Bidding Westeros adieu might not be painless, but it will be quick.

During a South by Southwest panel on Sunday, “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss revealed that the eighth and final season, airing next year, will have only six episodes. 

Season 7, which premieres July 16, will feature seven episodes. Each prior season spans 10.

Having wrapped Season 7, Benioff and Weiss are beginning the writing process for next year’s denouement. No ice-melting premiere date has been announced. 

In other “Game of Thrones” news out of SXSW, Ed Sheeran will have a cameo in the upcoming season. Benioff and Weiss didn’t divulge the singer’s role, but it looks like the HBO smash could be Sheeran’s Castle Black on the Hill. 

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With a harrowing series of animations, the humanitarian group Save the Children hopes to show how the crisis in Syria is taking its toll on the psychological well-being of refugee children.

The animated images, produced by photographer Nick Ballon and artist Alma Haser, interpret the haunting audio, in which the children and their family members talk about how the war has made them feel.

The photos were all taken near the Syria-Turkey border, according to a release from Save the Children. Haser altered those images by ripping, cutting, folding or crumpling the paper to visualize the children’s experiences.

“I hate it when I am alone,” 9-year-old Hassan says in the animation below. (All the refugees’ names have been changed to protect their privacy and security.)

After seeing his father shot dead at point-blank range, Hassan became withdrawn and began stammering, according to Save the Children.

“When I get afraid my body starts shaking,” Hassan says in the recording, as the image starts crumpling into the shape of wings. “I dream of a big bird, bigger than me, that I can ride it and fly away.”

After six years of war, almost half of the country’s population has been displaced, according to the nonprofit Syrian Center for Policy Research. The United Nations says some 5 million Syrians are now refugees.

Kids in Syria are living in constant fear, Save the Children found in a recent report. Some wet the bed, some try to harm themselves, some even try to kill themselves. Mental health experts warned that the “toxic stress” from “prolonged exposure to war, stress and uncertainty” may have lifelong negative impacts on the children’s mental and physical health.

“Our report is the first in-depth look at the mental health of these kids, and the psychological scars are dramatic,” Greg Ramm, the vice president of humanitarian response at Save the Children, told HuffPost. “But reports and statistics and numbers can be numbing. What the images are trying to do is to take those numbers and put a name and face of a child to them, and make it real.” 

Seven-year-old Razan is pictured in the animation below, but her sister does the speaking. Razan was pulled alive from the rubble of an attack that left her without parents, according to Save the Children.

“She is no longer Razan,” her sister says in the animation. “She looks like Razan. … But she is absent. … She never came back to how she was before.”

With these videos, Save the Children said it hopes to break through “the now familiar news imagery of Syria’s war.” Millions of people have seen the pictures of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, aka “the boy in the ambulance,” and 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, whose body was found washed ashore in Turkey.

“People do become desensitized to six years of war,” Ramm said. “We hope these images provide a fresh look at what’s going on ― because the situation in Syria and the surrounding countries has not gotten any better just because it’s not in the news.” 

The children featured in the series are living as refugees near the Syria-Turkey border, either in homes or residential centers, according to Save the Children. All of them receive some form of counseling or psychological support through the humanitarian group.

“At my aunt’s house my cousins all died,” 9-year-old Nesreen says in the animation above. “I hope my voice will be heard by everyone. ... We don’t want anything else, just help for Syria.”

By executive order, President Donald Trump has banned refugees from entering the U.S. for at least four months and cut the total number of refugees to be admitted for resettlement this fiscal year from 110,000 to 50,000.

“If you’ve fled your home, and you have some hope people around the world will offer help to restart your life, the message you get is, ‘You’re not welcome here,’” Ramm said of Trump’s ban. “That’s why people of goodwill need to stand with these refugees, support programs that help them, but also speak out. Call on our government to do the right thing by refugees.”

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Ava DuVernay’s adaption of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time won’t be out until 2018. But after wrapping principal photography over the weekend, the director shared some photos of her cast that reminded us just how many famous people are gonna be in this movie. 

They include: Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Reese Witherspoon, André Holland, Zach Galifianakis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Rowan Blanchard, Chris Pine and, playing Meg Murry, Storm Reid. 

Seems like they all had a good time together.

“A Wrinkle in Time” follows the story of Meg, who goes in search of her missing scientist father with help from her friend Calvin O’Keefe (Levi Miller) and a trio of supernatural beings, Mrs. Whatsit (Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Kaling) and Mrs. Which (Winfrey).

“She does it all. Happiness. Heartbreak. Action. Emotion,” DuVernay said of the 13-year-old Reid, who appeared in “12 Years a Slave,” over Twitter.

“Our hero. In the story. And on the set.”  

Meanwhile, Oprah claimed her on-set throne in the shape of a carved tree trunk.

Check out more behind-the-scenes photos below.

”A Wrinkle in Time” hits theaters April 6, 2018.

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With fireworks and Cher sparking the moment, this proposal couldn’t miss.

Colton Haynes of “Teen Wolf” and “Arrow” fame announced his engagement to Jeff Leatham on Sunday, with pyrotechnics lighting up the sky and the “Believe” singer giving her blessing on a video monitor.

“I SAID YES!” Haynes, 28, captioned an Instagram photo of himself locked in a kiss with Leatham in Los Cabos, Mexico.

Cher set up the proposal in a video that appeared on a screen next to the pair, telling them, “I got you, babe.” (She also sang the song as well, People reported.) 

After the video played, Leatham took a knee (per Us Magazine) and popped the question ― successfully, of course! Bruno Mars’ “Marry You” played as the couple celebrated, People noted.

Haynes publicly came out as gay in May 2016. In February, he took to social media to praise his beau, a florist. “It’s not every day that someone comes into your life & makes you want to be a better man,” Haynes wrote.

Congrats to the happy couple!

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When a loved one welcomes a new baby, you naturally want to shower them with warm embraces, helpful gifts and celebratory cards.

But sometimes the real message you want to convey can’t be found in a classic greeting card. Still, there are many other options.

