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DJs Troll Entire Crowd By Dropping The Beat A Little Too Well

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Not even Rick Astley trolls this hard.

As this inspired bit of pranking makes clear, there's a big difference between dropping the beat -- and disowning it entirely. Australian electronic dance music artists Mashd N Kutcher took advantage of a hopped-up crowd at one of their shows recently, swapping out the punchy climax EDM is known for with something a bit more ... mellow.

Billboard notes Mashd N Kutcher isn't the first electronica group to troll a crowd with such devastatingly effective tactics, but based on the audible groan in the video, it's certainly one of the most entertaining.

Even though the song is actually Spandau Ballet's hit single, "True," we'd like to think Rick Astley is out there, somewhere, smiling.

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Many Kids Feel 'Unimportant' When Parents Are Distracted By Smartphones, Survey Says

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While limiting their children's screen time, parents may also want to consider being mindful of their own habits when it comes to mobile devices. 


According to a global survey by online security company AVG Technologies, many kids notice their parents' screen addictions and it can profoundly affect their views on the subject. In June, AVG polled families with kids from ages 8 to 15 years old in eight different countries -- a total of 6,117 people. 


Here are some of the results of their polls about families and devices like smartphones:


 



 


The survey results showed that 54 percent of kids think their parents check their devices too often and 32 percent of them "feel unimportant" when their parents are distracted by their phones.


As for the parents, 52 percent agreed that they check their phones too often. 


Clearly, mindful screen time is important a goal for parents as it is for kids. 


Also on HuffPost:


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Want A Lesson In How People Judge Women's Voices? Start A Podcast.

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"Whiny." "Empty-headed valley girls." "Sorority girls with zero insight."


When two women decide to record their voices and put it out for public consumption, these are the kind of constructive comments that follow.


We are two women. We also decided to start a podcast about “The Bachelor” franchise, "Here To Make Friends," several months ago, because we thought it would be fun and believed we had some things to say on the subject that might be worth listening to. We knew we would have some haters -- as women who write for a living on the Internet, we’re no strangers to the backlash ladies who deign to have opinions tend to receive -- but we weren’t prepared for how much of the critique we received would be centered around one thing: our voices.


We probably should have been. Ann Friedman recently wrote about the underlying sexism that surrounds the critiques about the way women speak -- regardless of what they're talking about -- in a piece for New York Magazine, connecting it back to her own experience hosting a podcast.


“Until I started co-hosting a podcast, I was fairly oblivious to my own vocal patterns,” she wrote. “Then the emails and tweets started rolling in, advising me and my co-host that we would sound a lot smarter if we could just pay a bit more attention to our speech.”


Of course, listeners are entitled to love or hate any podcast, including ours -- hey, we’re new to this, our quips don’t always land. However, in line with Friedman’s experience, the contemptuous vitriol directed at us seems to have more to do with our female voices and “feminine” vocal patterns, than the thoughts and opinions we express with said voices.


As podcasts rise in popularity, a previously overwhelmingly male-dominated medium is becoming more diverse. Many women who spent years behind the scenes producing have stepped out “in front” of the mic. It’s incredibly empowering for women to have greater access to podcasts, and to be able to put their voices out there, but it also opens women up to having their voices -- and therefore, their perceived intelligence or lack thereof -- picked apart.



It may seem paranoid to note that we, like other female-hosted podcasts, have drawn a barrage of insults about our vapidity while comparable podcasts by men or mixed-gender hosts draw more measured feedback. A recent episode of This American Life, “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS,” made public just how many emails they got about their female producers and journalists. “They call these women's voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying,” said host Ira Glass, mainly for the crime of vocal fry. He later points out that he too has vocal fry, but, of course: “I get criticized for a lot of things in the emails to the show. No one has ever pointed this out.”


Glass has one of the most distinctive voices on the radio; it’s creaky, oddly cadenced, a bit lispy at times -- though, since he speaks from a script, there are few “likes.” He’s been lovingly chided for his unusual speaking style, frequently parodied, but it almost seems to add to his mystique. The same can't be said for his female contemporaries.





We got tweeted at by one listener who chastised us for saying “like” every third word; apparently it made us seem less intelligent. This isn’t an uncommon thing to tell young women. (Or, really, any women. We stumbled across similar criticism of Melissa Harris-Perry and her female guests on Twitter just last night.)





Claire recently sat down for an interview with a male author -- a multi-talented, learned, brilliant man who’d just published a remarkable novel -- and had a fascinating conversation with him, during which he said “like” every third word. He also up-talked, for that matter. It would be wrong to question his obvious intelligence due to these verbal habits, and likely no one has or will. It’s women, not men, at least not white, straight men, who find their speech patterns constantly scrutinized for deviations from the dominant accepted norm, with any tic or casual verbal styling attributed to stupidity or immaturity.


Research shows that it’s not just women who employ “feminine”-coded speech patterns. A 2013 study found that young people -- across gender and ethnic lines -- all use “Valley Girl talk,” meaning uptalk. And a 2014 study found that both men and women have vocal fry, it’s just that women are punished (a.k.a. perceived as unintelligent, incompetent, untrustworthy) more severely than men for using it.


It doesn’t help that young women, as is true for young people from marginalized groups, tend to pioneer changes in speech patterns. Though those changes eventually filter through to the entire population, including white men, these speech habits only become acceptable for people in this dominant class.


