You'll fall in love with this gorgeous leaf art. 

Joanna Wirażka, a 16-year-old self-taught artist from Poland paints beautiful scenes on dried leaves. The high school student started creating the picturesque works last winter and since then, she's made about 10 paintings on leaf canvases, the teen told The Huffington Post in an email. 

The 16-year-old's designs, which include stunning cityscapes and galaxy-inspired art, are made by collecting leaves in the park and drying them in books. After they've dried, Wirażka said she paints on them with acrylic paints.

The leaves look so professional that one might assume Wirażka's had formal training. But while she's never attended art school and is a typical high school student, she says that art plays a huge role in her life. 

"Art is my cure for stress -- [a] hobby which fills my life," she said. "When I paint and draw, I forget everything and let my imagination create new things or just bring new reflections through painting."

To see more of Joanna Wirażka's work, visit her Instagram page here. 

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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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"The Martian" is expected to rocket to No. 1 at the box office this weekend, possibly overtaking the October opening-weekend record set by "Gravity" in 2013. Fox snatched up the rights to Andy Weir's debut novel just months earlier, with "The Cabin in the Woods" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" scribe Drew Goddard set to write the script and direct. But when Goddard stepped down from the director's seat in order to write the now-delayed "Spider-Man" spin-off "Sinister Six," Ridley Scott laced up his spacesuit instead. Goddard, who has since created the Netflix series "Daredevil" and begun work on a "Cloverfield" sequel, promises that's for the best. The Huffington Post hopped on the phone with him to discuss "The Martian," his appreciation for "Galaxy Quest" and one big lesson he learned from "Cabin in the Woods."

Do you feel like you've lived in the world of "The Martian" for a long time at this point?

I think I first read the book in March of 2013, so it’s been about two and a half years, which in Hollywood terms is a pretty short time, actually. But it’s still two and a half years of your live to be living with this, so it’s fun to see it finally get out there, for sure.

After "Gravity" and "Interstellar," this is the third consecutive year a big space movie has transcended the sci-fi genre and become an Oscar contender. Is it better to avoid those movies in case they seep into yours, or do you see them to make sure you're not doing the same thing?

I got a really good piece of advice when I first started out in this business. A friend of mine said, “Whatever you’re writing at any given time, don’t read the trades because you will read about four other projects that will sound exactly the same, and if you let that in, you’ll never get anything done. Your job is just to concentrate on making yours unique. That’s all you have to do and things will tend to work out for the best.” With "The Martian,” we started long before “Gravity” had even come out. I turned in the first draft the day “Gravity” came out and I had that sinking feeling in my stomach, like, “Uh-oh.” So we went to the movies and of course I loved “Gravity” -- I thought it was spectacular -- but we’re very different. It’s just a very different movie, so we felt like we were going to be fine. Then the same thing happened the next year. “Interstellar,” I think, came out our first day of shooting, and so we all went to see that. I remember I loved that movie, but ours was just very different. So we felt like the unique quality of the book would shine through and I think it has. I hope it has.

Would you have been as inclined toward "The Martian" had it not had been so humorous?

No, definitely not. I think that was one of the things about the book that I was very much drawn to. And it’s not just the humor, it’s the optimism. I felt like the humor and the optimism were two things we don’t see in sci-fi a lot. You just don’t. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t tend to shine through. Or when it does, it shines through as just a comedy. Something like “Galaxy Quest,” which I love, is clearly meant to be a comedy. I just felt like, no, we could do a drama and have comedic moments. I’ve always felt that way. I think that’s what attracted me to “Buffy” and why it was my favorite show. I never got the sense that Joss Whedon saw a difference between comedy and drama. It was not one or the other; it was both, and I feel strongly that that’s just what I enjoy doing. It’s sort of my aesthetic. 

How different would this movie be had you directed it?

It would have been worse. Ridley Scott is just a much better director, but I’m not saying anything surprising there. No, look: He got a level of scope and scale that I never could have gotten. He’s so good at that stuff. I look at this movie now and I freely feel like the best possible version of this movie is what made it to the screen and I’m just so thankful that I got a chance to work with Ridley, without question.

All due respect to Ridley Scott, who is a Hollywood god, but after "Sinister Six" was delayed," did part of you think, "Well, shit, I could have directed this movie after all"?

No, because the truth is, that’s Hollywood. It’s a pretty volatile business and things come together and things fall apart. That’s what happens, so you make the best decisions you can at the time and you don’t regret ‘em. I tend to think very hard about the decisions beforehand, and then once I’ve made them, it’s time to move on. And the truth is, it was a dream to get to work with Ridley. At the time, that was beyond my wildest dreams that a director of Ridley’s caliber would say yes, and then when he said yes, it made the decision really easy, quite frankly. I want to work with people who inspire me in whatever capacity, and then you keep moving forward. The truth is, in Hollywood you never know what’s going to come together. You just put your head down and try to get things made as fast as you can.

