You know that slightly awkward scenario in which you're a white male modernist painter who's obsessed with female muses? You tell every beautiful woman in your life how badly you want to paint them -- how they are such unique babes! And then you paint them. All of them. Fast forward a century or so after your death, and the portraits of all those bombshells come together for a single, absolutely stunning exhibition. Sort of eyebrow-raising in retrospect, but so it went with the iconic painter Gustav Klimt.

This September, the exhibition “Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918” will bring together 12 paintings, 40 drawings, and 40 works of decorative art, all starring the sensual, dazzling women that, to Klimt, served as the living embodiment of fin-de-siècle Vienna -- or at least that was his line. 

At the core of the exhibition are two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the only subject to make it into two of Klimt's full-length portraits. The pieces, titled "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907) and "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II"(1912), will be displayed side by side in the show for the first time in a decade. 

The more famous Bloch-Bauer portrait, also known as "The Woman in Gold," depicts Adele swallowed in a golden, starry sky that blurs seamlessly into her coat and gown. Gold triangles, eggs and eyes swirl on her garments, alluding to the sensuality and mysticism of the subject.

Klimt captured Bloch-Bauer's paradoxical nature through his careful rendering, the way she appeared at once full of suffering and yet the very picture of elegance and sophistication. A delicate individual, Bloch-Bauer was constantly battling illnesses that left her weak and fatigued, and was severely impacted by the death of her beloved brother. Yet, as an avant-garde intellectual and director of an artist salon, she remained always the savvy sophisticate, eager to turn her pain into power. 

Klimt's later portrait of Bloch-Bauer, a bit more traditional in style, renders her in a broad-brimmed hat against a floral patterned backdrop, her elongated figure stretched to the point where poise becomes uncanny. Other muses who will make an appearance in the exhibition include Gertha Loew (1902), Mäda Primavesi (1912), Szerena Lederer (1899) and her daughter Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16).

Through the lens of these influential individuals, the exhibit will explore Klimt's evolving portrait style, as he dipped in and out of movements including fauvism, symbolism and pre-Raphaelite art. Fashion, of course, also plays a major role, as Klimt brought dresses, robes and gowns to life, their patterns proliferating and extended beyond the confines of the clothing they sprung from. 

For the Klimt fans of the world, the exhibition is sure to dive into his glimmering world of opulence and eroticism. Personally, I'm hoping it will be the artistic equivalent of a rom-com, in which a bunch of women all find out they've been dating the same guy and band together to seek revenge. But even if there's no supernatural convergence of Klimt muses past, the art will surely be stunning. 

"Gustav Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900-1918" runs from Sept. 22, 2016, until Jan. 16, 2017, at Neue House in New York.

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In 2007, "Once" told the romantic story of a couple's songwriting journey through Dublin. Now, writer-director John Carney is back with another romance -- also a musical, also set in Ireland, but this time in the 1980s. 

In "Sing Street," 15-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is struggling to adapt to his new school when he meets Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a mysterious self-proclaimed model and, duh, the prettiest girl in the place. Having just recently been tuned into the idea of music videos as a cool, new form of art, Conor invents a band to make them -- and invites Raphina to star -- but quickly discovers his own talent for songwriting. The film features original tracks as well as hits from The Cure, Duran Duran and a-ha. 

"I think the '80s really were the last true decade that just didn't sound like anything before," Carney says in the clip above. "So when we were doing the music, we wanted the songs to be as good as an '80s song ... but good in their own right."

Take a look at the video above to hear more from the director, and catch the full trailer below.

"Sing Street" is available exclusively on iTunes beginning Tuesday, July 12.

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You've never seen graffiti like this.

Parisian street artist Astro is making his mark all over the walls of the world, but his latest work appears in the Portuguese city of Loures.

The intricate optical illusion makes passersby feel as though the wall will take them into a "deep and dark abyss," designboom explained. Astro used assorted colors of blue to create the incredibly trippy piece of work.

The paintings are part of a public art initiative called Loures Arts Publica.

According to his website, Astro is entirely self-taught and frequently uses curves, calligraphy and shapes in his abstract art.

We can't wait to see where else his work pops up.  

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In these prime summer days, clothes can often seem like a cruel, sweaty burden. An unnecessary layer holding you back from your true potential. If only you could rip the itchy fabric from your flesh and dance free like the nature baby you were born to be! Then you'd be free, you'd be au natural, you'd be ... probably, pretty inappropriate and awkward, but awesomely so. 

Art history contains a long tradition of people getting naked at the most unlikely of times. At a picnic, chilling with friends, fighting a dragon, kissing your dog by the seashore -- there is literally no time too improper for these painted subjects to strip down and strike a pose. 

In honor of summer and nudity and art, behold 21 times (including the painting above) people in paintings got naked at really weird times. Not. Suitable. For. Work. 

This is one of those dreams when you're suddenly naked and surrounded by wild cats.

"Can you pass the butt? The butter. I meant butter."