But of course, it’s not really about the speech habits. It’s about being women, speaking. Think of the centuries-old stereotype that women never stop yapping -- nearly every culture has proverbs to this effect: “Where there are women and geese, there’s noise.” But a review of over 50 studies conducted in 1993 by Deborah James and Janice Drakich made a startling revelation, according to the BBC: In only two of the studies, women talked more than men; in 34, men talked more than women. The bulk of the research suggests men and women speak at comparable rates, depending on the circumstance, yet the perception is that women talk constantly -- most likely, Amanda Marcotte argued on Slate, because by speaking an equal amount, they are judged as speaking more than they ought


Some people listen to our podcast and hear whiny feminists. Some listen to the same podcast and hear vapid, bubbly sorority chicks. Those are both trite stereotypes of women, but they are stereotypes of very different brands of women. It’s difficult to see how listeners could hear both in our voices, except for the thing the two stereotypes have in common: They're kinds of women these listeners don't deem worth listening to. In short, they hear our female voices, and they want to make us stop talking.


Men and women alike make these judgments, and encourage young women to alter our natural speech in order to prove our intelligence or skill. Don’t say “just,” every time you say “like” snap a rubber band on your wrist, lower the pitch of your voice so it’s less “whiny.” This advice is presented as well-intentioned and practical, but trying to change the way women speak is a fool's errand. Society will never be happy with our voices, if we just tweak them this way or that way. Even the highly professional, media-trained women journalists of This American Life don’t meet with approval. We will forever be altering our voices to prove something entirely unrelated: our worth. Meanwhile, men with odd vocal tics elude this scrutiny; we simply aren’t attuned to hear the grate of their vocal fry or the lilt of their uptalk, or at least not to find it annoying.


When it comes down to it, women's voices are a screen people in a patriarchal society project their issues with women upon. Ultimately when you critique to death the way women speak -- the way they communicate with the world -- you are trying to avoid hearing what they have to say. 


Also On The Huffington Post:


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'Meet Me In Montenegro,' And 6 More Beautiful Films About Runaway Love

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"All great literature is one of two stories," said Leo Tolstoy, a guy who would know. "A man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town." Fans of the romance film might make the case for a third possibility: the tale of strangers who meet in the midst of their own, intersecting journeys.


Cinema has long celebrated the kind of love that exists only when its co-conspirators are displaced from their normal lives -- sometimes by choice, sometimes not. "Meet Me In Montenegro," opening July 10 in limited release and on VOD, is the latest tale of two people who find themselves far from home and then find each other.


Here are some of the best films inspired by love on the move, in no particular order:


1. "Meet Me In Montenegro" (2015)




"Meet Me In Montenegro" tells the classic story of American boy meets Norwegian girl (then loses her, then finds her again while on a business trip to Berlin). Writer-director-stars Alex Holdridge and Linnea Saasen traipse around Europe after years apart in this new vision of the rom-com. The low-budget, hand-stitched vibe isn't the only reason "Meet Me In Montenegro" feels genuine: Holdrige and Saasen are real-life lovers and crafted the film around their own transcontinental romance. 


2. "Y Tu Mamá También" (2001)




By the time Alfonso Cuarón cleaned up at the Oscars for flashy, intense "Birdman," the Mexican writer-director had been making inventive movies for several decades. A retooled take on the classic road movie, "Y Tu Mamá También" diverges from typical romance on pretty much every count. When Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) go on a wild journey across Mexico with an older woman, things get interesting. NC-17 interesting.


3. "Roman Holiday" (1953)




Audrey Hepburn's famous roles in "My Fair Lady" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" cast the legendary beauty as a plucky, down-on-her-luck gal. Hepburn's turn as Princess Ann in "Roman Holiday" gave her an equally charming shot at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum. While on a visit to Rome, Ann decides she's had enough of the royal treatment and trades in her life for a new, less gilded one that includes -- and how could it not? -- a romance with a handsome American ex-pat.


 4. "Before Sunrise" (1995)




"Before Sunrise," the first film in Richard Linklater's dreamy, all-dialogue trilogy, follows Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), two young people who meet on a train and spend a night wandering the streets of Vienna. Tiny in scope, the movie is built entirely on meandering, dense, hyperrealistic conversation. Linklater, a man of infinite patience, reunited the actors nine years later for "Before Sunset," then waited another nine to conclude with "Before Midnight."


5. "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (2008)




Love, sex, and Spain: These are the three intoxicating main ingredients of Woody Allen's critical hit "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Americans Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) decide to spend a restful summer in Barcelona. Things get decidedly un-restful when they both become enamored of the same complicated, sexy artist -- and encounter his volatile ex-wife. 


6. "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967)




Perhaps the most obvious choice for this list, but with good reason: "Bonnie and Clyde" is one of the most iconic love-stories-in-motion in cinematic history. When Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beatty) go on a high-octane crime spree in the middle of the Great Depression, a whole host of craziness ensues. The movie has been celebrated even more with age, and even influenced the entire industry with its groundbreaking depictions of sex and violence on the big screen.


7. "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" (2005)




It may have been Pythagoras who first postulated that LENA + KOSTAS = FOREVER. Lena (Alexis Bledel) is a shy, artistic teenager visiting some family in Greece. Kostas (Michael Rady) is a the handsome Greek boy who steals her heart. "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" defies stereotypes to show that teenagers can have glamorous, globe-hopping romances too (well, at least in fiction).

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The LiliLite Is A Genius Solution For Your Bedside Pile Of To-Be-Read Books

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Few things are more fraught for a nighttime book reader than the half-awake search for a bookmark, or the onerous reach to a bedside lamp before finally drifting off into a content, well-read sleep.