You started writing for "Buffy" and "Lost" well after they'd begun, so you had to dive into pre-existing mythologies. The same goes for a superhero movie, of course. Even though you were adopting a book, was "The Martian" easier to do because you didn't have to deal with a deep fictional universe?

The approach is still the same because I always start with character. I start with "What are the people going through?" and "How can we relate to it?" In some ways, it’s very similar, whether it’s hard science or made-up mythology. It’s just there to serve as the story you’re telling about the characters, and if you flip it and make the mythology the point or the science the point, you’re going to end up with a very boring product, quite honestly. Or it’s certainly not what I’m that interested in. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I know rocket scientists and I gave them the script and said, "How does this sound," "Does this sound right,” and they’ll tell me where I made mistakes and we’ll fix it.

It was our approach on “Daredevil,” too, because I always felt like as soon as it becomes about the mythology, we’re fucked. I’m not interested in mythology. I think it’s important and you want to respect it, but it’s all about the characters. I grew up reading comics, but it’s not like comics started when I was 8. When I started picking up “X-Men,” there had already been years and years of stories that I didn’t know about, and I didn’t care because I liked the characters. I feel like the reason we like "Spider-Man" is because of the character; it’s not because of all the other stuff that’s happened and, oh, this is what happened in Issue 393. No, I like Spidey interacting with other people. Certainly there’s a place for mythology-driven storytelling. I’m just not that guy. But the other thing is every comic-book movie has its own rules. You have to be clear about what story you’re telling and what the rules are of that particular movie and trust that. 

The supporting characters in "The Martian" feel more fleshed out than they did in the book. Did you feel like you needed to do more with them?

I don’t know that I had to do a whole lot more. I think what happens is you have to crystallize each character as quickly as you can because you just don’t have a lot of screen time, whereas in the novel you have more time. Some of these characters only have three scenes, but you learn you can do a lot in three scenes. One of the best lessons in my career happened in “Cabin in the Woods." We had this merman story where Bradley Whitford’s character has never seen a merman, and he talks about for two scenes and then he sees the merman in the third scene. It’s just a tiny part of the movie and yet when we test-screened it, it was everyone’s favorite part. I realized, "Oh, you can really tell a story with three beats." You can get away with it very quickly. So for a lot of the smaller roles, I said, "Look, if they only need three beats, we’re going to work to tell a story with each of these supporting characters so that everyone gets a chance to shine." And I think that was the approach that got us the cast that we needed. 

What's impressive about "The Martian" is how crystal clear the science is. Even when you don't understand the minutiae, you know the goal of every scene. Did test-screening help you figure out what audiences grasped?

The thing I was most worried about, even though I never voiced it to my collaborators, was that at some point in this process I was going to have to simplify the science. I just thought at some point this is going to be too dense and we’re going to show it to an audience and they’re going to hate that it’s so complicated. But when we showed it the first time, it tested really well, and the first thing out of the audience’s mouth was, “We loved how smart it was.” They loved the science, even when they didn’t understand it, which was crucial. There’s such a worry in Hollywood about everyone having to understand everything all the time, and I don’t know that that’s true. It’s OK for you to understand the intricacies of the science as long as you can understand the story. It was really gratifying to see the audience respond so strongly to it. It rallied all of us after that first test screening to say we trust that the movie can be what it is not, which is nice.

Have you started rewriting "Sinister Six" now that Andrew Garfield's "Spider-Man" is out of the picture?

No, here’s the thing: “Sinister Six” got put on hold indefinitely, so one day I’ll go back to it. But the truth is I designed that movie so that it didn’t have to be tied into any mythology. Not on purpose, but because that’s the kind of stories I like. I like them to have a clear beginning, middle and end. I get bored with mythology very quickly, so it was designed so that it could just be its own thing. I’m sure I could revisit it one day, but right now it’s on hold indefinitely and I’ve got other things to write.

 "The Martian" is now in theaters. This interview has been edited and condensed. 

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Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a famously outspoken atheist, said Friday the trend of students pushing to disinvite speakers on college campuses is a "betrayal" of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. 

Dawkins, speaking with Bill Maher on HBO's "Real Time," discussed the idea of "regressive leftism" and how typically liberal crowds -- like college students -- have acted in non-liberal ways. Dawkins drew on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, a famous protest by students demanding academic freedom and for the school to lift restrictions on political activity on campus.

"What a betrayal we're seeing now with campuses all over the Western world over -- America and Britain -- are denying people the right to come and speak on campuses. If you can't speak your mind on a university campus, where can you? I mean, that's what universities are about," Dawkins declared.

Students at UC Berkeley, Dawkins' alma mater, attempted to disinvite Maher from speaking at their winter commencement in 2014 over his comments about Islam. University officials rebuffed their students, and Maher spoke there in December. 

