In one of the scariest videos you'll see this week/month/year, Donald Trump is being prayed for by some pastors and Rabbis. According to Facebook, their names are Kenneth Copeland, Rabbi Kirk Schneider and Pastor Paula White. 

Watch the video and we'll meet back up in a sec!

Ok great, so he couldn't care less! If you aren't convinced, let me present the evidence.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

Now that it's settled, let's try to guess what Donald Trump was ACTUALLY thinking about! Because it definitely wasn't God.

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A mom and psychologist has developed a line of empathy cards that she hopes will break down the silence around a common but not often discussed source of grief: pregnancy and infant loss.

Jessica Zucker's empathy cards are meant for people who have experienced miscarriage and stillbirth, as well as other heartbreaking situations like early infant death, having to terminate a wanted pregnancy or giving birth to a preemie who requires intensive care in the NICU. The cards' messages express support, understanding and even slightly irreverent candor.

"My hope is that people are able to feel less alone through these cards," Zucker told The Huffington Post. "Women are reporting feeling a sense of shame, self blame, guilt and definitely isolation after experiences of pregnancy and infant loss."

As a psychologist who specializes in women's reproductive and maternal health, Zucker has listened to many mothers' stories of pregnancy and infant loss. But her own experience of having a miscarriage at 16 weeks gave the mom and psychologist a incredibly personal connection to these issues.

"My cards express a combination of things that I wish I had heard, things I definitely say to my patients in a certain way, and things I've heard from my patients in the aftermath of loss," Zucker said, adding that she feels most people today aren't equipped to know what to do or say to someone going through infant or pregnancy loss.

"My biggest inspiration is my desire to help shift the cultural conversation," the mom said. "I hope that through these cards, I can sort of make an indelible impact on normalizing this kind of grief in our society in a way that it isn't right now."

In honor of the start of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, here are Jessica Zucker's empathy cards, available online and in select Los Angeles stores. 

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"My body. My terms."

That's the powerful slogan and name of a new campaign that hopes to spark some honest and open conversations about sex, consent and victim blaming.

Created by New Zealand media company Villainesse, #MyBodyMyTerms was created to combat revenge porn and victim-blaming, and to also start a larger conversation about sexual violence and the importance of consent. 

"Here in New Zealand we have some of the worst sexual violence statistics in the OECD," Lizzie Marvelly, Villainesse editor and creator of #MyBodyMyTerms, told The Huffington Post. In New Zealand, one in three girls will experience an unwanted sexual experience by the age of 16.

"With the prevalence of sexual violence around the world, especially on [college] campuses, the increasing number of revenge porn cases and the continuing presence of pervasive myths that encourage victim-blaming, it’s clear that we need to talk about these issues," she said. 

The campaign launched this month with a video featuring a mix of famous and everyday New Zealanders with the words "My body, my terms" written on different parts of their bodies. 

Throughout the video, each person gives important reminders about sex and consent including: “I respect myself and I deserve to be respected," and, "If she chooses to drink alcohol it doesn’t make her responsible for the criminal actions of others."

Marvelly explained that #MyBodyMyTerms deals with topics that affect people of all genders, so everyone needs to listen and learn. 

"I think that it’s really important that we talk openly about these issues," she said. "To have discussions about what constitutes consent (freely, and consciously given, enthusiastic agreement), to reiterate that posting revenge porn is both a crime and not the way to deal with a break up, and to remove the stigma and judgment that survivors face."

Using this campaign, Marvelly and Villainesse hope to encourage people to think a bit more critically about their personal opinions about sex and consent. "If we can start to remove some of the taboos around these controversial subjects, hopefully we can create a space for open and honest discussion." 

Scroll below to see 13 images of people taking a stand against sexual violence with #MyBodyMyTerms. 

Head over to Villainesse or #MyBodyMyTerms to read more about the campaign.

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 Like most modern humans, I was scrolling through Facebook the other day, and I saw something in a friend’s status update that snagged my attention. My friend Carl is a self-described nihilist, an intelligent and well-read guy, and somebody I respect and like a lot. In this update, he was giving a shout-out to the form and function of religion and the structure and moral guidance it provides to people. He also said that he thought the word spiritual, in contrast, was a cop-out.   

As a person who checks the “spiritual, but not religious” box, I felt a pang when I read that. I logged off and tried to go about my day, but my mind kept flipping back to his update, and the pang persisted. I felt upset in the same way I might feel if a loved one came under attack---somebody who’d been there for me in every one of my darkest hours. But I also felt the insult personally.

I kept thinking back to something one of Carl’s friends said in the thread: “The whole ‘I’m not religious but I’m spiritual’ nonsense strikes me as not only disingenuous but also reminiscent of dowager duchesses with an affinity for seances, scented candles and Svengali boy-toys.”  

That’s not the first time I’ve heard spirituality dissed like that. This might have been the hundredth or indeed the thousandth time. There’s an assumption floating in certain circles that people who identify as spiritual are simple and gullible, that they’re not strong thinkers, and that they lack the courage or discipline to either jump with two feet into religion or make a clean, smart break into atheism.

I’ve heard all of that so much over the years that I’d internalized it. I thought the fact that I’m a spiritually-oriented person was something I should be ashamed of and hide to avoid people thinking less of me. For a long time, I kept this central part of my being closeted and only talked about spiritual matters with close friends---friends who either looked at things the same way or friends whose love and respect for me I knew wouldn’t shift even if our takes were very different.

Ironically, I’m pretty sure Carl falls into that last camp of people, but his update and the thread that followed were the last straw for something inside me.

I’m tired. Carl, everybody---I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling like I should be ashamed of my spiritual orientation. I was afraid to respond and defend spirituality in Carl’s thread. But now, more than anything, I’m tired of my own fear. It’s time to speak up for myself and for anyone else who’s been tiptoeing around keeping their spiritual orientation a secret for fear of ridicule. Enough is enough.

I have to start by saying that it feels a little ludicrous to have to defend my spiritual-but-not-religious status in the first place. My chief question to anyone who thinks it requires justifying is this: What do you care? What’s it to you how I find peace, inspiration, and stability in this difficult world? Why do you need an opinion on this? I’m not hurting anybody. I’m not launching any crusades, picketing funerals, or chopping any heads off in the name of my meditation cushion. My spirituality is between me, the quiet space inside me, and whatever loving force I sense or hope is out there, and nobody else.

That said, the idea that all of my spiritual searching and practice is somehow a cop-out boggles my mind. Because I can’t find a religion that rings sufficiently true for me, I should abandon belief altogether? Because I can’t prove the existence of God or anything else I can’t see with my own two eyes, I should ignore the tug in my heart that tells me to keep looking? Does that genuinely seem reasonable?

And for those who imagine that spirituality is nothing but an amorphous, fluffy way to comfort yourself in the face of the Great Unknown, one that’s missing both the rigor of religion and the face-the-void courage of atheism, let me tell you what it’s been for me over the years.

A word of warning: I’ll be touching briefly on some charged and possibly upsetting subject matter. There’s no way for me to convey the immeasurable value of spirituality in my life without stopping there for at least a moment, so bear with me.

I hadn’t been alive on this planet for very long before I was repeatedly sexually abused by a close family member. The details are not germane to this discussion, but the aftermath of sexual abuse is. When you undergo abuse, you lose some fundamental things for a while. You lose trust in others and by extension the world at large. But even more insidiously, you lose trust in yourself. It becomes difficult to be in your own body, and so you do whatever you have to do to numb yourself and skip out on being aware of your feelings, both physical and emotional. You abandon yourself like you would abandon a condemned building.  