OK, we might be exaggerating, but our haphazard nightstand pile of books with crumpled receipts as markers is astoundingly less cool than the LiliLite. An all-in-one bookmark, bookshelf and reading lamp, the device sits at that rare intersection of being functional and really nice-looking. 



The shelf, made of steam-pressed plywood and bent in a way that accommodates both your to-be-read pile and your current pre-sleep pick, includes a light that turns on automatically once a book is lifted from the shelf. When finished, one simply replaces the book to turn off the light.  


The shelf/light, now in its last few days of a successful Kickstarter campaign, comes from designer Thijs Smeets and his girlfriend, Liedewij. "We were looking for a product that could solve all the issues we encountered with reading in bed," Smeets told The Huffington Post in an email. "As a dyslexic product designer, I'm not much of a reader myself. I think in images instead of words ... Liedewij however is an absolute bookworm."


The resulting product seems to be a perfect coupling: an ideal accessory for the avid reader and pleasing enough to have a place in a designer's bedroom, too. It clears some bedroom clutter, keeps books an arm's length away, and adds light right where it's needed.


And what do Smeet and Liedewij prefer to keep on their own invention? "My LiliLite carries Le Petit Sauvage (in Dutch) by Alexandre Jardin, a sketchbook and a marker," Smeet said. "Liedewij is currently reading All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior, Old School by Tobias Wolff and Gut by Giulia Enders."



Also on HuffPost:


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Snorkelers 'Jam Out' At Underwater Concert, Learn About Coral Reefs In The Best Way

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BIG PINE KEY, Fla. (AP) — Hundreds of music-loving snorkelers and divers, joined by distance swimmer Diana Nyad, ducked beneath the waves Saturday as a radio station broadcast a concert underwater at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.


Such songs as the theme from "The Little Mermaid," the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" and Jimmy Buffett's "Fins" entertained listeners during the four-hour music session.


Some snorkelers pretended to jam underwater on mock guitars or play other fake instruments such as a whimsical fish flute. Others wore costumes depicting mermaids and seahorses as music sounded from waterproof speakers suspended beneath boats.


 



"To be immersed in the sea and feel the music coming from underneath instead of through headphones — it's very magical and distinct," Nyad said. "You couldn't hear it this well if you were in a concert sitting in the front row."


In September 2013, Nyad became the first person to swim from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage, singing to herself to get herself through the more than 100-mile swim. One of the songs from Nyad's personal soundtrack, "Me and Bobby McGee," was played in her honor Saturday.


The so-called Lower Keys Underwater Music Festival took place at Looe Key Reef, part of the continental United States' only living coral barrier reef, located about six miles south of Big Pine Key.


"This is a way for people to really appreciate the coral reef while at the same time listening to an environmental message about coral protection," explained WWUS radio station news director and festival founder Bill Becker.


Staged by WWUS in partnership with a local chamber of commerce, the festival featured music specially programmed for the aquatic listening experience. Accompanying the tunes were coral reef conservation messages and tips on environmentally friendly diving practices.


Also on HuffPost: 


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Incredible Color Photos Give A Rare Look At London During The Blitz

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In the months between September 1940 and May 1941, the German air force engaged in a brutal and relentless bombing campaign against the United Kingdom known as "the Blitz." The aerial attacks killed over 43,000 people and left over a million homeless. Millions of citizens huddled in bomb shelters and homes amid the raids, contributed to early warning systems or worked in the home guard.

"The blitz" was a defining moment in British history and the images of the British population soldiering on as major port cities, including London, were devastated in the bombing became a crucial element of how Britain perceived itself during World War II.

The attacks dwindled after mid-1941, when the German Luftwaffe was largely reassigned to the campaign against Russia. By that time they had dropped over 50,000 tonnes of bombs on Britain.

Manchester's Imperial War Museum North is displaying a series a series of incredible color images from that time in a major new exhibition called entitled "Horrible Histories: Blitzed Brits at IWM North." The show is set to mark the 75th anniversary of the Blitz, and features personal stories, objects, photographs, art works, film clips and sound recordings. The exhibition runs through the spring of 2016.

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Amandla Stenberg: Black Female Bodies Are Treated As Less Than Human

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“Do black females lives matter, too?”


 That's the big question  16-year-old Amandla Stenberg posed on Instagram on Sunday. The powerful post broke down the bullsh*t cultural double standards that plague black women every day. 


“Black features are beautiful, black women are not,” Stenberg wrote. “White women are paragons of virtue and desire, black women are objects of fetishism and brutality. This, at least, seems to be the mentality surrounding black femininity and beauty in a society built upon eurocentric beauty standards.” (See the full post below.)



bigger than you or me. discussions are healthy. ignorance is not. words by me

A photo posted by amandla (@amandlastenberg) on



Stenberg’s words ring especially true in light of the ongoing discussions about the way the public fetishizes and attacks Serena Williams' body. As Stenberg points out, mainstream beauty standards privilege white women's bodies, while neglecting and sexualizing black women, like Williams.  


“Deeply ingrained into culture is the notion that black female bodies, at the intersection of oppression, are less than human and therefore unattractive,” Stenberg wrote. “When the media is not ignoring black women altogether, they are disparaging them." 


Stenberg has been consistently outspoken  on issues of race and cultural appropriation. Time and again, she has critiqued the double standards that so often allow white Americans to borrow from black culture mainly for their own benefit. 


Just hours before Stenberg published her post about black female lives, she left a comment below a picture Kylie Jenner published to Instagram, which showed her hair braided in cornrows and a caption that read, “I woke up like disss."