A large number of students in recent years have pushed to disinvite speakers because they disagree with them or their organization on political grounds.

"If you only get exposed to ideas you believe in," Dawkins asked, "what kind of university would that be?"

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It's hard to explain the everyday phenomenon that occurs when water meets dog. Fur and hair are immediately soaked, exposing the miniature frames and pink limbs hidden beneath. Ears perk up in a state of emergency. Faces immediately assume a recognizable state of alarm, wonder, confusion and oh no you didn't. Look a wet dog in the face and it's hard not to feel a pang of sympathy -- even remorse -- for their struggles. It's all very weird. 

Photographer Sophie Gamand captures wet dogs in all their peculiar and utterly adorable glory. Her furry subjects flaunt their sopping beards and befuddled expressions in their own individual style -- each embodying his or her own personal variety of wet dog.

"Photographing dogs during bath time allowed me to capture the wide range of expressions they have," Gamand wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. "I wonder: have they acquired human expressions after living with us for so long?"

And this is where Gamand's project starts to get deep. "I find wet dogs funny, yes," she writes, "but mostly incredibly touching. There is something deeper and more poignant happening with these portraits. When we laugh in front of a miserable wet dog, aren’t we also feeling some kind of guilt?"

Gamand's photography often revolves around a canine obsession. An earlier series, hoped to debunk the violent mythology surrounding pit bulls, capturing the oft maligned breed (or amalgamation of breeds) in whimsical flower crowns, transforming the pups from monstrous to irresistibly cute.  

In the "Wet Dogs" series, Gamand again hopes to shift the way mainstream culture perceives their pets. "When I would volunteer with dog rescue groups, I always wanted to help during bath time," Gamand continued. "The bath was like an initiation process, it is the moment a neglected dog becomes a pet, a beloved creature that will be taken care of. To these rescue dogs, the bath has the same strong connotation as a baptism."

Whether you're in the mood to wax poetic on the possible symbolic meanings of doggie bath time, or you just want to make baby noises while ogling these adorable creatures, you will not regret taking some time to look at Gamand's work. 

Gamand's Wet Dog photography book, featuring 120 photos of pure wet dog, goes on sale October 13. 

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"Edward Scissorhands" is one of those rare movies that sucks you in any time it's on TV. It only takes a few minutes to get wrapped up in its titular character's gothic origins, the pastel uniformity of suburbia and the love story that envelops the film's third act. That's partly because "Scissorhands" is what crystallized Tim Burton's aesthetic. The director was coming off the success of "Beetlejuice" and "Batman" when Fox fast-tracked the movie, which became a critical and commercial success, cemented Johnny Depp's fame and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup.

Twenty-five years later, "Edward Scissorhands" is being re-released via restored, special-edition Blu-ray. To mark the occasion, The Huffington Post hopped on the phone with screenwriter Caroline Thompson and production designer Bo Welch to reflect on how the story came to life. Below are highlights from the conversations, including how Edward's topiaries were created and why the movie couldn't have been made today.

On crafting the story:

Thompson: "Tim had just done 'Pee-wee’s Big Adventure' and I had written a novel that was sort of an angrier, more adolescent precursor -- a 'Frankenstein'-style story -- to 'Edward Scissorhands,' and we were represented by the same agency. The agents didn’t know what to do with him and they didn’t know what to do with me, so they introduced us. We had lunch together and we immediately felt a bond and became very good friends. Tim told me about a drawing he had made in high school of a character who had scissors instead of hands and I said, 'Stop right now. I kind of know exactly what to do with that.' And three weeks later, I gave him a 70-page prose treatment version of what actually was very close to the movie that we made."

Welch: "The thing that guided me the most was wanting to see the suburban neighborhood and the other visuals within that world as if you’re looking through Edward’s eyes. Everything had to be slightly tweaked in order to fulfill that, so through his eyes this looks ironic, but it’s also weirdly beautiful and appealing for a guy who lives in the attic of a castle with a hole in the roof and he’s tucked into the fireplace. The colors and the activity and the warmth of this neighborhood is appealing to him. We recognized it as a suburban icon."

On adding to Tim Burton's aesthetic:

Thompson: "The neighborhood was based on a neighborhood I wished I had lived in when I was a young teenager in Maryland, which is to say that my friend lived in a neighborhood where all the houses were in a brand-new development and there was very little vegetation. Mine had all old people and no kids, and she lived in this neighborhood where everybody turned up in the streets after school to play football and all the parents came out and put out chairs and watched. She grew up in this community and I grew up in this cocktail-hour joint. The trajectory of the story is that [Edward] goes to this neighborhood that, to him, is just beautiful and enchanting and delicious. They adore him at first and then when he isn’t exactly who they want him to be, as none of us is, they turn on him. So I wanted to base his neighborhood on as delightful a neighborhood as I could possibly evoke, and that was the delightful one in my life. That being said, Tim has a beautiful eye and Bo Welch’s contribution and [costume designer Colleen Atwood’s] contribution and the whole art department -- what was amazing about the making of that movie was that we were all making the same movie, and I don’t know if you know how rare that is, but it is ridiculously rare."