We’ve rounded up 39 creative, hilarious and brutally honest cards for new parents.

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Photographer Lauren Greenfield was rummaging through approximately half a million photos she’d taken over the past 25 years. The images chronicle the Western world’s spiraling obsession with consumption and celebrity, part of her extensive project “Generation Wealth.” Specifically, Greenfield was looking for potentially overlooked connections to help round out her visual story, which starts with MTV-crazed teenagers and ends somewhere around the election of President Donald Trump. 

Greenfield zeroed in on a photo she had previously disregarded, showing a group of bored looking preteens huddled in the hallway of a Los Angeles private school dance, wearing ripped jeans, T-shirts and plaid button-downs. When she took the photo in 1992, Greenfield recognized two of the partygoers as the daughters of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, but didn’t think much of it. Looking back, she realized she’d unwittingly captured Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, two individuals who embody the very dreams of status and spectacle she’d spent decades exploring. 

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenfield expanded upon the Kardashian’s immense influence over contemporary generations. To explain, she cites sociologist and economist Juliet Schor, who wrote the introduction to Greenfield’s monograph. “According to Schor, in America, people used to compare themselves to the person down the road,” she said. “Someone who had a little bit more than they did. Keeping up with the Joneses.”

Today, however, we’re no longer comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but with the chimerical images we encounter on TV screens and social media feeds. As Greenfield put it: “Now we’re ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’ comparing our houses to what we see on ‘MTV Cribs.’” The latter reference is a bit dated, but it brings us back to the project’s origins in 1992, when Greenfield first began documenting her hometown of Los Angeles.

Greenfield returned to LA after completing her first photographic assignment as an intern for National Geographic. She’d been documenting a Zinacantec Maya village in Mexico ― an “exotic” culture she knew little about. “I realized I wanted to come back to my hometown and photograph my own culture,” she said. So she returned to her high school, Crossroads, an elite private school frequented by families with Hollywood ties, whose students were constantly competing with blowout Bar Mitzvahs, expensive cars and designer purses. 

Greenfield’s first series, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” focuses on the impact of media saturation on youth culture in LA. “It was the beginning of MTV,” Greenfield said. “I was seeing how rich kids, influenced by hip-hop, wanted to be like the kids of the inner city with this idea of ‘bling,’” she said. Those same kids living in inner cities, in turn, yearned to be rich. The series revealed that the appeal of wealth and fame crossed boundaries of race, class or background; most young Los Angelenos were driven by a desire for status and attention. 

“Money affects kids in many ways,” Adam, a 13-year-old subject of Greenfield’s, explained to her in a 1994 interview, the first she ever conducted. In the photo alongside Adam’s interview, he’s pictured as a pudgy pubescent grinding with a go-go dancer at his nightclub-themed Bar Mitzvah. “It has ruined a lot of kids I know,” he continued. “It has ruined me — wearing a Rolex watch to school or just buying a $200 pair of shoes. I take flying lessons. I mean, I know a person who has a soccer field and an indoor basketball court. But that person’s dad is going to jail.”

Greenfield recalled the impact Adam’s words had on her back in 1994. “I was so amazed by the acute perceptions that a kid right in the middle of it had,” she said. “I was very moved that he could see it and be critical of it and still be affected by it.”

Greenfield has interviewed and photographed young people in bathtubs and dressing rooms, at weight loss camps and eating disorder clinics, in the middle of a face lift, and just after a chemical peel ― the “Rolls Royce of rejuvenation” ― their face still coral and bubbling. “They are the truth tellers in this work,” Greenfield said, referring to her subjects. “The story, for the most part, is in their words.”

“I would say usually the people are comfortable because they kind of have to be to do this work,” Greenfield put it. To earn their trust, her process entails a lot of, in her words, hanging out. She spends weeks, months or even years with her subjects, waiting to catch that single shot that communicates something bigger. “There is no staging, there is only capturing moments. For me, it’s about trying to find moments that speak to the culture. Sometimes I understand the photos’ significance at the time, oftentimes I don’t.”

Greenfield’s extensive photographic project features 14 chapters, each focusing on a particular population, fixation or epidemic. “New Aging” explores society’s rejection of aging and the ways medicine and technology conspire to prevent its effects. In one image, a woman receives a post-operative mani-pedi in a luxury surgery-aftercare facility, her entire face covered by a mask of bandages with holes for her eyes, nose and mouth. 

“The Princess Brand” documents how even the innocent exercise of playing dress-up initiates young girls’ obsessions with luxury and desirability. Greenfield captures girls as young as 4 years old, wearing their mothers’ high heels, striking a seductive pose for the camera. Juxtaposed with “New Aging,” the series hints at how aging adults and young girls chase the same impossible ideal.

“I started to think about the connections,” Greenfield said. “The connection between a little girl and her precocious sexualization and the woman who decides to become a prostitute because she doesn’t want to make $20,000 a year anymore as a social worker, to Jackie Siegel, who decides being a beauty queen will get her closer to the American dream than her engineering degree.”

The various threads of Greenfield’s story converged during the financial crash of 2008, when her anthropological experiment suddenly resembled a morality tale. “We had lost sight of what is important and what really matters,” she said. “The crash was an opportunity to take stock of that and document this pain, pain that stretched from the working class to the ultra rich.” 

The following year, Greenfield made the documentary film “The Queen of Versailles,” which follows time-share mogul David Siegel and his third wife, Jackie, after their quest to build the largest home in the country was brutally interrupted by financial turmoil.

“In the new house it’s going to be hard to communicate with each other,” Jackie says in one interview. “Even in this house, I could scream right now and no one would hear me. I could yell for Marissa to come here, and she wouldn’t come. I have to use my cell phone. In the new house, we will have Segways to go around the house.”

Although there are urgent moral undertones to Greenfield’s project, she never casts judgment on her individual subjects. Rather, she portrays every person, from a former assembly line worker at General Motors to the sex worker famous for citing Charlie Sheen as a client, as reflections of the same cultural phenomenon. “We’re all susceptible to it,” Greenfield said. “We all become addicted.”

