Individual Radio City Rockettes may opt out of the group’s performance during Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration celebration, management has stated, if they do not wish to appear supportive of the president-elect.

Behind the scenes, however, manager James Dolan’s attitude toward the highly politicized event is more flippant, according to a report from Marie Claire.

Citing a transcript from a private meeting with the dance company, the publication reports that Dolan, who serves as Madison Square Garden executive chairman and Cablevision CEO, encouraged the Rockettes to “tolerate” Trump supporters, some of whom belong to the sexist and white nationalist alt-right movement ― seemingly no matter what.

“I mean, it just sounds like you’re asking us to be tolerant of intolerance,” one dancer reportedly said in the meeting. Other dancers previously expressed concern over backlash and social media abuse the company has received since their performance announcement. 

“Yeah, in a way, I guess we are doing that,” Dolan replied. “What other choices do we have? What else would you suggest?”

Dolan reportedly focused on the idea of “tolerance” during the meeting, which took place Dec. 27, with the largely white group of dancers. He compared some Trump supporters’ hateful messages with those of dissenters writing in protest of the company’s decision to perform, labeling it all “ironic.”

Dolan defended the decision in part by stating that he did not think it would hurt the brand, according to the transcript.

“I would simply say, we’re celebrating a new president, not necessarily this president,” he said. 

The Marie Claire piece comes on the heels of continued reports that the Trump team is having trouble finding performers for his Jan. 20 Inauguration Day. British “X Factor” singer Rebecca Ferguson recently stated she will not agree to perform unless she can sing the anti-racism ballad “Strange Fruit.” 

So far, the Rockettes will be joined by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and “America’s Got Talent” singer Jackie Evancho.

Madison Square Garden, which oversees the Rockettes, stated in response to the story that Dolan “stands behind everything he said during the meeting.” But the company disavowed the anonymous person who produced the recording by suggesting it was made by the same disgruntled dancer who previously spoke out against the inauguration performance. Read MSG’s full statement below: 

This is one person who continues to attempt to represent the entire team of Rockettes. This time it’s in a story that is the result of an unauthorized recording that violated the confidentiality of all of her sister Rockettes. While Mr. Dolan stands behind everything he said during the meeting, no one in that room believed they were speaking publicly. Everyone in the meeting had the chance to speak their mind in a safe setting, and many did. Her secret recording was deceitful and cowardly and has betrayed all of her fellow Rockettes. Posting this story is beneath the ethical standards of Hearst. We are deeply disappointed in their decision to post this story.

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This certainly gives new meaning to the term “lip crayon.”

Clinique’s latest collaboration is sure to tug at your red violet heart strings. Feast your eyes on the new Chubby Stick line, inspired by classic Crayola crayon colors. 

Designed to look like actual crayons, the adorable sticks come in a range of red and pink shades and are even packaged in a classic-looking Crayola box (iconic back-of-the-box sharpener sadly not included).

Each full-size stick is $17, but they’re also sold in a four-pack of minis for $25 and an eight-pack of minis for $49.50. It’s a pretty big jump from the $7.20 we’re used to paying for 64 crayons, but they do provide a much safer option than trying to use actual Crayola products as makeup. 

Now all Clinique needs to do is make a cerulean eyeliner and our lives would be truly, colorfully complete. 

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At 101 years old, abstract painter Carmen Herrera is beyond over the art world’s misogynist double standards.

The prolific artist, whose work is currently on view in New York at The Whitney, didn’t sell her first painting until she was 89 years old, in part a consequence of an artistic climate that underestimated and overlooked women. Nonetheless, she’s worked in a minimal yet incisive style since the 1940s, creating combinations of sharp-edged forms that overlap and intermingle. Most of her paintings feature only two or three colors, taking the shapes of triangles, rectangles and ovals that vibrate at the seams.

In the mid-20th century, Herrera has recalled, it was difficult for any woman artist to make a name for herself ― and nearly impossible for one whose work registered as stylistically masculine. Herrera, whose work was reminiscent of artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt, fell into this category. 

In a recent interview with The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone, Herrera recalled a particular conversation with avant-garde gallery owner Rose Fried, who gave a succinct and wholly infuriating explanation for why, despite her abundant talent, Herrera couldn’t land herself a show. 

“She said, ‘You know, Carmen, you can paint rings around the men artists I have, but I’m not going to give you a show because you’re a woman,’” Herrera recalled. “I felt as if someone had slapped me on the face. I felt for the first time what discrimination was. It’s a terrible thing. I just walked out.”

Fried apparently went on to explain that male artists were in greater need of exhibitions because they had families to support, reasoning Herrera called out as a “lame excuse.” As to whether or not anyone had a right to know why Herrera didn’t have a family to support herself? “That is my business, not yours,” she told Fried.