Spirituality, for me, is the process of returning. I’m returning to myself. I’m returning to an innate wholeness at my core that never got lost. I don’t know where this core meets God or the divine or the big humming nothingness, but I believe it meets it somewhere. And when I return to this core and discover that I’m okay, I can enter the world more fully and fearlessly.

What does this look like in practice? I sit on my meditation cushion and bring my attention back to myself. I become aware of all the various pains I’ve been running from—both emotional and physical—and I sit with them. I don’t get up when they get tough. I let them expand, even, and become more intense. In doing all of this, I learn that I can handle it. I can handle being in my own body, and I can handle being with any and all of my emotions and the sensations they create. When they’ve been allowed to make all the noises they want to make, these old storehouses of emotion calm down and loosen their grip, and even some of the pain falls away entirely.

This is where I have to laugh at the idea that spirituality is a cop-out. The hours I’ve spent sitting resolutely on my meditation cushion while pain shot up my spine and tears rolled down my face say otherwise. I’ve found a lot of peace, strength, and calm in my spiritual practice that I’m able to draw on when circumstances get challenging, but I’ve practically had to pass through Mordor to get it.

But every minute I’ve spent in this practice has been worth it, and for every tough experience I’ve had on the cushion, I’ve had ten glorious ones there and elsewhere. I get a rush when I read Rumi’s poems, talk to my teacher, sit in my garden, or wrap my arms around my sons, kiss their fuzzy heads, and remember how fleeting our time on Earth is. I don’t know if there’s a word for that place where love and terror meet—the Germans probably have one—but the act of fully entering into the contemplation of that meeting place is spirituality in my eyes, and if you do that, nobody can say you’re copping out.

My spirituality has given me back the knowledge that I’m a whole, healthy, and happy creature with agency, who lives in a world that is far more benevolent and loving than I knew. It’s taken faith to get here, but it wasn’t faith in Jesus or the Buddha or Ganesha or the Bhagavad Gita, even though I appreciate all those things. It was faith in life itself as it moves in me and moves through the world. I don’t have a better definition for my spirituality than that, and I don’t need a better word than spirituality to describe it.

This article originally appeared on QuietRev.com.

You can find more insights from Quiet Revolution on work, life, and parenting as an introvert at QuietRev.com.

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Mom of three Vaida Rasciute puts a new spin on pregnancy cravings and mood swings with her quirky maternity photos.

The Ireland-based art director and stylist for Carrot Incorporations let her imagination take over while she was pregnant with her youngest child and only daughter. In four "American Beauty"-esque photos, Rasciute posed in a bathtub filled with flowers, each image representing the changing emotions she felt during her pregnancy.

"We go through so many stages of moods while pregnant," the art director told The Huffington Post. Rasciute's photos express her feelings of serenity, sadness, pain and even sensuality while carrying her daughter. 

After her flower-based photo shoot, Rasciute continued the project with photos of another mom-to-be in the bathtub with foods that represent her strong pregnancy cravings. From decadent chocolate to a mixture of limes and peppers, the foods reflect the range of many expectant moms' strong epicurean desires.

Keep scrolling to see Rasciute's whimsical pregnancy photos. 

Rasciute would like to credit make-up artists Giedre Bereisaite and Aushra Lauren, hair stylist Kristina Sumile, and Carrot Incorporations for art direction/styling.

H/T Daily Mail

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Inevitably at some point in most parents' lives, they take to verbally spelling out certain words they don't want their young children to hear -- whether it's to avoid teaching them curse words, hide a surprise or prevent them from repeating information.

This new video from the hilarious moms of The BreakWomb shows what happens when parents taking that spelling mania overboard...

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Here we go again. Someone is making an app that's "like Yelp, for people."

A new app called Peeple wants adults to rate and review the folks they know, the way one would evaluate restaurants online. The service resembles other controversial rating apps that have launched over the last few years and, just like before, people are not happy about it.

Set to be released in November, Peeple encourages users to write comments about friends, coworkers or individuals they've dated -- and rate them from one to five stars. To sign up, reviewers must be 21 years old, have a working cell phone and a Facebook account that's been active for more than six months. They must also leave reviews under their real name.

Once a review is submitted, the person being critiqued will receive a text. The reviewer and reviewee then have 48 hours to try and work out their differences before the post appears on the site, but "[i]f you can’t work it out with the person you can publicly defend yourself by commenting on the negative review," the app's creators write.

When a reviewer wants to write about someone who's not in the app's database, all they need to do is submit the person's phone number. If that person doesn't verify a profile that's been set up in his or her name, negative reviews can't be posted there, per Peeple’s current rules. Once a profile is claimed, however, you can't opt out of being reviewed, delete yourself from the site or remove bad reviews.

Reviews will remain up on the site for an entire year, at which point they'll expire. While Peeple's terms of service bans a laundry list of abusive behaviors, it doesn't seem likely that the app's team will be able to police every problematic post while it's still up -- unless the founders and their funders have huge resources for content moderation, that is.

As news of Peeple spreads, it's generating a massive backlash online that has knocked its website offline, flooded its Facebook page with critical comments and barraged @PeepleForPeople with angry tweets. There's even a Change.org petition asking that Apple's App Store and the Google Play marketplace block the app. 

Author and futurist Brian Solis argues that the very idea behind Peeple -- not just the way the app is set up -- is deeply flawed. 

"Discovering human qualities is supposed to be part of life," Solis writes. "And how you and I live our lives, for the most part, is not expected to be gamified and recorded at every step let alone partially reassembled through random dealings and unsystematic, and imperfect reviews of those that get around to publishing them."

The Huffington Post requested an interview with the women behind the app, Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough, but did not hear back on Twitter, Facebook or email. 

Though Peeple bills itself as something entirely new, the idea of rating people online is not. We can already say positive or negative things about other people via social media, as the subjects of public shaming know well. LinkedIn, for instance, encourages its users to endorse others and write testimonials for them.

The Lulu app, which let women anonymously review men, provoked its own controversy when it launched a couple years ago. Way back in 2010, a people-rating app called Unvarnished tried to do exactly what Peeple aspires to do, and it encountered a similar reception. Unvarnished eventually became Honestly.com and closed in May 2012.

And then there's SketchFactor, an app created by two white people to tell other people how steer clear of "sketchy" neighborhoods. As with the concerns about racism which stopped SketchFactor dead in its tracks, the initial response to Peeple could set it on a road to nowheresville.

The Peeple founders responded to some of the criticism in a Facebook post on Wednesday:

The founders also shared a philosophical statement about humans: "People are genuinely good." The ways we see humans behave online today, however, show how entrepreneurs need to be careful from the very beginning about how they build digital architectures of participation. 

 It's inevitable that other people will keep trying to build apps that quantify the behavior or even value of others, that other people will hate them, and that the data from the ones that succeed will be used by some governments to "score" their citizens, as China already wants to do.

The DNA of services matters. Building empathy for other people is hard but necessary for review apps. 

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So you want to be an artist. Not just someone who is good at painting, drawing, sculpting, but someone who truly understands things as they are, and communicates these most elusive truths to others through a quietly unforgettable image. Right? 

Such an exalted goal comes with some inevitable associated intentions: my work should be smart, sophisticated, unique, profound. Do you recognize these expectations? Are you familiar with the way they rest on your shoulders and fog up your vision? Close your eyes, envision them, capture them, and watch them dissolve. To be an authentic artist, at least according to Enrique Martínez Celaya, the first step is latching onto artificial desires and letting them go. 

Martínez Celaya was born in Havana, Cuba, to a schoolteacher mother and a "jack-of-all-trades" father. As a child, he relocated with his family first to Spain and then Puerto Rico. At the age of 12, while serving as an apprentice to a painter, Martínez Celaya had an acute realization about the power of creative expression.