Amanda thinks you should make a painting. It will last longer.

"Are you gonna smile for this one?" 

"No. Are you gonna wear clothes?"

"No." 

When you show up at a party wearing the same thing.

Carol brought the fruit platter, guys.

"So awkward you had to rescue me like this." 

"Wait, you mean I'm naked too?"

Laura has definitely arrived. 

TFW you realize every body is a beach body.

Lindsey and her dog do everything together.

There's nothing like getting your coiffure done in the nude.

"Same."

Venus doesn't need your ugly pink blanket, Tiffany.

This jacket came a size too small, but Helene DGAF.

"Do these shoes go with my labia?"

Gorilla's like, what?

Come on, we've all seen "Game of Thrones."

"Roger, ughhhh, we were just talking."

If you're not staring at the giant predatory bird in the background of this painting, you're doing something wrong.

Every so often, HuffPost Arts & Culture attempts to bring to light a few forgotten gems with our light-hearted look back at art history. For past examples see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. 

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Maya, the protagonist of Jade Sharma’s debut novel Problems, has problems. A heroin problem. A self-esteem problem. A problem getting to her dead-end bookstore job on time. A problem keeping together her marriage to kind, steady, slightly alcoholic Peter. A problem staying faithful.

In short, she's the kind of character who, until recently, we’d expect to be male. Fiction about the psychology of a self-destructive, appetite-driven, deeply flawed character has traditionally focused on compelling but often rather loathsome men. In American fiction, at least, it’s often white, middle- or upper-middle-class men. But Sharma’s relentlessly grim, morbidly clever novel insists on the universality of this experience by allowing Maya her particularity. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, she explained, “At first I thought, I should make her white, so I don’t have to deal with the race issue, because white people are blank slates.” Instead, like Sharma, Maya is Indian. “Indian girls can be crazy bitches, too,” she told PW.

Sharma paints Maya’s spiraling life in raw, sharp-edged, almost confrontational language. No euphemisms paper over the poisonous bowel movements that mark days of withdrawal, or the urgent, self-abasing sexual fantasies that she masturbates to when she’s alone. Maya’s crass wit and vitality can make her facade of “togetherness” convincing, even to her, but it slowly becomes beyond obvious that her heroin indulgences have seduced her into a full-blown addiction.

Finally, her husband leaves her. Though Maya professes mostly indifference and disdain toward him, she’s rocked by the divorce -- not that it’s happening, but that he left her. Worse, her former professor, Ogden, ends their affair. Suddenly, instead of a married woman with a glamorous older lover and a fondness for getting high, Maya is alone, with a rapidly crumbling bookshop job. Her fingernail-hold on functional life slips, and soon she’s doing little but cycling through unending bags of heroin and making the easiest money she can in between to pay for her new lifestyle. Sharma follows Maya as she slides into unkempt filth and flattened misery, doing lines off of ironically selected books and pretending she’s totally fine.

Maya’s addiction cycle, and her attempts at breaking it, structure the novel. It’s the plot, such as it is, and it can be both hypnotically compelling and somewhat listless, as one might expect. Her searching mind slip-slides easily from one thought -- Should I snort my last bag now? -- to another -- I’m sick of Greek yogurt -- to another -- How awful it is to get flowers from a guy -- to another -- Maybe I’m just in love with who I am around my husband. She observes her life as if she’s watching herself on TV, but her life couldn’t appear on the shows she watches, and she knows it. She cuts up a bag of heroin to snort through a rolled-up bill, and imagines appearing on a cooking show, chirpy as she explains the steps to prepare her highly addictive, illicit treat. (These pop cultural vignettes, where Maya mentally superimposes her own, frequently X-rated or grimy habits over squeaky-clean American clichés, are particularly razor-sharp.) Maya is unfocused, incisive, banal and brilliant.

Sharma guides us into Maya’s addiction like slowly boiling us in a pot of water. It’s almost imperceptible to see the change at any given moment, but the danger becomes impossible to ignore at some point. Once there, going elsewhere becomes tricky. Recovery tends to prioritize routine, calm, and the removal of unhealthy influences. Maya’s clean self does things, walks places, eats normal food, all without the pages of frantic thought. These aren’t easy things to propel a narrative forward with.

The latter portion of the book can feel hazy, indistinct and glided over -- certainly reflecting the powerlessness and numbness she comes to accept as a patient, but also, perhaps, because it’s not as thrilling of a subject. That may not be the most unforgettable thread of Problems, but everyday reality often seems lackluster. Nothing about Sharma's debut reads as sensationalized or sanitized or anything but the truth of living through what Maya lives through.

Maya, with her bodily neuroses and impulses and lusts and bolts of cleverly crafted philosophical insight, is the novel. And she's hard to stop watching and caring about and even, optimistically, rooting for.

The Bottom Line:

A psychologically astute portrait of a woman's cycle of addiction, the ebb and flow of her life around it, and her own hilarious, bittersweet and brilliant inner monologue through it all.  