Welch: "I had done 'Beetlejuice' with Tim, which was a learning experience for me, so by the time I did 'Edward Scissorhands' with Tim, I totally got his aesthetic. I’m there basically to serve his vision of the film. Tim draws very well, so mainly he’d draw characters. I remember, early on, looking at the drawing of Edward Scissorhands that he had done, and like all of his drawings, it ended up looking just like the character looks in the film, more or less. I looked at those as my cue on where to go design-wise, but in reading the script, I’d read about where Edward lives and where he comes from and his adjacency to a model suburban neighborhood. And I asked, 'So these two things that are so different are going to coexist in the same film?' And Tim goes, 'Yes!' First I designed where Edward lives, and then we scouted neighborhoods, by photographs, all over the U.S. looking for new suburbs. We landed on Florida because it just looked more graphic and it had interesting skies. Those two elements, I think, create kind of a friction next to one another. That’s the magic of that."

On the complications of shooting in a real neighborhood:

Welch: "We went door-to-door and got them all to agree to allowing us to cut out all of their shrubs and paint their houses. In some places, we’d put up false fronts to make windows smaller and to make them more uniform. The people were paid money for the use of their yard, and if they wanted to be put up in Disney World or something they could do that during the shoot. It’s quite an achievement in terms of location management to do that. It was about 20 houses and we had every one except one house in the center, and they were holding out for more money. They said, 'Nope, can’t do ours.' We didn’t know what to do, so we basically said, 'Let’s just go ahead and do it and we’ll shoot around it, even though it’s dead center in the neighborhood.' We treated all the houses, painted all of them, did the shrubs and the topiary to every house but theirs, and they eventually realized that we’re just going to do it regardless, so they caved in, too. Thank God they did because then we would have been hamstrung by that one odd man out in the center of the neighborhood."

On writing Edward:

Thompson: "I based the character of Edward Scissorhands on a combination of my dog and Tim. It was a love letter to Tim, really. The character was based on a dog that I had who was so ridiculously present that if she had had the physiological ability I swear she could have talked. And if you examine Edward, that’s what he’s like. He’s this dog that’s like, 'What do you need? Here I am.' Somebody once counted the number of words that he says in the script and I can’t recall it precisely, but I think it’s something south of 150 words. He’s basically a nonverbal character. He’s a beautiful, wild-eyed dog. Johnny nailed my dog." 

On Edward's shrubbery creations:

Welch: "We designed them in the art department. We said, 'Okay, how about one is a dinosaur and one is a tutle and whatever?' They tended to be fantastical animals. We designed them and then had them manufactured. They’re light-weight steel armitures wrapped with chicken wire and stuffed with artificial greens. They were light enough to move around."

On why the movie wouldn't be made today:

Thompson: "Here’s the amazing thing about the deal that we made: Scott Rudin was the head of Fox at the time, which was in the mid-‘80s. He recognized in Tim a talent unlike any other talent and basically I think he would have made the phone book if Tim had wanted to make the phone book. So Tim said, 'Here’s the deal: no notes, no meetings, no nothing. We turn it in on a Friday, you tell us on a Monday if you’re making it.' That’s literally the only way this movie could have been made then and it never would have been made now. It just doesn’t stand up to the kind of micromanagement scrutiny that executives bring to bear on every script they get their hands on. You couldn’t have answered the question 'How did Edward go to the bathroom?' for example. It’s just not a question to be asked or answered, but they would have put a nail gun to my head to get an answer. But when people want to make a contribution to something, mostly they bring logic to it, and that’s their job. So our agents said, 'Let’s just not have that job exist.' I wrote the script in ’86 and Tim, in the meantime, was working on 'Beetlejuice.' The whole business is so much more corporate now. I would hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think you could ever make a deal that says 'no notes, no meetings' today." 

"Edward Scissorhands" is now available on Blu-ray. The above quotes have been condensed. 

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As a single 28-year-old woman living (and dating) in New York City, there are few labels I've learned to fear more than "crazy." At some point between childhood and adulthood, you learn that crazy is just about the worst thing you can be. The goal -- especially when it comes to your romantic life -- is to avoid the label at all costs.

Of course men can be called crazy, but "crazy" is a label that men seem to disproportionately throw at women when they are displeased with said women's feelings and demands. As Harris O'Malley wrote for The Washington Post in 2014: "'Crazy' is one of the five deadly words guys use to shame women into compliance. The others: Fat. Ugly. Slutty. Bitchy."

