Quinn and Rachel's f**ked up love story that will make them stick around. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Admit it: your selfie game will never be as good as these goobers.

Stevo Dirnberger and Chanel Cartell captured huskies seemingly taking selfies at a lodge in Norway, helping to care for the pups while giving them some sexy head shots.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Pop quiz! Which do you prefer: feminist revolution or fried ravioli with porcini and ricotta and spicy Italian salsa? How about this: girl power bands like Slutever and Babes in Toyland or crack bacon dark chocolate cupcakes? 

If you are in Los Angeles this weekend, you don't have to choose. Riot Grill, an all-femme punk, comedy and food fest is combining all your feminist passions and foodie desires into a single revolutionary festival. Is your mouth salivating while your hand subconsciously tightens into a fist prepared to pump? Good. 

An original '90s Riot Grrrl flyer, plus burger!

This year's lineup features Babes In Toyland, Le Butcherettes, Slutever and The Menstruators. Emmy Award-winning stand-up comedian Sara Schaefer will be your lovely host, and Bitchin’ Kitchen's celebrity chef Nadia G is providing the grub. Bonus: all proceeds from the evening will fund the Human Rights Campaign's fight to protect LGBTQ rights across the country. 

If you need a little background, the Riot Grrrl movement has fought against patriarchal capitalism in all its manifestations since the 1990s. In the words of the original Riot Grrrl Manifesto: "BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-heirarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations... BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak... BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real." 

To add to those stirring words, we'd suggest a Riot Grill addendum: BECAUSE we femmes also deserve a dank six-course meal while benefiting the LGBTQ community and the belief that Love is LOVE!  

This is happening tomorrow. Get your tickets now. "Riot Grill" begins at 7 p.m. at the The Regent Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The men of "Well-Strung: The Singing String Quartet" are putting a whimsical twist on the Taylor Swift smash, "Blank Space," in their new video. 

The group -- comprised of first violinist Edmund Bagnell, second violinist Chris Marchant, violist Trevor Wadleigh and cellist Daniel Shevlin -- hits the streets (and rooftops) of New York in the new clip, which mashes Swift's hit song up with Johann Sebastian Bach's “Partita No. 3 in E Major (BWV 1006).”

Each of the boys has a chance encounter with a handsome stranger as they traverse Manhattan, but by the video's conclusion, they all discover that -- as is often the case in matters of love -- things aren't always what they appear to be. 

It's been a busy summer for Well-Strung, who are gearing up for the release of their sophomore album, “POPSsical," this October. Their video, "Chelsea's Mom," racked up over 200,000 views on YouTube after being featured on The Huffington Post, MSNBC and People, among other media outlets. The song, which revises Fountains of Wayne's 2003 hit, "Stacy's Mom," as an ode to 2016 Democractic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, was even shared by Chelsea Clinton on social media. 

You can catch Well-Strung live in their new show, "Summer Lovin,'" at The Art House in Provincetown, Massachusetts through Sept. 12. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

We feel you, introverts.

It can be exhausting living in a busy, boisterous world when your personality not only prefers but craves a little solitude. Unfortunately, those needs may come off as aloof or shy to those who don't understand the personality type.

Thats why artist Aaron Caycedo-Kimura turned to a creative outlet to explain his -- and so many others' -- quiet nature to the rest of the world. The result? These spot-on comics that perfectly capture what it's like to be an introvert.

"Introversion is a preference that has to do with where you direct your energy (inward) and how you recharge (usually by being alone)," Caycedo-Kimura told The Huffington Post in an email. "It's not something to be cured. It’s just how some people are wired and how they were designed to be."

Sound familiar? Take a look at Caycedo-Kimura's all-too-real illustrations below, which detail the plights and triumphs introverts deal with on a daily basis. Keep on keepin' on, quiet types.

Also on HuffPost:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

There's a lot going on inside Noor Al-Mosawi's head.