What other reviewers think:

Publishers Weekly: "Sharma’s debut novel is an uncompromising and unforgettable depiction of the corrosive loop of addiction."

Kirkus: "An absorbing novel carried by a seemingly hopeless protagonist you will want to befriend and save."

Who wrote it?

Jade Sharma is a writer living in New York City. She has an MFA from the New School, and Problems is her first novel.

Who will read it?

Fans of Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and other genre-bending, memoiristic authors of female experience. Also, readers who enjoy gritty fiction that explores the darker side of human existence.

Opening lines:

“Somewhere along the way there stopped being new days. Time progressed for sure: The rain tapered off through the night; near dawn, cars rumbled and then zoomed away. Sounds folded back into the world, moving on, light-years from the living room where I lay around, hardly living.”

Notable passage:

“On the toilet, I doubled over in pain. I wanted to fucking die. When I stood up, my vision darkened. I sat back down on the toilet lid. I closed my eyes. Did I need to puke or shit? Did I need more Suboxone, or had I taken too much? I stood up. Shit on the floor and puke in the toilet, or puke on the floor and shit in the toilet? I lay down on the cool tiles with my eyes closed. Get it together. Grow up. Get it together. Darkness. Self-loathing. Regret. I was an addict. I wasn’t an addict; I was just in a fucked up situation. I was going to end up homeless. Everything would be fine. I needed to use a lifeline. I needed to ask the studio audience. I needed to phone a friend.”

Problems
By Jade Sharma
Emily Books/Coffee House Press, $16.95
Publishes July 5, 2016

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

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Just because a woman who is related to you says you are a feminist does not mean it is true.

In a July 3 interview with the Sunday Times, Ivanka Trump, eldest daughter of The Donald, tried to outline her father's feminist credentials. First she pointed to his record of hiring women:

My father is a feminist. He’s a big reason I am the woman I am today. People talk about gender equality. He has lived it, he has employed women at the highest levels of the Trump Organization for decades, so I think it’s a great testament to how capable he thinks women are and has shown that his whole life.

Then, she pointed to her own childhood, which she says was full of strong women, thanks to her father:

He always told me and showed me that I could do anything I set my mind to if I married vision and passion with work ethic. He’s also surrounded me with strong female role models who have done just that since I was a little girl.

These are certainly nice sentiments. It's wonderful that Ivanka feels like her dad surrounded her with women role models. And it is absolutely true that Trump has a record of hiring whoever he believes will be the best in a job -- er, make him the most money -- regardless of gender. That's great.

But that still does not make him a feminist -- not least because the presidential campaign he is running stands in direct opposition to the advancement of women's rights (and really, the rights of anyone who is not a straight, white, cisgender, Christian man). 

Treating a handful of women like human beings deserving of jobs and independent thoughts does not make you a feminist. And for Ivanka to casually throw around labels that have real meaning without us questioning those assertions is problematic.

So, here's a quick refresher on what feminism is: The belief in and advocacy for the social, political and economic equality of all genders. (Something much more expansive than giving a few select women limited power within one space that you, a man, ultimately control.)

And here's a quick refresher of what it is not... 

You are not a feminist if you routinely call women "fat pigs," "dogs" and rate them on a numeric scale by how sexually attractive you personally find them.

You are not a feminist if you comment on the bodies and weight fluctuations of the women you employ.

You are not a feminist if you publicly say you are annoyed that your wife has a job because that cuts into her ability to prepare you dinner each night (Marla Maples), or because you are upset that she talks about said job (Ivana Trump). 

You are not a feminist if you pay the male staffers on your presidential campaign 35 percent more on average than your female staffers, as a June analysis by the Boston Globe found. 

You are not a feminist if you incite online harassment against female journalists who you don't agree with. 

You are not a feminist if you say women should be punished for having abortions and vow to appoint Supreme Court judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade. 

You are not a feminist if you have said so many offensive things about women that a publication has created a Sexism Tracker dedicated to you!

Basically, if anyone truly believes that Trump is a feminist: 

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — An Iraqi self-taught dancer who defied conservativism and threats ahead of his stage debut last year was among the scores killed in a massive suicide truck bombing over the weekend in Baghdad.

The 23-year-old dancer, Adil Faraj, was buying clothes in the neighborhood of Karada for the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan when the attack happened. The holiday begins on Wednesday in Iraq.

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There's a couple of things Lin-Manuel Miranda would like to clear up with Jesus. 

The Puerto Rican star and creator of the smash hit musical "Hamilton" sat down with the president of The Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, recently to discuss inclusivity in the arts and the Puerto Rican debt crisis. At the end of their chat, Rodin asked Miranda: "So, what person dead or alive would you like to have dinner with?"

The Tony-winning MacArthur genius was quick to respond, "Oh, I have so many questions for Jesus."