Stenberg called out the reality star for appropriating black culture. She wrote that she mainly took issue with Jenner for adopting traits from black culture while ignoring the dangerous reality that comes with identifying as black.


“When u appropriate black features and culture but fail to use ur position of power to help black Americans by directing attention towards ur wigs instead of police brutality or racism #whitegirlsdoitbetter,” Stenberg wrote, according to screenshots of her comments that were captured and shared online.


Stenberg has since been applauded by many -- and we are part of that chorus. You go girl.


Also On The Huffington Post:


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Anatomy Of The Female Antihero

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There are a lot of shitty men on TV. In its simplest form, the so-called golden age of television is basically a timeline demarcated by Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Walter White. The past decade of programming has been colored by a clear fascination with the antihero, but where are all the female counterparts?


Imagine, if you will, a female version of Tony Soprano. Maybe her name is Antonia and they call her "Toni" for short. She spends her days waddling around in a robe and shoving capicola in her face, while alternately talking about ducks and ordering gratuitously violent murders.  She's had several gumars, who are all, by the way, objectively more attractive than her. She's despicable, but we forgive Toni, because her mom's a real "c" and, hey, she's just clinging desperately to the last strands of the matriarchy!


Yeah, it's pretty impossible to imagine. The body-centric think pieces alone could fuel a subsection of Jezebel, though there'd be plenty more "problematic" elements than that. The female antihero is, it seems, as difficult to accept as she is to write. There are infinitely more obstacles faced by leading ladies making morally questionable choices while hoping to keep viewers engaged. The gendered likability issue of the small screen has never been so clear as in our willingness to accept serial-philandering murderers and meth cooks, just so long as they're men.



The most basic obstacle with setting up a female antihero (antiheroine?) is sympathy. It doesn't take much for us to reject a woman as "unlikable." Consider that audiences criticized Skyler White's unpleasant reactions to having a drug lord, murderer husband more than her drug lord, murderer husband himself.


"There's this weird thing ingrained in our culture that it's no fun to watch a woman out of control. You know, versus with a guy out of control, where the idea is that's just what they do," said "Bridesmaids" director Paul Fieg when discussing the rise of the woman-child. Of course, gaining audience acceptance is far trickier when said woman is not merely lost on the way to adulthood but inherently flawed on an ethical level.


In crafting a female antihero, the double-standard of likability is then compounded by the limited way we process fictional women. All too often, female characters are denied complexity by both creators and consumers. As "UnREAL" co-creator Marti Noxon put it in a recent interview with The Huffington Post, "A lot of people want to reduce female characters to one thing."


Given the prevailing mode of watching women on screen, that "one thing" often requires likability, prohibiting leading ladies from being anything but. Combine the lack of nuance with the demand for the sympathetic, and you've got something resembling a sexist algebra equation in which X equals "an almost complete lack of female antiheroes."



Enter Rachel Goldberg. The protagonist of "UnREAL" and one of the only leading female antiheroes on TV.


"UnREAL" takes place behind the scenes of "Everlasting" -- a "Bachelor"-style reality TV show, which we can only hope is more morally deranged than its real-life inspiration. After a meltdown on set climaxing in a DUI, producer Rachel is indebted to the show. If she wants her boss, Quinn, to help drop the charges against her, she'll need to deliver her uncanny ability to manipulate participants for yet another season.


When we first meet Rachel, she is cast as an aesthetic foil to the contestants filling a limo with their ball gowns and blown-out hair. She's splayed on the floor of the car, out of view of the reality show's camera, wearing a messy bun over her slouchy "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt.


Her ideals, as a women's studies major (and the kind of person who would wear a "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt) are set up in immediate conflict with the job she's forced to do: turning women into stereotypes for entertainment.


Along with the other producers, she coaxes the participants into temper tantrums, sets the stage for date rape and solicits an abusive ex for a surprise visit. And while she expresses discomfort -- sometimes to convince others, but most often to convince herself that she is not okay with what's going on -- it's clear beneath her scrunched faces and eye rolls that Rachel finds a source of pleasure in the influence she is able to yield on set. 



"One thing I felt really strongly about is that we knew where Rachel came from," Noxon told HuffPost. "Walter White had cancer, Tony Soprano had a poisonous mother."


Early on, we get the backstory fueling Rachel's behavior. Weighed down in debt, she's compelled to go home to ask for money. It's there we see Rachel's own poisonous mother figure: a domineering psychiatrist, who perpetually diagnoses her daughter and insists on being able to provide treatment in exchange for the cash.


"[Rachel] basically suffers from mental Munchausen syndrome by proxy," Noxon explained. "You know, she’s been told her whole life that she’s crazy, incapable and helpless."



The comparison to Tony is interesting. In "The Sopranos," the groundwork of his mother's impact on him is built gradually. The maternal "explanation" for his behavior is the bedrock of the first season, mounting through several sessions with Dr. Melfi and a plot line revealing Livia's betrayal of her son.


Noxon and her co-creator, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, didn't have that kind of time to unpack Rachel on screen. "We really pushed -- and Lifetime was supportive -- of taking Rachel out of the environment in Episode 3," she said. "That way we see, for her, that kind of power that she feels over other women and any kind of control is going to be incredibly seductive. If we didn’t get into the fact that she was literally raised to believe she’s crazy, we would probably not have as much sympathy."


Noxon also paid close attention to casting, both with Shiri Appleby, who plays Rachel, and Constance Zimmer, in the role of Rachel's boss, Quinn. Noxon felt there was something about both women which would translate through the core of their characters to keep audiences along for the ride.


