It may not’ve been your favorite movie to release last year, but chances are, if you went to see David Fincher’s film adaptation of “Gone Girl,” you have vivid memories of the building, hostile tension between protagonists Amy and Nick. And it’s not just Rosamund Pike’s pitch-perfect, icy performance that makes the movie unforgettable -- it’s the drawn-out, edge-of-your-seat suspense sequences.

According to a new study conducted by Matt Bezdek at the Georgia Institute of Technology, we are more likely to remember suspenseful stories better than we remember those from other genres, such as comedy. This is because, Bezdek asserts, during suspenseful moments -- when the beloved hero or heroine’s safety teeters precariously -- we tend to tune out our surroundings, honing in on the story, and immersing ourselves in it fully. 

For the study, Bezdek hooked participants up to an MRI machine and instructed them to watch ten scenes from suspenseful movies, including classics such as “Alien,” and a selection of works by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. During the most chilling plot lines, viewers remained focused on the movies, which played at the center of their screens, surrounded by a checkerboard flashing as a potential distraction. Their eyes remained fixed on the movies when things got tense, but during calmer moments, they took the bait.

A write-up of the study notes that Cary Grant’s near-death-by-airplane experience in “North by Northwest” narrowed viewers’ visual focus, while his escape into a nearby cornfield broadened their focus, allowing outside distractions to seep in. So, while “Gone Girl” wasn’t a film considered in the study, we can assume that Nick’s pursuit of her clever clues would capture viewers’ attention, while scenes following her reappearance might be less engrossing. And, films without these elements of suspense are likely to fade from viewer’s memories more quickly overall. 

Commenting on the study’s significance, Bezdek said, “Now we have brain evidence to support the idea that people are figuratively transported into the narrative.” In other words, watching a movie can be as thrilling as really being present at the scene of a crime -- calling into question the benefits of supposedly more immersive technologies such as virtual reality.

And movies aren’t the only artistic medium capable of transporting. Last year, a study proved that reading novels triggered neural changes “associated with physical sensation and movement systems,” making readers feel as though they're actually experiencing the same ups and downs as the fictional characters. So, if you’re looking for a brief reprieve your day-to-day, a vacay may not be necessary -- picking up a book or heading to the theaters can do the trick, especially if the story is a suspenseful one. 

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Academic studies can be fascinating ... and totally confusing. So we decided to strip away all of the scientific jargon and break them down for you.

The Background

Sarcasm doesn't always land well. Comedians like Sarah Silverman and Trevor Noah have come under fire for jokes gone awry (or misunderstood, depending on where your tastes lie), and some psychologists even equate sarcasm to "bullying." If the line between harmless fun and hostile snark can often be thin, why take the risk?

For one, sarcasm can be pretty damn funny. And now, researchers have identified actual cognitive benefits to being sarcastic. 

The Setup

To find this out, researchers from Harvard University, Columbia University and INSEAD conducted four different experiments. For the first three, participants were divided into one of five groups wherein they were either the expresser or the recipient of sarcasm or sincerity. "Sarcasm" was defined as "expressing the opposite of what one thinks or feels with the intention of communicating one's true meaning." So the groups were: expressing-sarcasm, receiving-sarcasm, expressing-sincerity, receiving-sincerity or a control condition that was neither sarcastic or sincere. The fourth experiment used similar groupings in regard to sarcasm/sincerity, but had an element of trust/distrust for the hypothetical prompt deliverer. 

Based on those groupings, participants completed a specific conversation exercise, depending on the experiment. For example, the first experiment had participants write replies to prompts. Those in the expressing-sarcasm group replied to a prompt by writing the first sarcastic reply that came to mind, and those in the receiving-sarcasm group were told to imagine that the prompt was delivered sarcastically and they then provided the first reply that came to mind.

After the conversation exercises, participants completed various creativity tests, including a word association exercise and the Duncker Candle Problem. The third study also tested participants' abstract thinking skills after the sarcastic or sincere exchange through an established test that showed whether they were more likely to describe words (like "voting") either concretely ("marking a ballot") or abstractly ("influencing the election").

The Findings

All four experiments found that sarcastic remarks led both the expressers and recipients to be more creative. The sarcastic exchange didn't even have to be particularly clever -- the creative boost was seen no matter what the hypothetical conversation looked like. The third study, the only one to test for abstract thinking, delved a bit deeper, finding that expressing or receiving a sarcastic comment can jump-start a person's abstract thinking, which then leads to creativity. 

The Takeaway

As hostile as sarcasm can come off, it just might be a great brain exercise for those hoping to spark creativity.

This isn't such a crazy concept when you think about it. Crafting a statement that literally says one thing but purposefully conveys the opposite probably does take a little extra brain work than straightforward communication. And once your brain switches into sarcastic mode, it seems you can tap into all sorts of creativity sitting idly in there just waiting to be put to work.

So go forth and be your sarcastic, smart-alecky, creative self. No apologies.

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Read the original story on ArchDaily  

The 6th annual “Space for New Visions” competition has announced its winner: a project entitled “Homes for the Homeless,” by James Furzer of Spatial Design Architects.

Hosted byFAKRO, a global manufacturer of roof windows and loft ladders, and A10 Magazine for European Architecture, the competition sought proposals that incorporated FAKROproducts. With entries from around the world, projects were judged based on user comfort, environmental impact, functionality and natural light, among other things. Read about the winning entry after the break. 

Recognizing the issue of homelessness in the U.K., James Furzer focused on creating a safe space for “rough sleepers” – of which there are over 750 on any given night inLondon alone. Homes for the Homeless consists of a series of pods that attach onto existing buildings. Able to be used both independently or to form a  community of pods, they shelter the homeless from the harsh weather of Britain. 

Designed for a budget, the material application of each pod is variable, allowing costs to be kept low and for a pod’s outer appearance to match that of its host building. As they are meant to be temporary shelters, charities would manage the general maintenance and availability of the pods.

With economic downturn, homelessness is on the rise. Accompanied by feelings of isolation, the average homeless person dies at just 47 years old, and are 35 times more likely to commit suicide than the average person. Being insulted, harassed and attacked by the public, it becomes difficult for the homeless to fix their situation. With Homes for the Homeless, James Furzer hopes to change attitudes toward homeless people.

Learn more about his proposal here. 

These Detachable Pods Aim to Provide Shelter for Britain’s Homeless originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website in July, 2015.

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For decades, characters on screens big and small have been held back from singing "Happy Birthday" to one another by copyright law.

Yes, if producers want to hear the song in their final cut, they need to pay a sum to Warner/Chappell, the publishing division of Warner Music Group, which ended up as keeper of the song after a series of acquisitions stretching back to the 1930s.

But soon that could all change. In 2013, documentarian Jennifer Nelson sued Warner/Chappell with the goal of making "Happy Birthday" public property, and now her team has found some compelling new evidence to rebuff a key argument made by lawyers for the music behemoth. 

Warner/Chappell's case, according to The Hollywood Reporter, rests on the idea that the song could only be freed from copyright claims if the sisters credited with writing it had allowed it to be published -- sans copyright notice -- before it was registered with the copyright office in 1935. Nelson's lawyers have done just that, unearthing a 1922 copy of "The Everyday Song Book," containing lyrics to "Happy Birthday."  

A quick history: The sisters, Mildred and Patty Hill, wrote a tune called "Good Morning To You" in the late 1800s. When the lyrics eventually shifted to celebrate birthdays, we were left with the song practically everyone in the English-speaking world knows to use to embarrass their friends at restaurants.

If Nelson wins the case, Warner/Chappell would also be asked to return millions of "Happy Birthday" royalty fees collected over the past four years. That includes payouts to studios big and small, like Nelson's Good Morning To You Productions. As it stands, the current copyright wouldn't expire until 2030.

A hearing scheduled in Los Angeles today could determine the song's fate. Of course, it'll always be legal to serenade family and friends off-camera as they turn one year older.

But we would very much like to live in a world where we can watch actors singing "Happy Birthday" freely on screen whenever a show's writers feel like making it happen. 

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On Tuesday, New York Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote a piece called "For the love of God, stop dressing like crap." In it, she describes a few incidents in which she witnessed theatergoers wearing what she describes as "hideous" attire. She berates women who "look as if they had stepped out of a jazzercise class," men who wear cargo shorts, and people in Crocs.

My thought on the subject: WHO CARES?

I love going to the theater. I've performed all my life. Growing up, I would ask my parents for tickets to a Broadway show every year for my birthday. It was such a special treat for this small town Pennsylvania girl to travel to the Big City and see live theater. Today, as an adult living in that Big City, I see an average of one Broadway or Off-Broadway a month, and it never gets any less special. 