Greenfied’s book includes an interview with social critic Chris Hedges, who illuminates just how pervasive our generation’s preoccupation with status has become. “Celebrity culture functions like a religion,” he said, continuing:

“For one thousand years the Catholic Church ruled Europe by creating massive stained-glass windows with images of torment and hell and damnation and salvation to control society. Today we have electronic images of celebrity and wealth that do the same thing. We worship narcissistic monsters. The drive to become a celebrity is at its core a drive to become immortal. What you’re seeking is an unattainable perfection. You’re seeking essentially to become a god.”

Of course, people react to the cult of celebrity differently, with certain populations more susceptible than others. “I think the power of capitalism, and exploiting addiction in general, is looking for insecurities and weaknesses,” Greenfield said. “Everybody that has insecurities becomes a very good consumer. The way marketing works is, if you buy this thing, it will fix what you feel is missing.”

She continued to express that, though both men and women are prone to the bottomless desire for acquisition, women are societally conditioned to determine their self-worth based on their desirability. As a result, they sometimes veer from coveting commodities to becoming commodities themselves. The last chapter in the series, “Make It Rain,” visualizes this sentiment, peering into nightclubs where men shower cash onto nude dancers’ bodies. 

Today, Greenfield’s series inevitably calls to mind Trump’s rise to power ― and whether it was really that shocking at all. “It was kind of amazing because I was finishing the work over the past year while I was watching his campaign and, then, seeing him take the highest office in the land,” Greenfield recalled, “it was almost like an uncanny expression of what the work is about — proof that it was all real.” 

Trump, with his gold-plated skyscrapers and his penchant for treating women as property, is the living embodiment of “Generation Wealth.” As Greenfield put it: “His brand mixes business and celebrity and beauty pageants and power and real estate and your name as big as possible. He represented all the values of the work in their most extreme form ― his addiction to attention and admiration and even his use of Twitter.”

The sweeping “Generation Wealth” exhibition, featuring 195 prints and 42 first-person interviews, goes on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography next month. The show is based in the heart of Los Angeles, a mere five miles from Greenfield’s high school. The photos offer authentic portrayals of artifice and abundance in their many manifestations. Either dazzling or deeply disturbing, the series, 25 years in the making, offers a gold-encrusted portrait of our time. 

“I hope this provokes discussion about our values and where we are going,” Greenfield said. “It’s clear our current path is unsustainable ― environmentally and morally. It’s a value system that leads to exhaustion, collapse, and no satisfaction.”

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here. 

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The house at 30 East Livingston Street is officially off the market. 

Conceptual artist Adam Pendleton, sculptor and painter Rashid Johnson, collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher and painter Julie Mehretu teamed up to purchase the Tryon, North Carolina, home for $95,000. The space is significant because it is where the late iconic soul singer and civil rights activist Eunice Kathleen Waymon, also known as Nina Simone, grew up. 

Simone was born in 1933, the sixth child of a handyman and a Methodist minister. She grew up in racially segregated North Carolina, where she took piano lessons and sang in school recitals. She eventually left home to study at Juilliard in New York in 1950. 

The house where Simone grew up went on the market in 2016, having been owned by Kevin McIntyre since 2005. McIntyre spent $100,000 restoring the home to its 1930s state, and hoped one day to turn it into a museum and community center. Due to money troubles, however, he was forced to sell it. 

“It took me about five seconds to know what I wanted to do,” artist Pendleton told The New York Times, “and I called Rashid and we talked and we knew we wanted to get women artists involved, and it all happened very quickly.” Before seeing the house in person, Pendleton recruited Gallagher and Mehretu and quietly purchased the space. 

The four artists who now own the legendary house use disparate media to address questions of race and identity in relation to history and creative expression. “I think for us there was a kind of symbolic value to four artists stepping forward and saying we’re going to support and preserve the legacy of an artist like Nina Simone,” Pendleton told WNYC. 

“It gives Nina the notoriety she deserves,” Cindy Viehman, the realtor who sold the house, told The Tryon Daily Bulletin. “The house sold itself because it has its own feeling and history. It’s a preserved piece of history and the buyers have no plans to move it. It’s a tiny house, but if you think about how many people lived it, back in the 1930s, that’s how it was.”

The artists don’t yet have concrete plans for the future of the home. Pendleton explained to WNYC that he and the others artists would like to “reactivate the site so it doesn’t become a dead place.” 

We look forward to seeing what becomes of Simone’s childhood home, a space with a rich past and a future ripe with potential.

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Scarlett Johansson and Aidy Bryant said the ladies of “Saturday Night Live” proudly participated in last Wednesday’s “Day Without A Woman” strike, taking off work and leaving the sketch-writing to their male co-workers.

And, well, it didn’t go that smoothly.

In the new skit, the two welcome viewers by explaining they took the day off last Wednesday and haven’t seen the sketch they’re about to perform that was written by their two male co-workers Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett. The four sit down at a table and begin discussing women’s issues in light of International Women’s Day ― but the only people who get to speak in the script are the two men. 

Bennett and Mooney go on and on about sexual harassment, equal pay, sexism on the internet and how horrible these issues are. Johansson and Bryant only get to speak when they read lines thanking the kind feminist men. “Thank you for saying that,” the two say in unison, reading off the teleprompter visibly confused. 

The two faux feminist dudes even venture to discuss how hard it must be for women to experience microagressions on a daily basis. But, of course, they don’t ask women to talk about their experiences. 

As John Oliver said on this week’s “Last Week Tonight,” it really is entertaining to see how men handle talking about International Women’s Day. “Every year, the best way of gaging not just how far women have come,” Oliver said. “But perhaps how far they still have to go, is by watching powerful men around the world trip over their dicks talking about the day.”

Well put, as always, John. 

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The publishing industry may currently seem awash in celebrity-penned fantasy novels, short fiction by movie stars and problematic screeds by problematic provocateurs with hefty social media followings ― but a newly published short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that viewing publishers as greedy and exploitative is nothing new.