Despite the misogynistic habits of the art world she was enmeshed in, Herrera kept painting. Today, around 70 years later, despite using a wheelchair and being arthritic, Herrera is still creating work.

And finally, although it took far, far too long, Herrera is receiving the artistic acclaim she’s long deserved. As The New York Times’ Holland Cotter wrote, Herrera is “finally getting the show the art world should have given her 40 or 50 years ago.”

Yet, even now, the art world has far from outgrown its gender biases. While Herrera has finally scored a retrospective, its scope pales in comparison to other exhibitions by men recently on view. 

“Why didn’t the Whitney give Ms. Herrera not just the show she ought to have received some decades ago, but also the show that she deserves today?” Cotter asked. “Meaning a full retrospective on the big stage of the fifth floor, like those the museum bestowed on Frank Stella last fall, or even a slightly more focused look at her oeuvre from maturity on, as in the Stuart Davis survey that’s now in its final weeks. Well-intentioned as it is, ‘Lines of Sight’ gives us just a narrow slice of a career that’s seven decades strong and still going.”

It is clear that there is still much work to be done in terms of gender parity in the creative realm, but Herrera’s resilient style and determined spirit serve as an example of what is possible with hard work and a fierce antipathy for sexism. 

Go see Herrera’s “Lines of Sight” before it closes on January 9, 2017 at The Whitney. 

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The importance and rigidity of gender roles in a Latino household are sometimes ingrained at a young age. But Los Angeles-based filmmaker Gloria Morán wants to change that narrative.

In a recent PSA titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” Jorge Diaz (”Elena of Avalor,” “East Los High”) helps deliver a powerful message about the ways men and women experience machismo at a young age. As he washes the dishes, vacuums and organizes the living room he addresses his daughter with anecdotes about how differently he, his sister and his female cousins were raised. 

Diaz talks about how angry his father was when he found him playing with his mother’s shoes at age 3; how woman in his family were forced to help around the house while boys were allowed to play; and the double standards that some parents have when it comes to dating. 

“I took a backseat to standing up for my cousins or my sister, because everyone else around me assured me that, that was the way things are supposed to be,” Diaz says in the video, which has over 5 million views on Facebook. “It took me some time, but, I know it’s not the way. Being a man is about challenging the script that was handed down to us. And I especially, don’t want you, mi hija, to grow up in a world where you will be told, ‘Boys will be Boys!’” 

(H/T Remezcla)

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Last week Mashable shared a look at a surprising new book meant to posit virtues of the U.S. president-elect.

Its title, Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect & Admiration, is likely off-putting to those who don’t support the normalization of Donald Trump’s manners and mantras. And the book’s author, David King, would agree: His new release is filled with blank pages.

“Despite years of research, we could not find anything to say on this subject, so please feel free to use this book for notes,” reads the book’s Amazon description.

It’s a self-published prank that anti-Trumpers will appreciate ― and an example of how trolling can be harsh without using harsh language. In late 2016, vocal Trump supporters pulled some book-related stunts that seemed less satirical and more harmful, targeting individual writers instead of a public figure.

In November, Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly accrued a number of one-star Amazon reviews on her book Settle for More. Suspiciously, the reviews focused not on the book itself but on choices she made as a debate moderator; once 76 percent of reviewers gave the book just one star, Amazon moved to delete the more nefarious ratings.

In September, a similar attempt was made to bring down the overall rating of Laura Silverman’s Girl Out of Water on Goodreads. Silverman, a Jewish writer who had expressed her political beliefs on Twitter, received a bevy of one-star reviews related to her opinions rather than her writing, before review copies of the book were even sent out. “She is literally worse than Hitler,” one reviewer wrote.

The Amazon ratings on King’s book, on the other hand, are mixed, but uniformly civil. Those who enjoyed the prank took it a step further with puns and limericks; those who didn’t had quips of their own. It all shows that effective satire ― that is, humor that punches up ― can catalyze playful debate.

Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect & Admiration is now available in paperback.

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The Abakuá is an all-male, Afro-Cuban secret society that originated in Nigeria and gained traction in 19th-century Cuba, where African slaves would covertly participate in the mysterious rites and rituals as means of protection and forging community.

Today, the mysterious Abakuá is the only prevalent secret society in Cuba. Through the centuries, one of the fundamental traditions of the brotherhood has remained constant: the secrets of the Abakuá must remain secret, at all costs. 