As a wedding photographer, the 34-year-old from the greater Toronto area spends her days telling other people's stories. Her Instagram feed is filled with elaborately dressed brides and loving couples sharing tender gazes.

But on the inside, her soul was still searching for solid ground.

"I recently walked away from an emotionally abusive relationship and I realized that I lacked a connection to my inner voice," Al-Mosawi told The Huffington Post. "Not knowing about what I thought, or how I felt about things."

Then, one day, Al-Mosawi decided to turn the camera on herself.

When she first started putting her self-portraits together, Al-Mosawi said it was strange seeing her face on the computer screen. But she pressed on, manipulating the space around her head to fit her mood.

She would start with an image of herself, keeping her face bare and using just a few dabs of eyeliner and mascara. Then, she'd add layers to the piece, mixing images that she had photographed with designs she created on Photoshop. 

The result is a series of 21 images, each paired with a quote from author Mark Gonzales' book, "In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty." The book is made up of short but inspirational lines of prose that guide the reader through what Al-Mosawi calls an "internal paradigm shift." It was these words, along with the support provided by her faith, family and friends, that helped spur the photographer's healing process.

"This series is about self-care, about finding a grounding, stabilizing energy in our lives, regardless of what's swirling around us," she said. "We have this space we can go to retreat, recalibrate and center ourselves."

See some of Al-Mosawi's  images below, and follow her on Instagram for more.

H/T Ummah Wide

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

A rousing new video connects the Jim Crow-era activism of famed American poet Langston Hughes to the activism of today's #BlackLivesMatter movement.  

The video, published online Wednesday by the group Color of Change, has actor Danny Glover reading Hughes' 1938 poem "Kids Who Die" over a series of haunting images: the Cleveland park where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was gunned down by police, the Oakland train station where 22-year-old Oscar Grant was also killed by cops, and a group of riot officers with their guns aimed at a black protester in Ferguson, Missouri, among others.

"This is for the kids who die," opens Hughes' poem. "Black and white / For kids will die certainly / The old and rich will live on awhile,  /As always, / Eating blood and gold, / Letting kids die." 

“August 9th is a big day for the movement," Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.org, said in a statement announcing the video's release. This Sunday marks one year since the death of Michael Brown -- the black, unarmed 18-year-old gunned down by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. His death touched off riots and peaceful protests in the St. Louis suburb. 

The date "also symbolizes the incredible volition and power of the people of Ferguson and the birthing of another movement centered on Black lives," Robinson said. "But it also shows how the brutal assault of Black people did not end with the Jim Crow era, it has only shifted and adapted to take on a new form of oppression and violence that has manifested in rampant killing of Black people at the hands of the state.”

It's been 77 years since Hughes first published "Kids Who Die" in the communist-backed pamphlet of poems "A New Song."

"It’s very much an interracial anthem that celebrates young blacks as well as whites, in the struggle against fascism, capitalism, and racism, especially in the American South," Stanford University professor Arthur Rampersad -- whose book, "The Life of Langston Hughes," was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 -- told The Huffington Post.

"I have no doubt that Hughes would strongly approve of the poem being used to protest against anti-black violence even if he intended it for a much broader purpose," Rampersad said. 

Media consultant Frank Chi co-produced the video with Terrance Green. Chi told Mic.com that the pair "wanted to make a video that brings together the brutal images of the past year -- seeing Eric Garner choked to the ground, Walter Scott shot in the back, Sandra Bland dragged out of her car over a cigarette -- but display them in a way that pays tribute."  

"We wanted to inspire people to keep fighting," he said, adding that he first time he read "Kids Who Die" was on Twitter after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the death of 18-year-old Trayvon Martin. 

The video ties particularly searing lines in Hughes' poem to real-life events and characters today. When Glover reads "sleazy courts," the viewer sees footage of St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announcing that Officer Darren Wilson would face no charges in Michael Brown's death. The "bribe-reaching police" are NYPD officers turning their backs on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The "blood-loving generals" are militarized police in Missouri.

