When Canadian model Coco Rocha received criticism for posting an Instagram photo that indicated she feeds her baby daughter formula, she put an end to the bottle-shaming with a strong follow-up post. 

While on vacation in Oahu, Rocha shared a screenshot of a text message conversation with the virtual assistant service GoButler about acquiring formula for her six-month-old daughter Ioni.

While Rocha's caption was an endorsement of GoButler, many commenters fixated on the fact that she used the service to acquire baby formula, with several responders criticizing the model for bottle feeding Ioni.

Rocha responded in the comments section and in a follow-up Instagram post that she would be blocking hateful, judgmental commenters. She also shared her personal breastfeeding and bottle-feeding journey.

The model mama wrote:

"Getting a lot of unwanted advice based on my last post. Not that this is anyone's business -- I loved breastfeeding Ioni for the first 5 months of her life and then one day my milk went dry. It happens to every mom at different times. She's been on formula for a few weeks now and seems to be doing just fine. In the last 4 weeks she gained another 2 pounds, grew another inch and is in the 90th percentile for her age. Anyone who has a negative comment to make on the way I raise my baby will be blocked. This is not a democracy, everyone doesn't get a say."

Rocha's follow-up Instagram received over 19,000 likes and 800 comments, most of which praised the model for "shutting down the haters" and reminding people that the way a mom feeds her child is a personal parenting choice.

Power to this mama!

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The Pirelli Calendar -- an exclusive annual for rich people sponsored by an Italian tire maker for rich people -- will look a lot different in 2016. 

Each year that Pirelli has put out a calendar since 1964, it's featured pretty girls in pretty minimal (or totally absent) clothing on a pretty set -- perhaps a cloudless beach or a cobblestone street in some idyllic corner of Europe. In short, it's a highbrow nudie cal. It's been available to only a select few Pirelli customers and celebrity VIPs. It's featured top models like Sienna Miller, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and other people living off their genetic lottery winnings.

This year, though, it's getting an Annie-Leibovitz-designed makeover.  

New York Magazine posted a behind-the-scenes look:

The photographer -- who also shot the 2000 edition --  will feature comedian Amy Schumer, writer Tavi Gevinson, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, artist Yoko Ono, musician Patti Smith, tennis star Serena Williams, writer Fran Lebowitz, philanthropist Agnes Gund, producer Kathleen Kennedy, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, artist Shirin Neshat, actress Yao Chen, and one model, Natalia Vodianova. Huzzah!

"I started to think about the roles that women play, women who have achieved something," Leibovitz said in a release. 

"I wanted to make a classic set of portraits," she continued. "I thought that the women should look strong but natural, and I decided to keep it a very simple exercise of shooting in the studio. This calendar is so completely different. It is a departure. The idea was not to have any pretense in these pictures and be very straightforward." Yet still soft and glamorous and well-composed and everything else we love about Leibovitz's celebrity portraits.

Speaking with Vogue after her shoot, Patti Smith said she was impressed with the photos she's seen so far. 

"I have no idea what the average recipient would [think], but I think that they should appreciate a bold move," Smith told Vogue, adding, "We’ll see."

Ready your holiday stockings, rich people. "The Cal," as you call it, is set to debut Nov. 30 in London. 

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WASHINGTON -- Martin Shkreli has said he will lower the price of a drug used mainly by AIDS and cancer patients following outrage over his pharmaceutical company jacking the pill's price up 5,000 percent this week. 

But a mere price reduction isn't good enough for Nothing, a Philadelphia-based rock band that has a two-album contract with a label that happens to be bankrolled by Shkreli. For Nothing, it's an odious association. It does not rock. 

"If he gives everyone the drug for free for the next five years, then I'll put my record out with him," Nothing frontman Domenic Palermo told The Huffington Post on Wednesday. "And that's one record. If he wants the other one he's got to put it out for 10 years. That's my deal."

Other bands on the label have also registered their disgust, as has the label's owner. They're joined by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who have also expressed outrage over the news that Shkreli's Turing Pharmaceuticals hiked the price of a 62-year-old drug called Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per tablet overnight.

In a Tuesday Facebook post, Palermo said he only realized Collect Records had a relationship with Shkreli after outrage cascaded over the Internet this week in response to the price jump. Shkreli is a "silent partner" at the label, according to label owner Geoff Rickly.

Nothing had planned to announce its next record would be released in March, but that plan is now in doubt.

"I really don't see how that's going to be a possibility," Palermo said, adding that delaying the record release also complicates booking the shows that would support the record.

Shkreli, for his part, has said Turing will back off the price hike, though he hasn't said what the drug's new cost will be. "[T]here were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this action, I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people," Shkreli told CNBC.

Nothing's not impressed. 

"I don't want to be attached to that person," Palermo said. 

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All over America, people are disappearing without a trace. 

Lovers, friends: here one day and gone the next, ghosts vaporizing into the mist. At least, if they’re not liking your Instagram selfies and texting you sweet emojis, do they really exist? It doesn't feel like they do.

What once was difficult has now become as easy as that: Breaking things off made as simple as not texting, not emailing, not calling. No “sorry, I have to wash my hair tonight.” No “it’s not you, it’s me.” No “I met someone else.” No “no.” 

We seem to have become a nation of wafflers and avoiders, carefully evading even the most quotidian confrontation. It's not just in the realm of dating, either. "I see this in college classrooms all the time," linguist Naomi Baron told me, "that people are less willing to take positions on anything." Nothing stakes out a position more firmly, and more provocatively, than "no," and increasingly, it's far easier to simply not say it. 

When We Gave Up On "No"

Now, like most generations, millennials are given to feeling special. If it seems harder than ever to get a clear “yes” or “no” out of someone, who’s to say that’s unique to us? Maybe that’s just how it feels to grow up, to be surrounded by adults with too-full plates and a mature awareness of the awkwardness occasioned by saying “no” when one could tell a white lie.

In a way, even the modern epidemic of ghosting differs only superficially from more well-established ways we’ve found to reject people without confrontation -- lying about the reason, continually saying we’re busy until the message is received, asking our friend to deliver the message. (Other people do that, right?) These methods, like ghosting, leave the rejected without answers.  And it’s a lot easier to use them than it is to say, “No, I’m not interested.” 

“We may have changed the language we use, but the sentiment is not a new one and is not one that’s unique to this generation,” Baron told me. She, as well as other experts I spoke to, recalled the transparent lies that were once the best way to say "no" without saying it. “When I met someone in person I thought was unattractive I’d have to … lie and say ‘I’m busy for the next two years’ or something,” offered lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower as a (generic, not personal) example.

But why do we struggle so much with saying “no”? The impulse to go with the flow is more deeply ingrained than many of us realize, says Vanessa Bohns, an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell, who studies the social psychology of rejection. “It’s a social norm to say ‘yes,’ and breaking that social norm and saying ‘no’ is awkward and embarrassing,” said Bohns.

Her studies have suggested that we vastly overestimate others' willingness to say no to our own requests. She pointed to the politeness theory put forth by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson in 1978 -- well before millennials were even twinkles in their parents’ eyes -- which argued that in social interactions, both parties tend to avoid behaviors that will cause overt damage to each other’s public face, or self-image.

Saying “no” to a direct request publicly suggests that the request was unacceptable or objectionable, which is a body blow to the requester’s face -- which in turn creates an uncomfortable social situation for the rejecter. Bohns’s studies on persuasion have suggested that “it can ultimately be more effort to say ‘no’ politely than to just go ahead and do whatever was asked,” she says.

In social contexts, this gets a bit more complicated. It’s easier to simply fill out a short survey or help carry a box -- or even vandalize a library book -- than it is to grapple with the awkwardness of turning someone down, but committing to a full evening or more of unwanted togetherness can be a heavy price to pay for this conflict-avoidance. Suddenly we find we have phantom prior engagements the night of our frenemy’s holiday party or a skeazy suitor’s proposed dinner. These face-saving maneuvers extricate us from commitments without the actual unpleasantness of saying, aloud, “No.”