That being said, what other people wear to the theater has never had any impact on my experience. I've never once commented on another audience member's clothing and I expect others not to comment on mine. If I want to dress up, I dress up! If not, I don't. 

Theater today is ridiculously inaccessible as it is, and to tell people they have to dress a certain way to participate is unfair. Ticket prices for Broadway shows are skyrocketing. Last year, the average price of a Broadway show cost over $100. Very few people can afford to pay over $100 for a few hours of entertainment.  

There are many ways in which the industry is trying to become more accessible to younger people, those who have had little exposure to theater and people with less disposable income, and I applaud them for that. There are discounts for students, special prices and perks for people 18-35, and an overall push for more diversity on the stage and in the seats. 

Theater is changing. Playbills often include hashtags. People wait in line to take selfies with actors post-show, rather than get their autographs, and all of that is great! As time hurtles forward, our traditions change. Not every tradition is worth holding onto. 

That being said, audiences' behavior at the theater is a whole other story. You absolutely must behave respectfully while at the theater. No, you should never pull out your phone. No, you shouldn't be talking. No, you should never climb onstage. This should be obvious (but clearly isn't). It's important to remember that dress and behavior aren't necessarily connected either. It's actually quite problematic to conflate the way someone dresses with how he or she acts. Ever heard of not judging the book by its cover? 

Finally, I would venture to guess that professional actors do not care what the audience wears. They're picturing you naked, anyway! But seriously, they can't see you; the lights are too bright. 

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The year of late-celebrity documentaries continues, with Marlon Brando joining the ranks of Kurt Cobain, Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse and Chris Farley. "Listen to Me Marlon" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and it opens in limited release on Wednesday. Told exclusively through Brando's own words via home recordings, interviews, acting studies, film clips and self-hypnosis tapes, the doc contains no talking heads or narration. As a result, rather than use secondary sources to define the myth of why America's most celebrated actor became a recluse and rejected Hollywood, "Listen to Me Marlon" channels Brando's psyche by way of his most intimate reflections. The Huffington Post sat down with the film's director, Stevan Riley ("Fire in Babylon"), for a wide-ranging discussion about Brando's archives and to what degree fame destroyed the actor's resolve.

Clearly the movie hinges on the access to these recordings, but would you have considered making the movie had the estate not backed it? Many documentaries don't have that luxury.

This was a bit different, in a sense. Had it not come my way, I’m not sure Brando would have even been on my radar. The access was in place. The estate was keen to do a piece to commemorate the 10 years since his passing. They were pulling all these boxes out of storage in Hollywood vaults. I’ve done character pieces, and I knew he was a complex character, so that was interesting. I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to figure this guy out." Every book that I picked up -- and I read all of them -- just opened with a question: Who is the real Marlon Brando? Everyone was trying to figure this out, and it was a challenge to try to have a go at that. When Marlon Brando was the only voice and he was psychoanalyzing himself, I thought that had a good chance at actually answering that question once and for all. But what was terrifying was that even a lot of moments in these first-person documentaries, there are still a lot of interviews that are taking place, and I was doing no interviews.

You didn't do any at all?

None. I mean, I went to go meet people to speak and get notes. I met about 40 of his family and friends and other colleagues.

Including Hollywood acquaintances?

Yeah, I met with Harry Belafonte, who was around during the early years. I spent an afternoon with Harry Dean Stanton, and Marlon was friends with Ed Begley Jr. David Lynch I had a brief chat with. I bumped into him at a restaurant, actually. There was his first agent, Jay Kantor, and there was Stella Adler’s daughter, Ellen. It was interesting, actually -- I spoke with a lot of PAs and the women who worked with him in home health, his nurse. They probably knew him better than anyone. His kids, too.

I was really getting confused because it was all so contradictory. I’d read different books that would make sense in their own way, but they would conflict with each other. Really, who is this guy? I was hitting the same blocks that everyone was hitting about the differences in his public and private personas. It was just by stages. It was books, interviews, tapes -- with that combo, I felt like I was getting better and better at just being able to read between the lines, that he could hold opposing views and be contradictory but still be coherent.

Brando has a great quote in the film, "No matter what I say or do, people mythologize me." Did you come to the project with your own mythology about him?

Oh yeah, and I really tried to hold on to that, what little I knew. Because that’s what the audience is coming with, too, so I wanted [that as] the lowest common denominator for how I introduced the audience to the piece as well. I was obviously a big fan and loved his iconic roles. I’ve seen all of his films. But beyond that, I knew he was potentially crazy and that he lost control of his weight and was a recluse, all of which had some truth behind it. But I had no idea about how ordinary and approachable the guy was behind that, and how much I had in common with him and how much I really liked him and understood him by the end of it. He made me laugh and he fascinated me, but it took me a while to get into that friendship. I call it friendship because that’s what it’s like when you spend that amount of time in someone’s head and get to know them.

How did your mythology about him change? 

What was fascinating about Brando was that he introduced me, in a big way, to the idea of myth. I didn’t analyze myth nearly so closely as when he was giving a tutorial and saying this is an amazing thing, that myth is all-pervasive. He said myth dominates our lives in a way that we lose control of, and we very quickly lose sight of the truth. Truth was always what he was interested in -- truth meaning social realism and the Method and Greek theater. That was all his idealism right there. And then the rest of his life was a deteoriated life worth living. It was about his loss of faith in mankind and his inability to actually grasp and hold on to the truth, and myth -- the myth of everything: the myth of one’s partner, one’s parents, one’s self, even, and the myth of bigger things, whether it’s the myth of goodness and justice and America.  

A fair assumption at play, and one that's been made in the Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone documentaries that came out this year, is that fame did Brando in. Did you reach that conclusion in making the film?

I think it really, genuinely crippled him. It was not his nature. He loved to observe and he loved to be out in the world and to see people, and he was a voyeur. He said, "That was my thing, that’s what made me tick, was observing people." He was morbidly fascinated. It was great equipment as an actor. I’m not sure anyone would have shared his obsession with everyone’s tics. He used to find people’s perimeter, their silhouette, and prod and nudge until he found what made them break or what made them react. Even as an old man, he would go and watch people with binoculars from his car at a distance with a hat on while they were at the bus stop. He was trapped by fame when he couldn’t leave his walls. 

When he got on the train to come to New York -- when he got here from home, from that oppressive household, that violent household -- that brief moment was when he said, “When I was standing on the train, I was free.” Between then and when “A Streetcar Named Desire” hit, I’m not sure he was ever so free again. I think fame really was torture for him, in many respects, and it did conjure up a cynicism about his craft.

It’s interesting. I asked one of his PAs, who is actually one of the trustees of his estate, because she spent many years with him: “If he’d had the chance to give it all up and be an ordinary citizen and do away with all that, do you think he would have done it?” And she said, "That’s really tricky." She goes, "I’m not sure that he would give it up, because it did give him access to things. He wanted to educate himself, and he could pick up the phone to any university professor or he could pick up the phone to any senator." He could get access to people to learn from. I don’t know whether she’s right, but I do think about how much fame affected him and how much he wanted to get away from it.

Yet, unlike so many others, he never took his own life or did anything other than back away from the limelight.

There’s a lot to suggest that there was a lot of life left to him at the end. He actually found a degree of peace in the aftermath of his daughter’s suicide. I think he did that through meditation. It’s amazing, his capacity to survive.

That has to come from whatever resolve he'd accrued before becoming famous.

Yeah, I think he was quite self-reliant. He was a latchkey kid, his parents weren’t around. He’d often be wandering by himself. I think he was used to his own space and his own world. He hadn’t fully discovered himself yet. I wonder whether Brando did fully know himself at the time fame hit. He said he was in therapy for the rest of his life. I just don’t think he wanted to be gazed upon like an animal in a zoo. He was the prized scout of the paparazzi. I watched a film about these three guys who were the top paparazzi and they were asked, "Who’s your main target?", and all of them said Brando. They’re all pretty ruthless guys, and poor Brando is being hunted. I just think it’s an interesting treatise on fame.

Especially when you consider that celebrities now, unfortunately, have to expect attention from paparazzi. It almost comes with the territory. But there wasn't much of a precedent back then.

Well, you can see around “Guys and Dolls” how ruffled he is, and you can tell that he wasn’t prepared for that. That’s pre-Beatles. It’s pre-Elvis. He was the forerunner for that whole hysteria.

The movie's title comes from a self-hypnosis tape Brando made. It must have been incredibly intimate to hear those types of recordings.