In “The I.O.U.,” a man relates the saga of a nonfiction work he published. Written by one of his previously successful authors, Dr. Harden, a “psychic-research man,” the new book promises to be even more lucrative thanks to its tear-jerking subject. Harden’s nephew, Cosgrove Harden, had been killed in World War I, and his uncle’s work recounts “his psychic communion through various mediums with this nephew.”

The publisher touts Harden’s intellectual bona fides and praises the book’s sensitivity and nobility.

His book was neither callous nor credulous. There was a fundamental seriousness underlying his attitude. For example, he had mentioned in his book that a young man named Wilkins had come to his door claiming that the deceased had owed him three dollars and eighty cents. He had asked Dr. Harden to find out what the deceased wanted done about it. This Dr. Harden had steadfastly refused to do. He considered that such a request was comparable to praying to the saints about a lost umbrella.

Unfortunately for the businessman, salivating over the sale of “huge crates” that had been shipped “to a thousand points of the literate compass,” a dramatic wrench is thrown into the works. Fitzgerald shows him scrambling to protect his profits, at the expense of editorial integrity.

Readers would expect nothing less, of course, given Fitzgerald’s introduction of the man:

I would rather bring out a book that had an advance sale of five hundred thousand copies than have discovered Samuel Butler, Theodore Dreiser, and James Branch Cabell in one year. So would you if you were a publisher.

(In case we’re not clear, it’s the role of publisher, not the individual man, that is corrupt.)

Fitzgerald wrote “The I.O.U.” in 1920, at the age of 23. Originally intended for Harper’s Bazaar, the manuscript wound up back with the author after he requested time to make revisions. He never sent it on for publication.

Though the story mocks publishing for mercenary motives, Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of an upcoming collection of lost Fitzgerald stories, noted that “[s]hort stories were Fitzgerald’s bread and butter,” adding that he “was acutely aware of how much he could make, quickly, with stories.” 

Given his famously enormous living expenses, this was probably a wise strategy.

Read the full story at The New Yorker.

Every Friday, HuffPost’s Culture Shift newsletter helps you figure out which books you should read, art you should check out, movies you should watch and music should listen to. Sign up here.

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”She’s a woman who knows what she wants ― and knows what she’s doing,” murmurs a sensual voiceover to a “Saturday Night Live” parody ad for an Ivanka Trump fragrance.

Now, the perfume’s name ― Complicit ― is enjoying a popularity boost familiar to words associated with President Donald Trump: It’s surging in lookups on Merriam-Webster.com, according to the site’s blog.

“Complicit” sits atop the current trending list, above “neophyte,” “incredulous,” “refute,” and “recuse.”

The “SNL” spoof ad, starring host Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka Trump, promotes a fictional perfume, Complicit, dubbing it “the fragrance for the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.”

The voiceover slyly mocks Ivanka’s brand as an empowered woman and feminist, as well as a glamorous socialite. It’s an image, the spot suggests, that juxtaposes poorly with the visible and reportedly influential role she plays in her father’s campaign and administration. It specifically calls out her failure to distance herself from her father’s campaign after the infamous Access Hollywood tape leaked. The tape featured an audio recording of Trump apparently confessing to grabbing women by their genitals without prior consent.

“A feminist, an advocate, a champion for women ― but, like, how?” the voiceover purrs at one point.

Answers may vary on that front, but one thing is clear: “Complicit” is an adjective meaning “helping to commit a crime or do wrong in some way.”

Just so we all know.

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A large-scale humanities festival of arts and ideas is underway this week in New York City, bringing together LGBTQ artists and creatives from across the spectrum of personal identities.

Presented by New York Live Arts, this year’s “Mx’D Messages” festival is curated by Justin Vivian Bon and Elizabeth Koke. “Mx’D Messages” asks the question: what would it be like to live in a world without binaries ― across the lines of “gender, politics, theology, sensory perception and race”?

Roughly 75 different artists, activists and speakers are scheduled to be involved with “Mx’D Messages,” including Laverne Cox, Kate Bornstein, Hari Nef, Colin Self and more.

“When we started to put this festival together, the 2016 election hadn’t happened yet,” Bond and Koke said in a joint statement sent to The Huffington Post. “Now that it has, this festival really feels like an important intersectional gathering of queer community. Civil rights are under attack, and creative expression is threatened. ‘Mx’d Messages’ is creating space and time to share work together and to form alliances for moving forward.”

Check out some photos of other people involved with “Mx’D Messages” below, as well as an interview with Bond and Koke.

The Huffington Post: What does a world without binaries look like to you?
Justing Vivian Bond and Elizabeth Koke: With Mx’’d Messages, we’re thinking beyond restrictive labels, assumptions, paradigms. We’re using trans as a lens to explore creative, intellectual, and activist work that challenges not just gender roles, but other limiting social constructions, as well. The world we imagine is full of imagination and freedom.

How does the festival carry on and embody the tradition of queer festivals/events that challenge binary notions of gender and identity?

Our Keynote on Queercore was inspired by an arts [festival] that took place in a rundown theater on Mission Street in San Francisco in 1989. It was weekend of poetry, music, spoken,word, dance and ritual which was was organized by a bunch of arty queer anarchist punks who were really trying hard to challenge assimilation and bring some color to the LGBT scene during the AIDS crisis. They challenged gender norms, racial stereotypes and class distinctions, they also channeled a lot of their rage into creative non-violent ways of dismantling the hegemonic forces that were working their mainstream asses off to oppress us. We see a lot of similarities between the ways we were being threatened then and now so it feels like a great way to contextualize this Live Ideas Festival.

What do you want attendees to take away from this festival?

We hope people will feel inspired and supported. We hope audiences will walk away from the readings, performances, conversations, and films, having connected with other attendees and participants feeling energized.

“Mx’D Messages” will run March 14-19 in New York City. Head here for more information.

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Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the author behind a heartbreaking “Modern Love” essay that appeared in The New York Times earlier this month, died on Monday. The Chicago-based writer of adult and children’s books, who’d been battling ovarian cancer since 2015, was 51.