A "No" By Any Other Name

Still, saying, “Oh, I can’t, I have a … a thing” isn’t as different from saying “no” as it may once have seemed. The more commonly an excuse is used as a disingenuous excuse, the more transparent the ruse. Do we really believe it anymore when an acquaintance tells us he’s just “too busy” to schedule lunch, or that she "didn’t even see" our email asking her to sponsor to your charity 5k?

The plausibility of an excuse depends on most instances of its deployment being true. So “I have a doctor’s appointment” remains a reliable standby -- doctors aren’t going anywhere, and most of the time that appointment is probably real. But the more we exploit vague forces outside our control to function as a gentle brushoff, the more obvious it becomes that we’re all probably lying to each other. The first person who told the girl he was dating, “I’m just too busy with work right now for a relationship” -- he probably got away with that. These days, it sounds like a thin cover for a break-up conversation he doesn’t want to have. How often, after all, is that excuse used any other way?

As polite language for avoiding commitments becomes routinized, it becomes transparent, closer and closer to the bluntness of actually saying “no.” Think of how laughable we now find the excuse of "I can't go out with you; I have to wash my hair tonight." The ways we avoid saying “no” evolve and shift accordingly.

“In the United States, we find different words at different time periods that are hedge words. Maybe. Sure,” said Baron. "That word 'sure' does not mean 'sure' any more than 'LOL' means 'laughing out loud.'"

A firm yes, on the other hand, needs to be delivered with enthusiasm. Which sounds more like a definite “yes”: “Yeah,” or “Absolutely”? The lack of unmitigated enthusiasm can read as hedging or veiled rejection -- thus our suspicion of “maybe,” “sure,”  "OK" and “fine.” “I think there’s always been a tendency for exaggeration, especially in more colloquial circumstances,” says Sheidlower. “It can’t just be good, it has to be great. It can’t just be great, it has to be awesome. You’re struggling for forever more praiseful adjectives. Eventually you run out, there aren’t any more terms left.” 

So… then what?

How We Say "No" Now

The rise of digital communication has inarguably disrupted the classic etiquette of the white lie and the polite evasion. “I would say that millennials are more likely to say ‘no’ because they are less likely to make and receive requests face-to-face,” says Bohns. 

But what does saying “no” actually mean in this context? When most of our conversations take place via email, text and social media, rejection can be as simple as failing to respond -- a strategy that’s painfully rude when someone is standing in front of you, asking you for something. “Most of the people we counted as ‘no's’ in our email study simply didn't respond,” concedes Bohns, referring to a study tracking whether people were more likely to respond to a survey when approached via email or in person. “In face-to-face interactions [...] you could just walk away or pretend that you didn't hear something to get out of doing something.” Of course, she says, “it's pretty rare in face-to-face contexts because it would make the interaction incredibly awkward.”

In person, it is extremely uncomfortable and bizarre to ignore an acquaintance who’s trying to ask you out; instead, you reach for a tepid excuse. Fortunately, there’s little need to say, “Thanks, but I have to do laundry that night,” when you can ignore a text instead. 

On OkCupid, cofounder Christian Rudder says, “Rejection almost always takes the form of silence. A message from a man to a woman gets nothing back 80 percent of the time. That’s not bad!” he hastens to add. 

When it comes to online dating, silence may be the best rejection. Few if any pre-Internet dating scenes allowed for such high-volume, rapid-fire propositioning. “It’s hard for someone to answer 50 messages in a day,” says Rudder. “Most people understand that you’re just not going to get a reply to every message.” Very few women got asked out 50 times a day before the advent of online dating, and most of us realize that having to turn that many people down can be too overwhelming to face. Part of the price for the convenience and options of online dating may be sacrificing the old-school norms of courteous response and gentle excuse in favor of, well, nothing.

Still, some do respond to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Rudder, also the author of Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity -- What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves, calls these “false positives” in their messaging data, which track how many exchanges happen in a single OkCupid conversation thread. “We go all the way to four [messages exchanged] now” to account for these rejection replies, he says. Long-standing etiquette guidelines aside, it may be more uncomfortable for everyone involved to say “no thanks” to a Match.com message than to convey a lack of interest with silence.

You can’t simply ignore everyone, though, not even online. What if that person is your mom, or your S.O., or an old friend? The rules still seem to be evolving. When communicating over text or email, “You don’t necessarily have the kinds of cues that you get normally because you don’t have facial expressions,” says Sheidlower. “Is the person being not that enthusiastic?” You can’t mumble “yeah” halfheartedly or yelp it excitedly; all the other person sees are the cold, hard letters. 

The human race, however, is nothing if not linguistically inventive. Scores of cultural language think pieces have pondered the use of ellipses, periods, capitalization, emoji, gifs and specific word choices to signal sincerity and enthusiasm -- or the lack thereof -- in the digital age. Even your friends will get the hint that you're unexcited if you respond with "Maybe ... " (If you get this text, consider that a "No.")

Even better, it’s never been easier to postpone actually making a commitment to saying “yes” or “no.” “Sounds good, I’ll text you tomorrow!” is akin to a yes, but simple enough to walk back the next day just by not following up or using a last-minute excuse (“Sorry, so exhausted -- another time?”). With instant communication at our fingertips, we can run late or cancel at any moment, whereas just a couple decades ago we were bound to show up at the right place and time, as planned.

Rich Ling, who studies mobile communication, notes that his studies reveal an unprecedented level of vagueness about prior planning. Young millennials, he says, “might have two or three threads going at any given time. Some of these might coalesce into an actual event, and others might not.” Ultimately, this indecisive juggling of social options means “more indeterminacy when thinking about informal social interactions,” he says. When it comes to ignoring invites, "The degree to which it is seen as rude depends on the degree to which the sender weighs the importance of the invitation." So promising to attend a more planned-out event, like a birthday dinner, is still considered a commitment; backing out with a last-minute message doesn’t come across well, he adds.

Still, if you avoid saying “yes,” you can prolong the horrifying point of committing to something you’re not sure about. The existence of a “maybe” option on Facebook may be the most institutionalized concession to our modern reluctance to send an RSVP more than a few minutes in advance.

Whether you decide to show up or not, the host can’t complain -- you did say “maybe.” 

No: Who Needs It?

In the flurry of think pieces and societal angst over ghosting, it might seem as though the practice came into being with Tinder and smartphones. Despite this current panic, ghosting didn’t arrive with texting; what about good, old-fashioned pretending to be dead? Or pretending to have moved to Antarctica to study the mating habits of penguins? (Seriously, though, I did move to Antarctica, if someone named Derek asks.)

Disappearing without a trace possesses a particularly modern brutality, all the same. It’s saying no without saying anything, not from any particular creativity or desperation but simply because we now can so easily. If "Sex and the City" were being created now, there would be a lot fewer tense break-ups and a lot more scenes of Carrie waiting for a text that never comes from a guy she'd been dating for months. When Berger breaks up with her on a Post-It, she smashes a vase in fury. Now, that analog note seems almost sentimental compared to today's ghosting epidemic.

At least she had an answer, no matter that it was only seven words.

“Back in the day ... if some guy wanted you to go out, and you didn’t want to go, but you were 15 and you didn’t know how to say, ‘No, I think you’re a creep,’ you’d say, ‘I’m busy, I can’t,’” Baron recalled. “You didn’t have the social skills yet.” She seems to take for granted that this tactic is born of youth, but if teenagers can't handle the truth, they're not alone -- at least these days. Teens and adults alike have even less effortful ways to give the brush-off, by simply vanishing from our romantic interests’ inboxes and DMs. 

Why would we, in a world that offers negligible consequences for such behavior and the tempting reward of a no-muss break-up? We live in a world of silence and "yes," and maybe we actually prefer it that way.

In this world, we're just so rarely threatened with "no" that the word itself seems to be losing its teeth. Older, more proper English speakers often flinch when young servers jovially say "No problem!" after being thanked for performing their duties. It implies, many argue, that it might be expected that you're causing a problem to the person you're paying for food. But "no" formulations simply don't mean what they used to. Look at phrases like "no, totally" and "yeah, no" -- both of which, almost universally, mean "yes."

"No problem," despite the discomfort it causes some, doesn't actually mean "there is no problem." It means "You're welcome," or "Happy to help," and is typically delivered with the same sheer positivity.