Miranda explained to Rodin and many amused audience members how growing up Catholic made him curious to know "what really happened" in Jesus's life. And, he shared some hilarious burning questions he'd like to ask Jesus regarding one of his most famous miracles (Because, bread and fish don't just multiply...or do they?). 

The conversation with Miranda was part of The Rockefeller Foundation's “Insight Dialogues” series, for which The Huffington Post is a media partner.

Watch Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his hilariously honest questions for Jesus in the video above. 

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The earliest book ever published on American insects (1797, for the record) sits in a massive library in the Bronx, and fewer people than should be are aware of its existence.

And I'm talking about the library, not the book. 

Stephen Sinon, head of special collections, research and archives at the New York Botanical Garden, describes the Mertz Library "as the largest of its kind in the world under one roof." Founded in 1899, the haven for plant-related literature is often described as either the largest or the most comprehensive botanical library in the Americas. With over one million items -- including The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia by James Edward Smith -- it sits rather quietly on the property of the Bronx Garden, hiding, one might put it, in plain sight.

Its full name is the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, named after an Ohio-born librarian and supporter of the NYBG. Specializing in general materials related to botany, horticulture and landscape design, the ornate building houses collections devoted to topics as specific as ornamental plants, the American nursery trade, and economic botany. In fact, on a recent visit paging through tomes with Sinon, I peeked into Charles Darwin's journals, centuries-old blueprints for royal gardens, and vintage ads for garden gnomes, all in one afternoon.

"We have always been open to the public and we maintain a 4,000-volume collection of circulating books which can be checked out by members," Sinon explained to The Huffington Post in an email after our visit.

Beyond the scope of its holdings, public accessibility makes the behemoth Mertz unique among its botanical peers. Garden membership must be bought (and allows patrons to borrow books for three weeks at a time), but use of the library on premises is free, and has been since the dawn of the 20th century, Sinon emphasized.

The scope is still impressive, though. Mertz plays home to 550,000 volumes in its general research collection alone, nestled into a 9,000-square-foot, environmentally controlled storage facility. Make an appointment and you can feast your eyes on the holdings kept in the Rare Book and Folio Room. Sinon described the manuscripts and other materials kept there as mostly pre-Linnean (published before 1753). Among the notable offerings are 18th- and 19th-century plate books filled with decadent engravings and illustrations of plants, the stuff of retro botanical dreams.  

As the New York Botanical Garden, founded in 1891, celebrates its 125th anniversary, Sinon and his team face a particularly 21st-century endeavor: digitization. As Mertz notes online, the digital collections -- segments of the library's physical materials available to anyone in the world with an internet connection -- represent only a fraction of the library’s holdings, but it's growing every month.

"The transition from print to digital has facilitated research worldwide and I suspect access to information and new knowledge will only improve in the future," the library's vice president and director, Susan Fraser, told HuffPost. "Technologies change fast and libraries can hardly keep up with those changes but we do our best to keep abreast of these advancements and migrate to new platforms whenever possible."

"The future of digital libraries is a bright one," Sinon added. "Digitization provides access to research materials for scholars in developing countries who do not have travel funding, as well as to researchers in the field and the lab."

The Mertz recently received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to work with smaller libraries digitizing materials for inclusion in a larger initiative dubbed the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The BHL, he explained, is helping to make botanical literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

In the past, the BHL has used tactics like crowd sourcing to help with the transcription of words and phrases that remain fuzzy after migration online. Digitization efforts like these are bringing budding librarians together across the globe in ways a physical library cannot.

That being said, Fraser emphasized that many of the traditional library skills and services are still necessary to the research community that relies on the NYBG. "The pleasure of sitting with a printed book, manuscript or original artwork," she added, "cannot be replaced."

Mertz Library is located at 2900 Southern Blvd in Bronx, N.Y. For more on the NYBG's 125th anniversary, head here.

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One dachshund links four disparate stories in "Wiener-Dog," the latest bleak comedy from Todd Solondz, the notoriously bleak director best known for "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness." The Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL, have four exclusive short clips from the movie. Presented in PSA style, they feature the likes of Greta Gerwig, Ellen Burstyn, Danny DeVito and Julie Delpy, each dealing with dog-related matters in their own oddball ways. Watch all four continuously below. "Wiener-Dog" is now in theaters.

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Is the Hiddleswift romance is really just one elaborate, artistic critique of celebrity culture and voyeurism? 

That's what some people on the Internet think. BuzzFeed noted a number of posts regarding the very public relationship between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston following her split from Calvin Harris.

The latest theory: The whole affair is actually a faux-mance created as part of an upcoming music video. 

Swift has previously been accused of getting into relationships and using the narratives for songs and, thus, professional gain. (e.g., Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal). But the superstar singer has denied such claims and blasted the media for twisting things. 