The estate didn’t know about the hypnosis tapes. I’m probably the first person to ever hear that. It was a strange moment because it felt like I was really treading on something terribly private, and I didn’t feel appropriate or right, in a way. And that remained the case. Even after I’d developed the approach for the movie and once they’d approved the approach, I wanted to make sure the film still had a purpose. I wanted to represent Marlon in a way that he hadn’t really been fully represented in his life, so if I could understand him and what made him tick and what he was interested in, then it would somehow justify playing those very private tapes, because they were ones where he was addressing himself, and it doesn’t get much more private than that. It’s complicated.

"Listen to Me Marlon" is now in limited release, with a nationwide rollout planned in the weeks to come. This interview has been condensed.

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Dracula is back, again.

According to Deadline, the latest film to hop on the remake train is F.W. Murnau's 1922 horror classic, "Nosferatu." Robert Eggers ("The Witch") is writing and directing the untitled remake according to the trade, with Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen’s Parts & Labor company producing for Studio 8.

It comes as little surprise that Murnau's silent film is being reworked, especially after news that another classic, Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," is also being remade. This reimagining will be more one of the numerous adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Murnau's film was an unauthorized retelling of the classic novel.

"Nosferatu" is regarded as one of the greatest, and scariest, horror films of all time, mainly for its chilling black-and-white cinematography, which leaves the audience in suspense while viewing the gothic corridors of the vampire's Transylvanian home. Even watching the film, and Max Schreck's eerie performance as Count Orlok, today is an unnerving experience -- turn the lights off and try watching it alone with the volume blasting (bearing in mind it is from the '20s).

But we can't help feeling disappointed by such news, since Dracula adaptations have been far overdone, not to mention the vampire sub-genre alone. The concept of a modern reworking of a silent horror film that chills mainly due to its lack of elaborate special effects and dialogue, seems antithetical. Still, we're open-minded and hopeful Eggers can bring something new and refreshing to the original, or at least to the genre. After all, Grantland called "The Witch" the scariest film at Sundance this year.

For more, head to Deadline.

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When mom Meghna Shah was expecting her first child, she turned to comedy to help her cope with some of the more challenging aspects of pregnancy. "You go through all these physical and emotional changes that are difficult to understand and process," she told The Huffington Post, adding, "Since alcohol is not an option, having a sense of humor is sometimes the only way to get through the day." 

The New York mom launched Mommie Poppins, an alter ego-esque Facebook page where she posts hilarious musings about pregnancy and new motherhood, along with illustrations by her friend Radhika Chitalia. "I felt like pregnancy was the hardest thing I have ever done but after my son was born I realized that being a new mom is even harder!" Shah said.

"Life just keeps getting more confusing and more overwhelming!" she continued. That's why she created Mommie Poppins -- "a sassy new mom who has a unique, relatable and funny take on the things women experience during pregnancy and motherhood."

Shah officially launched Mommie Poppins in June and continues to update the page with quirky thoughts, drawing inspiration from life with her now 4-month-old son. Though she says laughter doesn't necessarily make new motherhood easier, it helps her put things in perspective.

"[T]here is a little human that is completely dependent on you for everything, and you are completely responsible for him. And the only language he uses to communicate with you is crying and screaming!" she said, summing up her experience as a new mom. "You are sleep deprived, recovering physically and emotionally from child birth and to top it all are exposed to 1,000 different conflicting philosophies on how to care for a newborn (thanks to family, friends and the Internet) and are just living each day with extreme insecurity and vulnerability."

Despite these challenges, Shah is working to "cut through all the noise" and become more confident as a parent who trusts her own instincts. And she hopes Mommie Poppins will help other moms and dads do the same and "bring some humorous respite" from their everyday parenting struggles.

Keep scrolling and visit Mommie Poppins on Facebook for a look at Shah's spot-on musings about pregnancy and new motherhood. 

H/T BoredPanda

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You may know that we live in a world of stunning inequality. But do you know what that looks like?  

Myles Little, an associate photo editor at Time, has made it his mission to display those inequalities. Little's exhibition, called One Percent: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality, juxtaposes photos depicting excessive wealth, like a butler serving champagne on the Maasai Mara, with scenes of abject poverty, such as a legless man cleaning the stars on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

Little told Slate that he encountered photography about unequal wealth distribution through his work and wanted to showcase the “the ecosystem of privilege, from work to education to leisure.” He sourced the 30 images from modern documentary photographers. 

On a Kickstarter page where Little is seeking to raise $29,500 to publish a photography book, he lays out some of the harsh truths about inequality around the world. For example, he notes that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim makes the equivalent of the annual wages of 400,000 Mexicans just off the interest from his fortune, that inequality in the U.S. is at a 100-year peak and that 1 percent of the population is projected to own 50 percent of global wealth by 2016.

"One Percent" will debut in China in September, and is scheduled to travel through places like Nigeria, Guatemala, Dubai and Chicago during the fall and spring.

Take a look at the photos below for a preview, and ponder your place in the world. 

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Today, the name and image of Marilyn Monroe is synonymous with Hollywood glamour, but in 1949 she was just another struggling young actress trying to make it in Tinseltown.

Tight on cash with a car payment looming, the starlet, who was just days away from her 23rd birthday, agreed to pose nude for $50 for photographer Tom Kelley. The photos, featuring Monroe against a red velvet background, would go on to make up the now-iconic "Golden Dreams" calendar and would appear in the first issue of Playboy in 1953. 

Now, 21 never-before-seen photos from the original shoot have just been released and can be viewed this summer in a traveling exhibition across the U.S. courtesy of Limited Runs. 

And while die-hard fans may think they've seen it all, these photos show how the images were retouched (pre-Photoshop, of course) adjusting everything from lipstick and hair color levels, to adding items of clothing over the original photo.

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Giselle Morgan's introduction to girl-on-girl hate started early. She was 14 years old when an eighth-grade girl sent her a death threat on MySpace.

"The hostility, anxiety, and sheer terror that resulted from this message created an internalized hatred for women within me that would take me years to overcome," Morgan wrote in her artist statement. 

In order to break down this subtle hatred and competition between women, the 20-year-old feminist, artist and photographer created a photo series in April called "Our Lady Of Forgiveness." Each image features young women comforting, complimenting and empowering one another.  

Morgan described the project as a "visual depiction of a formal apology for every time I’ve put another female down, as well as a piece to show my forgiveness to those who have inflicted pain on me."

"I’ve judged, stereotyped, and hurt women; women I’ve seen walking down the street and ones I had known from childhood. And it is something I regret immensely," Morgan said. "I deeply apologize for perpetuating girl hate and wish I could retract all the agony I’ve caused."

All too often this "girl hate" is created from our culture's practice of pitting women against other women (aka the patriarchy). Whether it's being prettier, smarter or funnier than another woman -- the list is long when it comes to how many ways women are taught to compete with one another. 

"I now can step away from my actions and fully see girl hate for what it is: a system perpetuated by fear, jealousy, internalized misogyny, and the patriarchy," Morgan said. "The first step to eliminating girl hate is forgiveness and letting our remorse be seen by those we’ve hurt in return."

Head over to Morgan's website to see more of her work. 

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Few figures rank above Studs Terkel and Hunter S. Thompson in the pantheon of American journalism greats. So what, exactly, could be better than Terkel interviewing Thompson? Oh, that’s right: Terkel interviewing Thompson about his time studying the Hells Angels.

Not to mention a wry cartoon animation of the interview from the PBS web series "Blank on Blank," which debuted Tuesday. The old-school illustrations capture Thompson's self-deprecating yet hardbitten tone, as he reveals details about his time with the Hells Angels, and lessons he learned from getting repeatedly "stomped."

Terkel conducted a radio interview with Thompson in 1967, as Thompson was poised to take off as a superstar of gonzo journalism. He had just written Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, a book that stemmed from a breakout article he'd contributed to The Nation magazine. 

"Hunter Thompson, our guest, is a new kind of journalist," Terkel said upon introducing him. "The journalist who is not detached [...] in fact he was almost an honorary member, or a dishonored member of the the Oakland Hells Angels." 

Thompson speaks sympathetically about the Hells Angels, without whitewashing their violent predilections. "I think the Angels came out of World War Two," he posits to Terkel. "This whole kind of alienated, violent, subculture of people wandering around looking for either an opportunity, or if not an opportunity then vengeance for not getting an opportunity."  