"I realized there was something profound [in] the experience of putting charcoal on paper and in the effort of understanding what was in front of me," he explained to Blouin ArtInfo. "Drawing, and by extension, art, became less of a vessel in which I put stuff, and more of an experience to be unveiled."

In high school, Martínez Celaya stumbled upon another vehicle for comprehending the nebulous world around him: science. He studied applied engineering and physics at Cornell University and later received a masters Quantum Electronics at the University of California. Martínez Celaya was fascinated by physics; however, he eventually felt its scientific language fell short of addressing the deepest of life's mysteries. So he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received an MFA in painting.

Today Martínez Celaya lives and works in Los Angeles, creating multimedia portals into mythical realms brimming with genuine emotion. The oil-and-wax paintings often feature moonlit castles and fluorescent ocean waves, star-sprinkled night skies and isolated cabins. Men young and old serve as protagonists, often represented as lost boys or eternal dreamers.

Though the content may sound overly whimsical, Martínez Celaya's work inevitably addresses the dark reasons humans turn to such fancy in the first place. "People invent fairytales to escape the life they’re in or to try to make sense of it," he said in an interview with Bomb Magazine. "When life is unbearable in some manner, you invent another life, a better life. Or maybe, a clearer life."

Beyond the whimsy, Martínez Celaya's work is accessible. Despite the fact that nearly all of his works are born first from texts, and address a number of philosophical and psychological questions, they're never densely packed with references or inside jokes. There are no winks, no wise cracks. 

In honor of his current joint exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery, "Empires: Sea" and "Empires: Land," I reached out to Martínez Celaya to discuss his recipe for making honest art.

What motivated you to devote your latest exhibitions to the land and the sea? 

I wanted to create an exhibition that touched on the empires we gain as well as those we lose. Not the historical empires -- this is not an examination of politics or history --but the empires of the everyday. Hopes. Illusions. Resignations. Compromises.

Empires make me think of journeys, of setting out on campaigns driven by need, lack, love, or illusion, and journeys make me think of land and sea. Land points to where one is as well as where one hopes or fears to go. The sea is both the means by which one goes somewhere and also the mystery and the promise that incite the journey.

Were there specific works of literature or philosophy you were reading that contributed to the themes of these shows? 

Although literature and philosophy are important to my working process, and I return to them daily, there is no specific book that contributed to the ideas in this work. However, it is appropriate to say I find echoes of many authors and philosophers in the confrontations and journeys suggested by "Empires," such as [Robinson] Jeffers, [Leo] Tolstoy, [Boris] Pasternak, and [Arthur] Schopenhauer.

What role does myth play in this exhibition, especially in relation to history and memory?

I am interested in the way myths map and clarify [...] the dynamics of life, hopes, and losses, so it would not be wrong to describe the disjointed narrative of "Empires" as a remnant of a myth. 

In an interview with Bomb Magazine you said "the work always begins with writing." What role did writing play in this exhibit and how did the paintings evolve from them? 

At first "Empires" seems to be an assembly of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, but I see them as part of a broader thought that includes writings. It is this broader thought that provides the emotional and intellectual framework from which the work emerges. Sometimes it is easier to recognize and to explore this broader thought through writing, so while constructing the exhibitions at Jack Shainman I wrote short pieces that took the form of philosophical reflections, fictional accounts, and writings that resemble poems.

Did your knowledge of physics play a role in the works in the show? How do you see the relationship between art and science? 

Physics and art -- at least as I think of it -- are ways to understand the world and also ways to find one's place within that understanding. They are both concerned with truth, with the inner workings of nature, though art also offers insights into our interior life and the choices we make.

The show features your work in a variety of different media. What compelled you to work with so many different techniques and materials? 

Formally there are differences between media, and I am interested in those differences, especially those differences related to qualities like distance and reference more than materials or traditions. I move between different strategies, media, scale, and ways of conceiving a work, partly because they unconceal different things and partly because I am kept away from becoming too familiar with a way of working. Of course, this in itself is a way of working, so sooner or later I might do things another way.

How would you describe the story being told through these two exhibitions? 

If there is a story, it is one assembled from fragments and ruins, and it is a story that moves in time, or maybe more accurately, that folds different moments in time onto one another. It is not casual; in fact, the effects often precede the causes. It is a story of hope and the price paid for it; of the trade we make of the present we know (sort of) and the future yet to be; of desperation and endings.

Can you talk about the importance of accessibility in your work, as well as if and how you work to keep your works in a language legible to all? 

The themes, topics and images in my work are relatively familiar and because the exhibitions consist ostensibly of objects like paintings, sculptures and works on paper, they also seem familiar. The complexities and lack of familiarity become apparent when the work is considered for a while. At that point, it becomes less accessible. The apparent familiarity of the images, for instance, dissolves when we notice their conviction as scenes is undermined by the way they are painted, something that is difficult to see in reproductions.

At times the work seems personal and thus, inaccessible, but it is not personal in the sense it is not built around private secrets. I am interested in universal aspects of life which are inherently mysterious, out of reach, and that is partly why the work resists sound bites and quick analyses.

How do you go about rendering authentic emotion in a painting? 

The path to authenticity must include its own negation -- the inauthentic, the lie. The way to truth is to shed false sophistication, the badge of intelligence, and the need to please, and even then most of what we do lacks heart and authenticity.

What role do you think art plays in the contemporary age?

Besides its increasing role as a favored commodity and rising asset, art plays a very small role in society. I think the majority of people could care less about what artists are doing, and, to a large extent, artists and those in the arts have a lot to do with it. 

What role do you wish it would play? 

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it would be good if art took the guiding role currently attributed to religion, but for that, the world, not just art, would have to change. On the other hand, maybe it is right that art operates on the fringes.  

Enrique Martínez Celaya's shows run until October 24, 2015 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. "Empires: Sea" is on view at 20th Street. "Empires: Land" is on view at 24th Street.

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The very last words printed inside Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Heart Goes Last, appropriately come straight from the heart. “My special thanks to Graeme Gibson,” she writes, referring to her long-time partner, “who, though always an inspiration, did not inspire any of the characters in this book. And that’s a good thing.”

A sardonic wink anyone who just finished her latest book will understand; The Heart Goes Last is peopled by the kind of of fatally flawed, pitiable remnants of humanity we all secretly fear to see in ourselves. There’s no Offred in this novel, not even a Snowman. If you’re looking for a hero, look elsewhere.

Instead, our protagonists, Stan and Charmaine, a young married couple, open the novel bickering their way through a horrific regional depression that’s left them sleeping in their car and subsisting on instant coffee. They have to move frequently at night, woken up by desperate vagrants or drug addicts trying to break into their vehicular home. Charmaine scrapes in a tiny income as a bartender, while Stan hasn’t been able to find a job since they lost their stable, middle-class gigs in the crash.

Then, a ray of light: Charmaine sees a TV ad for a community where those most affected by the economic climate -- the homeless, the unwillingly jobless -- can come find a fresh start, not to mention abundant food, a cozy home, and a safe community. Charmaine and Stan, as well as two sex workers who work at Charmaine’s bar (literally, they entertain customers in the corners), pile onto the shuttle sent for curious new recruits and enter Consilience, bursting with optimism. Despite warnings from Stan’s delinquent brother, Conor, that those who enter may not leave, Stan, determined to provide for his wife, agrees to sign on for all that Consilience demands.

The system, like pretty much all systems, is no free lunch. After the free lunch, at least. The motto of Consilience, “DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR OUR FUTURE,” isn’t figurative. Stan, Charmaine and all the denizens of Consilience spend alternate months as inmates at Positron, a comfortable prison that generates enough employment to keep the town’s economy stable. During those alternate months, an alternate person lives in their house, using their sofa and kitchen table and bed.