And when Glover reads "money-loving preachers," there's footage of a wild-eyed and bloviating Bill O'Reilly, the conservative Fox News host. 

Like Hughes' poem, however, the video ends on a hopeful note. Ultimately a tribute to the success of the #BlackLivesMatter movement -- which has helped initiate widespread criminal justice reform over the past year and reshaped how America talks about race -- the video ends with the final lines of Hughes' poem read over footage of massive, peaceful protests across the country. 

"But the day will come -- /," it says. "You are sure yourselves that it is coming -- / When the marching feet of the masses / Will raise for you a living monument of love, / And joy, and laughter, / And black hands and white hands clasped as one, / And a song that reaches the sky -- / The song of the life triumphant / Through the kids who die."

You can read the full poem below. (As Professor Rampersad notes, the version Glover reads in the video is edited and has some key omissions. The most notable are Hughes' references to two well-known activists of his era: Karl Liebknecht, a German socialist assassinated in 1919, and Angelo Herndon, who was arrested in 1932 when he was just 19 for leading an interracial protest in Georgia.)

"Kids Who Die" by Langston Hughes

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people —
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people —
And the old and rich don't want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die —
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies'll be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter's field,
Or the rivers where you're drowned like Leibknecht

But the day will come —
You are sure yourselves that it is coming —
When the marching feet of the masses
Will raise for you a living monument of love,
And joy, and laughter,
And black hands and white hands clasped as one,
And a song that reaches the sky —
The song of the life triumphant
Through the kids who die.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

A Disney animator has created a breathtaking tribute to Cecil, spurred by his own love for animals. 

Following the death of the beloved Zimbabwe lion, Aaron Blaise, who was an animator for several Disney movies including "Lion King," decided to honor the animal by creating his own illustration on Photoshop of a regal-looking Cecil amid the clouds, in the style of the iconic kid's movie, according to his blog. 

Accompanying the portrait is an iconic quote from Mufasa. And in this context, it's especially heartstring-tugging. 

"Look at the stars," the quote reads. "The great kings of the past look down upon us from those stars." 

Blaise, a huge animal lover, documented the artwork's creation process in a mesmerizing time-lapse video uploaded to YouTube late last month. The animator told Distractify that Cecil's death had a big effect on him and he wanted to find a way to express his emotion. 

"I felt an urge to create something beautiful. I was an animator on The Lion King and the scene where Simba sees his father in the clouds after his death popped into my head right away," Blaise explained to the outlet. "I just wanted to create a noble, spiritual image that would move people. "

The animator ends his video with a hopeful call to action, asking viewers to donate to Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, the organization that had been tracking Cecil.  

We'll certainly be looking for Cecil up in the sky tonight. 

Also on HuffPost: 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In the fall of 2014, a group of visual artists called Schnellebuntebilder joined conceptual artist Leif Elggren to attempt to converse with the spirit of Andy Warhol.  

The whole stunt was part of a marketing effort by Absolut, which had just come out with a Warhol-branded vodka. We can imagine the brainstorming session that happened in some ad agency's conference room, during which a low-level creative, in a desperate effort to lengthen her list of ideas, floated a ghostly interview concept which was, somehow, not shot down immediately. The artist had famously collaborated with Absolut once before -- maybe he would do so again, from beyond the grave?

Elggren, selected as the medium, got to work researching meaningful places in Warhol's life and setting up recording equipment. He collected clips of Warhol (supposedly) speaking and, in a huge performance piece at a Warhol vodka launch party set against an illuminated backdrop by Schnellebuntebilder, blended them into DJ A-Trak's setlist. The disembodied voice of pop art's eternal king allegedly vocalized statements such as "It's so beautiful," "She let go," and, "Leave me here." 