Though he ruefully recalls falling victim to "bylaw number 10 or 11 [...] 'When an Angel punches a non-Angel all other Angels will participate'" -- apparently he once made the fatal mistake of giving a member a hard time for beating his wife -- Thompson even sees himself in the frustrated bikers. He confesses to a tendency toward throwing "beer bottles into bar mirrors" and admits enjoying the visceral rush he found in speeding down the highway on a powerful motorcycle. 

Thompson only sped down the open road with the Hells Angels for around a year, but he told Terkel he learned about broader society during that time. "I wouldn’t just call Hells Angels in Oakland the only violent part of our society," he said. "The Angels reflect not only the lower segments of the society but the higher, where violence takes a much more sophisticated and respectable form."

He wasn't just referring to easy marks, like political wheeler and dealer Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he named as having great Hells Angel potential. "I learned a lot about myself just writing about the Angels," he admitted. "I was seeing a very ugly side of myself a lot of times."

For more, check out the video below, and the full (amazing!) feature at PBS's Blank on Blank!

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In Margaret Atwood’s classic, cheeky short story “Happy Endings” she takes a swift jab at the tropes we rely on when we tell stories -- love stories in particular.

“John and Mary meet,” she writes. “What happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A.” She then reveals a myriad of outcomes that can occur between John and Mary’s budding relationship: they grow old together, Mary’s love goes unrequited from a selfish John, Mary uses John for personal gain. Etc., etc.

Though Atwood is demonstrating that a life can’t be reduced to a formula, she’s also suggesting that there are only so many possible arcs that John and Mary’s life can follow -- at least if John and Mary are fictional characters, crafted within a fictional story.

Enter Anne F. Garréta, a French author whose experimental tricks aim to make readers question the strictures we apply to our love stories. In particular, she’s interested in how gender influences how we write about romance, and her newly translated novel, Sphinx, avoids gendered descriptors altogether in its characterization of its two protagonists.

The story begins with a nameless narrator drifting away from a sturdy academic life as a religious studies student (in France, or at least in the world of the book, racking up ample education is not what drifters do, it’s what ambitious people do), and towards a pulsing, sensuous nightclub scene. Disillusioned with the rigidity of school, he or she begins frequenting the Apocryphe, where tragic happenstance turns into a regular DJing gig. The narrator quickly discovers a knack for fluidly mixing tracks, a hobby that serves as a distraction from a newfound love interest: A***, a desired cabaret dancer.

The relationship begins with one-sided lust. The narrator pines after A***, who’s described as having slender, strong legs and a cat-like face (hence the novel’s title, which refers also to a song starring a coy, capricious sphinx). Shallow outward differences are pointed out; one is black, while the other is pale from always holing up inside studying. Beyond that, physical attributes -- or at least those that can be rattled off in straightforward description -- factor little into the pair’s coupling. Although A*** is mostly concerned with kinesthetic pursuits, such as dancing, exercise and sunbathing, the narrator is unconcerned with physical particularities. The sheer fact of A***’s sensual nature is appealing, as it offers a distraction from the tedium of school.

But, as the narrator realizes that their differences make cohabitation a struggle, and A*** realizes that the narrator’s infatuation may be shallow and fleeting, their connection slowly weakens, and each is forced to reconsider what their once-strong bond meant. The set-up is such a classic, relatable tale of falling in -- and out -- of love that one wonders why gender has always been such a huge factor in how we discuss relationships, in fiction and otherwise.

Constructing such a story would be laborious enough had it been written originally in English -- crafting a romance, and fully realized characters with fully realized ambitions and desires, is unfortunately difficult to remove from our learned roles as men and women. But in French the job is even harder: many verbs, including "go," are gendered in the past tense. So the words the author opted for to convey the narrator's actions -- wandering, roaming, visiting -- were genderless, and shaped who he or she was as a person.

Emma Ramadan, who translated the book into English, wrote in a note at the end: "Garréta believed that equality could not exist within a language that puts the two genders in opposition to each other." So, the author, and the translator, created their own language, championing love and desire over power and difference.

The bottom line: The author tinkers not only with language, but also with social norms, to reveal that gender isn't essential to how we talk about love. 

Who wrote it? Anne F. Garréta is a French author. Sphinx is her first novel to be translated into English. She belongs to the same experimental literary group as Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. 

Who will read it? Those interested in feminist or LGBT literature. Those interested in experimental writing or love stories. 

Opening lines: "Remembering saddens me still, even years later. How many exactly, I don't know anymore. Ten or maybe thirteen. And why do I always live only in memory?"

Notable passage: "The machine was running on empty, racing, turning out a fortune without producing an iota of delight: no one enjoyed themselves in the least in these clubs, and I started to doubt whether anyone ever had."

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"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak."

Writer André Breton explained as much in Manifestoes of Surrealism. The 1924 text founded the surrealist movement, one characterized by, in Breton's words, "pure psychic automatism."

The names most often associated with surrealism, the avant-garde cultural movement born in the 1920s, include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy, among others.

Surprise, surprise, they're all men. 

Thankfully, Sotheby's is now hoping to illuminate the many women artists who deserve equal recognition, those who also expressed the convoluted details of their interior worlds with sharp lines and bold colors. The upcoming exhibition "Cherchez la Femme: Women and Surrealism" will feature more well-known names like Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington, along with many even surrealist buffs may not recognize.

"A lot of it is still fairly unknown to the general public, even to surrealism enthusiasts," Julian Dawes, a Sotheby’s vice president who organized the show, explained to The New York Times. "Male surrealists look at women as objects of desire. The female surrealists sort of treat women as looking inward."

In anticipation of this much-needed exhibition, here are seven forgotten surrealist artists who deserve to be remembered.

1. Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)

"Keep your eye on your inner world and keep away from ads and idiots and movie stars, except when you need amusement," Tanning told Salon in 2002. The self-taught surrealist, who passed away in 2012 at 101 years old, enchanted the public with her meticulously detailed canvases depicting richly colored worlds of the imagination.

Her most well-known work, 1942's "Birthday," features a self-portrait of Tanning, breasts exposed, dressed in shabby, Shakespearean garb. Before her feet rests a mythical furry creature with black wings and behind her, an endless path of doorways extends into infinity. 

"When I saw the surrealist show at MoMA in 1936, I was impressed by its daring in addressing the tangles of the subconscious -- trawling the psyche to find its secrets, to glorify its deviance," she continued. "I felt the urge to jump into the same lake -- where, by the way, I had already waded before I met any of them. Anyway, jump I did. They were a terribly attractive bunch of people. They loved New York, loved repartee, loved games."

Tanning, who in her later years made a name for herself as a writer and poet, was also in love with sculptor Max Ernst. The two were married for 30 years until he passed away in 1978. 

2. Bridget Bate Tichenor (1917-1990)

Tichenor was a French-born painter who later embraced Mexico as her home. At the age of 16, when still based in Paris, she served as a model for Coco Chanel and a subject for photographers including Man Ray. In the 1950s, the artist left her second husband and a job at Vogue to permanently move to Mexico, building a community with fellow magical realist painters like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

Tichenor's paintings, inspired by 16th-century Italian Renaissance works, combined traditional painting methods with more unorthodox spiritual influences, such as Mesoamerican mythology and the occult. Her works often involve masks, disguises and unhinged faces, evoking her personal journey to self-discovery and spiritual awakening. 

3. Toyen (1902-1980)

Toyen, born Marie Čermínová, gave up her name and adopted an ungendered pseudonym based on the word citoyen, French for "citizen." She frequently referred to herself using masculine pronouns, and was uninhibited in expressing her queer desires through both her life and art. 

In terms of her art, she was at the forefront of the Czech avant-garde, known in part for her erotic artworks that incorporated tongues, labia, vaginal openings, phallic chess pieces, lesbian orgies and a sleeping woman dreaming of penises.

"Toyen's entire oeuvre aims at nothing less than the correction of the exterior world in terms of a desire that feeds upon and grows from its own satisfaction," Benjamin Peret wrote in 1953. Indeed, her work constructs the enigmatic stage for an interior world, one pulsing with erotic urges and animal instincts that do not ask to be explained. 

4. Kay Sage (1898-1963)

Sage was born to a wealthy New York family and, after her parents separated, moved to Italy with her mother. It wasn't until the late 1930s, after she had married and divorced a young Italian nobleman, that Sage discovered her passion for surrealist art. 

"I call Kay Sage a surrealist because her painting resonates with the unsettling paradoxes and hallucinatory qualities prized by André Breton and his group," her biographer Judith D. Suther wrote. "More fundamentally, I call Sage a surrealist because her allegiance to the surrealist identity lies at the heart of her self-image as an artist."