 At first, this seems like a small price to pay to the couple, who are fresh off months in a cramped car. The prison is clean and humane; the food is plentiful; everyone has everything they need. They’re assigned to jobs that suit their interests -- when in Positron every other month, Charmaine, a former nursing home worker, works in a mysterious medical capacity. 

But they quickly grow restless in their safe, conflict-free bubble. Innocent Charmaine falls into a torrid affair with a man she’s not even allowed to see. Stan becomes moody, gruff and frustrated with his wife’s bland, blonde softness. Suddenly, Consilience seems to be bringing out the worst in these two utterly normal, nice people, and when the situation takes a shocking turn, their plight only becomes darker and more desperate.

Atwood sketches Stan and Charmaine empathetically, but she’s also unrelenting, cataloging their selfish desires, hypocritical justifications, and weakness in the face of temptation or coercion. They’re normal, and yet often loathsome, and the peripheral characters in the novel -- except for an often-sneered-at sex worker friend of Charmaine’s -- show equally little pure moral feeling or courage.

That doesn’t mean there’s no salvation to be found, but it won’t come from a heroic ideal. Sometimes, the only hope is that selfish interests and human weaknesses will work to the good, as if by accident. Atwood’s clear-eyed depiction of a far-too-believable dystopia explodes our current problems with mass incarceration and substitutes for human intimacy, but also refuses to excuse our individual human failings on some faceless fascist state. We may be headed for a dystopic future, but no matter where we end up, we’ll be pretty damn good at messing things up for our own greedy reasons. Humans, Atwood suggests, are nothing if not consistent.

The Bottom Line:

Atwood will always be her own best competition, but The Heart Goes Last doesn’t need to surpass The Handmaid’s Tale to be a gripping, psychologically acute portrayal of our own future gone totally wrong, and the eternal constant of flawed humanity. 

What other reviewers think:

NPR: "Her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last, flips her usual script, to surreal but disappointing comic effect."

The New York Times Book Review: "What keeps The Heart Goes Last fresh, as with the rest of Atwood’s recent work, is that while it revisits earlier themes of her oeuvre, it never replicates. Rather, it reads like an exploration continued, with new surprises, both narratively and thematically, to be discovered."

The Guardian: "The Heart Goes Last, originally written as an ebook serial, is a jarring, rewardingly strange piece of work."

Who wrote it?

If you don’t know who Margaret Atwood is by 2015, you may be beyond help. Here are a few highlights to jog your memory: She wrote the modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as the Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin.

Who will read it?

Fans of Margaret Atwood, and all readers who are drawn to speculative fiction that takes a dark dive into our own worst human tendencies.

Opening lines:

“Sleeping in the car is cramped. Being a third-hand Honda, it’s no palace to begin with. If it was a van they’d have more room, but fat chance of affording one of those, even back when they thought they had money. Stan says they’re lucky to have any kind of a car at all, which is true, but their luckiness doesn’t make the car any bigger.”

Notable passage:

“‘Tired of living in your car?’ he says to her. Really, straight to her! It can’t be, because how would he even know she exists, but it feels like that. He smiles, such an understanding smile. ‘Of course you are! You didn’t sign up for this. You had other dreams. You deserve better.’ Oh yes, breathes Charmaine. Better! It’s everything she feels.”

The Heart Goes Last

by Margaret Atwood

Nan A. Talese, $26.95

Published Sept. 29, 2015

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Step inside the Baltimore Museum of Art this fall and you could find yourself face-to-face with a crowd of seven-foot mannequins dressed head to toe in Ku Klux Klan robes.

Of course, they are not your average white hoods. The robes are made from patterns like Kente cloth and camouflage fabric, turning the ghost-like memory of a KKK uniform into a chilling, anachronistic image. Unlike the black-and-white photos of Grand Wizards buried in American history books, these vibrant costumes force the horror of racism in the United States into the present moment. Standing before the imposing statues, you can't ignore they're there.

The carefully crafted robes are one piece of a larger installation currently on view, courtesy of conceptual artist Paul Rucker. The multimedia show is titled "Rewind," an apt name for an installation "about American history repeating itself over and over again." From Kente cloth Klan robes to reimagined postcards of lynchings to celestial maps that document the proliferation of the American prison industrial complex, Rucker's show is a jarring look back on the bits of U.S. history that predate acts of contemporary brutality -- for example, the death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray.

"Rewind" is "my life's work," Baltimore-based Rucker told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. He says he's been documenting police violence and incarceration since April 29, 1992, the day the police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King were acquitted. That day was also Rucker's 24th birthday.  

Rucker's first major piece, "Proliferation," was completed during a residency at the Blue Mountain Center in New York in 2009. Rucker had come across a series of maps that helped illuminate an overwhelming statistic -- that the incarcerated population in the U.S. consists of a staggering 2.3 million people. He transformed this information into a ten-minute video that shows the physical proliferation of prisons across our country. "It’s been viewed 10,000 times," he said, "which is not as much as a cat playing piano, but I’m happy people are seeing it."

While much of Rucker's work revolves around the current American prison system, and how it's morphed into a profitable and powerful economy of its own, he's very much invested in the artifacts of the past. He's managed to collect a Confederate $100 bill featuring images of slaves, a copy of a book entitled White Supremacy and Negro Subordination and a copy of the 1860 census. A newspaper that accompanies the "Rewind" exhibition is filled with anecdotes from the 19th century, when slavery reigned as another viable economic system.

For Rucker, the ultimate goal of "Rewind" is to "create a starting point for an informed discussion," one that connects our past to our present. Specifically, one that connects the current reality of incarceration with the former practice of slavery. One piece in particular, "When Black Lives Mattered," consists of a branding iron once used on runaway slaves. "Black lives mattered back then because cotton sales equalled $200 million in 1860 alone. That would be around $5 billion today," Rucker said. 

“I have these whistle boxes," he continued, referencing yet another component of his work that brings then and now together. "They’re made from custom speakers. And these boxes whistle every 67 minutes." The sound is meant to mimic the whistle 14-year-old Emmett Till reportedly directed at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant in 1955. Till was eventually murdered by relatives of Bryant, who beat and tortured him before depositing his body in a river. The 67 minutes is meant to represent the time it took the jury to acquit Till's killers. 

"These are the things that our parents don’t tell us about," Rucker adds. "A lot of history is not taught in school, because there is shame on all sides. We’re not taught to think as much as we’re taught to be ‘good citizens.’ We’re not taught to ask questions or challenge, because challenging preconceived ideas is hard, especially if it challenges why we have what we have."

We can’t talk about solutions before we talk about the past. We have to ask: How did we get here?

Part of the reason Rucker was intent on including KKK robes in his show is because, in his opinion, there is a lack of Klan artifacts in major institutions, save for places like the Smithsonian. His robes not only stand to remind us of a significant aspect of the American story, but they also serve to reappropriate symbols of historic racism. "If I cannot claim the words and symbols of those who killed and oppressed and make them my own," Rucker explained, "then I will turn them into an object of curiosity at least."

In the past, it's been difficult for the artist to secure funding for his work on issues surrounding incarceration. Rucker is quick to thank the curators and staff at the Baltimore Museum for supporting his provocative work, also noting the importance of the Baker Foundation. Rucker received the Baker Artist Award earlier this year, an accolade that comes with a $25,000 bonus that has helped bring "Rewind" to life. 

"I think in order for museums to remain relevant and have a broader reach, it’s important that they reflect what’s going on in the community," Rucker concluded, noting that a Confederate monument still stands across the street from the museum.