The entire experiment was, as expected, creepy. And yet somehow disappointing. Given the chance to ask Andy Warhol -- cultural icon, maverick of the arts -- anything at all, the vodka maker didn't leave us with a single compelling response. It seemed, to us, a very, very, very tragically wasted opportunity. 

So we set off on our own very noble, deeply journalistic and DEFINITELY NOT batshit insane mission to contact the spirit of Andy Warhol on what would have been his 87th birthday to ask him some better questions.

What, for example, ever happened to the 2,000 bottles of Dom Perignon Warhol helped purchase before his death, which was intended for consumption on January 1, 2000 but mysteriously disappeared? And are the lyrics to that one Dylan song really about Warhol's poor treatment of poor little rich girl Edie Sedgwick? 

We gathered our best digital and analog recorders, downloaded a few iPhone apps, and found Warhol's first Factory -- a studio space where he made paintings and screenprints, hung out with famous friends and held crazy parties. The building was demolished in 1967; it's now a parking garage. At midnight, we showed up with a piece of birthday cake, lit the candles and floated some questions into thin air.  

Q: Have you been "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" in the afterlife?

Ignoring our very human chatter at the end, we'll take that as a yes. Or something. Later, given his experience with fast food burgers, we asked another. 

Q: McDonald's or Burger King?

McDonald's, obviously.

Some muted clips of Warhol's experimental videos were the closest thing we had to personal belongings, which Elggren said, in his Reddit AMA, could draw Warhol out of the ether. And yet somewhat surprisingly -- or not, depending on your presuppositions -- a good portion of our questions seemed to go unanswered. We asked whether the quote, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," referred to social media, nonexistent during the time of his death in 1987. We also asked if he enjoys the "art pop" of Lady Gaga. 

At some point, audio producer Katelyn Bogucki asked Warhol to blow out one of his birthday candles. In what felt like a minute -- but, when replayed on the recording, only amounted to a few seconds -- the wind picked up and extinguished a candle. SPOOKY. A few moments later, the flames shifted and reignited it. Whether that was convenient timing or contact is a hairy question that can be debated amongst yourselves.

Q: For whom would you design an album cover in 2015?

One Direction? FKA Twigs? Azealia Banks? 

It's tough to discern between various background noises -- a small group of men were gathered a few dozen feet away, speaking quietly. A few trucks drove by. A particularly chatty cicada occupied a tree somewhere above us. An audio blip on our old-school cassette recorder -- as if someone placed their palm over the mic for a moment -- continues to puzzle us. There were a couple weird noises, though, that we couldn't make out at all. We'll leave them up to you.

So, what did we learn here? If Andy Warhol's ghost exists -- and deep down we all know the answer to that question -- he's a pretty chill guy. We can imagine him hanging out in some glittery nirvana with Edie, his mother and three-eighths of The Velvet Underground, forever and ever.

And ever.

Gifs created by Priscilla Frank, HuffPost Culture writer extraordinaire. 

HuffPost audio producer Katelyn Bogucki assisted with the technical aspects of this post. 

Additional help was provided by HuffPost Comedy editor Andy McDonald. On a fright scale between Velma and Scooby Doo, he considers himself a Fred. 

Also on HuffPost:

For a constant stream of entertainment news and discussion, follow HuffPost Entertainment on Viber.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

On April 25, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck a mountainous region northwest of Kathmandu, Nepal. The quake, the worst to hit the country in over 80 years, triggered a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and historical sites. More than 8,800 people were killed in the quake and its aftershocks. 

Filmmaker Nehemiah Stark and cinematographer Nick Wilson arrived on an assignment for Time in the village of Samantar, in Dhading district, on May 18, some three weeks after the quake struck. The village is located a mere 75 miles from the earthquake's epicenter, and Stark and Wilson got there at a crucial time.

May is usually when the residents of Samantar plant rice seeds to prepare for the upcoming monsoon season in June. Plant the seeds any later, and the monsoon weather will destroy the crops. But this year, collapsing buildings from the earthquake had destroyed food stockpiles, and rice seeds became part of the rubble. For this reason, rice seed became very limited in the markets -- and even if there had been enough in stock, the villagers had no money to pay for it.