In these cases, throwing in a "no" implies no weighty negative connotation; it's almost a replacement for "um." Our age-old horror of rejecting people has finally evolved to this point: We've found pathways to almost completely avoid ever directly rejecting someone, and our old bogeyman, "no," has become a harmless shell.

After all, if you were going to say "no," you'd find a nicer way to non-say it.



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Gisele Bundchen, the world's highest paid model, is probably not coming to a coffee table near you.

In celebration of her twenty years in the modeling industry, the supermodel has decided to release an over 500-page chronicle of her career that will set you back a whopping $700. The book is set for release in November 2015 and was co-curated by Bundchen herself.

According to book publisher Taschen, the tome includes "jaw-dropping glamour and intimate, personal insights," as well as over 300 photos of the supermodel.

It's quite a hefty price tag for a book that will likely sit on your coffee table. That is, if you're able to get your hands on one at all. A limited release of 1,000 copies will be signed by the supermodel. The first 100 copies will be considered Art Editions, and include a signed print by famed photographer Juergen Teller.

Considering the amount of photos included in the $700 book, when you break it down, you're paying about $2.30 per print. Kind of a bargain, no?

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Whether writing a memoir, personal essay, confessional blog post, or private journal, examining your own life is far from easy -- even for the professionals. For this week’s Self-Portrait series, we’ve rounded up 25 women’s thoughts on the joys and struggles encountered by female writers in telling their stories. Read on for their wisdom on everything from the tricky nature of memory, to sexism in the literary world, to the question of other people’s privacy.

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ISLAMABAD -- On a recent workday in a labyrinthine building in Pakistan’s capital city, young men and women in t-shirts, kurta tops and jeans stared intently at computers in a maze of offices and cubicles. Around them unfolded a style of workplace not typically associated with the country’s best-paved city, known for a suburban calm that remains a sticking point in the age-old question of whether Lahore’s soulful bustle is superior.

At the Islamabad-based animation studio known as Unicorn Black, even the walls pulse with creative activity. Nearly each hosts an image, some printed on slick poster paper, others drawn directly onto the vertical surfaces with pencil, mostly of a young woman in a form-fitting black bodysuit, a cape usually flapping righteously behind her. In each portrait, a determined pair of eyes peek out through the dark cap segmenting her face. 

She is Jiya, fictional star of Pakistan’s most popular homegrown cartoon, "Burka Avenger." The country’s first female superhero is a mild-mannered teacher by day and a fierce keeper of the peace by night. Her nocturnal incarnation uses books as weapons and fights for causes unique to the region -- polio awareness, literacy, anti-radicalization efforts -- all while wearing a stylized burka in the form of her jet black costume.

In two years of existence the conceit has proven broadly popular, expanding to India and Afghanistan. This fall, the fourth season of "Burka Avenger" will air in five languages across the region, coinciding with the roll-out of Pakistan’s first line of TV-inspired merchandise.

In the studio earlier this month, project manager Adeel Abid described the fine balance between values -- commercial, civic, religious -- the show walks. When it launched in 2013, “people were divided” on its buzziest feature, he recalled. “Are they making fun of the burka? Or supporting it?”

The answer is more complex than the question. "Burka Avenger" reflects the concerns of Pakistan itself, a country where growing extremist factions are plunging the middle class into existential reflection. Jiya, at once progressive and devout, represents the balance many in Pakistan long for on a national scale.

Her ability to reconcile seeming contradictions informs a favorite anecdote at the office, of a mullah who was approached by a French newspaper early in the first season. Asked what he thought of the show, he gave a response that surprised even its legendarily uni-named and polymath creator, Haroon. Instead of issuing a fatwa, the mullah proclaimed that even he approved. 

A Unicorn Black animator manipulates the show's villain Baba Bandook using Autodesk Maya, a software new to Pakistan. 

In a country where women make up nearly half of the population but only 25 percent of the labor force, the endorsement defies reasonable expectations. An educated girl can seem mythical in the country’s rural stretches (the studio’s promise of unicorn harboring seems fitting). As of 2012, a mere 61 percent of Pakistan’s girls finished primary school, according to World Bank figures. The same census also found that nearly an equal ratio of women between 15 and 24 were literate.

Girl power ranks high in the cultural consciousness. The first episode of "Burka Avenger" aired after Malala Yousafzai rose to global fame in 2012, after surviving a gunshot delivered point blank to her face on her way to school. But the show had already been conceived of by then, Abid said, adding that the first episode alone took five to six months to produce. “When Malala happened, [distributors] said to air it,” he said. “But we waited.”

Production time has sped up as the team has grown. For the fourth season, nearly 80 people worked out of Islamabad to turn out 26 episodes in less than one calendar year. Operations are more sophisticated as well. Unicorn Black claims to be the first studio in Pakistan to use Maya, a premiere software that enables designers to tweak facial expressions and body movements with the drag of a mouse, like puppeteers blessed with hundreds of sensitive strings.

Still, the country’s rhythms set the pace. When asked about the presence of significantly more male employees in the studio than women, Abid seemed flustered. He cited a powerful female producer absent that day, before conceding that the overall ratio is heavily skewed. In explanation, he produced a twist on the old Islamabad-Lahore dichotomy, crossed with the realities of new Pakistan. “Everyone who goes to art school is from Lahore,” he said. “And for women, it’s not safe to travel for a job.”

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Happy fall! You can grumble about rosé bottles slowly vanishing from bodega shelves, or, you can embrace the cooling weather with a hot coffee and a good book.

If your to-read pile isn’t already toppling over, we recommend adding a few campus novels to it: those warmly (or painfully) nostalgic stories set on high school and college campuses. They probably won’t make you long for the halcyon days of crisp new notebooks, but they will, at the very least, move and entertain you.

Mislaid by Nell Zink

“Campus novel” might be a bit of a reductive descriptor for Zink’s saga, but a hefty chunk of it does, in fact, take place on a Southern college campus -- a little time capsule tucked away from the rest of the country’s social progress. A revered poet takes a special interest in a young student, who winds up canoeing across the tiny school’s lake to visit him. It’s only after she has his child that she finds out he prefers men, in one of the many surprising twists in Zink’s insanely cerebral yet deeply enjoyable story -- recently longlisted for a National Book Award.

Read our interview with Zink. 

My Education by Susan Choi

Yet another student-professor seduction tale, only this one doesn’t imply naivety on the part of protagonist Regina Gottlieb. She’s aware of her literature professor’s slightly seedy reputation, but becomes enamored with his wife, pursuing her relentlessly. So, Choi subverts the conventions of a genre brimming with similar stories, offering an alternative to the tired arc of girl meets man, girl learns an important lesson about independence. 

The Professor's House by Willa Cather

If you’ve never read a novel by Willa Cather -- well, shame on you. But also, you’ve got to start somewhere, and The Professor’s House has all her trademark, engaging plot elements. Professor Godfrey St. Peter is prepping to move, and takes the time he spends packing his belongings as an opportunity to reflect on a relationship past. His former student, Tom Outland, inspired him when they knew each other and influences his life still.

I'll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin

Originally published in Korea, Shin’s novel has the elements of an American campus novel -- students forming lifelong bonds amid their introduction to life’s difficulties -- but adds to them the backdrop of a tumultuous, riot-torn city. Three friends -- Jung Yoon, Yoon Miru and Yi Myungsuh -- recover from all they’ve lost by taking long walks around Seoul, each contributing different observations.

Read our review of I’ll Be Right There 

Paulina and Fran by Rachel B. Glaser

Glaser’s story of a female friendship that inches closer and closer towards being fully realized is a blunt, honest portrayal of how human connection -- at least connection between two likeminded, artistic women -- really works out. Paulina and Fran met at an art school party and bonded over a study abroad trip, but petty quibbles over boys and future ambitions keep them from expressing their complete adoration for one another.