The weight of this secrecy is palpable in the works of the late master printmaker Belkis Ayón, who made the Abakuá her primary subject matter. Throughout her career, the Afro-Cuban artist used the technique of collography to create sharp and unnerving representations of Abakuá folklore imbued with a feminist, intellectual edge. A retrospective of the artist’s works is on view now for the first time at a U.S. museum.

As part of her unique process, Ayón collaged a variety of textured materials ― from soft paper to sandpaper to vegetable peelings ― onto a cardboard matrix, which she’d then cover with ink and run through a printing press. By layering a wide range of surfaces with different feels and absorbencies, Ayón could precisely control her ink ― whether it came out thick and velvety or delicate and scaly, yielding prints that resembled meticulously sketched drawings. 

Ayón, who was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, became interested in the Abakuá and their mysterious traditions in 1985, when she was making art as a high school student. She was drawn, primarily, to the figure of Sikán, an African princess and the sole female character in Abakuá mythology. 

According to legend, it was Sikán who originally discovered the magic of Abakuá, by accidentally trapping a fish who subsequently spoke to her in the mystical “voice” of Abakuá. Since women were banned from knowing the organization’s deepest secrets, Sikán was sworn to secrecy. The princess, however, gave in to temptation and divulged her forbidden knowledge to her fiancée; her life was sacrificed as a result. 

In Abakuá lore, Sikán is killed for her transgressions. But in Ayón’s works, the figure is brought back to life, in part serving as a proxy for the artist herself. As Ayón put it: “I see myself as Sikán, in a certain way an observer, an intermediary and a revealer,” an exhibition statement from the Fowler Museum recounts her saying. “Sikán is a transgressor, and as such I see her, and I see myself.”  

Like the princess, Ayón tests the limits of secrecy enshrouding the Abakuá, saturating her prints with graphic symbols and visual riddles ― sacred fish, roosters, goats, medallions, and snakes. The foreboding presence of silence bleeds through Ayón’s artistic style, in which humans appear as flattened figures in greyscale hues, endowed with large, expressive eyes and no mouths. 

“These figures can look at you but cannot speak,” art historian Cristina Figueroa explained in an interview with NPR. “So you have to interpret what they’re trying to say through the expressions in their eyes.” 

Furthermore, Ayón injects the all-male narrative of the Abakuá with feminine presence in her prints, accomplishing in art what could never manifest in real life. In “La cena (The Supper),” she riffs off the familiar image of The Last Supper, with Sikán replacing Jesus at the center of the table, and an assembly of lattice-laden shadow figures, also women, at her sides. 

Together Sikán and Ayón challenged a realm of knowledge ordained solely for men, art serving as an alternative means of communication that rests on the power of the eyes, not the tongue. 

Another, more sinister connection between Sikán and Ayón emerged on Sept. 11, 1999, when the artist shot herself with her father’s gun at just 32 years old. At the time of her death, Ayón was already a famed figure in the Cuban art world, having shown at the Venice Biennale in ‘93 and sold works to both MOCA and MoMA. For her loved ones, Ayón’s death was a complete and utter surprise, a mystery oddly akin to the shadowy scenarios that served as her subject matter. 

Cuban police allegedly investigated the possibility that the Abakuá was behind Ayón’s death, perhaps for revealing some fraternal secret or disrespecting its boundaries, but later ruled that suspicion out. The artist’s death was deemed a suicide, a conclusion with which her family agrees. Still, a sense of uncertainty looms over the event; a riddle that will never be fully solved. 

Following her death, Ayón’s family has worked tirelessly to preserve her oeuvre and share it with the world. Her sister gave up her career as a doctor to conserve the works, a challenge outside of a museum in Cuba’s humid atmosphere. It has long been a dream of Ayón’s family to see her work exhibited and celebrated around the world, making her first U.S. retrospective a truly momentous event. 

“Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón” is organized by the Belkis Ayón Estate and Ayón Manso with the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, guest-curated by Cristina Vives-Figueroa. The show, whose title translates to “greeting” and “praise” in the language of Abakuá, is divided into five parts, tracing the evolution of Ayón’s technique and career. 

Recent strides in diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S. have enabled Ayón’s work to travel further than once seemed possible. “Here in Cuba, we always keep hope for everything,” the artist’s niece, Yadira Leyva Ayón, told The LA Times. “And we have hope that now, so many people will see Belkis’ work. It’s important for our culture and our family. She was a very outstanding artist and person. And this way, we keep her alive.”   

“Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón” is on view at The Fowler Museum at UCLA until Feb. 12, 2017. 

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Hundreds of thousands of protestors are expected to flood Washington D.C. on January 21, 2017 to take part in the Women’s March on Washington, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

And thanks to a knitting project that has gone viral, thousands of them will be wearing bright pink and cat-eared “pussy power hats.” 