Rosenthal published more than 30 books throughout her career, including Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2005), The Same Phrase Describes My Marriage and My Breasts (1999), and the Duck! Rabbit! picture book. She also produced short films and YouTube videos and contributed to TED Talks and NPR.

Her widely read essay, “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” was published on March 3. In that piece, she imagined a dating profile for the husband she would leave behind when she died. “He is an easy man to fall in love with,” she wrote, recounting how the pair met in 1989 when they were only 24. “I did it in one day.”

The viral essay garnered more than 1,300 comments from readers, who expressed overwhelming gratitude for Rosenthal’s words. “I greatly appreciate you, Amy,” Ryan from Denver wrote, “for writing this and for giving me a perspective on what I hope for one day.”

Jason, her husband of 26 years and father to their three children, issued a response to the essay, telling NBC News, “It is Amy’s gift with words that has drawn the universe in. Unfortunately, I do not have the same aptitude for the written word, but if I did I can assure you that my tale would be about the most epic love story — ours.”

Shortly after, the “Today” show reported that Rosenthal was in hospice care, surrounded by family members who asked for privacy. The New York Times confirmed Rosenthal’s death over Twitter on Monday.

Fans of her writing have now begun to share stories of Rosenthal’s influence. Famed author John Green told The Chicago Sun Times, “It’s hard to imagine what my professional life or my personal life would look like without Amy’s influence. Amy taught me that, for writing to work, it has to be a gift for the reader, rather than an attempt to impress them or an attempt to think you’re cool or whatever.”

Read some of the many tributes below.

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Last week, Brianna Wu woke up to find a rock sitting on her living room floor, surrounded by shards of glass from the window it was thrown through. Sadly, for Wu, a video game designer and Head of Development at Giant Spacekat, this is nothing new.

For almost three years, Wu has been the target of malicious abuse and harassment, predominantly online. In August 2014, Wu, along with other women in the video game industry like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn, became a target of the Gamergate controversy, in which some of the internet’s worst trolls unintentionally exposed the misogynist underbelly of the gaming community and its hostility toward women and minorities. 

Gamergate was sparked after a smear campaign, led by Quinn’s ex-boyfriend, resulted in vicious online attacks against Quinn. Wu and Sarkeesian, who were both outspoken critics of the treatment of women in video games themselves and within the gaming industry, became targets soon after. 

What at first looked like disagreement about the culture of the gaming community quickly revealed itself as a thriving microcosm of misogyny and rape culture: Wu, Sarkeesian and Quinn were (and continue to be) threatened with rape and murder, stalked, doxxed, and harassed. 

The women found little to no support from law enforcement. Just last month, it was discovered that, even though a handful of the men associated with Gamergate who made threats against women had admitted to doing so, the FBI took no action.  

And now, almost three years later, Wu continues to be a target. Just two weeks ago, Wu revealed on Twitter that the harassment from the Gamergate community never really stopped:

Wu’s experience working in a male-dominated industry that has proven hostile to women, as well as her experience on the front lines of some of the internet’s worst trolling, have pushed her to take on a new challenge: running for Congress. 

Shortly after the election of President Donald Trump, Wu made the decision to run for U.S. representative in her home state of Massachusetts in the 2018 election. Wu talked to The Huffington Post about her life post-Gamergate, why she’s running for Congress, and what the future of the Democratic Party might look like (spoiler alert: it’s female). 

*  *  * 

HuffPost: What did your career look like before Gamergate? 

Brianna Wu: I’m Head of Development at Giant Spacekat and a software engineer. I started my first startup at just 19, and at 22 I could see that the percentage of women gamers was exploding in our field. So I did what the bros in our industry tell women they should do: “If you don’t like games, go make them yourself.” So I raised a bunch of capital, and hired a bunch of women and we put out games. 

When Gamergate happened in August 2014, how was your life directly impacted? 

Being a software engineer and leading an engineering team is a tough job to have under the best of circumstances. And for me, Gamergate really took over my life. I found myself spending [an] inordinate amount of time in meetings with law enforcement, and trying to track down the people sending me threats and kind of having this belief that if I did everything right on my end I could really change the culture. But you know how that ended. Law enforcement failed us entirely. It [made] it almost impossible to do my job. It was very psychologically damaging. To this day, when someone sends me a message saying they’re going to kill or rape me, I feel nothing. I just feel nothing. You can tell me it’s raining outside and I would have the same emotional response, just because it’s so exhausting.

What was your experience working with law enforcement? 

The local beat cops that would come to my house, they were good people. But they are tasked with looking at break-ins and making sure schools are safe. They are understandably focused locally. The FBI stepped in over prosecutors here in Boston and the Department of Homeland Security and said, “We’ve got this. This is on us.” And then they chose to do nothing about it.

Everyone I talked to was very nice and very professional about it, but part of the reason I’m running for Congress is because you can do everything right. You can have thousands of stories written about you, you can have a “Law & Order” episode written about you, you can pay someone to investigate and document threats, you can get their names, you can do everything right. And law enforcement’s still not going to do anything. And I don’t know what other options we have other than getting women in Congress to change the laws. 

Do you think that, since Gamergate began, things have gotten better, worse or stayed the same for women online? 

I have a very clear message on this: When the FBI failed to do anything about [Gamergate], it was like the kitchen was on fire. And they ignored it. And now the entire house is on fire. The truth is, nothing was done. It’s a game for the people who do it. It’s gotten much worse. 

You can have thousands of stories written about you, you can have a “Law & Order” episode written about you, you can pay someone to investigate and document threats, you can get their names, you can do everything right. And law enforcement’s still not going to do anything. And I don’t know what other options we have other than getting women in Congress to change the laws.
Brianna Wu

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, you decided to run for office. What made you decide to run? 

I’ve always intended to run for office sat some point. I’d always wanted to return to politics at some point ― my first job out of college was in politics ― but I was planning on doing this a decade or two. 