"You know, the Freddie Gray trial is happening here, and there’s huge disparity in Baltimore as far as opportunity and selective enforcement of the law. And we’re asking, how can we move forward as a community? For any institution, especially a cultural institution, to remain relevant, they need to able to speak to all of the community. And the Baltimore Museum does a great job."

"Rewind" is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art until Nov. 15, 2015 as part of the Baker Artist Awards 2014 & 2015 exhibition. Full credits for the various animators and craftsmen who helped bring the multimedia installation together are available here.

View more images from the exhibition below. 

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Putting gendered violence into words is a site of struggle. Press here and I’ll tell you if it hurts. 

Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points opens with a riddle: “Why, exactly, am I constantly in pain?” This question positions itself as a point of urgency and entry into the difficult work of investigating inexplicable pain in order to uncover the original source of trauma. For Berkowitz this pain manifests as fibromyalgia, a medical condition characterized by the presence of widespread chronic pain in at least 11 of 18 designated “tender points” throughout the body. In Tender Points, the body that is mapped out becomes a conduit for cultural and somatic reflections on memory, rape, male authority and the cruel assumption that a female truth is never a truth but an exaggeration. Using a fierce, lucid prose, she writes in a refusal to accept her diagnosis as a sentence of silence. The following is an interview -- or rather an expanded conversation about our mutual experiences of trauma and pain -- conducted this past summer.

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Each Wednesday evening, around 6:30 p.m., an unlikely group of artists congregate in the activity room downstairs at the Anne Douglas Center for Women, located in downtown LA. For an hour and a half, we sing along to Mariah Carey, swap tales from the weekend, compliment each other's work, and make things.

More specifically, we make wire sculptures and multimedia masks, collages and self-portraits, worry dolls and letters to our future selves. We play telephone Pictionary and draw with closed eyes. Some projects come together with ease, others are more of a gamble -- turns out, mixing bubble formula and paint does not look that cool.

However, regardless of the finished products, all of us cherish the roped-off time each week when there are no strict instructions, no right answers, no winners. And this is not to say the finished products aren't surprising, genuine and wildly beautiful -- which they most definitely are.  

On Saturday, Nov. 7, the artists of the Anne Douglas Center will take over Bruce Lurie Gallery for a single night, selling their work to raise money for next year's art programming. The evening, dubbed "The Art of Love," is both a chance to support women and aspiring artists in the community, and to see some quality artwork. 

"Art therapy is more than just making nice pictures," art therapist Tally Tripp explained in an earlier interview with The Huffington Post. "In fact, art therapy is more often a process of making ugly or messy pictures that depict a feeling state, not a final product that is all neat and tied together. Art therapy is about that creative process where the client, in the company of an art therapist, is working and re-working problems via a range of fluid and variable art materials."

Neither I nor Justin Waring-Crane, my partner, are art therapists. (She is an occupational therapist.) The projects we're leading are not, therefore, art therapy. And yet, the healing benefits of creative expression are too powerful not to mention. I can, at the very least, speak for myself; I leave our meetings feeling both accepted and inspired. 

To expand on the idea, Justin and I asked some of the participating artists if they'd be willing to share an element of their experiences. Take a look below.

"The Art of Love," presented by LumillaMingus and LA Arts Alliance, takes place Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015 from 6-8 p.m. at Bruce Lurie Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Theme parks are booming in China right now, thanks to the rise of the country's middle class. Disney Resort is gearing up to open its doors in Shanghai in early 2016 and Universal Studios, which Steven Spielberg will help design, is slated to arrive in Beijing in 2019.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese government opened its very own Communist theme park on Monday in the city of Wuhan. The opening of the three million-square-foot "educational park" conveniently comes just days before the "Golden Week," a seven-day public holiday from Oct. 1 to 7 commemorating China National Day.

The park focuses on highlighting important facets of Communist Party history and "outstanding Communist deeds," according to a statement in Chinese by the Wuhan municipal government's propaganda department.

And instead of roller coasters, waterslides and people dressed up as movie characters, the park features 29 statues of "great Communist figures" with 100-character-long biographies.

The park is carefully divided into sections, and is organized to show the Communist Party's greatest glories. It features sculptures, interactive experience areas, and galleries themed on the Chinese flag, the lives and work of major Communist Party figures and the party's history.

"The designers of the park calculated that the elderly, middle-aged, young adults and children would all be able to sightsee, tour and rest in the park, and identify with the core values of socialism," Wuhan's propaganda department wrote.

Building theme parks is part of a long tradition of communist societies to instill the countries' values and patriotism in their citizens. In 2001, former Soviet republic Lithuania opened Grutas Park -- nicknamed "Stalin's World" -- featuring statues of Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and other Soviet party leaders. In the early 2000s, Serbian businessman Blasko Gabric built "Yugoland" in the former Soviet republic of Lithuania, where people could take part in communist sing-alongs, buy communist merchandise, and even obtain virtual Yugoslavian passports. While Grutas Park remains a popular tourist attraction, Yugoland has since been shut down due to lack of funding.

And in China particularly, "red tourism" is back on the rise, where millions flock to parks like the one in Wuhan to enhance their "patriotic education." In 2008, China's Wuxiang county opened a cultural park featuring stage shows and trips that allowed visitors to experience life as a guerrilla fighter in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945.

The propaganda-filled park seems to have attracted some enthusiastic supporters on its first day. Some 300 attended the opening ceremony and festivities, the Communist Party's official newspaper, People's Daily, reported. Some of the shouts overheard at the park were: 

"What do you see?"

"Prosperity!"

"And you?"

"Civilization!" 

The Internet wasn't so hot about the news, however. Critics on Weibo, China's microblogging website, lamented the park's opening, calling it a waste of taxpayers' money, The Guardian reported Thursday. And here's what some Twitter users thought:

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Fat-positive feminist and artist Rachele Cateyes is fed up with [people's] fatphobic bullsh*t. So she decided to draw about it.

In her illustrated series called "Glorifying Obesity," the Portland, Oregon-native expresses how she feels about those who shame, harass and bully obese people for being fat. The illustrations are honest and powerful -- pairing phrases like "Fat people don't owe you shit," with dainty flowers and hearts.  

"I've been turned into memes, my image stolen and used in diet company ads, photoshopped to look thin, received rape and death threats and continue to be stalked online," Cateyes told The Huffington Post. "The common denominator in most of this dehumanizing harassment, is that they claim they are concerned about my health."

As Cateyes put it, her illustrations are a "big middle finger to fatphobia." A wonderful and welcomed middle finger. 

"I am a firm believer that being attractive and healthy doesn't determine your worth," she said. "It's okay to be fat, ugly and riddled with health problems and have health problems related to being fat. It doesn't matter if you eat garbage or have a chronic illness. You still have the right to be treated fairly." 

Cateyes said she titled the series "Glorifying Obesity" because many people have told her that she is promoting and glorifying obesity by being a fat woman. Her response?

"If living my life and being outspoken about body positivity is glorifying obesity, then so be it," she told HuffPost. "I am all about people of size being unapologetically fat. My body positive movement is inclusive and doesn't have to be pretty, able-bodied, white or justified by good behavior."

She also noted that the hate and harassment she receives is often linked to misogyny online. Men on the Internet often talk to women "like they are children and reducing them to creatures like whales and manatees," Cateyes said. "They can swoop in, tell me what is okay and what isn't okay because their opinion is more important and the only way a woman can exist is by the approval of a man."

Scroll below to see Cateyes' amazing illustrations. 

Head over to Cateyes' website to see more of her work or click here to visit her shop and buy some awesome artwork. 

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Just when Rinee Shah switched to working as a full-time freelance illustrator, another big change happened in her life: she was confronted with the always-trying tumult of a breakup.