Read our review of Paulina and Fran 

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

A classic campus novel, where Amis’s ability to openly mock the pretensions running rampant in most academic circles shines. Jim’s bumbling observations will make you laugh -- but the story isn’t all cynical; it has heart, too. If British humour’s your bag, pick this one up, if for some silly reason you haven’t already.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

There may be no easier way to cause a ruckus among a roomful of Tartt fans than to ask them which of her novels is best. There may be a few votes for The Little Friend, but otherwise the chorus of strong opinions will be divided between The Goldfinch -- her sprawling epic of art and loss -- and The Secret History, her fast-paced story about a gang of eccentric college students.

The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller

Miller’s first novel is set on a high school campus, rather than a college, but her story is full of smart literary allusions. Iris Dupont is an aspiring journalist who’s working to get to the bottom of a secret society revealing disparaging rumors at her school. The titular gadfly refers to the subject of one of the characters’ research -- a tiny organism that can only live in severe settings -- and serves as an analogy for teenagehood.

In One Person by John Irving

Like Miller’s novel, Irving’s is set at a high school, where narrator Billy explores his sexual identity. Boldly confronting stereotypes about bisexuality, Irving explores a relationship -- founded both in literature and in physical attraction -- between a transgender librarian and a young, curious student. As usual, the author demonstrates he’s adept at writing youthful characters, full of wit and longing.

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

Powers’s novel is as fascinating as its premise: a professor with writer’s block teams up with a computer scientist in an attempt to build a computer that can write a book indistinguishable from a work by a human. The result, “Helen,” isn’t quite as quippy as the ScarJo-voiced robot in “Her,” but she’s capable of feigning -- or, perhaps, truly understanding -- human emotion.

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New Yorkers may have to deal with traffic woes, security checkpoints and a whole lot of police barricades over the next few days. But the pope is in town, and the city is excited.

This is Pope Francis' first visit to the United States, and his two-day New York tour will take him up- and downtown as he visits a school, Central Park, the United Nations and more.

Here's what's on the docket:

Click the square button in the upper left corner to see his full list of destinations.

Thursday, 5 p.m. -- Arrival. The pope will land at John F. Kennedy International Airport right at the start of rush hour. Transportation officials have pleaded with New Yorkers to refrain from driving and opt for public transport throughout the duration of his visit.

6:45 p.m. -- Evening Prayers at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Pope Francis will attend vespers at the newly renovated, neo-gothic masterpiece. St. Patrick's wrapped up a $177 million renovation earlier this month in anticipation of his visit, the scope of which you can see here. 

Friday, 8:30 a.m. --  Pope Francis will address the United Nations General Assembly early Friday, which is expected to discuss a swatch of major issues facing the planet, including climate change and ongoing worldwide conflict. 

11:30 a.m. -- A multi-religious service will be held at the 9/11 Memorial. You can watch a live-stream of the event here.

4 p.m. -- The pope will visit Our Lady Queen of Angels Elementary School in East Harlem, where 24 third- and fourth-grade students will meet with him. He will likely teach a lesson on how to protect the planet.

5 p.m. -- The visit will turn towards Central Park, where the pope will lead more than 80,000 people in a procession. Attendees will need a ticket (no longer available) and an ID to participate. Much of the area south of the 79th Street Transverse will be closed to the public.

6 p.m. -- The pope will lead mass for 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden, many from parishes within the Archdiocese of New York. The theme of the mass is peace and justice and will be spoken in three languages: English, Latin and Spanish.

Saturday, 8:40 a.m. -- The pope leaves for Philadelphia.

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No one wants to work on Labor Day, so when I sat down with Andrew Garfield at a Manhattan coffee shop, I wasn't expecting much. I was wrong. What unfolded during our 25-minute conversation was a typhoon of well-considered reflections on celebrity culture. It came at the right time, too, seeing as we were discussing the new sell-your-soul drama "99 Homes," directed by indie wunderkind Ramin Bahrani ("Man Push Cart," "Chop Shop"). Garfield plays Dennis Nash, a struggling single father who takes a job working for the same corrupt real-estate broker (Michael Shannon) who evicted him and his mother (Laura Dern) from their home. Told in the vein of a spellbinding thriller, "99 Homes" is Garfield's first release since the third "Amazing Spider-Man" installment was axed. Amid the ebbs and flows of endless relationship rumors and mild Oscar buzz, Garfield was in the mood to wax poetic about the state of fame. 

This movie premiered at Venice and Toronto last year, so it feels like the initial buzz was forever ago. Does it feel that way to you?

It feels like a long time, but it’s weird -- you make the film and then, as an actor, you kind of have to forget about it. This was different because I was a producer on it, so I was able to have a bit more hands-on input from inception to completion, so that felt really good.

It's your first time producing. Was that your idea or were you approached to do it?

It was something that was important to me to set up so I didn’t feel like I was banging my head against a door trying to get in, which I’ve felt in the past on certain productions.

"99 Homes" is the story of a guy who sells his soul in order to put a roof over his family's head. By the time he's fallen down the rabbit hole, you have to ask, "Is it worth it?"

I think that’s the question for all of us to answer and ask ourselves if we watch the film, and in our lives on a day-to-day basis: How do we forego our true selves in order to -- what? In order to make money? In order to not rock the boat? In order to survive financially, economically, putting food in our mouths and roofs over our heads? Or in order to survive in a culture that will reject us and put us out on the street, emotionally speaking, if we call it on its shit? It’s a very strange thing to go to, but not all that strange. You look at the life of Jesus. No matter what you believe -- whether you believe he was just a man that had this divine connection, or whether he was literally the son of God, or whether he was saying that we are all the sons and daughters of God -- he was someone who was so unpopular for talking shit about the moneylenders, the money collectors, the taxmen, the evils in his society. He was literally crucified and killed for it. You look at John Lennon, you look at Gandhi, you look at Martin Luther King. Look at all these people that are executed for speaking out against the evils of the system and you kind of go, “Well, fuck, I ain’t gonna say shit. I’m going to compromise what I know and what I feel just so that I can survive and get along and not rock the boat, and be liked and be cute and have everyone understand that I’m just a regular person like everyone else.” It’s like, “I’m cute, but I’m also, like, super humble but I also have confidence.” Everyone is a brand at this point. I’m going off-topic a little bit.

Well, the idea that everyone is a brand is very relevant to your profession. Do you see that about the decisions you’re required to make regarding how you portray yourself onscreen or offscreen?

I can’t do it. I can’t do it. And there is a pressure that I think all people feel -- it’s the film industry and it’s the music industry, especially -- to be accepted, to be liked, to be loved by everybody so that you stay on top. It’s a way of life that permeates our culture so much, and it’s every Facebook page and every Twitter feed. We’re always going, "Am I liked, am I accepted?" I know it in myself -- I know the temptation and the pull to be like, “Cut your hair, man” or “Take off the mustache, it’s not attractive” or "Fucking tuck in your shirt.” Whatever it is. "Be charming, be likable, be sweet. Don’t be too serious -- be a bit serious, but not too serious. Be authentic, but not too authentic." It’s like, what the fuck? I just want to break something on a red carpet most of the time because no one is fucking talking to each other and no one is going deep.

You sound like you’re cycling through a range of things a publicist might tell you to do.

Right. But no, I don’t have that in my life, thank God. My publicist isn’t a publicist -- he’s a friend, and he’s like, “Fuck yeah, fuck it.”

Has he been with you since the beginning?

Yeah. But the world is a publicist at this point. The Internet is a publicist, every comment is a publicist saying, “Fuck you.” Everything can be misinterpreted, reinterpreted, pulled apart and criticized. There’s no way of moving. I especially think about it with young female pop stars and actors, mostly female. That’s where most of the pressure I see happening is. That’s my perspective -- I see young, female, brilliant, artistic, creative people being looked at under this microscope and being pressured into being everything that a patriarchy is asking them to be by being perfect in all of these different ways. It’s not something that anyone can live up to, and it creates all of this projection.

Think of Marilyn Monroe, think of Lindsay Lohan. People will probably be mad at me for mentioning those two people in the same sentence, but fuck it. Fuck off. They are responding to the same kind of external projection, unless you go down into who you actually are, with all of the shit, as well as all of this gold. Because you can’t deny that Lindsay Lohan was this beautiful, bright, vibrant actress who was sweet and lovely and had this quality about her. But if you’re not in contact with that grounding, human, failing, fucking-up, mistake-making that we all share -- we all trip over our shoelaces and take a shit daily -- then this perfection idea is unattainable. It’s killing us from the inside.