The Pussyhat Project, which launched over Thanksgiving, is the brainchild of two friends and recreational knitters: screenwriter Krista Suh and architect Jayna Zweiman.

The women were devastated by the election results and looking for ways to channel their grief. With Kat Coyle, owner of their neighborhood knitting shop, they designed a “pussy power hat” pattern ― an extremely simple hat that knitters, crocheters and sewers of all levels can whip up for themselves or for other marchers.

This accessibility is an essential component of the project, the women say. It’s not just about making a strong visual statement on the day of the march, or offering up a symbolic rebuke of Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” comment, though that’s definitely a factor. It’s also about giving people who aren’t able to march for physical, financial or other logistical barriers a concrete way to take part.

“Everyone can participate,” said Zweiman who isn’t attending the the march because she is recovering from an injury that prevents her from being in large crowds. “We’re hearing from people who are saying, ‘I just sprained my ankle and I’m sitting here watching Netflix and it’s the best thing ever.’”

The co-founders have heard from women who tell them that knitting the pattern ― or any pink cat hat of their choosing ― has been a productive way of managing their election-related anger and grief. 

With just a few weeks to go, Suh and Zweiman don’t have an exact sense of how many pink cat-eared hats will be at the march. Partly, it’s because they’re encouraging people to give hats to marchers directly if possible, although they can also be dropped off at participating knit shops across the country that will get them to the march, or shipped directly to the Pussyhat Project. But it’s also because the founders say they’re more concerned with creating community than in reaching any specific distribution goals.

If they had to guess, however, they think anywhere between 30,000 to 100,0000 hats have already been knit, as more than 60,000 people have clicked on the “patterns” section of their website. 

“There’s a man who made 100,” Zweiman said. “We just launched a hat registry, which is new, but we’re seeing the average amount of hats is about seven to eight per person.”

Suh and Zweiman believe the project has struck a nerve because knitting is at once meditative and communal, giving women and men time to, say, reflect on what’s at stake for women’s health under a Trump/Pence administration and to connect with others in yarn shops and in classes.

“For me, a lot of the magic lies in [saying], ‘Hey women of the country, you might not think you’re politically active, but you’re already community organizing in your knitting groups and women’s groups, you just don’t call it that,” Suh said. “The Pussyhat Project calls it that, which is where a lot of the power comes from.”

“We hope,” she added, “these hats will become a symbol long after the march.”

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An intimate and powerful new video from National Geographic is telling the story of one transgender teen undergoing gender confirmation surgery and coming to live more fully as her authentic self.

Seventeen-year-old Emmie Smith allowed her story ― and surgery ― to be documented by NatGeo in conjunction with their January “Gender Revolution” issue, and specifically an article titled “Rethinking Gender.”

Smith, who has a cisgender identical twin, told National Geographic that she hopes the film will help with a growing public understanding about the nuances of gender confirmation surgery. 

“It’s not science fiction or mythology,” Smith said. “It’s what happens to women just trying to be at peace with themselves and their bodies.”

National Geographic first announced its “Gender Revolution” issue, which made history by featuring 9-year-old Avery Jackson on the cover, in mid-December 2016. According to the publication, the issue examines the “cultural, social, biological and personal” aspects of gender identity, and is tied to an upcoming documentary hosted by Katie Couric called “Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric.”

The two-hour documentary is slated to debut on National Geographic on Feb. 6. 

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“Humans Of New York” photographer Brandon Stanton is known for capturing intimate moments in everyday scenarios ― and his most recent work is no exception.

A photo posted to the HONY Facebook page on Monday night features a young woman holding a cell phone with pictures of herself underneath the label “Art.” In the caption, the woman describes the body-positive story behind the beautifully illustrated images. 

She told Stanton that she began modeling for nude art classes last year and was nervous because she’s plus-size. “I was nervous about everyone seeing my stomach, and my thighs, and all my fat,” the caption reads. “But apparently my curves are fun to draw.”

The young woman said she began to see just how beautiful her body is through art. “In the classroom, all the features I saw as negative were viewed as assets. One student told me that it’s no fun to draw straight lines,” she said. “It’s been liberating for me. I’ve always been insecure about my belly. But now my belly has been part of so many beautiful pieces of art.” 

Read the full post below. 

As of Tuesday morning, the photo had more than 170,000 likes and 8,600 shares. 

The best part? An overwhelming number of the 2,600 comments are messages of love, body positivity and support. 

“Plus-sized is a human construct,” one commenter wrote. “You are beautiful, and right-sized.” Another commenter added: “Own your flaws and make them your strengths. No one would like HONY if it was all perfect people living perfect lives. It’s the imperfections that we all relate to that keeps us coming back”

After posting the original photo, Stanton added a second photo in the comments section of the woman sitting on a park bench. 