For three weeks, Stark and Wilson documented the struggle of Samantar's residents to secure the rice seeds they needed to survive. They were struck by the villagers' resilience and energy, despite the tragedies they had suffered.

"Nick and I were incredibly humbled by the consistent communal spirit, humility and drive of the Nepalis we saw," Stark told The WorldPost. "Seventy-year-old women carrying 50 pounds of crops on their backs [stopped] to say 'Namaste' and bow to us in the wild heat."

Find out how Samantar's inspiring community defeated the odds and secured food for the season in Stark and Wilson's film, "Planting Life."

Visit Nehemiah Stark's portfolio to see more of his work.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Shut up, put the record on, drop the needle and crank up the volume. The first teaser for Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger's HBO series, "Vinyl," has arrived, and it's pretty awesome. There's guitar-smashing, coke-snorting, guns, fighting and '70s wardrobes and all to a rock 'n' roll soundtrack we can't wait to hear more of. 

The series, which also comes from Terence Winter ("Boardwalk Empire"), stars Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, president of a New York record label during in 1972. The teaser also stars Olivia Wilde as Richie's wife and former actress Devon Finestra, Juno Temple as assistant Jamie Vine, Ray Romano as one of Richie's partners Zak Yankovich, as well as Max Casella and Jack Quaid. On Tuesday, HBO debuted an even shorter teaser on the series' Instagram account, but we already can't wait for this show.

"Vinyl" premieres in 2016 on HBO.

Also on HuffPost:

For a constant stream of entertainment news and discussion, follow HuffPost Entertainment on Viber.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In the Al Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza, residents have transformed a conflict-stricken area into a vibrant work of art.

Formerly bare doors and windows are now covered in rainbow shades of paint, and pastel-colored flower pots hang down alleyways. There are swirling murals on light purple and yellow walls, and brightly colored bricks line the sidewalks.

The neighborhood's aesthetic stands at odds with its devastated surroundings. Gaza is still recovering from last summer's 50 days of war between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants in the territory. This conflict came on the heels of another flare up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just two years prior.

 The effort in Al Zaytoun to beautify the neighborhood was the brainchild of 58-year-old resident Mohammed Al Saedi, who wanted to create a positive atmosphere. He began painting pots in his own home, but had bigger ambitions. 

 "I wanted this idea to spread beyond my house," Al Saedi told reporter Jehad Saftawi in a video for the U.S.-based nonprofit Institute for Middle East Understanding, which provides information to journalists on Palestinian issues.

"I wanted to create a serene atmosphere full of flowers and colors in an attempt to heal the suffering and psychological effects of the siege," Al Saedi said.

His initiative was aided by local residents and the Tamer Institute for Community Education, a Palestinian nonprofit that contributed painting supplies and some artists to help with the project.

In the video, residents tout the colorful neighborhood as a grand success.

"We felt very happy when they painted the neighborhood," says 10-year-old Maram Haddad. "It's become very beautiful."

Over 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis died in the 2014 conflict and around 100,000 Gaza homes were destroyed or damaged. Corruption and lack of access to building materials blocked rebuilding efforts. 

Also on HuffPost: 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

For wedding photographers, choosing a favorite photo is a next-to-impossible task. 

We recently asked a handful of talented wedding photographers to do just that -- and luckily for us, they accepted the challenge. Below, see some of their most treasured snaps.

Also on HuffPost:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Mazu is a Buddhist and Taoist goddess of the sea, protector of travelers and one of Taiwan's most popular deities. This year, a temple in her honor will rise above Black Rock City for the annual Burning Man festival -- only to burn to the ground at the end of the week.

Nathan Parker, the visionary and leader behind the Mazu Temple project, says the culminating moment is one he awaits with excitement, even after months of working on the installation.