In some sense, it's lose-lose. About a year or two ago, a trendy interview question was to ask every celebrity to “come out” as a feminist. It’s wonderful to promote those values, but then when people say, “Well, I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist,” or some other all-inclusive mentality that’s oriented toward equal rights, they get slammed. Sarah Jessica Parker experienced that just a few months ago. The good intentions get mutated into a negative domino effect. Do you feel like that’s accurate?

I’m scared to say anything right now because I know that whatever I say in response to the very smart thing that you’re saying -- you’re not going to get torn apart for it, I’m going to get torn apart for it.

I know, and that’s a weird position. I'm not here to goad you into saying something controversial and I'm not here to flatter you. Yet obviously I want good quotes from you. We are both sitting here in this coffee shop very aware of what’s going on at this table right now.

Of course.

Yet I understand that if you say something that doesn’t translate as well in print during what is ultimately a thoughtful conversation, you could be villified.

It’s so funny, isn’t it? So what do we do? The question is, how do we actually have a deep conversation? And I think the words “feminist" and "humanist," evidently they mean something different to every single person who is saying them. It’s all subjective. I was talking to the previous interviewer about how I had said before that I had been quoted as saying, "Why can’t Spider-Man be bisexual and have an interracial love affair with Michael B. Jordan?"

Sure, that would be wonderful.

It would be pretty wonderful. So where my heart is, where my allegiance lies, is with equal opportunity for every single human being, whether they are gay, straight, lesbian, trans, genderqueer, female, male, white, black, red all over, whatever. We all, men and women, are created equal. That’s just where I’m at. And I don’t even remember what your question is, but I think it has something to do with, "How do we move in the world right now in a way that is truly authentic?"

Like I was saying earlier, being truly authentic is going to upset people, even if people are saying, "I want something authentic." That means some dark shit, too. To me, authenticity is my whole self, and that means not just the pretty parts that will charm you and make you go and see this film and watch me on a talk show, but it also means my shame, my grief, my heartbreak, my pain. I’m lucky that I get to put all that into my work and I get to put that into art. I don’t necessarily want to have a conversation about my shame with the public -- I don’t feel the need for that, but if we’re actually wanting an authentic conversation, it’s not going to be in 120 characters and it’s not going to be in headlines. It’s not even going to be in an interview. We’ve gotten somewhere pretty deep, I do think, even pretty quickly, but the majority of people will not read this whole thing. The majority of people will look at some quotes that another website that wants clicks will steal. So we’re at a culture of thin-slicing.

And also, I believe these words -- "feminist," "humanist," "whatever-ist" -- have been taken and re-appropriated and, a lot of the time, used, quite frankly. I see a lot of using of these terms in order to further someone’s brand. That confuses the fuck out of me and makes me feel a bit sick. That may be me being cynical, but I see a lot of people bandying about these things, and actually they may not know the history of the word. Because to me, the word “feminine” is an energy. It’s an archetypal energy. A woman is a woman and a man is a man, but “feminine” lives in both. So what does it mean to be a feminist?

You’re talking about something very nuanced, though.

Right, and we’re not going to get to it in a headline or a quick 20-minute lunch break. If I was blind and never knew what a feminist was or what the feminism movement was, if someone said, “Feminism, what does that mean to you?” I would say, just as a child, that feminism means being loving, being compassionate, being kind, being community-minded and fierce in one’s lovingness. But someone is going to read this and go, “That’s not what being a woman has to be.” And I know that. I’m not talking about being a woman or being a man. I’m talking about what the word "feminine" feels like to me archetypically in my bones and the images it conjures. And masculinity, which lives in both men and women, just to be clear, is that warrior, hard, slicing with a sword, detaching, if need be. Both have power. Anyway, I’m going off. 

We talked about whether Dennis' actions in “99 Homes” are worth it. Do you, as a public figure, ever question whether the litmus test you're constantly subjected to is worth it?

Yeah, I don’t want to be a public person.

Just look at your dating life. It’s all over the headlines all the time.

Right. Yeah. 

Does it ever make you wonder why you signed up?

Yeah, I have no desire for any of it. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s a strange thing, because I get into a lot of conversations with paparazzi in attempts to just break down the barrier of the camera and say, “Hey, just so you know, I don’t like this. You are going to do what you’re going to do and I know it’s tough out here and we all have to make a living.” I feel like I’m talking to a lot of Dennis Nashes, to be honest, when I’m talking to paparazzi. I had a conversation with a couple the other day -- a lady and a guy, really lovely people, and she said, “You’re not a person, though.” I said, “I’m a human being and I don’t want this.” She said, “You’re not a person.” And I’m like, “You know what, that makes me want to introduce you to my family. It makes me want to bring you home and introduce you to my mother and father because I feel totally detached from being who I am to you in this moment.” And we got into this conversation and she said, “Thank you for talking to us because most people treat us like trash. Our bosses treat us like trash, you guys usually treat us like trash." And that’s how Dennis feels in “99 Homes” as he’s doing the bidding of those higher-ups by doing this awful thing in order to survive, because it is hard out there. When he starts evicting people, the shame in him and the knowledge that not all is well within his soul is devastating. And I just suddenly felt like, “Oh, that’s Dennis right there.” She exposed something so vulnerable and raw to me, and we ended up having this beautiful, proper and deep conversation, underneath all of the defensive walls, about grief and pain and how fucked the situation we’re all in is.

But do you think she was able to walk away from that conversation and feel the same way?

I believe so. I believe we got to a place where we could really see each other because we spend so much time not seeing each other and not respecting each other and not looking deep into each other. I think it goes into what we’re talking about. But with the whole celebrity thing, I don’t see myself as a celebrity because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to function in my life. I didn’t become an actor to be a celebrity. Of course, I knew taking on the Spider-Man role would shift something, so I did go in with my eyes partially open, but in a lot of denial. But I don’t feel all that bothered, to be honest, because I’ve worked hard to make sure that I’m of the earth. I don’t want to be in the gilded tower up there. It’s not a fun place. I don’t think that anyone who’s in that circumstance feels that way. I think there’s a feeling of separation that everyone feels. And it’s a madness, too, celebrity culture -- it’s a madness.

On all ends.

And I’m a culprit of hero-worshiping people, so I can identify with it. But to me, it’s like actors should be the most human of all of us, because we are the ones supposedly reflecting humanity and being the vessels for what it is to be a person, with all of the ugliness and beauty and confusion and messiness that it is to be a human being -- the absurdity and the tragedy. So we, as actors, should be the most relatable human beings in the world, whereas it’s become this weird thing where they’re unreachable. That’s not acting to me. That’s celebrity or self-worship or self-aggrandizement.

It removes some of the artistry at the core.

It goes back to branding. It's, "I’m much more concerned with being popular, being liked, getting an award, being perceived in this way, than just getting in the fucking muck of what it is to be a person and actually offering something that has soul back to the world." And I know that in myself -- I know my own temptation toward being driven by temptations and desires, by the thing of like, “I want to be more than I am, I want to win," whatever the fuck that is. 

With the idea of "winning" in mind, what is harder: stomaching everyone's intense reactions to a massive franchise like "The Amazing Spider-Man," or working on an indie passion project like "99 Homes" and knowing it may never find much of an audience?

It goes back to what can I do and what can’t I do -- what can I control and what can’t I control? All I can control in both of those instances is how hard I work and what I give to it in terms of the process. And then the results are really none of my business, to be honest, even though of course I want everything to be seen and affect people. But I work just as hard on everything. I have this problem with not-enough-ness. I never feel like I’m doing enough. I never feel like I am enough. It’s this weird kind of catalyst that makes me a really hard worker. I think I just care. I care a lot about the stories I’m involved in, and I do want to just make a difference as much as possible in the short time that I’m here, in whatever way I’m supposed to. I have no idea what that is either. They both have their frustrations, but ultimately all I can do is keep banging my head against the door until it opens, in both cases. 