“For the better part of 2012 and 2013, I did not go online, because I didn’t like what they were saying about me,” she told Vanity Fair last September. “And it was so overwhelmingly inaccurate that I knew there was nothing I could do to fight. When the media decides that they don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do that doesn’t seem desperate and irritating to everyone when you try to defend yourself. So I just had to go into my little emotional bunker and pretend there weren’t bombs going off outside.”

Swift and Hiddleston just wrapped up a very festive Fourth of July weekend with Swift's celebrity friends at her beachside mansion in Rhode Island, where Hiddleston was spotted wearing a tank top with "I <3 T.S." scrawled on it.

Whether he was showing his love for Swift or Tony Stark or T.S. Elliot, who knows? 

But they sure look pretty happy to us. 

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American photographer Robert Fogarty went to South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, to tell a story about peace. What he found was tale after tale of heartbreaking loss.

This week, South Sudan marks its fifth birthday as an independent nation. Yet, for half of its brief life, the country has been ripped apart by war, leaving tens of thousands dead and over 2 million fleeing for their lives.

Fogarty went to South Sudan in January in partnership with Oxfam for the latest iteration of his Dear World photography project. The project, which photographs people with a message to the world written on their skin, was founded in New Orleans in 2009, and now includes some 50,000 portraits including Syrian refugees in Jordan and survivors of the Boston marathon bombing.

He intended to photograph women working for peace in South Sudan, but after his first few interviews on the streets of the capital Juba, a common theme emerged.

“Everyone there has lost someone they love,” Fogarty told the WorldPost. “We all have people in our lives we wish were still here, but this is really acute in South Sudan.”

Fogarty began asking people to share a message about a person they have lost, and wrote it on their arms or hands. “People appeared re-energized as they paid tribute to someone they love,” Fogarty says. Some of their answers “still give me goosebumps,” he said.

The resulting series of portraits are a moving look at the many shades of grief behind a harrowing war.

The conflict erupted in December 2013, when a leadership struggle between President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar unleashed ethnically-motivated bloodshed. While the leaders reconciled and committed to peace earlier this year, fighting has continued to rage in parts of the country and nearly 5 million people facing severe food shortages.

Fogarty spent four days collecting stories and pictures on the streets of Juba and a camp for people displaced by war in Mangaten, on the outskirts of the city. They ran into a couple of obstacles along the way. One evening, they had to rush out of the camp before finishing their interviews as a nightly curfew set in. On their last day, they were detained and interrogated for six hours until they were able to convince a senior official that they were not engaged in a conspiracy to make the country look bad, Fogarty says.

The incident gave Fogarty all the more respect for the people battling these obstacles every day to reconcile and heal their young country.

“We met so many people working for peace ... these incredibly talented and smart people living under curfew and watching what they say,” he recalls.

“These are people in a very difficult situation, but they still yearn for a better day.”

See some of Fogarty’s portraits from South Sudan below, and see more at the Dear World South Sudan website. To learn more about the crisis in South Sudan, visit Oxfam’s page here.

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On March 2, 1998, Suzanne Gloria Lyall waited at her usual bus stop, on the way to her campus dorm room. That’s the last time anybody saw her.

Eighteen years later, she still hasn’t been found, in spite of the search efforts of police, her parents, and those enlisted by her parents, including a psychic who hovered her hands above old photos, hoping to form a connection. Although Suzanne’s parents, Mary and Doug Lyall, were able to find some closure -- in 2001 they founded the Center for Hope, a community providing support and resources to the parents of missing children -- they never stopped searching for their daughter.

Their story of tenacity, and of a relentless search for traces of evidence, caught the attention of photographer Virginie Rebetez, whose previous work centered on the way missing and unidentified people are described and depicted in police reports. 

“In all my photographic projects I am interested in the invisible, the meaning of identity, the traces we leave behind after death or an absence, in unfinished stories, in the materiality we, as humans, need for closure,” Rebetez said in an interview with The Huffington Post. “I can say, in a way, that I use photography to give consistence, materiality, to the invisible, to give a shape, a form to what is not there anymore.”

She’d hoped to tell the story of a single missing person, and the individuals whose lives are shaped by that absence. When she met Mary and Doug Lyall, she knew she wanted to photograph the materials and emotions surrounding their daughter’s case. The resulting series, which Rebetez is hoping to turn into a book titled Out of the Blue, is a patchwork of haunting images. In many of them, Suzanne is depicted, but her face is obscured, demonstrating visually that her disappearance is the cause for the strife shown in the rest of the collection’s photos, which consists of landscape shots, portraits, and a police composite of what Suzanne might look like today.

“I found the different use of the photographs of Suzanne by all the different people involved in the case quite interesting. Psychics used the portraits of her not for the representation of her but as an object they handled and touched in order to get a connection,” Rebetez said. “The more you read these files, the more your head is filled with stories, but the less you know. After 18 years, Suzanne's case is still unresolved.”

The project, then, is a thoughtful commentary on the need we have for closure, which, unlike other forms of comfort, like hope or faith, often must come in the form of something physical. Rebetez hopes viewers will feel provoked by her meditation on loss, but more than anything she hopes the project will raise awareness for Suzanne’s story. 