Sage's works are architectural, centered around the shadows and folds of various materials and "imbued with an aura of purified form and a sense of motionlessness and impending doom found nowhere else in surrealism," art historian Whitney Chadwick expressed. 

Sage wed fellow surrealist artist Yves Tanguy in 1940, and the two endured a passionate and sometimes volatile partnership. "Yves was my only friend who understood everything," she said following his death. The artist stopped making work following Tanguy's death, in part due to cataracts that affected her vision, and committed suicide in 1963. Her suicide note read: "The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called ‘I’m Waiting for You.’ I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again -- I’m on my way."

5. Leonor Fini (1907-1996)

Fini was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Italy. She was never formally trained and, as a teen, spent months with her eyes bandaged closed after suffering an ocular ailment. During this period she began experiencing interior visions, which she channeled into her artwork. Fini, inspired by artists including Hieronymous Bosch and Bronzino, became known for her morbid depictions of powerful and sexually liberated women. Hybrid visions of castration, shapeshifting and knife-wielding characterize her bold imagery. She also created the first ever erotic nude portrait of a man made by a woman, in 1942. 

The radical feminism evident in Fini's work extended to her personal life as well. She was a proud bisexual and often declared her revulsion at the idea of marriage. "Marriage never appealed to me," she said. "I’ve never lived with one person. Since I was 18, I’ve always preferred to live in a sort of community -- a big house with my atelier and cats and friends, one with a man who was rather a lover and another who was rather a friend. And it has always worked."

The bohemian It girl was one to watch; she'd often dye her hair blue, orange, red or gold and go to parties dressed as a man -- or wearing only boots and a feather cape. "I have always loved, and lived, my own theatre," she once said. She also was a mother to 17 Persian cats, who shared her bed and dining room table at mealtime.

Despite Fini's garish persona, her true mission was always expanding the scope for women artists. "She is performing the tightrope act that she perfected throughout her extraordinary career," Sarah Kent explained in the Telegraph, "adopting the unthreatening role of flamboyant narcissist, while quietly getting on with the more challenging and more controversial job of artist."

6. Dora Maar (1907-1997)

Maar, born Henriette Theodora Marković, is most often referenced as an influential muse to Pablo Picasso. However, Maar was an artist in her own right, having contributed to Picasso's "Guernica" as well as a sweeping range of her own works. She was born in Tours, France, and raised in Argentina and moved to Paris at 19, where she studied photography. 

Maar met Picasso when she was 28, he 54, while working on a photography set. Maar soon became a mistress and muse to the Cubist artist, occasionally modeling for, collaborating with and documenting his work. Their affair lasted nine years. 

When her relationship with Picasso ended, after Picasso took up with Françoise Gilot, Maar immersed herself in Roman Catholicism, having famously said: "After Picasso, God."

Maar's legacy extends beyond her romance with Picasso. As Mary Ann Caws expressed in The Guardian, "she drew upon her lover's imagery in her own representations of his work. This says a great deal about her strength. Her recovery of her image, the agency of her own art, have not been taken as seriously as they deserve. She was not simply 'imitating' Picasso, as has been said: she was too intelligent for that. Nor is she 'imitating' his portraits of her. She is collaborating in their representation of this tragedy, as she did in photographing his work."

7. Stella Snead (1910-2006)

Snead was born in London and, along with her mother, fled home at a young age, keeping her destination secret from her father, who was mentally unstable and potentially dangerous.

Around the age of 20 Snead became depressed, possibly a genetic tendency inherited from her father. "Try this, that and the other," she wrote. "No satisfaction, lonely, bored. During my early 20s, deep depressions started to descend, self-pitying they were, and would hang around for months. I cried a lot, wanted to hibernate like the bears or to be very old or dead."

She came to life in 1936 after being taken with a friend's painting, so much so that she too decided to create art. Her paintings are characterized by a nocturnal palette, exotic animals, New Mexico-style planes, ancient sculptures and ruins, sophisticated feminine style, all experienced through a warped, all-seeing perspective. 

She stopped painting abruptly in 1950, after again battling depression. Towards the end of her life, Snead was "rediscovered" as an artist, and had the opportunity to witness the positive critical response to her work.

"In 1998, I had turned 88 and time was running out to be rediscovered as a painter," she wrote. "Quite suddenly the doors were flung open, and there was Neil Zukerman wanting to do just that! A solo exhibition in April 1999; a handsome catalogue; enthusiasm, encouragement, kindness, reliability, generosity. What lovely luck!?"

"Cherchez la femme: Women and Surrealism" runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 17, 2015, at Sotheby's in New York.

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Once, while thumbing through my favorite book -- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf -- I found a scrap of paper wedged within the "Time Passes" section. "Hey," it read, "you found me! I love you."

The scrawl (sloppy, Sharpie-thick) was my ex-boyfriend's. Things had ended on not-great terms, resulting in a purging of all goofy or heartfelt e-mail exchanges (hundreds), but I decided to hang on to the note; it was a very tangible remnant of something elusive. It probably took him less then a minute to write, and, knowing him, the action left his mind as soon as he'd completed it -- quite literally "written off." Why, then, did I value it more than nearly novel-length debates about John Locke's optimism versus Jack Shepherd's cool rationality?

The answer could lie in the fact that I've always been Team Locke (see: blind romanticism), but I like to think that there's more to it than that. There's something universally appealing about hand-written letters. Simone de Beauvoir touches on their importance in "The Age of Discretion," in which the narrator complains about having to talk with her husband on the phone: "You are not together as you are in conversation, for you do not see one another. You are not alone as you are in front of a piece of paper that allows you to talk inwardly while you are addressing the other -- to seek out and find the truth."

So, handwritten letters allow us an opportunity to pause. Due to a lag in delivery time, they might also force us to consider the shelf life of what we write (an email works for Beyonce/Jay Z updates; a letter should express more lasting sentiments). And their tangibility lends them a sense of permanence. But, conversely (and this is where the romance comes in, I think), they also capture something ephemeral.

I can picture Sharpie-smudged hands more readily than I can imagine someone typing, because typing on a keyboard isn't a unique act (fonts can't convey hurriedness). And the fact that he may not even remember writing the note is appealing in a way. There's no physical log of delivered notes for him or any other letter writer to reference. Once it's delivered, a letter no longer belongs to the writer, but to its intended recipient. This imbues anything handwritten with an authenticity that typed, archived text lacks. When we know we can reread what we've written, we're prone to filtering it. This is why the admittedly immature act of deleting text message professions sent to potential partners is understandable, and why Snapchat's disappearing text function could be a success; re-reading our own vulnerable remarks can be deeply embarrassing.

Of authentic writing, Margaret Atwood wrote in The Blind Assassin, "You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it." It's an outlook that might not quite fit when applied to more rational or artistic writing, but when it comes to emotional expression, the handwritten note reigns supreme for a reason.

Here are 7 swoon-worthy love letters that will make you never want to write an email again:

Dylan Thomas to Caitlin Thomas

Dylan claims to have loved his wife Caitlin at first sight, and to have proposed upon their first meeting.

"I want you to be with me; you can have the spaces between the houses, and I can have the room with no windows; we'll make a halfway house; you can teach me to walk in the air and I'll teach you to make nice noises on the piano without any music; we'll have a bed in a bar, as we said we would, and we shan't have any money at all and we'll live on other people's, which they won't like one bit. The room's full of they now, but I don't care, I don't care for anybody. I want to be with you because I love you. I don't know what I love you means, except that I do."

Read the entire letter here

Virginia Woolf to Vita Stackville-West

Vita, the partial subject of Woolf's Orlando, was Woolf's close friend. The two shared a brief, passionate relationship as well.

"Look here Vita -- throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads -- They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river."

Read more of the letter on Brain Pickings

John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Keats and Brawne were betrothed from 1818 until his death in 1821.

"...write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."

Read the entire letter on poets.org

Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas

Wilde and Douglas had a tumultuous affair peppered with frequent break ups and reconciliations.

"Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days."

Read the entire letter on Thought Catalog

Stieg Larsson to Eva Gabrielsson

Written to his wife in 1977, and concealed in an envelope reading, "To be opened only after my death"

"I had a lot of faults, I know, but some good qualities as well, I hope. But you, Eva, you inspired such love in me that I was never able to express it to you...

"Straighten up, square your shoulders, hold your head high. Okay? Take care of yourself, Eva. Go have a cup of coffee. It's over. Thank you for the beautiful times we had."

Read more of the letter on Letters of Note 

Napoléon Bonaparte to Joséphine de Beauharnais

Joséphine was Napoléon's first wife. Although they both had affairs while he was campaigning, they regularly wrote each other passionate letters.