After Donald Trump won, we were working on a huge expansion for my company to work on some really interesting technologies. This is very important to me. I’ve been working since 2010 for this. But I’m sitting there in a meeting with venture capitalists, after Donald Trump had won, and I can’t concentrate on a thing they’re saying. I’m sitting there asking myself, “Can I really feel good about making pleasant distractions for the next four years while the country is burning? Can I feel good about this job?” And the answer is no. 

I talked to my husband and said, “If I’m not going to run for office now, when am I going to do this?” It’s scary, it’s a big sacrifice for me personally, it puts me right back into the jaws of this harassment, but it’s not in my nature to sit out a fight. 

What are your priorities as a candidate? 

There are two factors to this. There’s my national profile as an advocate for women’s rights and for tech issues like cybersecurity, encryption and privacy. I want to pass an omnibus privacy bill. Every single day, more and more of our data gets out there, identity theft is off the charts, our election systems are vulnerable, our infrastructure is vulnerable. We need engineers in Congress that understand those issues to make better policies. 

We’re going to be hitting the issues of privacy, cybersecurity, online harassment really hard. I will fight for those things. 

We need women to run for office and to vote with our lived experience.
Brianna Wu

I have a higher national profile than in District 8 where I’m running. And as for District 8, we’ve got to have a message that kind of resonates with a broad spectrum of Democrats. For me, it’s those bread and butter economic issues that are where the Democratic Party needs to really focus. I personally supported Hillary in the primaries, I supported her so hard. But I think Democrats need to ask themselves, “Why was Bernie Sanders able to get so much passion?” If you’re not asking yourself that question you are not learning. 

What we want to do is think very hard about income inequality, looking at breaking up large banking interests, [and] looking at single-payer health care. I think it’s so telling that we compromised with the Republicans. The ACA was originally a Republican idea. We compromised with them and they still want to kill it. So I don’t see the value [in] compromising. 

You brought up Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. In your position as someone who’s entering politics outside of “the establishment,” how do you feel about the Democratic Party taking on the role of the opposition to the current administration? And what do you think the future of the party is? 

I feel like both camps [Sanders supporters and Clinton supporters] have a little bit to learn. 

It’s frustrating to me that Sanders supporters still don’t understand why Clinton supporters felt so talked over and mansplained to in the election. I think that’s a lesson that they haven’t learned and that they need to think about. At the same time, I think Hillary supporters ― myself included ― need to have a large talk with ourselves about speaking with more passion and honesty with our base. 

There’s a moment I think about all the time from the debates between Hillary and Bernie, where Bernie’s coming out very strongly for $15 an hour minimum wage. Hillary Clinton came back and said, “It should really be $12.25.” And that’s a fine argument to have in an academic symposium, but it’s a really poor message to the populace.

The Democratic base is never going to get its fire up about coming out and voting as long as we talk [like that]. We need to speak with passion, we need real plans to help the middle and lower class in this country. We need to very directly and honestly speak about the systems that are murdering black people in our country. We have got to really look at the way women are dying because we don’t have access to reproductive health care. Until we drop this pretense and start speaking about that with honesty and emotion behind it, we will continue to lose. 

Are you experiencing more harassment now that you’ve announced your candidacy? 

Absolutely. It’s off the charts again. It’s not quite at peak Gamergate levels. But yeah, absolutely. The only difference is now I don’t even bother reporting it to law enforcement. I’ve completely lost trust in the system. I try not to talk about it so much. I don’t think it’s going to get us anywhere new and [this is why] we need women to run for office and to vote with our lived experience.

We need women doing that more than we need thinkpieces or stories about harassment at this point. Something I think about all the time is that four out of five people in Congress are men. What I want to see is more women standing up and running and getting our lived experience out there. Our voices aren’t heard. That’s a huge part of why I’m running.

Do you think that more women in positions of power in the government will have a tangible affect on policies? 

I know it will. How can it not? Studies show that in the tech industry, once you get women in positions of power, that’s when you get parental leave policies for parents of all genders. This is where the policies start to get put into place. It’s less about political ideology and more about lived experience. It shouldn’t be a controversial statement that 51 percent of people in America are women, and we should have a great number of us represented in Congress. 

Get involved in the system because your nation needs you right now.
Brianna Wu

Something I take very seriously in running is [that] I’m trying very hard to keep my messaging in my campaign about not just me. No matter if I win or lose, I want more women out there to see, if you’re angry, if you’re frustrated, if you don’t feel represented, lead by just standing up and running for office. And part of what I want to do is lift up other women.

So my message to other women out there that read Huffington Post is very simple: You are more qualified than you give yourself credit for, I guarantee you. Look at Donald Trump, who’s the most unqualified person to ever reach the presidency, and ask yourself what on earth is stopping you? What is holding you back? Push past those fears. Get involved in the system because your nation needs you right now. It is all on the line in 2018 and 2020. 

This Women’s History Month, remember that we have the power to make history every day. Follow along with HuffPost on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in March using #WeMakeHerstory.

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Being sexy has no age limit. 

Fifty-six-year-old model Mercy Brewer proves that, starring in a lingerie campaign for Lonely, a body-positive brand that’s based in New Zealand.

The new campaign is a part of the label’s ongoing “Lonely Girls” series, which has featured Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke.

Brewer, a self-described former punk, once modeled alongside Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. She was a perfect fit for the brand, according to Helene Morris, one of Lonely’s co-founders and designers. 

“At Lonely, we feel that it is important to challenge what we see in our media with a more authentic reflection of beauty and hope to grow people’s visual vocabulary,” Morris said in statement about the series. “The beauty and fashion industries are so obsessed with youth, but the reality is we are all aging, and there are so many wonderful things about growing older.” 

Brewer told i-D magazine that she was a fan of the lingerie brand before she started modeling for them. The model describes her appearance in the ad campaign as a way to bring “recognition that older women can kick ass when the opportunity arises.” 

“Forget stereotypes, if someone looks good in your gear, shine a light on them,” she said. We couldn’t agree more. 

The HuffPost Lifestyle newsletter will make you happier and healthier, one email at a time. Sign up here.

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“We had misunderstood one another, or we had not,” Joan Didion wrote in a short entry to her book of observations about the South and California, South and West. Written in 1970, the collection was published last week, a testament to the timeliness of its contents. 