“She disappeared in a time lapse of five minutes,” Rebetez reflects, reiterating the mystery and tragedy of the case. “The distance between the bus stop to her university campus dorm.”

You can donate to Virginie Rebetez's Kickstarter campaign here.

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If you are a media literate feminist who also loves “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” inevitably you have some inner turmoil while watching each week.

For those viewers who watch “The Bachelor” despite their stomach-churning discomfort with the franchise’s retro notions of heterosexual romance and gender norms, there is a script-flipping option out there. “Coupled,” a new Fox dating show created by reality TV guru Mark Burnett, the executive producer of gems such as “Survivor” and “The Voice,” feels like a direct answer to the more progressive criticism that has followed “The Bachelor” franchise over the last several years.

On the show, 12 accomplished, beautiful women take up residence in bungalows on an Anguilla beach. Every day or so, a handsome man who professes to be serious about finding a lasting relationship arrives by chopper -- AND boat, in case the helicopter wasn’t dramatic enough. Each woman has a chance to briefly meet the new suitor before deciding whether she’s interested in him. After he meets each one, he finds out which of the ladies are up for dating him, then picks two for an extended overnight date in an opulent villa. (So far, so Tinder.) The next night, he picks one to remain in a “couples” villa with him, at which point they begin working on developing a relationship. (If the couple doesn’t work out, the woman returns to the bungalows for another shot at meeting her dream man; the dude has to chopper right back home.)

“I wanted every woman to have a chance, technically, to end up in a relationship,” Burnett told Allison P. Davis of The Ringer. “And nobody wants to see one man eliminating 12 women. That’s just not very 2016.” In Davis’ deep dive into the aspiring “Bachelor” competitor, she highlights the appeal of a dating show that, unlike “The Bachelor,” seems determined to foster a positive, woman-centric, racially diverse dynamic.

The women and men featured on the season so far have been racially and even ideologically diverse -- there’s a very outspoken 23-year-old conservative radio personality in the bungalows. And since they’re not all competing for the same man, the contestants have a smoother path to forming firm friendships and expressing their true personalities, rather than being slotted into “angry black woman” or “blonde bimbo.”

In “The Bachelor” world, women have careers and communities they are often willing to leave behind for love. Their political views, religious upbringings and social values are set aside entirely -- at least for viewers -- in favor of vague “connections.” And the ultimate goal is always a proposal, driving home that the highest level of success one can achieve is a heterosexual marriage. “Coupled” is still ultimately grounded in a world that privileges couplehood (see: the name of the show), but it takes a different approach. Disinterest in the options in front of you is an acknowledged option. Breakups happen and they aren’t necessarily because someone was there for “the wrong reasons.” And the contestants discuss their political and social worldviews, using those values to evaluate whether a person might be a good -- or terrible -- match for them. Crazy, right?

As Davis points out, the bar is set so low for positive representation in the realm of reality dating shows, that “Coupled” gets points for “doing the bare minimum: i.e., casting people of color in a real capacity, as romantic leads, instead of just stunt-casting to silence critics.” (Plus, let’s be frank, all this girl-power energy and positive vibes don’t make for nearly as much can’t-look-away drama.) But it’s refreshing to see a show that jettisons some of the most irksome, offensive aspects of “The Bachelor,” which is, at this point, the grand old lady of reality dating.

It may not quite be must-see TV -- after all, we still find ourselves waiting a day or two to watch the latest episode of “Coupled” on Hulu in a way we would never allow ourselves to fall behind on “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” -- but it’s something.

For more on “Coupled” -- and Lifetime’s “UnREAL” -- check out this week’s episode of HuffPost’s “Here to Make Friends,” a “Bachelor” recap show.

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 A version of this article originally appeared on The Huffington Post in 2015.

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

Every summer, Nameberry releases a list of the popular baby names for the first half of the year. The rankings are based on which names attracted the most page views of nearly 40 million visits to Nameberry's web site. The list gauges the baby names that are winning the most attention from parents-to-be right now, and may predict which names will be used most for babies in the future.

There’s a new girls’ name at the head of the baby names popularity list for the first half of 2016, with Olivia claiming Nameberry’s official number one spot. Ezra holds his place at the top of the boys’ popular names list, a position the Biblical name also claimed in 2015.

Olivia replaces Charlotte, the girls’ top name for 2015, which slips to number three. Amelia, Ava, and Isla round out the girls’ top 5. Five new girls’ names ascend to the top 10 in 2016: Arabella, Aurora, Adeline, Isabella, and Mia.

The top 5 boys’ names retain the order they claimed for 2015: Ezra, Asher, Atticus, Declan, and Oliver. Only two names are new to the boys’ top 10 in 2016: Levi and Wyatt.