"I suddenly had a lot of free time without the structure of my usual routine," she told HuffPost in an email. "I knew I wanted to start a new illustration project and, instead of doing it on a random topic, I thought it made sense to make something relevant to the life shift I was going through."

So, as a way of easing her own unhappiness, she began a project for which she drew 100 happy things, mostly submitted by friends and fans of her work. Submissions ranged from the universally enjoyable (pie, warm socks) to those specific joys only some of us quietly share (the way Neil deGrasse Tyson says "water").

"It sounds a little cheesy, but I hope this project makes viewers smile and think of their own happy thing," Shah said. "Going through a breakup can feel like such a solitary experience, but I've gotten several emails from both friends and strangers telling me that they're going through a breakup right now, too, and seeing the site helped cheer them up."

Shah acknowledges that she feels fortunate to have an outlet. The project, she says, has been extremely therapeutic.

"This project is my way to grab control of the situation and focus on something really positive. Drawing out the happy things has been a way to really hold onto them," Shah says. "I feel like I'm collecting happy things for myself but also anyone who comes to the site. Also, I like the community aspect of drawing things that people submit instead of just thinking of my own."

View a few of Shah's 100 happy things below, or on her blog. 

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Ladies, autumn is upon us, and fall style isn't far behind. Expect plenty of burnt oranges, faux furs, suedes and, of course, ponchos!

But this season, there is also something for those of you who want to incorporate a look that says, "Men of the world, I know you cannot contain yourselves if you see even an inch of calf. So I will protect myself and cover my body in a big black bag." And trust me, this look is hot. (Like, seriously, carry water, because the material does not breathe.)

Dubbed the "Anti-Rape Cloak," this piece of haute couture comes courtesy of British artist Sarah Maple. And, just to be clear, the ludicrous garment is satirical, meant to comment on the bullshit belief that women are in any way to blame for their own sexual assault.  

"It has always made me really angry how the victims of rape are always made to feel it was their fault, [that] somehow they brought it upon themselves," Maple explained to The Huffington Post. "Many women I know have gone through this but never reported it, many made to feel they were 'making a fuss' or that they wouldn’t be believed. I was reading Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates and I realized just how universal this belief is -- with so many girls being told it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been wearing that outfit or they hadn’t been in a particular place on their own."

So, in case there was any ambiguity: Maple does not actually want anyone to wear her large, black cloak. "People should be able to wear whatever they like without the fear of being raped ... So by wearing a garment from head to toe, I am now completely safe from rape in any place, anywhere, any context. I am no longer 'asking for it.'"

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 Playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda is building a remarkable career on Broadway by highlighting the immigrant experience in masterful and tantalizing hip-hop musicals.

After his Tony-winning debut with “In the Heights,” the 35-year-old Miranda is the talk of the town again thanks to his acclaimedBroadway hit, “Hamilton.”

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Sophia is a project to collect life lessons from fascinating people. Subscribe to get our updates directly via Facebook or email, or share your own wisdom.

Alex Borstein is the profanely funny comic actor who voices Lois Griffin on "The Family Guy." She also stars in "Getting On," the most under-hyped series now airing on HBO, a dark comedy about a down-and-out hospital unit for elderly patients.

In an interview with HuffPost earlier this year, Borstein opened up about parenting, body image, creativity, and life with hemophilia ("it's like diarrhea of the blood").

She also described a new phase of her life, divorce. "If you believe in romance and if you believe in marriage, you also have to believe in divorce," she said. "It's like with 'Getting On,' a lot of people say, 'I don't want to watch that. It's so dark.' But you can't just want to go to weddings and children's birthday parties. You've got to witness it all. We're just here to witness and believe in both."

"Getting On" returns for its third season on Sunday, November 8.

Have you had any recent realizations about living a more fulfilling life?

You have to take breaks. That's what I think I've discovered from everything. Take a breather from work. Take a breather from your kids. You can't try to keep going and sustain everything all at once. That is, I think, the new magic rule I live by.

This trip is the most relaxed I've been in like two years. I've got a two-year-old kid. And it's being out here, in a hotel room, solo, laying naked in a bathrobe ordering room service -- it's the most relaxation I've had lately. It's astonishing how you have to take this kind of time.

I get the sense that you're a more private person than most who have been working in television for 20 years. 

I'm definitely not interested in the notoriety side of it. If it gets you a table at a restaurant, it's nice. But I'm just interested in the play, the fun work. "Getting On" is just the coolest experience ever, and working with people like Laurie Metcalf, that's the joy. That's what I love about it. I still get very uncomfortable and flushed on the street if somebody recognizes me or stops me. I don't know what to say. It's uncomfortable and strange.

I purposely moved to Pasadena in Los Angeles to not be so centered in it. I didn't want to be going to restaurants where you know there's going to be paparazzi. You see all these poor people and the paparazzi won't leave them alone.

That's been a good tool, just removing myself and not having to deal with it too much. I don't want pictures of my kids anywhere. I don't tweet pictures of my kids. I don't put them on any social media. I definitely do like to keep some privacy that way. And mostly it's fear-based; people are crazy.

Fans turn on you on a dime. I mean, I remember, Seth [MacFarlane] and I were signing autographs in front of a premiere for a movie, and people were like, "Oh, oh, Seth, Seth, Seth." The staff started telling us to get into the theater because the movie's going to start. One guy says, "Alex, Alex, Alex, just one more." I'm like, "I'm sorry. I can't do it." I handed the pen back and turn around and he darted the pen into the back of my head as hard as he could. "Bitch!" He called me a bitch. And you're just like, really? Just like on a dime they turn on you. It was mob mentality.

What has surprised you about parenthood?

Being terrible at it. [laughter] No. It's just 24/7. You don't really understand the constant-ness of it until it's too late. [laughter] You have to say that we laughed after I said that!

But yes, I think that was the most surprising part for me -- it is just all day, every day. The kids don't care that you have a script due. They don't care that you have to learn these lines. They don't care that you haven't slept. It also is a welcome surprise how your heart just melts, how you can't really believe your capacity for love for another human being until you have kids, I think.

Is there anything that you've specifically done differently than your own parents?

I think the biggest thing that I do is trying to delay gratification, and letting them feel things. Letting them cry, letting them be upset about things. My parents were wonderful, but there was a lot of, "Come on, now. Stop that. You're fine. You're fine. You're okay."

For them, it was how they were raised. "Uh oh, she's crying. Let's try to fix this, or help her stop crying." For a long time that made me feel like I should be stronger than to cry, I shouldn't let anyone see that I feel or emote.

I felt scared to feel things for long, so I'm trying to let my kids feel things and just be upset. If something that upsets them happens, I say, "You go ahead and cry. That's awesome. Let it out." Don't get me wrong. There comes a time where you're like, "Okay. You've been screaming for 10 minutes, I'm closing the door." 

How do you balance the work and parental life?

I don't. People who say they balance it are full of shit. It's never balanced. One day you fuck up in this way because you've done too much of this, and the next day you fuck up in that way. It's wonderfully imbalanced. And I think that makes life, life. I just do the best I possibly can.

I'm here instead of with them right now. I'm going to Pittsburgh tomorrow to work on a movie and I'm going to try to fly back every weekend to see them. And it's still not balanced, but it's going to be the very best I can do and it's probably going to be good for them in a way. I think having a break from mommy can be a good thing.

Interesting. In what sense?

The more present you are, the more you do things for them. The more you'll take over, the more you'll insert yourself into their personalities, insert yourself into their choices.

You remove yourself from the picture and their dad will do more of it that time, or grandma and grandpa will be there, or we've got sitters. I think it's really healthy for them to have time with all these different people and perspectives, and a chance to miss me. When I come back, it'll be, "Mommy!" It will be very exciting.