"The second part is casting," she said. "We needed people who have a kind of innate goodness to them. You know, you can see it."


"Constance has this quality where it’s like, 'I know! I just said that! Can you believe I just said that?' Noxon said, giggling over Quinn's more absurd lines. "So, you don’t get the feeling that she’s just the devil. These two women are both strong and good and you feel that. You know there’s something worth debating."



There are other female characters on TV right now that might be characterized as antiheroes. Noxon noted Katey Sagal's Gemma on "Sons of Anarchy." We also have Annalise Keating ("How to Get Away with Murder"), Piper Chapman ("Orange Is the New Black"). "Nurse Jackie" just ended, but let's count that, in addition to Hannah (or Marnie or basically anyone) on "Girls." 


Still, these figures are relatively rare. Consider this Hollywood Reporter TV roundup of 18 antiheroes that includes only four women (or three and a half, since Gemma from "Sons of Anarchy" is listed alongside Jax Teller). Or these lists from E! and Moviepilot, which consist of 100 percent men.


The head of FX, John Landgraf, noted the resistance met by female antiheroes when he famously turned down "Breaking Bad" in favor of greenlighting "Damages."


 "It's fascinating to me," he told NPR, "That we just have really different, and I think, a more rigorous set of standards for female characters than we do for male characters in this society. It's much harder to buy acceptance of a female antihero."



Fortunately, as Noxon sees it, the industry's approach to female antiheroes is shifting.


"Not too long ago, I couldn’t have made a show like 'UnREAL,'" she said. "I couldn’t have made a show where these characters are deeply flawed."


"You know, they’re 'powerful,' they have jobs, they have responsibilities, they’re not thinking about boys all the time and they consider themselves feminists," she continued. "But sometimes they consider getting boob jobs and they work on 'The Bachelor' and they want to be pretty and they want romance."


It's in understanding that potential for nuance that the greatest female antiheroes (and characters in general) are created.


"It's such a complicated, interesting time, because we are just as conflicted," she said. "That’s important to me and to Sarah. So, we had this idea of putting these sophisticated women into the world of making reality television, where all of us feel guilty pleasure."


"It pretty much says it all, I think, about a lot of us," she added. "We aspire to be one thing, and, in the end, we’re in the middle of a nest of conflicts and ideas."


 


Also on HuffPost:


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Harper Lee May Have Written A Third Novel, Lawyer Says

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A lawyer representing Harper Lee claims the celebrated author of "To Kill A Mockingbird" may have written a third novel.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Tonja Carter, the attorney responsible for Lee's estate, says she stumbled across "a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text" in a safe-deposit box last week -- the same box in which she found what's likely the original script for "To Kill A Mockingbird," and its soon-to-be-released parent novel, "Go Set A Watchman."

"Was it an earlier draft of 'Watchman,' or of 'Mockingbird,' or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two? I don't know," Carter remarked. She says the mystery pages have been handed over to experts for further review.

Lee, who is now 89 years old and lives in an assisted living community, will see her second novel released amid some controversy on Tuesday, 55 years after the widely acclaimed "Mockingbird" first hit shelves.

The followup, titled "Go Set A Watchman," was actually written several years prior to "Mockingbird," but remained unpublished at the insistence of her editors, Lee said in a statement earlier this year.

"It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort,” said Lee in the statement. “My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.”

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These Are The Portraits Of Eight Of The Rights Lawyers Rounded Up In China On 'Black Friday'

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free the rights defense lawyers

Free the Rights Defense Lawyers, by Badiucao for CDT


china digital times


Cartoonist Badiucao has drawn portraits of eight of the dozens of human rights lawyers and activists who were rounded up by police in China on July 10, which some netizens are now calling Black Friday.

The lawyers pictured include Wang Yu, Sui Muqinq, Liu Shihui, Liu Xiaoyuan, Wang Quanzhang, Zhou Shifeng, Li Heping and Liu Sixin. The Ministry of Public Security has said the detainees are “suspected of illegally organizing paid protests, hyping public sentiment and fabricating rumors on the Internet to sway court decisions.” From a Xinhua report:

According to a statement from the Ministry of Public Security published on Saturday, the suspects consists of lawyers as the core organizers and social media celebrities and petitioners, who are in charge of planning and implementation.

The statement accused the group, led by Fengrui Law Firm, of disrupting public order and seeking profits by illegally hiring protesters and swaying court decisions in the name of “defending justice and public interests.”

Since July 2012, the group has organized more than 40 controversial incidents and severely disrupted public order, it added. [Source]


All of the lawyers detained have worked on human rights cases in recent years. A full list of those detained is being updated via Google Docs (Chinese).

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Post-Apocalyptic Photos Imagine The Fate Of Our Outdated Technologies

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Icelandic artist Philip Ob Rey creates haunting visions that land somewhere between the dark, surrealist landscape dreamed up by William Blake and Gustave Moreau and the post-apocalyptic future looming in our subconscious anxieties and nightmares. From far away, his shadowy figures resemble the dark cousin of Game of Thrones' White Walkers. But upon closer look, the hulking beasts become slightly familiar, their physical anatomies suddenly resembling the remnants of a rejected memory drawer. 


Ob Rey's photographed sculptures are assembled from VHS rolls, as well as all the memories, outdated technology and wasted information tangled up in them. The faceless creatures, like the stuff they're made from, combine old recollections and not-so-new media to form a haunting vision outside of time and place. 