The chapter is one of the few written while Didion was in Meridian, Mississippi, where she stayed at a Howard Johnson’s and watched children dry off with confederate flag towels. The writer tried and failed to set up meetings with the director of a cosmetology academy and a business college in town; the purpose of the trip was to drive through Southern cities of all sizes, learning more about a region she hadn’t immersed herself in for years. 

But, the cosmetology director was shy about visitors ― she told Didion that she “wasn’t interested in any magazines at the present time.” The business school director booked the appointment, but failed to show up.

Such reticence about outsiders is a theme in Didion’s notebooks. At an award ceremony for a Mississippi Broadcasters organization, a presenter tells a parable about a bee staying still so as not to be eaten by a cow. The writer observes that the crowd instantly understood the moral, one about docility amid tumult. “It continued to elude me,” she writes.

Much eluded Didion on this trip. The tendency for Southerners to speak modestly as a kind of self-defense was a particularly puzzling convention. So the writer, whose approach to storytelling and note taking includes quiet observation, was forced to stand out. She was often carded at bars and restaurants, presumably because her hair was straight and not done up in curls, a less pampered look only younger Southern women wore. 

She visits a doctor for an injured rib, worried that her status as a non-Southerner will make the experience awkward. The doctor tells her he lived in the North briefly, and even thought he could stay, but eventually returned to his birthplace. She remembers women she knew in New York, whose Southern upbringings eclipsed their experiences in the city ― no small thing, considering the bustle of the larger place. The South, then, seems to Didion like an alluring mystery, one she never quite figures out. 

With her usual avenues into knowing a society and its people blocked off, Didion relied on another of her stalwart techniques: making sense of a place through its weather. In “Los Angeles Notebook,” an essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, written five years before her 1970 Southern expedition, she compared the capriciousness of Californians to the surreal Santa Ana winds.

Similarly, Didion’s notes on New Orleans focus on the fatalism of its residents, which she connects to the city’s tyrannical heat. “Bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas. Weather would come and be bad,” she wrote. “The temporality of the place is operatic, childlike, the fatalism that of a culture dominated by wilderness.”

Her observations, then ― being those of an outsider ― are poetic and critical, but not thorough or truly meaning-making. Still, the comparisons to modern-day middle America and its desire to protect hierarchical and oppressive values can easily be drawn.

An incomplete list of beliefs held by Southerners, according to Didion: marijuana is for hippie trash, wives should seek permission from their husbands in order to take lengthy business trips, a woodcut of Christ and a lighted cosmetic mirror are equally valuable items, demonstrators are unruly, and the press is biased against the South. 

The latter two points might strike a chord with modern readers. They resonated with Didion, too, who, upon leaving the South’s Gulf region, wrote, “I had the feeling that I had been too long on the Gulf Coast, that my own sources of information were distant and removed.”

The bottom line

With an anthropologist’s detachment and precision, Didion took notes on the South that, while lyrical and often funny, do little to empathize with the region. Still, the writer reinforces the paradoxes of Southern warmth, and exposes contradictory beliefs about race and religion.

Who wrote it

Joan Didion is the author of nine nonfiction books, including Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking. She’s also the author of five novels. She currently lives in New York City.

Who will read it

Fans of Didion and of narrative nonfiction in general. And, anyone who wants to learn more about America beyond the coasts.

What other reviewers think

The Washington Post: “At times, the notes are merely disconnected impressions. In one regrettable case, a harangue by a good ol’ boy is presented verbatim for pages. Still, salvation keeps arriving: Sentences — with their detached, reportorial tone, their economy of words, and piercing observations — that are vintage Didion.”

Kirkus: “An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant.” 

Opening lines

“In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.”

Notable passage

“The sense of sports being the opiate of the people. In all small towns the high school gymnasium was not only the most resplendent part of the high school but often the most solid structure in town, redbrick, immense, a monument to the hopes of the citizenry. Athletes who were signing “letters of intent” were a theme in the local news.”

South and West: from a Notebook
Joan Didion
Published March 7
Knopf, $21.00

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

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Twitter users completely turned a “Ghost in the Shell” ad campaign on its head to make a majorly important point. 

The film released a meme-maker with the intention of promoting the film. But instead, people across the interwebs brilliantly used it to generate snarky memes to call out the film for its casting of Scarlett Johansson in an Asian role. The actress plays Major Motoko Kusanagi ― or “The Major” ― in “Ghost in the Shell,” a film adaptation of a Japanese manga. 

The “I Am Major” meme-maker asks users to complete the statement “I Am...” in a template, encouraging them to fill in the blank with what makes them “unique.” They’re also invited to upload their own photos. 

But that’s not how many snarky individuals used the tool. 

From mocking the actress’ lack of connection to Japanese culture, to pointing out different instances of Hollywood’s whitewashing controversies, Twitter made it known that they won’t be fans of the movie. 

“I am unable to say Motoko Kusanagi,” reads one meme, with the words across a photo of the actress’ face. 

Another that says “I am in love with white feminism,” accompanied by an image of the actress, seems to refer to Johansson’s recent interview with Marie Claire. In the interview, she defended the film’s casting, saying she’d “never presume to play another race of a person.” She also took the opportunity to applaud the anime franchise for featuring a female protagonist. 

The film, which will be released later this month, has been criticized for whitewashing ever since early 2015, when it was revealed that Johansson would occupy the lead role.

Big names in the Asian community, including actresses Constance Wu and Ming-Na Wen, spoke out against the film. And a petition from Care2, calling for the film to be recast, generated more than 104,000 signatures. 

The “Ghost In The Shell” controversy comes at a time when several other films have featured white actors in roles that many feel should’ve gone to Asians. Emma Stone received backlash for playing part-Asian character Allison Ng in the 2015 film “Aloha.” The next year, Tilda Swinton found herself under fire for taking the role of “The Ancient One,” a Tibetan sorcerer, in the Marvel Comics-based movie “Doctor Strange.” Swinton later solicited Margaret Cho’s opinion on the subject and, while doing so, decided to shift the conversation to feminism, downplaying race in the process. 