And you can rest assured that the quality speaks for itself.

Right, but then again, the actor has so little control over what films people see. 

Especially not when actors don’t open movies the same way they did 20 years ago.

Yeah, I don’t really understand that whole concept. But what’s good now, I think, is that the culture we’re in is very good at talking to each other and telling people what they like.

We live in a good word-of-mouth culture.

Word of mouth is a big thing now, so I think quality is the king. It’s not about the marketing so much -- that’s taking on a new life because I think people are really hungry for something that’s real. It’s what we’re taking about -- something sincere and authentic, and when they see it, they say, “Oh, yeah yeah yeah, we have to tell everyone about that.” And there’s also this treasure-hunt thing that happens where everyone wants to find this rare piece of gold and then they want to spread it out, like, “Oh, well, I found this first, so here, have a look.” That’s awesome, so I pray that people enjoy this one.

"99 Homes" opens Sept. 25. This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Above are two blotting tissues. Specifically, they're Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton's blotting tissues. She used the white, pillowy papers to dab excess water and paint between brush strokes, unintentionally making figurative portraits along the way.

At the time, Tim Moore was Barton's assistant, and he was moved by the accidental beauty of the dampened tissue scraps. Touched with streaks of green, puddles of pinks, sprinkles of blue, the disposable material became, in Moore's eyes, an unexpected artwork in itself.

Thus, the book "Not My Blotting Tissues" was born. Dubbed a "sensitive collection of incidental expression," it features stark portraits of Barton's blotting tissues laid flat on the page, elevated from pieces of trash to humble gems of abstraction. The conceptual project privileges the subconscious acts of creation, those gestures and marks that occur almost without thought, and can, in many instances, create something utterly striking.

For a similar project, check out Tim Gardner's "Paper Towel Works." Moore's book is available through Formist. As the press release makes explicit, it's "not to be sneezed at."

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This post originally appeared on ArchDaily. 

In "It’s A Wonderful Life" the film’s protagonist George Bailey, facing a crisis of faith, is visited by his guardian angel, and shown an alternate reality where he doesn’t exist. With the increasing scale of design competitions these days, architectural “could-have-beens” are piling up in record numbers, and just as George Bailey's sense of self was restored by seeing his alternate reality, hypothesizing about alternative outcomes in architecture is a chance to reflect on our current architectural moment. 

Today marks the one-year-anniversary of the opening of Phase 3 of the High Line. While New Yorkers and urbanists the world over have lauded the success of this industrial-utility-turned-urban-oasis, the park and the slew of other urban improvements it has inspired almost happened very differently. Although we have come to know and love the High Line of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations, in the original ideas competition four finalists were chosen and the alternatives show stark contrasts in how things might have shaped up.

On this key date for one of the most crucial designs of this generation, we decided to look back at some of the most important competitions of the last century to see how things might have been different.

1. The High Line

“High is to New York what wet is to Venice,” says writer Adam Gopnik in the opening to his essay "A Walk on the High Line/The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in Spring", "the necessary condition that has become the romantic condition.” With such assertions it's difficult to believe that the High Line, a park redefining how we perceive urban greenspace, and a self-seeded oasis, was ever perceived as a demolition-ready eyesore.

While the collaboration by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations is the darling of New Yorkers, several alternatives could have produced a quite different park, with an unpredictable set of outcomes.

Zaha Hadid’s swooping and curvaceous platforms would have created a park of instant novelty, but perhaps without the staying power of a sensitive approach.

Having a special affinity for the High Line, Steven Holl is credited with two proposals: one, in the early 1980s, would have put a row of post-modern single-residency houses in a line along the platform - not a green space. The second, a finalist in the competition for the redevelopment, would have provided a simple meandering path with architectonic interruptions. The results are slick, but lack the effortlessness found in the winning design.

In a subtle balance of preservation and change, the realized version of theHigh Line exists in a delicate equilibrium between design and nature so, even though parks and New York real estate have a storied history, it's difficult to say if a bolder or more passive design would have held the same allure.

2. Chicago Tribune Tower

In what was arguably the first highly-publicized architecture competition of modern times, the contest for the fate of Chicago’s Tribune Tower also had some of the greatest implications on the discourse of architecture. Offering $50,000 in 1922, the design process attracted 263 entries from 23 countries.

The winning-design of John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, modeled on the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral, furthered a precedent for skyscrapers that looked like Gothic churches stretched to the heavens. By then though,Cass Gilbert’s Gothic Woolworth Building was a decade old, and with its nod to Rouen the Howells/Hood design arguably played it safe.

However, the Chicago Tribune contest is arguably more famous for an alternate design by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer which would have allowed the International Style to flourish in Chicago, decades before its wide-adoption in the late-forties and early fifties. Many have considered the implications of this unsuccessful design on Modernism's early rise, but better yet let’s consider the outcome of a win by Adolf Loos. His proposal for a monolithic, Doric column manifests an early tangent to existing design tropes that were soon to be eclipsed by Art Deco. Fetishizing symbols in a yet-unknown way – decades before Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T building – Loos presaged a life for architecture after modernism.

If Loos had won, the effects would have been unpredictable. With the great fervor generated by the design process, Loos would have created one of the most widely recognized skyscrapers in a nascent period for their design. Envy would have likely produced many knock-offs and had lasting implications on commissions of all degrees of importance.

3. Sydney Opera House 

A building that from its inception was bound for canonical importance, Jørn Utzon’s design for the Sydney Opera House is one of the most easily recognized buildings in the world and a beloved a landmark of the city, the country, and even the continent. As a judge for the design competition in 1956, Eero Saarinen selected Utzon’s scheme from a pile of rejected proposals, instantly calling it a masterpiece.

Although now so thoroughly embedded in the canon of modern architecture that it is difficult to perceive a world without it, Utzon faced competition from an astoundingly more conventional design by Joseph Marzella.

Taking its cues from a burgeoning New Formalist architecture, visible in many civic projects of the same era, Marzella’s design would have simply provided a solution to a request. Certainly, it would have been a boon for the arts in Sydney, but it likely would have faded into the background of architectural discourse in contrast to the innovation and visual poetry of Utzon’s design.

Decades before Deconstructivism and computer-aided design added unprecedented dimensions to architectural forms, Utzon was a pioneer of shape and precision. More immediately, the forms seems to hold similarities to Saarinen’s design for the TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport (now JFK), begun the same year.

While certain could-have-been proposals are melancholic, in that they are wildly more radical than the resultant designs, the Sydney Opera House is a reversal of fortunes. It’s as impossible to imagine a bolder design as it is to conceive of a world where Utzon’s vision did not so dramatically change the preconceptions and perceived possibilities of architecture.

4. Centre Pompidou

A new building in Paris is usually cause for uproar. Anything that lays roots in the city’s historic core is immediately judged by the Haussmann spawned mandate of the City of Light. It happened last year when Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton landed in the Bois de Boulogne, The Eiffel Tower was not immune, and the Tour de Montparnasse is easily despised. However, few equal the controversy tied to the opening of Rogers and Piano’sCentre Pompidou in January 1977. 

This early foray into what has come to be known as High-Tech was initially a tough-pill to swallow for much of the world, but an image-conscious Paris in particular. Sending its building systems to the exterior, it pridefully showered attention on elements that were traditionally relegated to the hidden interior.

An equally compelling, lesser-known alternative is the utopian museum within a park design of Moshe Safdie. Years before green building became a primary concern of architects, Safdie proposed a shifting plan of tetrahedral plates, splitting and expanding above the ground plane. The surfaces, layered with greenery, would have created a dialogue between interior and exterior. Safdie’s design is without obvious precedent.

It could have a been a bold foundation for future designs that were decades away from development. One need only look at the green roofs sprouting across the San Francisco Bay Area to see where this radicalism might have lead.

5. Guggenheim Bilbao

A paradigm shift in more ways than one, the Guggenheim Bilbao redefined its Basque host city, the art museum, and architectural discourse the world over. Then-Guggenheim director, Thomas Krens, prophetically stated from the outset that the museum would be "the greatest building of the 20th century.” While such a definitive claim may be controversial, the building is certainly one of the most important buildings of the last twenty-five years, and has had astounding implications on the current architectural landscape.