After a decade of dating and perpetual fear of ending up branded "crazy," I found myself watching a new musical TV show about -- you guessed it -- a crazy woman. The CW's "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" (very intentionally not "My Crazy Ex Girlfriend") was created by two women, Rachel Bloom and Brosh McKenna. In their hands, the "crazy woman" trope becomes a lot less tragic and a lot more interesting. Perhaps the key to doing away with the negative power the "crazy" label has over women is to embrace it with compassion and humor.

"Crazy Ex Girlfriend" follows protagonist Rebecca Bunch (played by Bloom), an ambitious but miserable real estate lawyer who runs into an old summer camp boyfriend, Josh, on the street and decides to follow him across the country. She ends up in a completely underwhelming suburb, West Covina, Calif., with a new legal job and plenty of time to casually stalk Josh while insisting that, "I did not move here for Josh because that would be crazy and I am not crazy."  If the premise sounds like a more absurdist version of "Felicity," it is, but somehow it works, turning the crazy lady romantic narrative on its head. 

McKenna told the New York Times that "'Crazy ex-girlfriend' was a sexist term she and several of her friends had appropriated to describe obsessive behavior, whether prompted by a relationship gone awry, twisted work politics or even something trivial like having a car fixed." Her philosophy comes from a deep belief that, "we’ve all been that person."

Most of us wouldn't move across the country after running into a childhood love for five minutes, but who hasn't spent hours staring at their phone waiting for someone to text back? Who hasn't attended an event secretly hoping to run into a specific person there? Rebecca Bunch is a manifestation of our inner obsessive.

At no point during the pilot does anyone in Rebecca's life call her crazy. In fact, the only time the label comes up is when she's insisting that she's not crazy, mostly to herself. When she finally breaks down about her real reasons for coming to West Covina when confronted by her new coworker Paula, it's Rebecca who berates herself with the crazy trope: "Oh my god, I’m crazy," she says in horror. "I’m crazy and I’m irrational and I’m everything my mother said."

In "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," it's the female characters who control the "crazy" narrative -- not the men who surround them. And that makes all the difference.

"Don’t you talk about my friend like that ever again," says Paula, admonishing her for bringing "crazy" talk into the mix. "You're brave."

Rebecca Bunch may be a little "crazy" -- after all, who isn't at times? -- but she's also intelligent, funny, professionally competent, flirtatious, goofy, charming and brave. Basically, she's a human being. And, really, what could be so bad about that? 

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An artist is giving Bratz dolls the makeover they desperately need. 

The dolls have long been criticized for their revealing outfits and heavy makeup, and parents have raised concerns about what Bratz teach children about women. 

For her Mighty Dolls project, Wendy Tsao removes Bratz dolls' makeup and repaints them to look like notable women including J.K Rowling, Malala Yousafzai and Jane Goodall.  

Tsao told The Huffington Post that she was inspired by artist Sonja Singh of Tree Change Dolls, who "upcycles" abandoned dolls, repainting their faces to give them a more natural, down-to-earth look.

Tsao also said she has been "overwhelmed" by the response to the dolls so far.

"Many people feel strongly about these dolls and what they represent," she said.

Tsao plans to begin selling the dolls in the next few weeks on eBay. Check out more of her designs below.

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"Just because you aren't being hit -- doesn't mean you're not being abused." 

That's the message behind Sarah Hosseini's new photo essay titled "Unseen Scars." As a survivor of domestic abuse, Hosseini created the series to reveal the emotional trauma that victims are often left with after leaving their abuser.

Although Hosseini's abuser only physically hit her once, she said that he abused her through manipulation, lying and verbally attacking her. The series represents the "unseen scars" that so many survivors of abusive relationships carry, but often go untreated because they're not physical scars. 

Hosseini and photographer Melanie Mercogliano created a series of 10 photos featuring Hosseini and her experiences as a survivor. Each image is paired with Hosseini's personal testimony of the everyday struggles she endures over a decade after her abusive relationship.

"I know many women who also suffer with these after effects of abuse -- even if their abuser never physically touched them," Hosseini told The Huffington Post. "The threats are damaging. The manipulation is monstrous." 

"Domestic violence can take many forms -- physical abuse, sexual abuse, rape, emotional abuse, intimidation, economic deprivation, threats of violence."

"While physical scars heal, the unseen hurt in a person is what affects them for the rest of their lives," Mercogliano told The Huffington Post. "There is no ER visit where the nurses stitch you up, there are no flowers and presents and there is no therapy afterwards."

Hosseini wanted to capture the trauma of emotional abuse in the same way physical abuse often is illustrated -- through photographs. So she drew from her own experience and created images from the thoughts that run through her head every day.