Truly a work of art. 

Head over to HONY’s Facebook page to see more photos from Stanton. 

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A U.K. dad’s adorable photo series is documenting his son’s growth, with some help from their trusty pet beagle.

For the past two years, photographer Timothy Jones has taken monthly photos of his son Stan sitting in a chair with their 6-year-old dog Jasper. Jones told The Huffington Post the series began when Stan was only 10 days old. 

“Jasper always used to sit in the chair and chill out, and I thought it would be a good picture of the both of them in the chair.” he said. When he looked at that first photo, he knew he had to make it a tradition. “As you can see from the results it’s been worth it!” he said.

Stan, who just celebrated his second birthday on New Year’s Eve, had a viral moment in 2016 after his dad gave him a camera to document the world from his toddler perspective. Jasper made an appearance in those photos, as Stan and the beagle have a special relationship. 

“They get on amazingly,” Jones said. “Jasper was a bit off at first as we basically brought home a screaming poop machine! They are now very affectionate to each other and Stan loves giving him a hug and the odd kiss!”

The dad said he hopes his photos of Stan and Jasper make people smile. “It shows the great relationships that kids have with their pets,” he said. “It’s great for us as a family, as we get to see him change in real life but we also get to capture it in these photos.”

Keep scrolling to see the full two years of photos in chronological order. 

H/T BoredPanda

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Last night Nick Viall made his debut as America’s most eligible (or at least most visible) bachelor. But although Chris Harrison went on and on about how “controversial” Nick has been within the “Bachelor” franchise, the true controversy of the night ended up being about dolphins... and sharks... and the very clear differences between the two. 

One of Nick’s suitors, Alexis, is a self-described dolphin enthusiast and aspiring dolphin trainer. So naturally, she showed up in a dolphin costume on night 1. Except it wasn’t a dolphin costume. It was a shark costume, a la Katy Perry’s Super Bowl Left Shark.

See below:

The dolphin-loving Alexis refused to acknowledge the truth, instead doubling down, continuing to insist that she was in a dolphin costume. But, of course, Bachelor Nation took note:

If any dolphin truthers still exist, please take a look at the two images below. The first, a shark costume, has gills. The second, a dolphin costume, does not. To be clear, sharks are fish, and they breathe through gills as they move through the water; dolphins are mammals, and they breathe by surfacing periodically to take in air through blowholes.

This is a shark costume. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE. 

It may be some comfort to marine biologists and actual dolphin trainers, however, that Alexis appeared to be the only one confused by her costume. In a Buzzfeed community poll, 97 percent of respondents agreed that she was wearing a shark costume. Even as he, perhaps unwisely, offered the hapless aspiring dolphin professional a rose, Nick insisted, firmly, “You’re a shark.” “I’m a dolphin!” she shot back. “Well, agree to disagree,” he said.

Even on the “Bachelor” for Hillary Clinton’s America, the relationship to cold, hard scientific fact is now all Trump’s America.

For more on “The Bachelor” premiere, check out HuffPost’s Here To Make Friends podcast below:

Do people love “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” or do they love to hate these shows? It’s unclear. But here at “Here to Make Friends,” we both love and love to hate them — and we love to snarkily dissect each episode in vivid detail. Podcast edited by Nick Offenberg.

Want more “Bachelor” stories in your life? Sign up for HuffPost’s Entertainment email for extra hot goss about The Bachelor, his 30 bachelorettes, and the most dramatic rose ceremonies ever. The newsletter will also serve you up some juicy celeb news, hilarious late-night bits, awards coverage and more. Sign up for the newsletter here.

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Margaret Atwood knows about political tumult. Twenty years ago, she wrote a classic book about a society’s quick slide into a woman-oppressing dystopia. The title remains relevant; The Handmaid’s Tale is getting adapted for a TV series next year, starring Elisabeth Moss (of “Mad Men” fame).

As an activist and writer of wayward worlds, Atwood is uniquely qualified to comment on political developments. And what she has to say about America’s recent state of affairs is pretty grim. 

In a brief letter in support of and distributed by PEN America, Atwood wrote:

When dictators of any kind, in any country, achieve power, they clamp down on writers and journalists first, because writers and journalists are alternative and frequently dissenting voices. 

The Canadian author continued, “America has always prided itself on being a country where the freedom to write is valued. Please support and preserve that value.” She also referenced a line from The Handmaid’s Tale, connecting it with today’s environment of fake news and “cyberbullying from the corridors of our power.”