Actual Asians, however, have had a hard time being cast in Hollywood movies. They nabbed no lead roles and just 3.9 percent of speaking roles in 2015’s top films. Factoring in the recent years’ whitewashing controversies, it’s no wonder Twitter didn’t hold back with its trolling of “Ghost in the Shell.” 

Check out more of the witty memes below. 

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Kat Lazo is putting telenovelas on blast in her new video series for We are mitú. 

The video blogger and producer called out the damaging lack of diversity in Latin American soap operas as part of the first installment of “The Kat Call” on Sunday. 

Lazo’s video features a young Afro-Latina girl and her grandmother watching a telenovela on the couch. The little girl turns to her abuelita and asks, “Why don’t the novela actors look like us? Why are they all white?” 

When her grandmother can’t answer the question, Lazo jumps in to break down how telenovelas are “overtly white,” casting mainly light-skinned Latinos as protagonists while actors who are Afro-descendant or indigenous are left to play “the help.” 

The reason for this is colorism, Lazo says. 

“Has your abuelita ever told you not to bring home a black guy? Or has your mom insisted you stay out of the sun to avoid getting a little darker? Yeah. That’s colorism,” she says in the video. “It’s privileging lighter skin over darker skin. And colorism doesn’t just exist in Latin American media. It’s worldwide. You see this in India’s Bollywood, in the Philippines and, yes, in the U.S.” 

Watch Lazo, who is of Peruvian and Colombian descent, describe her experiences with colorism while growing up in the United States in the video above.

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Warning: Spoilers for the “The Bachelor” Season 21 finale. 

Nick Viall’s had a few shots at finding love on “The Bachelor” franchise. Thankfully, he finally got his happy ending on Monday night. And it was, well, dramatic, of course. 

After weeks of tears, one-on-one dates, naps and cheese pasta, the 36-year-old proposed to Vanessa Grimaldi with a Neil Lane diamond ring. (Duh!)

“I will never forget the first moment I saw you ... and the first moment I started falling in love with you,” he said, adding, “There have been plenty of times where I wanted to fight it, but I don’t want to fight it anymore.”

“Nick, when I’m with you, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” she said. 

Raven Gates was the runner-up. Nick told her through tears, “I think about how much I’ve grown to care about you, respect you, and how much love I have for you ... I just don’t know if I’m in love.” 

He added, “I’m just torn up inside letting you go.” 

When Nick said, “I’m going to miss you,” Raven answered, confidently, “I know.” 

Nick and Vanessa had an immediate connection. Although they’ve gone back and forth about their plans regarding where to live ― Nick is Los Angeles-based while Vanessa resides in Montreal, Canada ― it appears their love for each other is more important than the distance.  

“It’s sometimes strange how similar we are, which I think it’s great and sometimes it concerns me,” Nick told Vanessa on the show. “I’m just worried about the fact that, sometimes, it could complicate things. There might be some strong conversations because we’re passionate people, and we want what we want. [But] if we, in our hearts, decide to get engaged, it’s because that’s how we feel.” 

Well, apparently they felt they were meant to be together. Congrats to the happy couple!

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Warning: This article contains many images of butts. Many indeed. 

The Fader magazine recently recruited New York-based photographer Caroline Tompkins for a very serious mission: they needed butt photos and lots of them.

The photos were meant for the magazine’s Love & Sex issue, specifically a piece called “What a Butt Wants,” filled with ass-centric wisdom from experts including a personal trainer, an acupuncturist, and a licensed esthetician. 

It was 2014 that was playfully dubbed “The Year of the Butt” around the internet, honoring women like Nicki Minaj and Kim Kardashian as its patron saints. Yet many interpreted the designation ― which, in part, correlated to an increase in surgical butt enhancements ― as pop culture appropriating, fetishizing and exploiting black women’s bodies, long criticized for being curvaceous. 

Tompkins worked with Fader’s photo director Emily Keegin and fashion editor Shibon Kennedy to create the series, aptly titled “Butts,” featuring a gorgeous melange of derrieres mugging for the camera.

The series breaks with the exoticizing male gaze often employed by mainstream culture. Instead of privileging a “Platonic Ass,” Tompkins pictures a variety of rears from individuals of all ages, races, genders and sizes. Butts are flat and fat, furry and bare, shiny and matte ― the list goes on ― proving that butts are not a hot commodity or a passing trend, but a real, smushy, sexy body part that deserves love and attention. 

“[Fader] presented [the series] as one part fashion, one part service (how to make your butt happy), and one part just cool sexy butts,” Tompkins explained to website It’s Nice That. “I’ve been making a lot of personal work about female desire and sex lately, so it was super flattering for this assignment to become an extension of that.”

Tompkins asked friends and people she spotted on Instagram to take part in the shoot, enlisting a total of 12 models to rock 29 looks. “I got a lot of cool butt pics texted/emailed to me that week for sure,” she wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.

“We were mostly looking for variety ― size, shape, color, hair/no hair, etc. We were also really happy to get a couple in the mix, as we didn’t want to ask anyone to get down and dirty in anyone else’s butt unless they were already dating each other, you know?”

For the shoot itself, Tompkins took inspiration from artists including Whitney Hubbs, Collier Schorr, Jo Ann Callis and Harry Callahan, as well as snapshots culled from amateur porn archives.

The resulting spread features butts in pants, butts in skirts, butts in thongs, butts in the buff. There are also butts in leggings, butts in fishnets, butts with tattoos, and butts pressed against glass. A true visual butt buffet, the playful series lives where sexy meets silly, the two juxtaposed like cheeks on a rear. 

The images perfectly compliment Fader’s fruitful guide to butt love and maintenance. “My favorite is the last part about buttocks sugaring,” Tompkins added. “That’s all I’m going to say because y’all should check it out. Also, if you’re wondering how we made the butts shiny, it’s mostly baby oil and Vaseline.”

Head to The Fader for more butt play. 

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