Other hot baby names for boys -- all up more than 40 places -- are John, Tobias, Daniel, Xavier, and Maxwell. For girls, the "hottest" name so far this year is Sadie, which jumped up 48 places. Other girls’ names up more than 30 places in 2016 are Elise, Astrid, Isabella, and Thea.

Newcomers to the 2016 top 100 include several unusual names we may hear lots more of in coming years. For girls, these are Anouk, Cecilia, Freya, and Ophelia. For boys, they are Alistair, Hugo, and Lucian.

Without further ado, here are Nameberry's 100 most popular names for girls and boys for the first half of 2016.

Girls

1. OLIVIA

2. AMELIA 

3. CHARLOTTE

4. AVA

5. ISLA

6. ARABELLA

7. AURORA

8. ADELINE

9. ISABELLA

10. MIA

11. ELEANOR

12. ARIA

13. PENELOPE

14. CORA

15. ROSE

16. VIOLET

17. HAZEL

18. THEA

19. CLAIRE

20. EMMA

21. ALICE

22. LUCY

23. LUNA

24. NORA

25. MILA

26. ELIZABETH

27. SCARLETT

28. ASTRID

29. IMOGEN

30. ELLA

31. GENEVIEVE

32. MAEVE

33. AUDREY

34. GRACE

35. SADIE

36. EVANGELINE

37. CHLOE

38. ESME

39. EMILY

40. IVY

41. ELOISE

42. OPHELIA

43. CAROLINE

44. AURELIA

45. MAYA

46. STELLA

47. ADELAIDE

48. KHALEESI

49. LILA

50. NOVA

51. ELISE

52. EVELYN

53. JANE

54. LYDIA

55. MAISIE

56. ELLIE

57. BEATRICE

58. IRIS

59. ELODIE

60. CLARA

61. SOPHIA

62. ANNA

63. EMILIA

64. ELIZA

65. HARLOW

66. AMARA

67. JULIA

68. MAE

69. ISABEL

70. JOSEPHINE

71. JADE

72. POPPY

73. ABIGAIL

74. SIENNA

75. HANNAH

76. MATILDA

77. ELSIE

78. ZARA

79. SERAPHINA

80. WILLOW

81. ZOE

82. MADELINE

83. EVIE

84. ADA

85. WILLA

86. JULIET

87. PHOEBE

88. MOLLY

89. MARGARET

90. LILY

91. ANOUK

92. MABEL

93. FREYA

94. ELIANA

95. LEAH

96. ANNABELLE

97. DAISY

98. EVA

99. CECILIA

100. NAOMI

Boys

1. EZRA

2. ASHER

3. ATTICUS

4. DECLAN

5. OLIVER

6. MILO

7. SILAS

8. LEVI

9. WYATT

10. HENRY

11. JACK

12. JASPER

13. LEO

14. ELIJAH

15. ETHAN

16. THEODORE

17. SEBASTIAN

18. CALEB

19. LIAM

20. OSCAR

21. ELI

22. BENJAMIN

23. BODHI

24. AUSTIN

25. FELIX

26. MILES

27. ALEXANDER

28. JACOB

29. ZACHARY

30. WILLIAM

31. LUKE

32. AXEL

33. THOMAS

34. ANDREW

35. XAVIER

36. ISAAC

37. JULIAN

38. JAMES

39. MATTHEW

40. LUCAS

41. ARYAN

42. FINN

43. JOHN

44. SAMUEL

45. NATHANIEL

46. SOREN

47. ROMAN

48. DANIEL

49. JOSIAH

50. TOBIAS

51. MAXWELL

52. CALLUM

53. GABRIEL

54. LINCOLN

55. NOLAN

56. ISAIAH

57. RONAN

58. CONNOR

59. HARRISON

60. BECKETT

61. CHARLES

62. OWEN

63. GRAYSON

64. LACHLAN

65. GIDEON

66. JONAH

67. ARTHUR

68. CHRISTIAN

69. RYKER

70. ARCHER

71. LUCIAN

72. JUDE

73. WESLEY

74. JACKSON

75. HARRY

76. KAI

77. JOSEPH

78. GRAHAM

79. NATHAN

80. SIMON

81. HUGO

82. ABEL

83. MADDOX

84. GRIFFIN

85. LANDON

86. DAVID

87. THEO

88. LEWIS

89. RYDER

90. ZANE

91. ALISTAIR

92. DASHIELL

93. KNOX

94. BENNETT

95. NICHOLAS

96. RHETT

97. VINCENT

98. GEORGE

99. EDWARD

100. LOUIS

Research by Esmeralda Rocha.

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There's nothing more beautiful than people who are comfortable and confident in their own skin, no matter what society says. And now one talented photographer has captured exactly that -- and the result is going viral. 

Jade Beal, a photographer based in Tuscon, Arizona, has taken stunning black-and-white portraits of a couple who have been together for over 20 years. In the photos, Gerry (75) and Darwin (70) are pictured happily embracing each other in the nude. The photos represent a joyous celebration of love and acceptance that highlights not only body positivity for older people, but also the beauty of interracial relationships. 