While Atwood doesn’t name names in her plea, her implication is clear: Donald Trump’s many attempts to discredit the media are more than bad omens. They’re deliberate steps toward limiting freedom of thought.

Atwood isn’t the first to make this claim. In a post headlined “Trump Won. The Media Lost. What Next?” NPR writes that the president-elect “avidly campaigned against” journalists. And his win hasn’t halted his media-shaming tweets.

The plot of The Handmaid’s Tale is set in 2005, after the spread of false information ― a staged terrorist attack ― leads to the speedy renunciation of the Constitution, and revocation of women’s rights. In her letter, Atwood makes it clear that she doesn’t view her story as a playful “what if” scenario, but a warning against a possible future. 

Read our interview with Margaret Atwood.

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If you’re getting into the “new year, new you” groove and cleaning out your closet, then you undoubtedly have stuff to give away and/or donate.

For those of you with books that you’re ready to Marie Kondo out of there, here’s where they can go:

1. Books For Africa

In an effort to “end the book famine in Africa,” Books For Africa collects, sorts, ships and distributes books to students in Africa. Just last year the organization raised $2.5 million to ship books to students.

2. Liberation Library

Liberation Library supplies youths in prison with books to “encourage imagination, self-determination and connection to the outside worlds of their choosing.” They offer many different ways to be a part of their effort that surpass just book donations, but if you want to donate books via their Amazon wish list, you can do so here.

3. Pickup Please

Pickup Please is run by the Vietnam Veterans of America and sells your donated items to private companies who support veterans around the country. You can donate almost anything, too ― clothing, shoes, accessories, jewelry, house and glassware, books, toys, bikes, stereos, radios, portable TVs, small electronics, tools, etc.

The organization will also pick up your donations within 24 hours. To see where this service is available, check here.

4. Goodwill

You’ve probably donated other stuff to Goodwill, but they also accept used book donations for their resale stores. The proceeds from your donations will do things like fund job training and placement programs for individuals facing unemployment challenges. Drop-off locations can be found here.

5. Operation Paperback

Operation Paperback collects gently used books and sends them to American troops overseas and veterans/military families at home.

6. Books4Cause.com

Books4Cause.com manages book and electronic donations through city book donations in places like NYC, Chicago, and Miami, as well as through college campus book drives.

Donations to the site have have helped create a free bookstore in Skokie, Illinois, develop libraries and education programs in Africa, and keep “more than 500K books out of landfills.” You can donate books here. 

7. Books For Soldiers

Books for Soldiers allows donors to create care packages with their used books and send them to deployed soldiers overseas. Once you’ve signed up to be a volunteer on the site, you can scope out specific books soldiers are requesting, though many just ask for anything.  

8. Your local public library

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Carrie Fisher died unexpectedly at the age of 60 on Dec. 27, 2016, but her legacy certainly lives on.

The actress proved herself a prolific writer in her lifetime and, according to her publisher Simon & Schuster, her books have seen a massive uptick in sales since her death.

President and publisher of Simon & Schuster Publishing Group Jonathan Karp told Entertainment Weekly that the publishing house is “quickly reprinting her books” to meet the overwhelming demand.

“All of them have remained in print, but our supply was wiped out by demand. We’ll have more books this week,” Karp told EW.

The publisher has ordered an additional 50,000 copies of Fisher’s titles, including her memoirs, Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic, and her novels, Postcards from the Edge and The Best Awful.

Fisher’s latest memoir, The Princess Diarist, came out last year and, since her death, has climbed to the top of the Amazon’s best-sellers list. 

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These pictures are not your average wedding photos. 

On Monday, Junebug Weddings released their annual “Best of the Best Wedding Photography Collection,” featuring their picks for the top 50 wedding images of 2016. 

They received nearly 9,000 submissions from photographers in 50 different countries. 

“What makes me so proud of this year’s collection is that you can feel the emotions of a wedding day through these 50 images. It’s a powerfully emotive experience,” editor-in-chief Carrie Schwab said in a press release.

Below, see 25 of our favorite photos from the collection. To see the rest of the award-winning images, head over to the Junebug Weddings site. 

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It’s long been known that Jonathan Franzen hates the internet and, well, the internet doesn’t exactly love him either.

From his writing about women to his comments on being a man (”It’s like there’s no way to make myself not male”) to his lack of a diverse friend group (”I don’t have very many black friends”), Franzen hasn’t done much to ingratiate himself with the people of the World wide Web.

As such, it’s no surprise that the polemical writer of works such as The Corrections and Purity was most recently the butt of a joke.

This isn’t a drill: Ciswhitemale.com actually takes you to Franzen’s Facebook fan page.

Also, if you search the ciswhitemale.com site on Google, you get this delightful search result: 

2017 is going to be a hoot, isn’t it? 