"Nothing is permanent, and we enjoy the moments that we know are fleeting far more than the ones we expect to last forever," Parker told The Huffington Post. "I get to spend almost a year building a temple that, for one week, will be enjoyed by 70,000 people, and then we will all watch as it burns to the ground. I can't begin to express how excited I am for that day."

Though it's not the official Burning Man temple for 2015, the Mazu temple is bound to cast an impressive aura across the Nevada desert where the festival takes place.

The structure is 50 feet wide, Parker said, and is raised four feet off the ground on a pier. Around the temple will be an elaborate light display, which will be illuminated at night and give off the illusion of a moat. Two 12-foot diameter "islands" will emerge from the main structure at the end of 20-foot walkways, offering visitors a place to sit, drink tea and contemplate life. Surrounding the temple will be a string of lanterns 150 feet in diameter. 

Despite its ambitious design, the core building crew has remained under 20 members, Parker said, all of whom he praised for their dedication to the project. 

Among the feats the crew accomplished are eight fire-breathing dragon sculptures that will be perched on top of the temple, reflecting Mazu's relationship to the mythical creature. When visitors enter the temple, Parker said, they will encounter moon blocks, or Jiaobei, which are small stones used in divination practices. These blocks will contain "accelerometers and bluetooth transmitters" which, when thrown, will trigger lighting effects built into the temple roof's lotus petals, as well as the dragons' flame effect.

The temple will also feature prayer strips written by the team's poet-in-residence, which visitors can grab at random. Each strip will coordinate to a particular location within Black Rock City. With their prayers in hand, Parker and his team hope to send people "out into the chaos of the city, seeking the answers to their questions."

Learn more about the Mazu temple in the video below:

Also on HuffPost:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If you like your mysteries regular and small, you would have done well to park yourself all summer 2015 outside a house exactly 100 years old, in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands. At the start of every weekend you would have seen the same curious sight.

A figure, fine-boned and long-necked, girl-sized but resolute as a professional, opens her front door. With her are a few items: an old Macbook, an Optoma projector, a sandwich for dinner built in the Dutch style of bread plus one ingredient. The mysterious girl-woman starts her car and is not back until morning. 

The rest of the week progresses as weeks do for new mothers. You see her carrying her baby in the window (are you feeling like a creep yet?), taking the bundle out for a walk. Friday winds down and it begins again: her nocturnal escape, to where, you don’t know.

The woman, 34, has a pseudonym: Lumen van Stralen, meaning “ray of light.” She is real, but she'd rather you not know her true name. Before she christened herself anew, she was a journalist who wrote about religion for Dutch language magazines. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity. She didn’t have a favorite; the fact of spirituality itself drove her -- the secret of what differentiates our deepest beliefs from each other.

She grew up, got married, then pregnant, and chose to work less. One day, a friend paid a visit. The loss of work was on her mind and she told him about a dream she’d once had, to write poetry.

This memory must have worked on her because the moment she shut the door behind him, she met the sort of idea that seems to have been handed whole from some better version of oneself. Why not project a story piece by piece to the public? If people choose to follow it by following her, it could live in their minds.

As a child, she had imagined writing a book in a way no one ever had. This solved that riddle. The adult in her understood that the impermanent is not easily monetized, and liked this aspect too. She wasn’t interested in making money.

She took her Optoma projector to an abandoned rail yard. The spell cast by a beam of light amazed her. She hadn’t yet seen the work of Jenny Holzer, an American artist known for her work in projected light. Holzer’s block phrases have graced some of the best known buildings in the world. In botanist terms, she creates trees, self-contained ideas with hidden meanings attached like roots. The Dutch woman makes something more like a dandelion, all the parts split and flown -- a page in one town, the next in another. Only a lunatic would track each seed of a dandelion down to see how they look all together.

In the end, who would follow her enough to understand her whole meaning? This aspect too, pleased her. Like a child, she preferred to work in a code all her own.