Creativity is a big part of your life. How do you try to instill that in your kids?

We chose progressive schools, which basically means you pay a lot of money and they just finger-paint all day, play in the sand, and crap themselves. That was a conscious choice to let them be in a place that let them be kids for a long time.

There's a lot of creative stuff going on in the house all the time. Literally, almost every other day I move the furniture around just because, fuck it. And I love it. I love messing around with what you think is certain. We live in a loft, so you can change the layout of the place dramatically by moving this here or there, or flipping where the dining room is and living room is. We do a lot of that, which keeps them like, "What?"

We do a lot of art projects. We do a lot of drawing. There's a lot of singing, a lot of singing, piano lessons, and I'm taking cello lessons, so the kids are around that a lot. There's no sitting down and forcing them to be that way. It's just kind of all over, they're surrounded by it right now.

"The Family Guy" in particular has been an incredible hit. What has been the relationship between financial success and personal fulfillment in your life?

I've been really lucky. I've been really, really lucky that things have blossomed one after the other. I mean, right now, I'm in a new chapter of my life. I'm going through a divorce [from husband Jackson Douglas], so that's a little different. But in terms of "MADtv" and then "Family Guy" and "Gilmore Girls," and then doing little movies here and there, and interesting projects, and a lot of writing, and now "Getting On".

I'm afraid -- I feel like I'm being set up. If I go for a mammogram, I'm like: Something bad is going to happen because things are too wonderful. Everything is blossoming. Please, please let me be healthy because, knock on wood, it feels like it's all blossomed together.

Of course, when you first come upon the dissolution of a marriage, it feels like a huge catastrophe and a blow. All you can do is say, Okay, this going to lead to something super interesting. What's next?

So I feel like everything has grown together. The schedule that "Family Guy" has allowed me to be with my kids is tremendous. It's astonishing. And then "Getting On" we shoot in the summer, a really tight schedule. So I'm around all the time for them, which is rare.

Are there any lessons that you've learned from the divorce?

Don't get married. Is that a good lesson? [laughter] If you believe in romance and if you believe in marriage, you also have to believe in divorce. It's like with "Getting On," a lot of people say, "I don't want to watch that. It's so dark." But you can't just want to go to weddings and children's birthday parties. You've got to witness it all. We're just here to witness and believe in both.

You have to ride the highs and ride the lows. To know when you've done all you can in something and ridden it to the end is important, too. To know, which is hard. It's hard to see that when you're in it, but maybe that's a good thing. You shouldn't see it immediately because then you do the work, and you work really, really hard for as long as you can.

Are there any books that have had a major impact on your life?

There was a book that haunted me for a long time. It was called "Shoot the Piano Player". I believe it was made into a film, too. It is really dark, really heavy. It sat with me for so long. I can't shake the characters.

Steve Martin's "Cruel Shoes" was huge. All of Steve Martin's work was a big influence on me and "Cruel Shoes" was just so odd. So bizarre, just his form of comedy, that opened my eyes to what's possible. It's a book of blown-out stories that are so weird, absurdist. It was my introduction to that.

In college, when I studied rhetoric, we had to read this book that took me forever to get through. It was by [Jean] Baudrillard and it was called "Simulacra and Simulation," and that was mind-bending. That kind of cracked opened things that made me realize I barely know anything and nothing is real.

What's some life advice you wish you'd been given 10 years ago?

Childbirth changes everything. Bodywise, as a woman, when you realize what your body is actually designed to do, it's such a fucking weight off of your shoulders. Just realize, like, it's perfect. Your body is perfect and it doesn't matter, a chunk here and a fat here and a cellulite here and your stomach this or that. That shit is just such a waste of time. That's one of my things I hate, is that I wasted so much time thinking that way, thinking that I was so imperfect. That would be the biggest bit of advice: do not waste that time.

Also, to actors, I would say, "Don't pay a lot for headshots." That's always my advice. They don't matter. The photo just needs to look like you. Take a bunch of classes and don't spend time writing to working actors asking them how they did it, because 9 times out of 10, if you're the person asking those questions, you're not the person that's got chutzpah to make it happen.

I find that to be true. The people that say, "How do you get into voiceover work?" You figure it out. I did. I don't even know how I did it now. When I was doing it, people would take demo reel classes and end up with a demo. You had a tape, a cassette tape. [laughter] Now people can just do things on their phone.  I don't even know what the hell the advice would be now. My advice is don't ask people for advice. [laughter]

Memories are important to happiness. Do you do anything to retain your memories? Keep a journal, anything like that?

I do. I keep several journals because I fall in love with a new blank book and start one, so I have a whole bunch of started journals.

They usually start off just trying to document the day so that I remember things with the kids when they're little, remember things they’ve said. Then they usually turn into emotional quandaries and questioning and philosophical things that I can't answer, and then I get frustrated and give up.

Then I open my computer and get back to work on a script and then I get stuck on that and I go back to the journal, and I kind of bounce back and forth.

I also do a lot of the photo books, basically photo journals. That's really fun to do now because there's always a camera with you. I just place a picture there and then ruminate on it. Meditate on it. You can write next to it sometimes.

I do ones where they're all little Fuji Polaroid photos. I'll put it in the corners and I’ll write in silver marker next to them. I also do digital one on the Mac, the iPhoto books, and it's fun.

Have you been thinking more about the fragility of life since working on "Getting On"?

Definitely. It makes you realize how short it is. The women that work on the set with us are in their 70s, 80s, some 90s, and they'll all tell you, [snaps fingers], "It's just a snap. It happens so fast." They’ve been doing theater.

The woman who plays Birdy on our show was Millie on the Dick Van Dyke Show. She says like, "Oh, it was yesterday that I was doing that." She told me: "I was you, on that show." I realize how quick it is.

I'm curious what it's like for older actors who are cast as characters on the cusp of death. Do you sense that it's difficult for them at all? 

I think a lot of them aren't in a position to choose if they want to work. They need to keep their health insurance. They take what they get, period. 

But with "Getting On," we've heard time and time again that they're so happy that these are real parts, that they're actual human beings. It's not just an old woman there to say, "Where's the beef?" [laughter]. Or "I'd hit that!" Just some dumb stuff. 

They're so happy to be playing these fully realized characters and showing the reality of aging. So the women that are there are thrilled to be there.

Has filming spurred any emotional experiences for you?

In the pilot, a woman passes. She expires. I'm holding her hand and the character dies and I have to place her teeth in her mouth. They got a woman who had no teeth and I actually had to put her teeth back in her mouth. The whole thing was just so surreal and so disturbing, and reminiscent. 

I had been through it with my grandmother a few years before. I was close with her. She was a Holocaust survivor, escaped, came to the States with nothing to her name, with a daughter, and made it work and survived. She was a fighter and she was funny. Really, the Miss Swan character that I do is a direct rip-off of her; it's just stolen. So her death was very hard, and really after the fact I realized how hard it was on me losing her. That was a real blow. That messed me up for a long time.

Did you learn anything from coping with that loss?

I just ate a lot. So that's a good coping mechanism. [laughter] I immediately, after she passed, felt like, "What the fuck am I waiting for? Why don't I start a family?" That was definitely -- I knew I always wanted to have kids, but her passing made me really realize what I could possibly be missing.

The last things that she said -- anything that mattered had to do with her children and her grandchildren. There was no thought of anything else. No celebration of her triumphs in her career or anything. All that mattered was the family she started and the people she cared for and they cared about her.

This is always in your face. You hear it and you see greeting cards. You see commercials. You go to weddings. You know that. You know it. But it really hit home and made me realize, "What am I doing? I've got to hurry up."

I've heard you talk about growing up with some hardships, having hemophilia and other things that led you to comedy.