"Ah! I entreat you to permit me to see some of your faults. Be less beautiful, less gracious, less affectionate, less good, especially be not over-anxious, and never weep. Your tears rob me of reason, and inflame my blood. Believe me it is not in my power to have a single thought which is not of thee, or a wish I could not reveal to thee."

Read the entire letter on PBS

Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin

Miller and Nin had a tumultuous, years-long affair in Paris.

"Anais, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that's in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don't find them -- not any."

Read the entire letter on Letters of Note

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By Amah-Rose Abrams
This piece originally appeared on artnet News

In the digital age we live in, it can be hard to get your break in the arts. But harness the power of the internet, and you can move forward by leaps and bounds.

Whether it be with nudity, theft, or simply by jumping on someone else's cyber-bandwagon, emerging artists can make or break a career with a web based project. Taking some recent stories as cues, we've compiled some handy tips to help you break the Internet with your art.

1. Get naked

Taking “Naked Selfie" artist Milo Moiré's lead, you may want to flash some–or all–of your flesh, in the course of your practice. This can really get a budding artist some traction. Lately, Moiré has been racking up the column inches with her bare bodied antics like it's nobodies business. Her unauthorized performances got her turned away from Art Basel 2014, shocked many at Art Cologne, and had her arrested in Paris.

“Through the immediate high level of intimacy, the subject behaves differently than when taking a regular selfie, because of my obvious presence, a new meta level of self-staging emerges." Moirés says of her most famous project, which involves taking selfies with willing participants, completely in the buff. There are many tried and tested creative approaches you can take, but if you decide to adopt it—as did this Swiss Performance art festival—we advise you take the highly public and deadpan route. 

2. Totally weird people out

One of the most recent examples of an artwork (however wide you're willing to stretch the definition) that launched an Internet frenzy was thecollaboration between, celebrity uber-couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and photographer Juergen Teller.

Brows around the world rapidly knitted, as they tried to make sense of the confusing shoot the trio published in System Magazine earlier this month. The photographs featured builders' sand, farm equipment, and carry-on luggage. The sight of the usually slick and highly styled couple on piles of rocks and sand in a rough rural setting was so weird it was almost too much for the Internet to handle.

To our consternation, Kanye's love for the art world is fast becoming less of an object of fascination and more of a real proposition with the imminent release of a collaboration with Steve McQueen.

3. Get vandalized

Another sure-fire way to get those much-needed clicks is to annoy the public to the extent that somebody takes the law of aesthetics into their own hands.

When Anish Kapoor opened his critically acclaimed show at the Palace of Versailles he called his work Dirty Corner (2011) “the vagina of the queen who took power." This invoked trepidation from some quarters in France as evidenced by the Tweet of one minister: “#Versailles Anish Kapoor skids on the green carpet."

Shortly after the exhibition opened, the huge iron sculpture was daubed with paint, which caused a media furor.

To employ this strategy by design it is essential to walk the fine line between friendly agitator and persona non grata. Although, it seems easy to offend at the palace of Versailles. Just ask Jeff Koons.

4. Steal someone else's work and pass it off as your own 

Yes, this is appropriation, a well-worn practice that is highly associated with Richard Prince, but most of the world doesn't know what it is, or that artists made this common practice decades ago, so it still manages to get people bizarrely enraged.

Prince has barely been out of the art news in the last couple of months and for the most part things have not been pretty. See Paddy Johnsonskewer his Gagosian show this past October. Then in May, people got excited all over again when the website SuicideGirls printed out a version of one of Prince's works (an Instagram selfie that he had appropriated from one of their images) and sold it for a mere $90. Websites were pointing out that Prince's works, in contrast to theirs, were selling for nearly $100,000.

Whether or not the images have artistic merit has been the subject of much discussion but Prince's smash and grab approach in this project has given the artist lots of fresh publicity, even if most of it was highly negative.

5. Align yourself with a celebrity who would like to be an artist

Don't know Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner? Yes you do. They're the artists who work with Shia LaBeouf.

The three art world provocateurs have gained themselves hits-a-plenty and much notoriety with projects like #METAMARATHON, #FOLLOWMYHEART, and #INTRODUCTIONS.

These projects have been well received by the art world and the world-wide-web. The #INTRODUCTIONS project was staged in conjunction with London's St. Martins art college and gained over 20 million hits.

LaBeouf was already known for stuff of the traditional enfant terrible variety but his conceptual art endeavors, although sadly putting him in harms way, have also given his post-Transformers identity, if not his credibility, a much-needed boost.

To make this work, you'll have to move to Los Angeles or hang out in London's “Theatreland" until you come across a creatively starved film star to team up with.

6. If you're James Franco, you can just copy people

This is another way to gain attention in a big way. Take another artist's idea and recreate it, stepping into the place of the other artist. The lovely James Franco, as intelligent and talented as he is as an actor, just can't seem to digest that mimicry is not pastiche.

After deeply offending the art world by dressing up as Cindy Sherman and recreating some of her iconic images with himself in the photos, he then made us howl with laughter with his “Just Poo It" video (remaking a LaBeouf video), but for all the wrong reasons.

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Hey! Hey! Look over here! This is an article, written in words, that you should read.

Wait, wait, no! Come back! Here, look at this:

See what I did there?

For a GIF newbie, this brief, looping clip might seem a bit annoying, out of place and simplistic, but in the age of multimedia, this basic format has taken over nearly every corner of digital communication.

Internet media nerds like myself haven’t been able to avoid the tidal wave of kitten and "Dr. Who" clips. It sometimes feels like I woke up one day and the comments sections of my favorite blogs were, all of a sudden, crammed with strings of GIFs, while I searched in vain for the words written in English I could understand.

At my workplace, The Huffington Post, email threads welcoming new co-workers rapidly became GIF-offs. Some part of me sensed that my humble offering of “Welcome to the team!” was basically garbage next to a colleague’s priceless Richard Simmons clip.

The GIF has rocketed to the top of the Internet communications pecking order, an unlikely queen of digital chatter. Nearly 30 years ago, CompuServe’s Steve Wilhite launched the graphics interchange format as a higher quality and more compressed image file than existed on the market. Then, copyright squabbles tied up the GIF in court for nearly 10 years and, according to Mashable, put off many developers, who adopted the PNG format instead of the GIF when the former debuted in 1996. As the years passed, however, rather than fading away, the GIF evolved in directions its creator could never have predicted. 

The GIF's relatively low quality -- it encompasses only 256 colors -- and its animation extension gave it the adaptability to survive in a more current application: as short, looping animated graphics. This ability to seamlessly integrate snippets of compressed video into message board comments, emails and websites held the power to revolutionize digital communication, without eating up insane amounts of bandwidth.

In the corners of the Internet, the GIF survived and thrived. The odd, absurdist GIFs that initially defined the category were, essentially, decorative, funny bits of attention-grabbing eye candy. Companies slapped pixelated construction animations on incomplete websites; personal or less high-class sites embraced the cheeseball factor with moving images reminiscent of primitive video games crawling along the margins. 

Wilhite’s image format was living on as a bit of digital kitsch.

To the average viewer, GIFs probably read as tacky and visually intrusive, but familiarity tends to breed comfort. “We have gotten acclimated to seeing not just graphics but animated graphics for quite some number of years,” linguist Naomi Baron told The Huffington Post. “Think about the moving ads that have been on Weather.com or name your favorite website for a very long time.” They may have irritated us, but over time, these jerky animated ads simply became part of our new online life. 

Then another unexpected, yet somehow totally obvious, evolution brought GIFs to the forefront of web communication: the reaction GIF.

Basically, people started to figure out that GIFs could neatly solve a previously baffling obstacle to naturally flowing online chats. Let’s say you’re commenting on a forum, and another commenter says something shocking. Rather than type out an expression of your reaction (“Oh wow!” or “I can’t believe you said that!”), you can do as you would do in person: Drop your jaw, widen your eyes, and stare, dumbfounded.

OK, so you don’t do that, as you would in person -- but a little video clip of Nicki Minaj does, over and over. Unlike the words, which may not capture your tone, the GIF provides a clear emotional reaction.

Over the past two decades, we’ve proposed, rejected, failed to adopt and naturally evolved a potpourri of solutions to the problem of Internet conversation. The subtle vocal and facial cues conveying intended tone weren’t available in AIM chatrooms or on Twitter. The misunderstanding of sarcasm skyrocketed; punctuation marks clarifying intended sarcasm were introduced but never caught on. Emoticons and chatspeak arose to smooth communication, letting the world know we were :-O or ROTFL (“shocked” and “rolling on the floor laughing,” respectively). More elegantly, tweeters have taken to all-caps or all-lowercase styling, dropping the punctuation for a sly deadpan delivery. 