The idiomatic “Bilbao effect” lead us to an all-or-nothing architecture of the iconic. Put simply, after 1997, everyone wanted a Guggenheim, a transformer that could change the fate of a city. Though the question lingers: was the Bilbao effect the result of the design of Gehry’s building, its location in a fading industrial city, or the support of one of the most lauded museums in the world - or all three?

Proposals by Coop Himmelb(l)au and Arata Isoki are the lesser-known finalists in the Guggenheim competition, both proposals for what would have certainly been a more sober outcome. Yes, Bilbao would have landed a Guggenheim, and yes, people would have certainly flocked to the city, but it's doubtful that either of those alternate realities would have produced the fervor that Gehry’s building has.

6. Museum of Modern Art

In its short but illustrious history, the Museum of Modern Art has amassed what is arguably the world’s greatest collection of twentieth century art. Unfortunately, spatial limitations are part of the culture of congestion, and the museum's expansion in the early 21st century arguably created more problems than it fixed.

Known for a characteristic Japanese subtly on projects of a much smaller scale, Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 redesign is out of scale in Manhattan, and leaves the museum feeling stunted. It is worth saying this, only because Taniguchi’s selection was not a cop out, the competition was fierce, and his selection was more a grave misstep than purposeful catastrophe.

There were a number of vaunted architects who submitted proposals, however maybe the most interesting came from Rem Koolhaas and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Having written Delirious New York, Koolhaas was the heir apparent for design innovation that only the limits of the Manhattan grid could inspire. 

Cheekily reminiscent of one of Hugh Ferriss' drawings of skyscrapers adhering to New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution, OMA proposed a building that would not rise gradually in a series of setbacks, but would instead be dramatically steep, with the sheerness of cliff face and a precise pinnacle. 

While it’s unlikely that a changed design would have changed the museum’s agenda over the course of the last decade, hostilities towards the museum’s current expansion plan, including the demolition of the adjacent Folk Art Museum, might not have been so urgent. Wise to a new set of roles and expectations for museums of the twenty-first century, OMAwas eager to design and build for these unprecedented changes.

7. The World Trade Center

On a site fraught with controversy, the radical design of Daniel Libeskind’s World Trade Center master plan has given way to the bland, value-engineered towers that have been built in its place, a group of buildings that speak the language of a corporate, profit-centric America where design is treated like an afterthought, staid and uninspiring.

While the implications of the World Trade Center site made any proposals difficult, the Twin Towers as designed by Minoru Yamasaki, were shocking and revelatory - a miracle of engineering that made their brutish scale and simple design forgivable. Honoring that tradition, a collaboration between Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl andGwathmey Siegel proposed another pair of towers. These, however, were large grids like a game of tic-tac toe or the impression of a waffle iron, not monoliths.

When the original World Trade Center was built, it reduced the gridded streets of the Radio Row neighborhood into a sixteen-acre superblock. The plan of Meier, Eisenman, Holl and Gwathmey Siegel, would have inverted the architecture of Manhattan. The superblock destroys the grid, but a tower made of grids swaps the x and y-dimensions.

Although the scale of the design may have required a larger and more expansive piece of land, the towers' would have given the World Trade Center site a sense of heritage and continuity that has been lacking in the current design. The new Bjarke Ingels Group proposal for 2 World Trade Center, gives not a twin, but a “sibling” to the lanky and lonesome 1 World Trade Center - whether it can correct the course of Libeskind's much-compromised masterplan to finally outshine the much more radical losing masterplan proposal remains to be seen.

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Introducing your new favorite kickass comic book! 

Dan White, a father in Fareham, England, has created a comic book, entitled The Department of Ability, featuring superheroes who have disabilities. One character, who uses an airborne wheelchair, is named after his 9-year-old daughter, Emily, who was born with spina bifida and uses a wheelchair to get around.

White is currently working on the comic and plans to have it out early next year. Through the series and its fantastic heroes, White aims to smash stereotypes surrounding people with disabilities. 

"Disability is not scary ... it is not awkward," White told ABC News. "The heroes just happen to be different and they utilize their superpowers to compete with any invading alien or crime boss."

White decided to create the comic after he noticed there were few characters in the media that his daughter could connect with.  

"I scoured the numerous channels and magazine racks looking for characters that Emily could relate too, i.e. anyone with a disability," he told ABC News. "I found several, but they were always at the edge of the action or had no real character to show off. I felt that TV and the general media was walking too much on eggshells."

So the dad took it upon himself to create some characters with disabilities. Alongside superhero Emily, The Department of Ability, which will be printed by Strongbones Children’s Charitable Trust, features heroes like Pawsy, a cheetah who has a high-speed solar powered running leg, and Azazzatz, a being from outer-space who has a bionic arm, according to the comic's website. 

Though the comic isn't out yet, it definitely has at least one fan -- his daughter, who told BBC South Today that she's enjoyed being turned into a superhero and loves that her character is the "leader" of the superhero pack. 

White told the outlet that he hopes The Department of Ability will eventually gain traction and be adapted into an animated series in the future. 

"I am hoping that my little project will be just the start," White told The Huffington Post. "I want the general public to be enthralled by these heroes to see beyond the disability, taste the humor and the action and to see a very underrated portion of society in a whole new inclusive light!"

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Print book lovers have suffered long under the rise of ebooks and the smug condescension of tech idealists, happy to remind old-school readers that their beloved format is headed the way of the record or the VHS tape.

The death of books has been so completely taken for granted by many that a genre’s ebook sales have been used to argue for a genre’s relevance, or irrelevance, to younger readers.

Well, um, maybe rethink that one? According to The New York Times, print book sales are holding steady in 2015 -- and ebook sales have hit a wall. “Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago,” writes Alexandra Alter. In fact, “E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers.”

As a print book lover and advocate, can I just say, with respect: I TOLD YOU SO I TOLD YOU SO I TOLD YOU SO! Ahem. Sorry about that.

It’s frustrating, as a millennial reader, to see commentators assuming that we can’t even read a book unless it’s presented to us on a screen. In fact, as I was writing this, I overheard a young colleague, who covers sports for HuffPost, casually remark, “I like to read a physical book, not just read on my phone.” Paper isn’t just the refuge of the old fogy. As Alter points out, studies suggest even digital natives prefer to read on paper.

#NotAllReaders, obviously, but the eager ebook adopters clearly aren’t representative of the whole body of book consumers, and eventually the easily convinced were bound to be maxed out. As early as January 2012, Nicholas Carr speculated, “The early adopters, who tend also to be the enthusiastic adopters, have already made their move to e-books. Further converts will be harder to come by.”

I feared the day with no print books would come, but never really believed it. Despite all the comparisons to VHS, records and CDs, I knew readers didn’t feel the same way about their books.

Here are just 11 simple reasons the print doomsayers have been wrong all along:

1. Some beautifully designed books offer pleasure in themselves, as aesthetic objects. Why buy a generic ebook copy of a new novel when I could spend a few bucks more -- or even, after recent ebook price hikes, the same amount -- and get an aesthetically pleasing memento to fill your bookcase?
   
   


2. While ebooks seem to encourage us to fly through a continuous stream of text, certain books just feel more real held in our hands and paged through meditatively. Personally, I will always prefer to read meaningful, thought-provoking books in print, easily able to flip back to previous passages and trace the passage of my reactions almost physically through the book, and I know I'm not alone. 
   
   


3. Many studies suggest reading on print is significantly better than reading on a screen, particularly in terms of how much we comprehend and recall.
    


4. Some titles, like the latest Fifty Shades knockoff, we may prefer to enjoy privately on an ereader. But if you’re tackling Infinite Jest or the new Marilynne Robinson, you’d probably like to telegraph your accomplishment to those around you by brandishing the physical book. Petty, maybe, but we’re only human, right?
   
   


5. What about that digital music comparison? For one thing, the ways we read books and listen to music differ, so being able to access a huge number of books on one device lacks the huge bump in convenience offered by an MP3 player. Most readers don’t pine for a way to easily toggle between 15 books, a couple pages at a time; we sit down with a book for long stretches, until we’ve finished it. Oyster Books, a subscription service similar to Netflix or Spotify, struggled to establish a foothold in the market and recently announced it would be shutting down, though much of the team will be heading to Google Play Books.
   