The reality is, in the grand scheme of things, I did not have hardships. I had a cakey, easy, wonderful life. I've got two parents that have cared for me, been housed, been fed -- way too well. [laughter] My parents had jobs. We were lucky enough to have medical insurance and stuff, and there's a lot of people who don't. So really, I mean the hemophilia was something to deal with, but I'd hardly say a hardship.  

I do try to instill this with my kids, the value of things. It's something that I try to do a lot. My son is starting to get a sense that everything is disposable. It really bothered me. I want him to understand that you can't just always get what you want. So I've been trying to lay that on him a little heavier, that you can't. If he wants something, I say, "Let's go home and we'll save up our money and we'll come back and get it, if you still want it."

I'm terrified for him to just grow up thinking he can get anything he wants. And of course it's always the easier route, shut your kid up in the store and just get him the candy that he wants, but you pay the price later.

So I make him do chores every day and time-outs when he's acting like a dick. I try to have consequences to his actions and to delay his gratification. That's the biggest thing I'm trying to do, delayed gratification.

I wanted to ask a bit more about hemophilia because I know it's something you've been very focused on.

Hemophilia is like diarrhea of the blood. [laughter] If you get injured -- not so much a shaving cut or a scrape, but more internal bleeding, like if you're playing basketball and you jam your finger -- it's not just going to go away. It's going to swell and swell. There's going to be internal bleeding, and if you don't deal with it, the joints will be damaged permanently.

So people with hemophilia are missing the clotting factors in their blood. The one that's in our family is hemophilia A, and there's also hemophilia B, and there's Von Willebrand's disease. 

They have different clotting factors you can take -- you inject, give yourself transfusions, and it will help your body coagulate and clot and stop the bleeding, but it's really expensive. It's one of the most expensive diseases in the world. And because it's such a small number of people have it, it's not as cost effective to develop treatments for as something that's prevalent.

A lot of kids growing up with hemophilia now are having such a different experience than my brother did or my uncle did back when treatments weren't as streamlined. A lot of the products then were tainted, there was a bad batch in the 80s not being screened for hepatitis and HIV. A huge population was killed with tainted product. There's amazing documentaries on this, and the industries knew that it was tainted and still let it out. It's really awful. 

But now things are really different. Everything is screened really well. A lot of the treatments now are not even made from human blood. They're derived in different ways, so it's much safer. It's incredible what they've done. 

But there's still no cure, and people in countries that don't have access, and even within the United States, many don't have access to the treatment -- for them, it's horrendous. It's still a really, really serious, terrible, debilitating problem, living with a bleeding disorder.

I've been trying to be really active with the National Hemophilia Foundation to help get the word out. It's funny, foundations and disorders and diseases, unfortunately they have to be branded. Like "Stand Up for Cancer" and "Autism Speaks". So these things are branded and people start learning about it and when it becomes part of the public consciousness, people start caring more, people will donate more. Education is key, so that's what I wanted to do.

I've been doing a comedy show for them I produce every Halloween called "What's So Bloody Funny?" -- get it? We do it in New York every year to benefit NHF, and really the hope is just to get awareness out there.

Hemophilia is mainly expressed in boys. The second I became pregnant with my son, I was terrified. I went to the National Hemophilia Foundation website and started getting involved in chat rooms with other moms and finding out, what will I really be dealing with?

It was so different from when my brother was a kid. I could talk to my mom and my dad about how they dealt with it, but it was so different that I wanted to know now. And NHF was so helpful and it was such a great organization. My son ended up not being a hemophiliac and I felt like I dodged a bullet. But I wanted to help out. And then low and behold, my daughter is one. 

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Dozens of notable authors are getting on the same page to support the Syrian refugee relief. 

Beginning on Thursday, U.K. book retailer Waterstones is giving 100 percent of sales from select titles to Oxfam’s Syria Crisis Appeal, the Guardian reported. Using books donated by famed authors and publishers, the campaign, marketed in the stores as "Buy Books for Syria," aims to raise 1 million British pounds (about $1.5 million). 

“Everyone is forgoing profits -- nobody is deducting a penny anywhere, including the distributors and the warehouses, who are doing it for free,” James Daunt, Waterstones managing director, told the Guardian.

A diverse range of authors are participating in the campaign -- including acclaimed writers like Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver and Hilary Mantel -- by providing the retailer with their books that will be on display with a “Buy Books for Syria” sticker. According to the Telegraph, Waterstones estimates about 125,000 books will have to be sold to reach its goal.

"I am proud to do as millions of others have, and say 'We see you, we hear you, we will not let you suffer this alone. We promise -- help is coming,'" Caitlin Moran, one of the participating authors, said in a statement published on Waterstones’ website.

Donations from the book sales will go toward providing clean water and support to families in need in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, according to Oxfam’s blog.

Readers can find the list of books that are part of the initiative here, and can follow and support the campaign on social media using the hashtag #BuyBooksForSyria. To donate directly to Oxfam, click here.

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No group is subject to more fascination and derision than teenage girls. 

We track them, we gawk at them, we sexualize them, we use them to sell things, we hope they buy things. We allow them to shape the direction of our culture and then scorn them when they move the needle. They are “shrill” and “self-absorbed,” and we can easily conjure up images of screaming “fangirls” who fall to pieces at the sight of their favorite boy band/singer/YouTube star.

In short, teenage girls are a powerful group, but we are terrified of them. So instead of trying to understand them, we settle on refusing to take them seriously.

Our collective scorn of young women became clear this week when two MLB announcers took it upon themselves to mock a group of them for taking selfies during a baseball game.

A viral clip shows the camera focus on a group of young sorority sisters from Arizona State University posing for selfies. Instead of panning on and showing other fans in the stadium or, you know, returning to the game, the announcers choose to focus their sole attention for two minutes on making fun of the faces the young women are making while they’re goofing around with their friends and taking photos. "'Hold on, gotta take a selfie with the hot dog, selfie with the churro, selfie just of the selfie," says one of the male announcers in a mocking tone.

Amanda Hess accurately summed up the absurdity of the situation for Slate: “What have we learned today? Men like to look at young women. Young women like to look at themselves. Men don't like it when young women look at themselves. But they don't dislike it enough to stop looking at them when they're looking at themselves.”

(To their credit, the sorority girls declined an offer of free tickets from the Diamondbacks and Fox Sports, asking them to instead donate the tickets to A New Leaf, a non-profit focused on helping domestic violence victims.)

Adults -- specifically adult men -- seem to feel unreasonably empowered to comment on and police the behavior of young people -- specifically young women. Would these male announcers have used the same condescending tone had a few boys been playing games on their phones? Would they have bothered to pay attention or comment at all? Somehow, I suspect not.

Yes, being on your phone can be distracting as hell from the world around you. Yes, we adults can argue until we’re blue in the face about how things were better before X technology ruined Y experience, lamenting how “teens these days” aren’t making connections the way we did 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. But that’s just goddamn exhausting and ultimately makes little difference.

Instead, we could try to learn from them. The majority young women I’ve encountered on platforms like Tumblr and Instagram are more informed and eloquent than I was at their age. They make real connections easily, both online and off. They are armed with language I didn’t have access to until college and they wield it with increasing power. This is a generation of Rowan Blanchards and Amandla Stenbergs, teen girls who create art and write and argue with the best of them, and, yes, take selfies.

If young women are in control of their own public-facing profiles and their own words and their own interests, why shouldn’t they have control over images of themselves?

Having been a teen girl a decade ago, I can tell you it comes with a whole lot of bullsh*t and self-doubt and other people telling you what your beauty should/could/will/must be. If a selfie can combat that in some small way, put a little bit of power back in the hands of young women, I say bring it on.

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