 "We are building the perfect 'human,' far from the writings of Nietzsche, but maybe more feasible," Ob Rey explained in an email to The Huffington Post. "I just created a possible visual of it. I built creatures made of VHS, covered with a black toxic skin, a chaotic flesh of magnetic encoded images, dreamlike and disfigured in reaction against the growing dictatorship of mass media and the unstoppable plastic pollution due to the overconsumption of new technologies."


Ob Rey combined the VHS rolls with feathers, stones, shells, and dry seaweeds culled from the Icelandic landscape and photographed the anonymous monsters amidst its most shadowy spaces. Captured amidst fog and sand in black and white, the eerie sculptures seem to have materialized from their surrounding environment, amalgamating natural and unnatural ingredients into a frenzy of flurrying darkness.



Aside from haunting your dreams for the immediate future, Ob Rey's photographs and the dark worlds housed within them pose a daunting possibility for our environment's future. "I think this is going to be one of the biggest challenges of the coming decades: the pollution due to the obsolete material is growing up so fast that the world can't really handle it. In an aesthetic way, I wanted to stage the darkness, keeping in mind the gap between the picture, what is pictured and the reaction of the viewer."


So, next time you contemplate upgrading your iPhone or digitizing all your VHS tapes, just imagine these bone-chilling giants roaming your neighborhood, and perhaps you'll opt for a more sustainable option. "I hope people will be more aware of this unstoppable 'race of Evolution,'" Ob Rey said, and "be more careful of the destruction of our habitat, and see that from very dangerous, poison material we can build a dreamlike, modern forest."



Also on HuffPost:


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Stop-Motion Short Explores Life At 'Woolly Bush' Nudist Colony

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If you love knitting, naughty puns, meticulously executed stop-motion animation and the glorious freedom of running through the British countryside with your bare buttocks flapping in the breeze, boy, do we have the video for you. 


Sarah Simi and Ed Hartwell are the strange and brilliant minds behind "Nudinits," an entirely hand-knitted stop-motion short chronicling the inhabitants of a small and scantily clad town called Woolly Bush. 



 


"Have you seen my clippers, Barbara? I think I might get around to trimming your bush this morning," it begins, and whisks you off into 20 minutes of excruciating knitted detail and enough silly and sly sexual innuendos to keep your eyes and ears pinned to the screen. Simi aptly described the work to It'sNiceThat as "Fifty Shades of Fray" or "Wallace and Gromit de-frocked." 


If you chuckle at "that's what she said" jokes and coo over your grandmother's handmade afghans, stop kidding yourself and press play now.  



Also on HuffPost:


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What Happens When An Art Museum Transforms Into A Giant Arcade

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We took a 9-year-old girl genius obsessed with video games to interview the masterminds behind a psychedelic new Brooklyn show.



Meet Faile, a collective of two artists named Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller who together have a penchant for turning the halls of art galleries and museums into video game meccas.

Now, meet Ada. Ada is a 9-year-old Minecraft champion and budding comic book writer who would like nothing more than to wander the expanses of an empty arcade, tearing open the consoles to see what's inside. That is, after she's confidently defeated each and every game she can get her hands on.

It was only fitting that Ada would become acquainted with Patrick and Patrick on the eve of their new show, "FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds" at the Brooklyn Museum. As part of the exhibition, the artists transformed a portion of the iconic museum's fifth floor into a neon-hued cave filled with pinball machines, foosball tables and tower after tower of multiplayer video games. Essentially, a gamer's paradise.



When we invited Ada to preview the work (read: challenge Patrick and Patrick to a few rounds at the Deluxx Fluxx arcade), she graciously agreed. We expected the precocious elementary school student to be at least somewhat star-struck by the likes of Faile, the two adult artists who designed and built every single game in the museum, along with their collaborator Bäst. After all, the games were inspired by mature concepts like consumer culture, religious traditions and the urban environment, with nods to gentrification and the perils of finding a parking spot in a New York City borough.

Boy, were we wrong.



Check out the video above for a sneak peek of the show, and for more on the exhibition "FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds," currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, check out Brooklyn Street Art's previous coverage of the show on HuffPost.

Associate video production by Marielle Olentine. Big thanks to Ada, our new hero, Faile, and all the folks at the Brooklyn Museum.

Also on HuffPost: Kids Review Famous Paintings, Prove The Best Art Critics Are 5 Years Old





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Meet Mikey Wax, The Singer-Songwriter Behind The 'I Am Cait' Promo Song

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New York-based singer-songwriter Mikey Wax is set to make a big splash with his marriage equality anthem, "Love Always Wins."


The new tune, which also features a verse by rapper Prophecy, will get an extra boost when it appears in new promotional clips for E!'s "I Am Cait," the eight-part docuseries on Caitlyn Jenner premiering on July 26. The lyric video features footage of celebratory scenes marking the Supreme Court's June 25 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. 


Noting that he was "honored" at having his song selected to promote Jenner's series, Wax told The Huffington Post in an interview that his relationship with his best friend, who is gay, prompted him to write "Love Always Wins." 


"His words of hope and happiness after the Supreme Court ruling inspired this song," he said. "I truly believe that despite race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, love always wins."


Ultimately, he hopes the song "helps spread the message that you don't have to hide who you are within."  


Wax's earlier tune, "You Lift Me Up," was featured in promotional clips for "Keeping Up With The Kardashians." 


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Gustav Klimt Painted Much More Than 'The Woman In Gold'

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Every year, at least one of the fine art masters is raised up in popular consciousness with a film, and this year’s pick was Gustav Klimt.