She ventured first to the riverside city of Arnhem, home of the world’s largest collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Her stop was the famous orchestra hall, the Musis Sacrum, a 19th-century building with a white wall at its rear. On this unexpected streak of modernism she projected the first page of her ongoing work, while her husband minded the baby back at home.

The story is about a Muslim man. It’s not clear from which country he hails, only that it’s not Turkey or Morocco, where most Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands come from. In this way, he is a bit like the Musis wall: a surface on which to project the idea of a man.

He is not a saint. He cheats on his wife with a woman he meets in the Netherlands. (As a sort of joke, the woman names this other woman Lumen van Stralen too.) People aren’t always kind to him. The story is set roughly four decades before the present day, when hatred for the rush of Muslim immigrants in the wake of a Dutch economic resurgence boiled close to the country's skin. Today, the infamous 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Moroccan Dutchman hangs in the air. Studies link the country's unofficial segregation to the radicalization of young Dutch Muslims; meanwhile, white Dutch people fill out polls about their fears.

She drove each weekend. One night she logged nearly 300 miles, from her home at the north tip of the country down to Rotterdam in the south, and back. As per the arrangement with her husband, she was home always by morning. Eventually she wrote a scene that made her uncomfortable to throw onto a public wall. She was in Dokkum, a small town of some 12,000 people, home to the tiniest hospital in the Netherlands.

The scenario was a confrontation between Dutch natives and the Muslim hero. Like a ventriloquist, the woman held a mystifying relation to the dialogue she wrote. The words were both hers and not hers. She felt wrong using them: Dirty Turk. Moroccan cunt -- or kut-marokkanen, as it is hissed on Dutch streets. In a parking lot by the brick wall where she worked, a car full of men pulled up beside her. The dust carrying the slurs hung in the beam of light whirring through the dark. The men asked if the idea was to comment on Dutch society. She said yes, adding that she wonders about “connection.” How do people from different backgrounds see each other? The men didn’t applaud, but they didn’t hassle her either.

One night, her words danced on a white sheet draped on the enormous underbelly of a bridge in Nijmegen. This was her first legal experience. The night before, a man saw her beaming at the side of the bridge. He said he was helping to organize Vierdaagse, the festival whose energy she'd come to feed off of. Stretching six days despite the name (which means "Four Days," in reference to how long the epic walks that are at its heart stretch), it is the country's largest event, full of music and food and some million attendees. He invited her to project as an official artist. In the gravel under the bridge, she worked in a sea of young people drinking grainy piña coladas out of plastic cups.

A woman approached her, explaining that she was Muslim.

This made our Dutch writer nervous. The narrative twist on display had been a particular source of worry. In the story, the main character wants to remake himself for the West and so he converts to a form of Islam palatable to Westerners. When an American or Brit or Dutchman hears the word Sufism, he thinks of whirling dervishes, spinning peacefully. Or else Rumi, whose poems show up in coffee table books and inspirational wall hangings. Knowing this, the hero changes his name to Derwish.

The woman worried she’d arrived at this bit of the fiction apropos of nothing. Then the other woman -- a poet, it turned out -- congratulated her. In real life, she said, some of her Muslim immigrant friends were considering converting to Sufism for the very reasons Derwish does.

Social scientists say we are wired to see the humanity in those who look and pray like us. They have a word for this: ethnocentric empathy. The woman felt she was short-circuiting ethnocentric empathy in a small way each night she ventured out. Even before the Muslim poet's corroboration, she felt vindicated. When white Dutch readers stopped to read, they seemed to care about the man on the wall. She could swear she saw new pathways forming.

If you were parked outside the century old house, you might see a change in the figure stealing back in the early light. Multiple lives might seem to radiate out like light: woman or girl, mother or radical? As she opens the door, she feels a thrill that her son has not missed her. She knows she can be many things. She is a hero in a story too, imperfect and full.

Also on HuffPost:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.