She said that creating the series was "absolutely therapeutic" as a survivor. "The project gave me power -- power over my abuser, power over my past and power in the dialogue about domestic violence," she said.

Scroll below to read Hosseini's intimate and powerful struggle as a survivor of domestic abuse. 

Head over to Hosseini and/or Mercogliano's websites to read more about them.

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In her first book of collected essays, novelist, teacher and lecturer Marilynne Robinson wrote that, while she’s thankful for her academic career, she would’ve been just as happy pursuing something more humble. Humble as in teaching children to read, or raising children of her own. As the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, Robinson's career might be one of the farthest things from humble. But, she notes that her upbringing didn't exactly angle her towards a life of fame. 

“I’m absolutely indebted to my origins, whatever they are, whatever that means,” Robinson recently said in a conversation with the President of the United States. “On the other hand, with all love and respect, my parents were not particularly bookish people.”

The president then praised the writer, who he says has “good sense along with sort of an overlay of books.”

In an unconventional interview published online yesterday on The New York Review of Books, the two discussed Robinson’s humble origins and how they’re not so at-odds with Barack Obama’s politics. The President noted, “And the thing I’ve been struggling with throughout my political career is how do you close the gap. There’s all this goodness and decency and common sense on the ground, and somehow it gets translated into rigid, dogmatic, often mean-spirited politics.”

The two continued to discuss the dissonance between religious thought and religious practice (Robinson didn’t reject the title of author and “theologian”), the state of education in America today (which Robinson characterizes as better than we often say), and, most notably, the lingering air of fear, which might be responsible for the recent, unsettling rash of violent acts across the country.

There’s perhaps no one more qualified to write about fear in America than Robinson, who related the feeling to many of the Protestant ethics underlying our country’s morality. She writes extensively about fear and Christianity in her latest essay collection, out this fall.

“Fear was very much -- is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people,” Robinson said. “When people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with.”

Robinson and Obama went on to discuss the concept of the “sinister other” -- the concept that, in the face of such speedy, globalization-induced change, people are prone to forming their own like-minded communities, closed to the beliefs of those who are different from them. The pair agrees that it’s a dark and dangerous breed of politics -- one that works against social progress.

This sentiment is echoed from Robinson's essay on fear, also published in The New York Review of Books. In it, she stresses that collective patriotism only functions well when we trust that our fellow citizens mean well. 

She writes, "Why stockpile ammunition if the people over the horizon are no threat? If they would in fact grieve with your sorrows and help you through your troubles?"

To read the entire interview, visit The New York Review of Books.

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Artist Robert de Michiell, who was best known for his pop culture illustrations and Broadway poster art, died on Oct. 12, at his home in New York. He had been battling cancer and was 57 years old. 

De Michiell's work had been seen regularly in Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He is survived by his husband, theatrical manager Jeffrey Wilson.  

The artist's death came a day before a retrospective of his work opened at ClampArt in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. "On Fire Island" features 22 of de Michiell's watercolors painted from 1998 to 2015, all inspired by New York's iconic gay beach resort. The day-long, Oct. 13, exhibit will mark the first time that all 22 of de Michiell's Fire Island paintings will be displayed collectively. 

According to a press release, the paintings portray Fire Island as "a whimsical, sexy, candy-colored Shangri-La, full of pumped-up beach boys frolicking in the waves and finding love beneath the setting sun." 

"These paintings symbolize my love for Fire Island and the friendships I've made there through the years," de Michiell told The Huffington Post in an email prior to his death. "As we head into fall, I'm so glad these pieces are being shown together, allowing us all one last glimpse of summer's magic."

The exhibit will ensure that de Michiell's legacy will live on for years to come.

You'll be missed, Robert. 

 
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Calling all artists, critics, creatives of any kind, oracles, crystal gazers, nature fiends, chefs, fashionistas -- basically, anyone who enjoys color on a daily basis. Sure, you appreciate a deep azure or a crisp cerulean -- but can you decipher between the two? 

It's time to put your peepers to the test. We stumbled across a test on Social Eyes, that, through a quick series of exercises, assesses just how well your brain digests the spectral compositions of light reflected by objects.

So, do you dare to put your vision to the test? You might not be colorblind (a person experiencing colorblindness may only be able to distinguish up to 20 different hues in their daily lives), but you could be color-deficient (meaning, you are seeing less than the 100 or more hues that a normal-sighted person can see).

Well, you can take Social Eyes' quiz HERE and let us know how you fared in the comments. Or, you can try our unofficial, unscientific quiz below. Can you beat a HuffPost Arts editor at a game of Guess Which Color Doesn't Belong? You can sure as hell try. Differentiate at least 10 of the colors below and you can crown yourself a pigment master.

HUFFPOST COLOR QUIZ: Are You A Pigment Master?

Which of the four shapes is a different color? Slide each image to reveal the answer.