In a June 24 Facebook post that currently has over 34k likes, a quote from Gerry reads: "I love my body. I use a cane, I am having vision problems and my breasts reach to my waist, but you know what? I like me!"

"These elder bodies: the temples to decades of wisdom, heartbreak, strength, failure, triumph, THRIVING," Beal adds in the post. "How, I wonder, could they be anything but beautiful?"

How, indeed.

To view more photos from the series and some of Jade Beal's other work, go to http://www.jadebeall.com/.

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Two women posing for a photograph, hands casually intertwined. Two men donning swim trunks and a lei, their arms draped across one another.

These moments, forever immortalized through the snap of a camera, didn't necessarily capture queer life in the early 20th century. In fact, most likely, they did not. But for artist Kris Sanford, these found photos provided a space to carve out a queer visual history where one did not before exist, transforming her own narrative from one of otherness to togetherness. 

Sanford came out in the 1990s, and for a long time, felt alone, without any friends or family who also identified as gay. "That left me feeling like the other for a long time," Sanford wrote in an email to Slate. 

She considered herself a natural storyteller; in youth she'd constantly conjure imaginary relationships, sometimes based on friends she desired, extracting fictitious assumptions from their gestures and tones. So when Sanford realized the visual history of queerness she longed for did not exist, and neither did the context and community that would accompany it, she resolved to make her own. 

Looking through a box of old snapshots Sanford inherited from her grandmother, she found a particular image of two women dressed up as flappers for a party, struck by the fact that something about it seemed so queer. This uncanny image inspired Sanford to search through family albums and other found image troves, searching for that same potential of a spark. 

Sanford's "Through the Lens of Desire" became a photography series based on found images from 1920-1950, depicting, in nostalgia-inducing sepia tones, pairs of men and women who, from the look of it, could be in love. In the way a particular way hand rests on a thigh, or two chairs are pushed together so closely the bodies upon them lightly touch, these photos buzz with the electricity of attraction.

Sanford intentionally crops out the faces of her subjects, and frames her snapshots in a retro, circular shape, adding a layer of mystery and universality to the images. Ultimately, whether or not the subjects of these vintage photographs were actually together is, to Sanford, besides the point. "I’m not suggesting that the actual people were gay or lesbian, because in all likelihood they were not," she told Slate. "They become stand-ins as I create an imagined queer history."

The stunning series conjures a remixed history, giving physical form to the desires and romances that surely existed, just kept from view. Meshing categories of past and present, history and imagination, ephemeral and permanent, personal and universal, Sanford creates a dazzling queer history that both does and does not exist. 

"Through the Lens of Desire" is on view at Elizabeth Houston Gallery until August 25, 2016.

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The new cast of the Broadway smash "Hamilton" has been announced, and -- yes -- the actors are as young, scrappy, and hungry as you'd expect.

Here's what we know:

Tony Award nominee Brandon Victor Dixon will take on the role of Aaron Burr beginning sometime in August, replacing the beloved Leslie Odom, Jr. Lexi Lawson will step into the shoes of Eliza Schuyler on July 11, taking over for the "Amelie"-bound Philippa Soo. And on that same day, Javier Muñoz will become Alexander Hamilton (Michael Luwoye will be his alternate) as star and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda departs. 

Dixon is seasoned. He has appeared in "Shuffle Along," "Motown: The Musical," 2005's "The Color Purple" and "The Lion King." (Bonus: he's also appeared in "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," a hilariously valuable experience for Broadway stars, as we learned at this year's Tony Awards.) 

Lawson (whose website is inconveniently under construction) appeared in a touring version of Miranda's first Tony-winning musical, "In the Heights" and "Rent." You might have also caught the actress/singer on "So You Think You Can Dance."

Muñoz, as most of us know by now, has been a part of "Hamilton" for a while as Miranda's alternate. He took over Miranda's role in "Heights" back in 2009 too, so it's safe to say he's ready for the pressure. Before that, he was a full-time manager at 44 1/2 restaurant in New York City.

If you haven't seen "Hamilton" yet, don't worry. A million people are heaving a disgruntled "saaaaaaaame" at this very moment.

But if you read this article and thought, What the heck is "Hamilton"? Whoa. Read this. And this and this and this and this. Then get back to us.

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If imitation is the best form of flattery, then Frida Kahlo would probably feel very flattered by these tattoos. 

The Mexican icon, whose birthday is July 6, was many things: a feminist, an artist, a lover and a resilient survivor of tragedy. And her legacy lives on six decades after her death thanks, in part, to those who've quite literally imprinted her work, words and image on their skin. 

Whether inspired by her most famous works of art or her empowering quotes, there are hundreds of Frida fans who've taken their devotion to the next level with some amazing ink work. 

Check out 31 of our favorite Frida Kahlo-inspired tattoos below.