“Woman in Gold” has harnessed the starpower of Ryan Reynolds and Helen Mirren to dramatize the legal battles over the Austrian painter's “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” The film has made visiting New York City’s Neue Galerie, where the painting is held, a rather humorous experience -- full of Mirren quotes and cinematic comparisons instead of the usual hushed art criticism inspired by the intimate space. And though I’d never take issue with any artist earning mass appeal, it’s worth remembering that Klimt’s legacy far surpasses a single adorned portrait.


For his birthday, here's a rundown on my personal favorite: “The Tree of Life.”


In some ways, we’re in familiar Klimt territory with this one. Like the Bloch-Bauer portrait, it was painted during Klimt’s “golden phase," a style that focused on decorative patterns, mosaics and brilliant ores. Klimt's earlier work had been more radical, but he calmed down after a particularly intense scandal involving three ceiling paintings that were seen as perverting the classic figures of "Philosophy," "Medicine" and "Jurisprudence." His travels to Venice and Ravenna at the time led to an interest in mosaics and Byzantine imagery, and those styles combined with the Viennese sensibilities in fashion and interior design to create the ravishing, pattern-stuffed portraits that are so iconic. 


But there’s one glaring difference between “The Tree of Life” and the other golden phase paintings: the tree. Klimt is known today for his portraits and human studies, but he had a side interest in landscape art, which he developed during his summer holidays by Attersee Lake. Unlike the golden phase paintings, the landscape works took their stylistic cues from Impressionism and Pointillism. So “The Tree of Life” can be seen as the synthesis of landscape content and golden phase styles. That’s why it’s been considered the only “landscape” he made during golden period. 


Symbolically, "The Tree of Life" also carries heavier spiritual and metaphysical meaning than much of Klimt’s work. It’s an image that appears across various religions and cultures, symbolizing the interconnectedness of the world. Klimt’s painting stresses that symbolism by stretching the tree across the canvas, as if linking the underworld, earth and heavens. Repeated motifs in the ground, the figures and the tree itself make it seem that they're all composed of a single substance. In a way, it's a visual effect typical of Klimt’s golden phase art: the decorative elements fusing with and elevating the central figures, but it also dissolves the barriers between them and their auric surroundings. It's a beautiful fusion of form and content: golden phase technique finding the perfect home in the tree's symbolic content.


Like Bloch-Bauer’s portrait, “The Tree of Life” has an odd history of private ownership. What we consider the “painting” was actually only a study for a massive mosaic installation for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. This private mansion was built for banker and art lover Adolphe Stoclet and, sadly, it’s still closed to the public. It might not be enough dramatic fodder for a star-studded film, but it’s a good reminder that the politics of patronage and private ownership were deeply intertwined in Klimt's work. Even when it seemed to diverge to more symbolic, metaphysical or natural motifs.


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NYU Student's #BetterSexTalk Campaign Shares Crucial Advice That's Often Skipped In Sex Ed

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"Own your sexuality, nobody has the right to shame you."

That is the sex advice that Josy Jablons, a New York University student, would like her younger sister to know. As the president of campus group Students for Sexual Respect, Jablons spearheaded a recent sexual education initiative, #BetterSexTalk, to call attention to gender-based violence and sexual respect.

The campaign takes the form of a photo series, where students of every community on campus answer the question: "If you could give one piece of advice to a younger sibling about sex, what would you say?" This approach allows NYU students to fill in the gaps of sexual education by controlling the discourse.

"I believe everyone has a fundamental right to comprehensive sex education, and that's simply not the case at the moment," Jablons told The Huffington Post. "I entered college with no understanding of sexual coercion, with no ability to recognize an unsafe relationship. I entered college with no grasp of affirmative consent, and I blame my sex education for that."

Jablons hopes to eradicate the silence that surrounds sex and sexuality by spreading the activist photos around Facebook and other social media outlets.

More personally, Jablons envisions the ways in which #BetterSexTalk will influence her 16-year-old sister. "I want to tell her everything. I have no 'one piece of advice,' I have hundreds."

Collaborating with a NYU student photographer, Emilio Madrid-Kuser, and president of The Feminist Society, Meghan Racklin, Jablons has now assembled photos of over 100 students.

Check out some of the #BetterSexTalk photos below:




These images were reprinted with permission from Better Sex Talk.

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'The Bachelorette' Season 11, Episode 10: Kaitlyn Bristowe Meets The Families

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It's 2015. By now, reality TV is a young adult, but it hasn't grown out of "The Bachelor" franchise. Despite its bizarre dating rituals, low success rate, and questionable racial and gender politics, the stable of shows is, if anything, more popular than ever. Do people love "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette," or do they love to hate it? 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.


In this week's "Here To Make Friends" podcast, hosts Claire Fallon, Culture Writer, and Emma Gray, Senior Women's Editor, recap the tenth episode of "The Bachelorette," Season 11. We'll discuss Sean and Nick's showdown, Kaitlyn's meet and greet with the families, and Ben H.'s send-off -- and inevitable "Bachelor" campaign.




David Flumenbaum, Managing Editor of HuffPost Live, joins to give his insights.




 "Here To Make Friends" is part of the Panoply Network, and we’ve combined forces to learn more about our podcast listeners. We want you to tell us about the podcasts you enjoy, and how often you listen to them. So, we created a survey that takes just a couple of minutes to complete. If you fill it out, you'll help HuffPost and Panoply to make great podcasts about the things you love. You can find the survey here.


The best tweets about this week's "Bachelorette"...


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Teen's Body-Positive Selfie Proves Her Rare Disorder Doesn't Define Her

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 Isa-Bella Leclair isn't letting let her medical condition get in the way of body love. 