Tweet your results! If you scored above a 10 out of 15, you are officially a pigment master.

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Filming pregnancy announcements and reactions can lead to some real gems.

This video compilation of nine such announcements shows what happens when mamas-to-be surprise their partners, family and friends with their exciting baby news. 

From symbolic gifts to wrapped pregnancy tests to actual buns in the oven, the video is seven emotional (and sometimes even comical) minutes of tears, shrieks and indescribable joy.

H/T Tastefully Offensive

 
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You hear that? That's the sound of fan girls and boys getting ready for battle.

"Game of Thrones" has attracted a considerable amount of negative attention in recent months from it's hypersexualiztion of the female body to its controversial depiction of rape. However, it's most recent critique comes from an unlikely source: Bernard Cornwell, the British author of The Saxon Stories and Waterloo.

The BBC adaptation of The Saxon Stories, now called "The Last Kingdom," premiered last week and tells the story of the creation of England through the eyes of Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the orphaned son of a Saxon nobleman. The series is already being compared to the HBO stalwart because of its medieval setting and penchant for violence and political maneuvering. 

Although Cornwell hasn't seen "Game of Thrones" (HOW?!), he had a few choice words for those who think the shows are similar. 

"If I was a commissioning editor at the BBC I’d say, 'We want 'Game of Thrones' -- boys, let’s have dragons and tits,'" he told the Telegraph during a visit to the set of "The Last Kingdom." "But as much as I love George [R.R. Martin]'s book, it doesn’t have that grounding in reality. Mine continually has to come back to this real story -- the making of England."  

Cornell doubled down on the "Game of Thrones" shade in an interview with the Radio Times. "So many characters. So many strands. You have to have large sections where the plot is explained, just have to sit there and be told what's going on. This is very, very dull. So they put a lot of naked women behind it all."

"They're called 'sexplanations' in the trade. My programs won't need sexplanations."

Those are some fighting words!

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See the original piece on artnet News.

One of the coveted works is a Claude Monet Nymphéas painting from the artist's celebrated Giverny series with an estimate of $30 million to $50 million. But the real stunner is a rare Pablo Picasso blue period portrait La Gommeuse that was painted when the artist was 19 years old. This 1901 painting came after the suicide of one of Picasso's close friends, Carlos Casagema, earlier that year.

Picasso created the painting after his much-lauded exhibition at Ambroise Vollard's gallery. At the time, he was sharing an apartment with his Catalan anarchist friend Pere Mañach. According to Sotheby's "the two young men immersed themselves in the debauchery of the Parisian demi-monde. This dizzying mixture of professional success and personal tragedy brought Picasso's creative genius to a climax." La Gommeuse is thus "portrayed in an absinthian haze of sexual ennui: she is both temptation and downfall incarnate."

Even more fascinating is that the back of the painting adds a curious new layer to the story. When Koch began conservation efforts in 2000, a crass rendering of Mañach appeared; his face is flush and his body is a sickly yellow color, as he appears to urinate on the canvas.

According to Sotheby's, scholarship suggests Picasso was frustrated with Mañach's professional dealings and "this outrageous portrait encapsulates their tumultuous friendship." It is inscribed "Recuerdo a Mañach en el día de su santo" (I remember Mañach on his Saint's Day) which suggests that Picasso gave La Gommeuse to his friend on June 29 with the scene serving as his "personal version of a boisterous birthday card."

Koch, aware of the unique history and insight into the artist's life constructed a custom display in his home so that both paintings could be viewed from opposite sides of the same wall. The unpublished estimate on the work is "in the region of $60 million."

Recent scholarship on the work suggests that Vollard acquired it sometime after 1906, and possibly lined it in order to "keep the work as commercial as possible," a representative at Sotheby's told artnet News in an email. It was later owned by 1930s Hollywood film director Josef von Sternberg.

The history of the work at auction also provides insight into the status of the Picasso market over the years. The upcoming sale marks the fourth time Sotheby's has handled the work at auction.

Sternberg first sold the picture in 1949, at Parke-Bernet (Sotheby's predecessor) in 1949 for $3,600. It was later acquired by Jacques Sarlie, a Dutch-born financier based in New York who had acquired a large Picasso collection that featured work from every major period.

It was again offered for sale in 1984 at Sotheby's London, where Koch acquired it for £1.4 million.

The works will be on view at Sotheby's London (October 10–15) and then in New York (October 30–November 5), ahead of the evening auction on November 11.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Linda McQuillen long wondered whether her 1917 home had any connection to Frank Lloyd Wright, thinking at best maybe one of his peers designed it as an imitation of the architect's famous Prairie School style. It turned out she was living in the real thing.

Wright experts announced Tuesday that the Madison house McQuillen bought for $100,000 has been verified as an American System-Built House, part of Wright's effort to develop and market well-designed homes at a more affordable level — his first effort to reach a broader audience. It is the second such house identified in the past four months, one out of only 16 ever built and 14 still standing.