The limits of language, however, still chafe in an era when so much casual, conversational communication happens via screens rather than face-to-face. The GIF allows a sort of proxy face-to-face encounter, conveying a visual cue of your emotional state directly across the web. While apps like Facetime and Skype allow us to get a direct face-to-face conversation with distant friends or relatives, a GIF can approximate this experience for less personal or intimate situations, like a group email chain or a message board. It remains an estimate, an actor or cartoon character’s enactment of your condition, but it’s far closer to an in-person reaction than a tiny, yellow circle with a few dots. GIFs are “like HD emojis,” the COO of Giphy, Adam Leibsohn, told HuffPost.

And, like the emoji, the popularity of the GIF may have as much to do with its newness and cultural cachet as with its intrinsic value. “It’s that kind of thing of knowing what’s in and using it,” said Baron.

By using a GIF, we’re signaling that we know that GIFs are a thing -- it’s a way of saying, “Hey guys, I’m like the rest of you.” The format also makes another layer of cultural swagger easy; tossing around GIFs made from cult TV series or ‘90s comedies can add a glow of studied cool to your online persona. You can say “I’m so excited!” and “I’ve seen ‘Wet Hot American Summer’!” all in one easy step.

Accordingly, the curation of GIFs has grown into its own sub-genre of communications skill. Anyone can grin with excitement, but how does Amanda always have the perfect strutting Beyoncé GIF to convey her enthusiasm to a group email thread? (Dammit, Amanda, stop showing off!) Part of the pleasure in using a reaction GIF is the satisfaction of having hunted down the perfect clip of Michael Jackson eating popcorn or that priceless ‘80s exercise video. 

This layer cake of cool has attracted more powerful voices than those populating the comments of Gawker. The humor Tumblr "What Should We Call Me" rocketed to fame exclusively by juxtaposing funny GIFs with common daily problems. Buzzfeed and other digital media outlets began to integrate GIFs heavily into their content; listicles like “The Story Of Egypt’s Revolution In ‘Jurassic Park’ Gifs” sat alongside listicles like “23 GIFs That’ll Make You Question Your Entire Existence.” It’s easy for web media to use GIFs as a shortcut to achieving an aura of cleverness. The entire value of such posts, obviously, lies in excellent GIF curation.

Already, however, the challenge of being good at GIFs is being softened. The more they’re around, the easier they get to use. Take the Giphy feature integrated into the trendy corporate messaging app Slack.

By the time The Huffington Post’s newsroom got on Slack, I’d been hearing about it, with burgeoning envy, for months. My friends at other newsrooms and offices were using it, and it made them seem cooler, more plugged in. 

I wanted to Slack.

What I didn’t realize until we did, eventually, move over to Slack, was how easy it would become to slack off. Amanda Hess, in a recent Slate article, broke down Slack’s gamification of work -- the custom emojis, the friendly Slackbot, the goofy hacks, and, perhaps most distracting of all, the Giphy command.

Slack’s built-in GIF functionality allows you to insert a GIF from Giphy, a database of animated clips, by typing "/giphy" followed by a key word or phrase. This function is, obviously, irresistibly addictive. It combines two things Millennials and digital natives love: ease of use and attention-grabbing images. Make including a GIF as easy as typing a short phrase and the possibilities seem almost magical; you can make your text alive without even trying. Of course, this shortcut means sometimes the Giphy command gets lost in translation, a sacrifice we make for the ease of convenience.

Bit by bit, as the newsroom discovered this magical command, Slack rooms filled with strings of nonsensical GIFs, every chat an opportunity to see what Giphy would conjure up for a phrase like “kitten party” or “consider the lobster” or “sparkle time.” (Hint: Just because you use the keyword “Taylor Swift” doesn’t necessarily mean the random GIF pulled up will be of Taylor Swift, though Giphy’s Director of Platform Products, Nam Nguyen, told HuffPost via email that the “translate” feature, introduced two years ago, is designed to “[convert] words and phrases to GIFs.”) 

The seeming randomness of the command created an inconsistent reward as well as the alternative hilarity of a totally out-of-context GIF. Both a perfectly apropos GIF and an absurd one could, somehow, be enchanting. At CollegeHumor, Hess wrote, the discovery of the Giphy command created such a distraction that they created a channel just for random GIFs, “to prevent the tool from totally derailing actual work threads.” 

The bizarre GIFs occasionally spat out by Slack feel like throwbacks to the untamed early days of the format, when dancing computer-generated babies reigned in absurdist glory. We now expect conversational GIFs to be functional and meaningful, serving a purpose by conveying an emotion, our cultural savvy or at least a comforting image (awww, a pile of squirming puppies!).

In 2010, Jezebel’s Tracie Egan Morrissey published a “Glossary of Gifs” compiling useful GIFs from A to Z. In June, Tumblr, whose GIF-friendly interface contributed in its own way to the rise of the format, published a staff post introducing an easier method of adding GIFs to posts. “Since GIFs have replaced written language,” the post explained (in, ironically, written language), “we’re making it easier to turn your obsolete verbiage into modern moving pictures.”

If you listen to Nguyen, this maturation of GIF usage underpins their integration with Slack. “The Giphy experience inside of Slack is conversational,” he told HuffPost in an email. “The Giphy + Slack integration allows people in a workspace to connect with one another using GIFs as a way of self-expression.”

Giphy’s easy-breezy Slack integration also serves as a constant, if unintentional, reminder of the semantic shortfalls of the GIF. Any Slack user is likely familiar with the scenario I was confronted with recently, when I deployed the seemingly unambiguous command “/giphy tidying up.” The GIF that appeared showed a man manically popping in and out of a large box. That’s a failure of translation that would have to be rectified for GIFs to take on a more outsized role in our language.

Some, despite the daunting odds, have dared to dream of more: a GIF language. In 2014, MIT graduate students Travis Rich and Kevin Hu launched GIFGIF, a project that included a site where users can choose which of two GIFs better exemplifies a certain emotion (disgust, happiness, disappointment) in order to methodically classify the clips. Their ultimate hope, they told The Atlantic, was a GIF language that even computers could understand: “I want people to be able to put in a Shakespearean sonnet and get out a GIF set,” said Hu.

As with emojis, however, this will likely extend no further than gimmicks (Emoji Dick, anyone?) and wishful thinking. "You can communicate a lot with pictures, but the requirements of being a language are pretty strict," linguist Tyler Schnoebelen told HuffPost. A GIF can represent certain objects, actions and emotional states, but what about prepositions, pronouns and adjectives? As linguist Ben Zimmer told The New Republic, knocking down the emoji language push, “If you look at those strings of emoji, they can’t stand on their own. They don’t convey the same message as the text on which they’re based.”

Even Hu and Rich, now over a year into their GIFGIF experiment, admit the text-to-GIF goal is unlikely to come to fruition. “When we first had the idea of text-to-GIF, we imagined a mapping from text to a set of emotions, and from that set of emotions to GIFs,” they explained in an email to HuffPost. “GIFGIF provides the second part of that chain, but the first part of the chain is lacking.” They have taken a shot at creating such a translator, but results vary rather significantly. The translation mostly distinguishes between happy sentences and sad ones, with (sometimes) appropriate GIFs.

There’s more to language, however, than conveying emotional reactions, and this is where GIFs are most likely to fall down on the job. “How do you show peace?” Baron pointed out. “You look at Chinese, you look at middle Egyptian -- because that also started as a character system -- and in both cases they took pictures of things and repurposed some of them to stand for sound.” The idea of making a whole language of GIFs: “It’s cute,” she said.

In short, Baron argues, there’s more to language than meets the eye; it conveys meaning that remains highly ambiguous in pictorial form. Consider that adage about a picture equaling a thousand words: A picture, or animation, can convey so much information that it’s unclear what the actual message is. A GIF of someone diving into a lake could mean various things, from “I want to go swimming” to “It’s really hot out.” In certain cases, context may clarify, but it’s always simpler and more easily understood to just convey the information in words. 

At least at this point in its life cycle, the GIF also seems to lack a sincerity chip. “A reaction GIF seems to be used more creatively as a meta-commentary than purely authentically for conveying emotion,” observed linguist Chi Luu on JSTOR Daily. The winky, allusive nature of most GIFs plays into this unserious tone. “These emotional responses are often well-worn tropes from film and narrative,” she pointed out -- and while it’s fun to recognize James Van Der Beek sobbing comically on “Dawson’s Creek,” using such a recognizable clip conveys more of a tongue-in-cheek nod to sadness than true devastation. 