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Last week The Washington Post reported on a Virginia bill proposal that would force school districts to highlight which books on a given syllabus contain sensitive or “sexually explicit” material.

“All local school boards would be required to set up a way for parents to opt out of objectionable materials; teachers would have to provide replacement texts for those who ask for them,” Washington Post writes.

News of the bill proposal, reportedly being drafted and considered by the Virginia Board of Education, comes shortly after two classic novels were pulled from the bookshelves of Accomack County Public Schools in Virginia. 

The proposal resembles a bill that the state’s governor vetoed last year. Nevertheless, its implications have educators and activists vocally worried.

The chief concern: such a rule could prevent young readers from accessing stories of literary and educational merit. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha -- celebrated classics -- are among the many books that’ve been banned or challenged due to sexual content since 2014.

And, in the past, books deemed “sexually explicit” have often been titles featuring queer characters or women asserting their sexual personhood. For access to be cut off to such stories could be damaging to kids who otherwise have no way of meeting fictional representations of their own experiences. According to the American Library Association, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about two male penguins raising a baby penguin, is regularly featured on the organization's annual list of most-challenged titles.

If a progressive book (or, at least, an innocuous one) is regularly red-flagged, it seems that red-flagging could put any title -- classic or new and innovative -- at risk.

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Twenty years ago, JonBenét Ramsey, 6-year-old daughter of a wealthy Colorado family, was murdered. Three months ago, CBS aired a documentary special about the case, which remains unsolved. The panel of investigators concluded that, though viewers should make up their own minds, the evidence pointed to her brother, Burke Ramsey, who was 9 years old at the time. This week, Burke Ramsey sued CBS for $750 million, claiming he suffered “permanent damage” to his reputation.

CBS isn’t alone in searching for that true crime breakout hit to compete with investigative dramas like the first season of the podcast “Serial” or the documentary series “Making a Murderer” and “The Jinx.” The relentless hunt for details in cases like the Ramsey murder can become grotesque and exploitative, especially when no further truths are brought to light, but it’s rooted in an understandable human urge: When confronted with a horrific crime, we want to know everything, to make sense of it. Who did such a thing? Why? How? What is the correct response?

This thirst for clear-cut answers chafes with literary fiction’s emphasis on nuance, ambiguity and a willingness to end without tidy summations. So in Idaho, a literary novel about a horrific and baffling crime, the tension between what author Emily Ruskovich will reveal and what readers long to know can be excruciating. Told from the perspectives of Ann, the loving younger wife of a man who tragically lost his family; Jenny, his ex-wife; and Jenny’s cellmate, Idaho obsesses obliquely over the horrifying moment that tore apart Jenny and Wade’s family.

When the novel opens, eight years into Ann and Wade’s marriage, she’s still gripped with a need to understand what happened before they got married. The sudden death of his younger daughter, May, and the disappearance of his other daughter June, has scarred her husband’s life, but Ann has never felt right probing for details beyond what he offered freely, which were scarce. Now, at 50, he’s succumbing slowly to some form of early onset dementia, and the moments when he seems to forget he ever had another wife or children at all are growing frequent. Looking back on the years since they met, and their loving but shadowed marriage, she longs to piece together what happened before his memory has completely slipped away.

Ann, who grew up in England, came to Idaho in her late 20s looking for a change. Teaching music at a local school, she develops a tender spot for Eliot, a high school boy who lost a leg in a freak accident (falling through a rotting pier where he’d ventured to find his backpack); so did June, Wade’s young daughter, whom Ann catches leaving a love token for the older boy at his locker. In reaching out to June’s family to discuss the incident, Ann meets Wade, who begins to come by for piano lessons in hopes of fending off the mental slippage that has plagued his older family members. Later, she sees the horrific news reports about her student. When Wade comes back for another lesson, many months after his daughter’s death, Ann simply and quietly offers to marry him. 

Meanwhile, in a women’s penitentiary, Jenny is quietly wasting away. Abasing herself in service to other inmates, she almost relishes her lifelong imprisonment, knowing that she at least has been given a punishment she knows she deserves.

Early in the novel, it becomes clear that Jenny is the reason May and June have been lost, though the violent killing of her youngest daughter hardly seems to square with everything else we learn of Wade’s first wife, his teenage sweetheart. It’s Ann, years later, who seems to struggle with this fatal contradiction, hoping to find what subtle but explosive impetus might have snapped something in her predecessor’s mind. For Jenny, no search for motives or explanations can matter, not because she necessarily understands what she did, but because understanding it will change neither her guilt nor the loss of her daughters.