"It's pretty exciting, I've got to tell you. And pretty overwhelming," McQuillen said, sitting in the front room of the 1,800-square-foot house she spent a quarter of a century refurbishing and decorating with Mission-style furniture.

It took years to unearth the evidence about McQuillen's home, located in a neighborhood less than half a mile from the University of Wisconsin campus where Wright went to school in the 1880s.

This much was known: It was constructed in 1917, an addition was built in 1924, and an open-air porch facing the street was enclosed three years after that. By the time McQuillen bought it in 1989 it was in such bad shape that a tree was growing through the roof of the garage.

"Over time we have completely redone the house without any indication it was a significant house," said McQuillen, 69, a retired teacher who now works part-time for the university as a math education consultant. "I didn't know it was a Frank Lloyd Wright home and had no imagination it would be."

The first real clue she got that the stucco home adorned with leaded glass windows may have any real Wright connection came in November 2009, when she received a letter from Mary Jane Hamilton.

Hamilton, a Wright scholar who has written about the architect's family and homes in his native Wisconsin, had been hearing whispers about the Madison house for years but had never been able to prove a link to Wright.

There was no reference to it in any of the catalogs of known Wright homes, and it had some distinctly uncharacteristic elements, like a band of dark red brick around the stucco exterior. There were no known drawings of the home linking it to the first owner, and no photos had been found showing the house as it looked when it was first built.

Hamilton said her "eureka" moment came when she found a 1917 Wisconsin State Journal newspaper advertisement by a Madison building company offering the American System-Built Homes. The same company was named on the 1917 building permit for McQuillen's home, which indicated it was building a spec house.

Hamilton and Mike Lilek, curator of the Wright-designed American System-Built Homes in Milwaukee, toured McQuillen's home in November 2009 and quickly found other indications that they may have made a significant discovery.

Framing studs in the basement were 24 inches on center, a known Wright deviation from the typical 16-inch span. The window pattern is custom designed, along with the latches.

Since then, Hamilton worked to gather more proof, including finding a drawing among more than 900 of the American System-Built Homes in Wright's archive at Taliesin West in Arizona that resembled McQuillen's house. All the evidence they collected led Hamilton and Lilek to finally conclude that the home was an authentic Wright.

It's also the first and only known example of the AA model from Wright's American System-Built House series ever constructed, Lilek said.

McQuillen said the news makes the money and hard work she invested in fixing up the house more than worth it.

"It does feel like a reward, a vindication that when I saw the house and could see beyond the disrepair that I knew there was something substantive," she said. "The house really spoke to me."

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For some reason, the dissected fetal pig made out of yarn isn't such a hit.

People love the disemboweled knitted frog. They can't get enough of the woolen rat, splayed up the middle, hand-crafted organs on display. 

But the pink yarn pig -- as cute, creepy, weird and wonderful as it is -- just doesn't get a lot of takers.

"It might be because it is less familiar," Emily Stoneking, the artist who came up with these brilliant, hand-made dissection models, said. "Or maybe because the word ‘fetal’ makes some people a little uncomfortable."

Stoneking came up with the idea for knitting approximations of dissected animals about eight years ago.

The Vermont-based artist has always been taken with vintage medical drawings, but "but I am terrible -- and I mean terrible -- at drawing. So instead, I thought I could do something similar, but in wool," she says.

She's gotten a load of attention since. 

The models -- sold in Stoneking's aKNITomy Etsy store -- have been featured on basically every website that caters to the whimsically and/or nerdily inclined.

Stoneking's gotten so much attention over the last years, in fact, she claims her mother's started wondering just what in the world is going on here.

"She is very supportive, but cannot fathom why someone would want to purchase something like this," Stoneking told HLN.  

We can: they're fantastic.

But, alas, they aren't a substitute for the flesh and blood and guts animals on which they're based.

The models aren't straight replicas. Rather, they are suggestive of their organic counterpoints, with features -- like the brightly colored organs -- designed to be pleasing to the eye, instead of teaching, say, exactly what an actual eye looks like when it's been all cut up.

And if you are inclined to read an anti-animal testing into the specimens, well ... these knitted creations certainly honor the animals whose lives are given over to the dissection tray, and Stoneking "would never condone superfluous or unnecessary animal testing."

But she is also impressed with the useful (to humans) advances that have been gained, thanks to the study of lab animals, such as possible treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes, or developing the ability to grow human organs inside pigs, that would be transplanted back into humans. 

Yes, we're back to the pig, who has done so much for us humans, without nearly enough love or appreciation in return.

You definitely want to check out the aKNITomy Etsy shop. 

And get in touch at arin.greenwood@huffingtonpost.com if you have an animal story to share!

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