This may be an inevitable downside to video clips of TV shows and movies. Another person’s tragedy can more easily seem like comedy, so it makes sense that the more distanced we are from the expression of sadness -- a clip of an actor portraying someone else’s pain on a movie from 15 years ago, say -- the less seriously we’re able to take it. That’s just one limitation of using GIFs as a language.

Here’s another: Imagine having to see that same Dawson weeping GIF every time someone wants to say “sad.” Good writing involves seeking the right word for the meaning, but also avoiding clichés. The distinctiveness of each clip, and the limited pool of GIFs, lends itself to our new “words” becoming hackneyed quite quickly.

At Giphy, Leibsohn has a slightly more moderated ambition for GIFs. “There's a huge future for GIFs as essential pieces of conversation,” he told HuffPost, avoiding any claim that the format could carry an entire language. “GIFs will surpass emoji.”

The parallel to emoji is apt. Baron, who cautions that she hasn’t specifically studied GIFs, argued, “If I were a betting linguist, if I wanted to do a pilot study ... my hypothesis would be GIFs work almost the same way as emoji, and emoji work almost the same way as emoticons.”

Arguably, GIFs already have surpassed emoji in that they offer a subtlety and meta-pop cultural commentary that has boosted their cachet. But will they ever really become essential? Well, that emoji comparison cuts both ways. “Think of the original emojis. They weren’t good enough,” Baron pointed out. “Fads come and go, so it’s important to know that something that seems so irreplaceable … I’ll bet you two years from now we won’t even be doing.”

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Meryl Streep is arguably either the greatest actress of her generation or the greatest living film actress -- a debate which boils down to the approximate difference between best and best-est. She shape-shifts on screen, changing her look, her accent, the very essence of her being for each role. Her skill is beyond reproach and uncomplicated by a tabloid presence, outspoken politics or activism. She is quite possibly our only megastar famous solely for her talent. 

Now, that is not to say Streep's IMDb page is without questionable choices. There is the garbage hodgepodge of ABBA hits that was "Mamma Mia!" Even in her role as the witch in "Into The Woods" or as titular crappy mom/wannabe rockstar in the upcoming "Ricki And The Flash," she is really just fine. Admittedly, Mediocre Meryl Streep is still at the level of Great Anyone Else. But we're so busy hyperventilating over the sheer fact of her existence, she could probably dress in brown face and star as Big Chief Offensive alongside Adam Sandler in "The Ridiculous 6" and maybe still get nominated for an Oscar.

And she's earned that. Actually, no one can ever earn the right to be an Adam Sandler racism accomplice, but she has earned the right to let loose and have fun on screen, without worry for acclaim. It is possible to be wildly respected in the acting world and fall out of grace. Just look at poor, "Focker"-ed Robert De Niro. Few actors have made the stunning lineup of choices that defined Streep's fledgling career. She emerged in the 1970s and early '80s, with the Vietnam War epic "The Deer Hunter," shortly followed by "Kramer vs. Kramer," for which she won her first Academy Award, and, of course, "Sophie's Choice." 

What stands out most about those early years is that Streep was never the ingenue. She was already 28 years old in her breakout role as Anne Marie in "Julia" (1977), 30 when we met her as Woody Allen's exquisite and sophisticated ex-wife in "Manhattan." In some part, her longevity is built on that premise for her fame -- a bedrock of talent, as sturdy and rugged as her physique in "The Bridges of Madison County." She didn't enter the realm of celebrity as the typical factory product of the decade's ideal woman, nor did she surface as a sex object whose tabloid status overshadowed her acting merits. She was playing real people, real women right from the start.

She's also, on the topic of age, one of the only stars who has maintained such steady critical acclaim and box-office success since her earliest roles. Glenn Close's résumé begins around the same time as Streep's, but is filled with far more valleys than peaks -- an 11-year gap between "Fatal Attraction" and "101 Dalmatians." (Note: That's not a joke! Glenn's live-action Cruella is iconic). Then there's Helen Mirren, notable for her similar role in pop culture as a Beloved Woman Of A Certain Age, though she's really only been a household name in the U.S. for the past ten years or so, while Streep is closing in on her fourth decade. Also, we spend a whole lot of time talking about how Mirren is a hot old lady.

Streep's prominence is even clearer when we look to these peers (or lack thereof, really). In terms of longevity, there is Clint Eastwood with his reputation of ridiculous, curmudgeonly behavior, or Jane Fonda, who starred opposite Streep in "Julia" and has long since established a parallel identity in the political sphere. Married to Donald Gummer since the release of "The Deer Hunter," Streep's dating life has never been in the spotlight. She pre-dated tabloid culture, but even now has one of the most tame searches in the InTouch archives (see: several articles about other actors mostly saying how great she is).

Nearly everyone even close to the realm of Streep's fame has established some second identity. Go on, try and think of a celebrity not well-known for their presence in the tabloids, or in the realm of politics or activism, in addition to whatever their talent may be. Examples include George Clooney, Natalie Portman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and everyone else in Hollywood. Streep is, and always has been, celebrated solely for her craft. That is especially rare.

Being famous for acting and only acting usually requires eschewing traditional celebrity, avoiding the press tours and and obligatory giggling at Jimmy Kimmel in favor of intensity. Consider Daniel Day Lewis. With three Academy Awards for Best Actor, he is a solid comparison point for Streep, at least in terms of decoration. Lewis is so intense, so method, he pretended to be Abe for three weeks before "Lincoln," lived on a Texas oilfield for "There Will Be Blood" and actually learned to skin animals for "The Last of the Mohicans." He's also reclusive and hates fame (and has not even really been in that many total movies).

There are few, if any, true celebrities known only for their craft that emerge and then stay in the spotlight for that very reason. And it would be hard now, given the absurd (and usually sexist) standards by which we try young women in the court of public opinion, demanding sensationalized personalities and punishing them with backlash, to see someone enter the A-list stratosphere based on sheer talent and remain long after their "last f**kable day." In the small, exclusionary pond of Hollywood, Streep is a rare trumpeter swan who speaks fluent French, and everyone else is a duck. You really just can't beat Meryl.

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There are a lot of articles, books and even music videos about parenting picky eaters. But that's not the case for picky dressers -- the kids who refuse to put on pants, the ones will only leave the house in a princess dress or those who insist on being in head-to-toe green. 

Filling this void, the funny ladies behind What's Up Moms partnered with Fruit of the Loom to make a clothing struggle-themed parody of Icona Pop's "I Love It." Their music video showcases some of the everyday battles parents of picky dressers face -- from arguing about whether or not it's too cold to wear a swimsuit outside in winter, to being forced to cut all the tags out of clothes, to commanding that you "can't wear PJ's to school!"

Standout lyrics include, "I wear my tutu every day, but I won't brush my hair," "I wear 10 bracelets and five necklaces when I go play" and "I've had this costume on since Halloween, and now it's May."

Too real. 

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Mom blogger and photographer Stasha Becker has gained over 113,000 Instagram followers with her beautiful pictures of her life in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically, it's the gorgeous photos she takes of her 7-year-old son, their two Newfoundland dogs and Arabian horse that attract a lot of attention.

Every day since 2011, Becker has been taking a photo of her son Julian and their black Newfoundland Max in front of their garage door so that her husband -- a naval officer -- can keep up with the family while he travels for work. "It grew from there and now it's just something we do, document our daily happiness on my Instagram account," she told The Huffington Post.

Eight-year-old Max has been by Julian's side ever since the boy was born, and the family adopted the brown Newfie Bruce after his birth two years ago. "Bruce adores Max and follows everything Max does," the mom said. The Arabian gelding named Vizon joined the family five years ago when they moved to Whidbey Island, Washington.

Though her son Julian is closest to his "big brother" Max, Becker said the little boy loves all of the animals in his family, and their bonds are evident in the beautiful photos she takes for her blog and Instagram account, Northwest Mommy.

"I really enjoy hearing from others that our photos made them smile," she said. "We have such a good life, and if by documenting it we can spread that attitude around we have accomplished more then I ever hoped for."

"Beyond everything else though," she continued, "I am so happy that both my husband and I as parents and my son in his future can look at my Instagram account and re-live the memories my photos hold." 

Keep scrolling and visit Northwest Mommy on Instagram for a look at some of the Becker family's beautiful memories.  

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