Ruskovich’s prose, which keenly captures the harsh beauty of the Idaho mountains where the novel takes place, can be intoxicating; the sticky sourness of lemonade and the sting of woody smoke in the air hit the reader almost viscerally in the tastebuds and nose.

Yet the forceful, crackling life of her scenery isn’t quite matched by the characters that move within it. By giving the narration of the novel mostly to its women, Ruskovich sets Wade, the man at its heart, to the side. Aside from jumbled memories of his early years, his romance with Jenny, we hear little directly from him. The result, perhaps intentional, is that he remains a cipher, from the shape of his mourning to the possible shades of guilt, rage, heartbreak and betrayal that might lie underneath it.

Despite the closeness with which we observe Ann, however, her feelings and actions still seem enigmatic as well. She adores her husband so much she builds her life completely around his comfort, but why? Why does she rush to care for him, marry him, so soon after the tragedy he suffered, when he is a relative stranger? Why the lingering fascination, which she can never shake, with his ex-wife? Jenny, with her far more profound potential to reveal, offers no why or how either; aside from her insistent need to be left in prison for life, she, too, is mostly unreadable. Whole threads of the plot ― Ann and June’s shared crush on Eliot, and his later reappearance in the narrative ― seem adrift from the heart of the book.

At times, Idaho seems to be taunting readers with our own desire to know. The book constantly dances toward revelations about the fatal day, then spins away, leaving us to grapple with our own obscene need to find out such private, incomprehensible secrets. But by that token, setting an entire novel around such a shocking act, without justifying its presence through some meaningful psychological exploration or other excavation of truth, bears its own whiff of needless prurience. It’s a novel about the psychological ripples of an unthinkable crime, but it ultimately wavers when it comes to laying bare the psyches of its subjects, which remain too opaque to be revelatory.

The Bottom Line:

Lyrical, sharply beautiful prose washes through Idaho, a dark and poignant debut that never quite manages to bring its characters to life yet remains gripping from beginning to end.

What other reviewers think:

Kirkus: “Ruskovich builds poetry out of observing the smallest details — moments of narrative precision and clarity that may not illuminate what happened the day of the murder but which push the reader to interrogate the limits of empathy.”

The A.V. Club: “Idaho is sad, but not despairingly so. Ruskovich’s prose is lyrical but keen, a poem that never gets lost in its own rhythm.”

Who wrote it?

Emily Ruskovich received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published short fiction in outlets including One Story and Zoetrope. In 2015, she won an O. Henry Award for her short story “Owl.” Ruskovich grew up in northern Idaho. Idaho is her debut novel.

Who will read it?

Readers who love beautiful nature writing and stories about the dark side of humanity. 

Opening lines:

“They never drove the truck, except once or twice a year to get firewood. It was parked just up the hill in front of the woodshed, where it collected rain in the deep dents on the hood and mosquito larvae in the rainwater. That was the way it was when Wade was married to Jenny, and that’s the way it is now that he is married to Ann.”

Notable passage:

“As soon as school was out, they were married. She quit her job. He held her and she breathed in the smell of his coat, moving her cheek against him in disbelief that this was what they felt. But it was; it had been all along. She moved into his small house on the mountain an hour north of the school, where he ― they ― raised goats for meat and milk, he trained dogs and made knives, and she gave piano lessons in their home. Adult students only, no children. She boiled the chickens she raised and ate soup with Wade at night. They made love under the scratchy wool blanket, found surprise in each other’s ordinariness, safety in each other’s pleasure.

“She pounded her own boots against a post to get the mud off, and set them down on the porch beside his. 

“She dragged the firewood down the hill in a blue sled.

“Sometimes, she sang.

“She loved him so much that there was never anything else she might have done.”

Idaho
By Emily Ruskovich
Random House, $27.00
Publishes Jan. 3, 2017

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

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With 2017 underway, it’s high time we fête the previous year’s movies with a bushel of prestigious awards. In other words, Oscar season is realer than ever. With the Golden Globes helping to ring in the new year on Sunday, Jan. 8, we have a fairly clear portrait of how the Hollywood derby is shaking out.

Having surveyed the Best Actress, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress contests back in 2016, it’s now time for a Best Supporting Actor overview.

This is a crazy category. Mahershala Ali (”Moonlight”) appears to be the definitive pacesetter, but the precursors have thrown some curveballs, namely with the Golden Globes nominating Aaron Taylor-Johnson (”Nocturnal Animals”) and Simon Helberg (”Florence Foster Jenkins”) out of nowhere. But keep in mind the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has no membership overlap with the Academy, and we can only afford them so much clout. With that in mind, here are the Best Supporting Actor contenders, ranked according to the probability of their nomination.

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