Nineteen-year-old Leclair suffers from Parkes Weber Syndrome, a vascular disorder that can cause "port-wine" stains, heart issues, and vascular swelling. The disease has caused her right leg to swell up to almost 40 pounds -- but that doesn't stop her from snowboarding, competing in beauty pageants and taking pictures in a bikini.   





"My condition doesn’t define me and no way I will let it stop me from wearing a cute swimsuit or a cute dress," Leclair told blogger Alexa from The Lymphie Life. "I don’t fit in skinny jeans or fancy shoes so I have to find alternatives, but I always end up still feeling good about my body."


 Leclair said that she is used to curiosity about her leg and her other health issues, and wants to educate other people about her condition. Now that her selfie is going viral, she can share her empowering message of body love worldwide. 


"For me, confidence is the most important part, because when people see someone confident in their body -- even with a handicap -- they don’t have pity but instead admiration, and that’s when you have the chance to be a good influence and change the standards of beauty," she told The Lymphie Life.


Preach, girl. 


 Also On The Huffington Post:


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Are We Finally Ready To Publicly Celebrate Female Desire?

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"Now I want someone to throw me around like that," my friend quipped right after we saw "Magic Mike XXL" last week. 


I went to see the much-discussed buddy-comedy-feminist-stripper-film with a lady squad of three in tow, and after two hours of muttering "holy sh*t" and giggling in our seats, we left the theater feeling giddy. The movie had, for lack of a better term, spoken to us -- specifically to our sexuality.


As Cosmopolitan's Patti Greco wrote: "It understands that the key to women's sexuality is foreplay. 'Magic Mike XXL' is foreplay."


It's rare to see a film that so unabashedly celebrates the desires of its target audience (in this case straight women of all races, body types and ages), unless that audience is a room of white, also straight, men. Watching "Magic Mike XXL" in a theater was akin to being in the audience of the film's Myrtle Beach Stripper Convention, or being one of the "queens" at Jada Pinkett-Smith's character's members-only club in Savannah. The overarching messaging was: You deserve to be catered to. These men are here for you. They know what you want and can deliver it. Now sit back and enjoy the ride. 





We have reached a cultural moment where female sexuality -- at least straight female sexuality -- is being acknowledged in bigger and bolder ways.


Female celebrities are talking about sex and sexuality frankly, and in greater numbers. Nicki Minaj and Beyonce sing about "Feeling Myself," and TV shows like "UnREAL"  display female masturbation unapologetically and without shock value.


These are messages we desperately need to hear from our sheroes, listen to in our music and see on our TV and movie screens.


In the last two months, both Nicki Minaj and Amy Schumer have flat-out said -- during interviews with major women's magazines no less -- that Women. Deserve. Orgasms.


"I demand that I climax. I think women should demand that," Minaj told Cosmpolitan for the magazine's July 2015 cover story. Schumer echoed those sentiments in an August 2015 cover story interview with Glamour: "Don’t not have an orgasm. Make sure he knows that you’re entitled to an orgasm," she said.


The statistics vary depending on the source. A Cosmopolitan survey found that just 57 percent of women reported orgasming "most or every time" they have sex with a partner, while a larger study from 2000 showed that women reported having one orgasm for every three orgasms men reported having. No matter which way you slice it, there seems to be a gender imbalance when it comes to the big "O." 





As The Guardian's Jessica Valenti wrote, "until we recognize that women’s pleasure during sex is just as important as men’s -- and that there’s nothing wrong with having sex just because it feels good -- that nuance will be difficult to... achieve."


When we see pockets of mainstream culture placing female pleasure front and center, we get one step closer to reaching the sexual equality that Valenti is referencing.


I informally polled some female friends who had seen "Magic Mike XXL" to make sure my enthusiastic reaction wasn't just the result of overexposure to Channing Tatum's abs. They all agreed that this mainstream movie had somehow tapped into something radical. 


"I have never seen a mainstream blockbuster hit that made me feel so understood as a woman," said Elizabeth Plank, Senior Editor at Mic. "Male characters that are both masculine AND deferential to women is very rare and 'Magic Mike' was able to strike that balance flawlessly."


"The movie was a giant celebration of women receiving and enjoying sensory pleasures, which, more often than not, we're told to deny or control in real life," Isabel Foxen Duke, creator of Stop Fighting Food, told me.


It's those sensory pleasures -- and the idea that everyone watching should feel encouraged to indulge them -- that make "Magic Mike" part deux such an utter delight.


Women want to be wanted. We want to imagine ourselves in the starring role of a sexual fantasy that was crafted for us. We want to have our bodies ravished, and maybe, just maybe, our minds too. We want better than Edward Cullen or Christian Grey. We want to be "exhalted," as Pinkett-Smith's Rome says. We demand all of those things. We are entitled to all of those things.


No one's saying we should send a DVD of "Magic Mike XXL" to every straight man in the world, and berate him if he can't gyrate like Channing Tatum or give his female partner an orgasm in 30 seconds, but rather to expand our own internalized ideas about female desire; to understand that we deserve to explore those desires and see them imagined outside of our heads.


Are we finally ready to expand our cultural idea of what female desire and sexuality looks like? We certainly haven't reached some equality-embracing, lady-worshipping sexual nirvana -- after all, we're still waiting on the mainstream blockbusters that cater to the multifaceted desires of queer women -- but the future looks a little more hopeful. 


"Queens, are you ready to be worshipped?," asks Rome in "Magic Mike XXL." Oh, we are, answer the women who dropped $20 to spend two hours staring at a screen. Now let us be.



 Also on The Huffington Post:


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