   


6. Authors often sign print books -- a fairly attainable and common way for readers to get mementos from their idols. Maybe we’ll see authors start to autograph fans’ body parts and T-shirts instead, but, uh … I doubt it. (The literary world is a decorous one.)
   
   


7. You can make your own mark on a book in a personal, distinctive way you simply can’t on an ebook. No amount of digital highlighting or typed notations can compare to looking back over the jotted marginalia in your own handwriting and pencil underlines that grow heavier when you were particularly excited. (Don't get too carried away, though!)
   
   


8. Ebook prices were rock-bottom low for years. Fair-minded people disagree over whether Amazon was purposely selling ebooks at an absurdly low price in order to win over the market, but given that writers, editors, publicists, etc., still need to be paid regardless of whether a book is made into a physical object, super-low prices probably weren’t sustainable. At least we know what physical books cost!
   
   


9. Many readers who’ve adopted ebooks still love print books and actually buy and read both, a 2012 Pew survey showed. Just because a reader likes the convenience of stocking a tablet with crime novels for a long trip doesn’t mean he or she wants to give up the pleasure of paging through and purchasing a beautiful hardcover to treasure for years and pass down to loved ones.
   
   


10. Full bookshelves make for both beautiful and functional decor! (A full ereader, not so much.)
    
    


11. Nearly every reader feels some sort of emotional attachment to their print books, which we physically interact with, closely, as we read. No other form of media involves this intimate engagement throughout, with our own fingers softening the pages and creasing the corners. Rereading these books also means returning to an object we’ve loved and imbued with ourselves. A VHS videocassette could never compete with that.

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The creators of the Off-Broadway musical "Invisible Thread" are giving audiences an early peek at their new show with this soaring ballad. 

Following a successful online fundraising campaign, composers Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews shot the clip for the song, "Beautiful," with "Invisible Thread" cast members in both New York and Uganda. Matthews and Gould, who are a real-life couple, told The Huffington Post in an interview that they wanted to capture the feeling of "how the grass is always greener somewhere else" in the song which, like the rest of the show, melds a pop melody with African beats. 

"Whenever we go to Uganda, we always wish that our lives could somehow resemble the pace and beauty of that place," Matthews said. "But inevitably, the Ugandans always talk about how much they want to come to the U.S. Each of us wants what the other has." 

Gould and Matthews teased the show earlier this year when they released a music video for the titular song, "Invisible Thread." That clip, which was directed by Broadway actor Andrew Keenan-Bolger ("Newsies"), showed the couple going about their day-to-day lives in New York and was created in support of Ugandan students who may be affected by their country's rigid anti-gay laws. 

Gould, who began writing "Beautiful" while serving in the Peace Corps in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, said that bringing cast members to Uganda, where much of the musical is set, was a no-brainer. 

"It's such a singular, unique, gorgeous place and we thought that having the cast there would deepen their performances," he said. "It was the most incredible trip of our lives."

Originally titled "Witness Uganda," "Invisible Thread" is loosely based on Gould and Matthews' experiences as aid workers in Africa. Directed by Tony Award winner Diane Paulus, the musical centers on Griffin, a 20-something Manhattanite who finds his life changed in unexpected and profound ways once he leaves New York to volunteer for an African charity. 

The show nabbed the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater in 2012, and the 2014 production at Boston's American Repertory Theater played to sold out audiences and received ample critical buzz, with The Boston Globe calling it "a joyous, wrenching experience."  

Previews for "Invisible Thread" begin at New York's Second Stage Theatre on Oct. 31, with an opening night set for Dec. 2. Head here for more details. 

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How do you deal with nasty Internet commenters -- haters, trolls and other anonymous, soul-crushing hobgoblins? Some of us don't read the comments. Others respond. And there's a select few who take those bitter comments and thread them into vaginal knitting. A very, very, very select few, that is.

If you know the name Casey Jenkins, you're likely familiar with the Australian artist's 2013 performance "Casting Off My Womb," which, not before long, came to be known as "Vaginal Knitting." If you aren't sure how one would accomplish such a task, it's actually very simple. Every day for 28 days, Jenkins placed a skein of wool inside her vagina, pulled out the thread and knit with it. If you can't quite visualize it, check out the (quite NSFW) video. 

Jenkins' work soon racked up over 6 million views on YouTube. And then the hate started rolling in. All artists must deal with criticism; "vagina artists," however, require an additional layer of thick skin. (For example, Japanese artist Rokudenashiko was arrested as a result of her 3D-printed "pussy" boat.) Jenkins' commenters ranged from unimpressed amateur critics to flagrant misogynists. "I think I just threw up in my mouth a little," one read. "Seems more of an attention seeker to me." "She needs psychological help ... " 

Jenkins' wasn't all that surprised by the negative backlash she received, even from women. "Shame is an incredibly powerful force for maintaining and enforcing prevalent attitudes," she explained in an interview with Vanessa de Largie for The Huffington Post.

"It's fascinating because those targeted by it often seem to be engaged most actively in its perpetration; perhaps as a way of trying to personally avoid the most hurtful direct impact of the shaming they align themselves with the status quo. Menstruation is the target of a lot of misogynistic attitudes. The fact that those who might be hurt by misogyny are taking part in the shaming is an indication of how deeply entrenched it is in the world today."

Well, sorry to tell you, trolls, but Jenkins is not backing down. In fact, the artist is weaving the angry comments she's received into her upcoming work, which also involves knitting from the va-jay-jay. This time, using a hacked digital knitting machine bought on eBay, Jenkins will knit some of her most recurring comments into woolen canvases. Also, she dyed the wool with her period blood. 

 "I’ve been screen-capping and saving the comments in files with titles like ‘WTF,’ ‘Crazy,’ ‘Nuts,’ ‘Mental Illness,’ ‘Gross/Disgusting,’ ‘Not Art,’ ‘She Should Be Shot,’ ‘LOL,’ and ‘I’m Gonna Knit From My Ass,'" Jenkins said in an interview with Hyperallergic. "The repetitious nature of the comments, I think, gives insight into how group-think operates on the internet as well as the power of major media outlets to lead and shape online discussion."

The bold performance artist is not the first to incorporate internet backlash into the work itself. The late photographer Wyatt Neumann documented a cross-country road trip with his 2-year-old daughter Stella, including shots of the young lady in princess dresses and sometimes nothing at all. When trolls attacked the work as "perverse" and "pornographic," Neumann responded by hanging angry comments alongside his carefully framed photographs as part of an exhibition aimed to spark dialogue around innocence, the sexualization of children, and the difficulties of raising a young daughter as a single dad. 

Like Neumann, Jenkins hopes to call out her haters and bring their comments out from the anonymous depths of the comments section. "Knitting those comments using my menstrual blood is both sticking my finger up at and paying homage to those commentators," Jenkins told Hyperallergic. "I imagine people who filled feeds calling me disgusting and gross will find it quite galling, and that does give me a certain sense of delight."

You and me both, Jenkins.

The artist's finished product is slated to go on display this October at the University of Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery, part of the group exhibition "f generation: feminism, art, progressions."

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This post is part of a weekly series celebrating #ThrowbackThursday with reflections of our favorite childhood memories, past pop culture moments and more! 

Viola Davis's historic Emmy win for Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series, as well as wins for both Regina King and Uzo Aduba, shows actors of color, particularly women, are rightfully being acknowledged and rewarded for their talent.  

The diversity of this year's Emmy nominations was a big improvement in comparison to this year's Academy Awards, which severely lacked any people of color and spawned the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. While it's important to celebrate greater representation for racial minorities, it's obvious that there is more work to be done. 

For the past 75 years, since Hattie McDaniel became the first person of color to ever receive an Academy Award in 1940, black stars have broken barriers and created opportunities for future generations of actors, actresses, screenwriters, directors, and producers to have a place in TV and film.

Here are the 25 black stars that were the first to pioneer the entertainment industry on both the big and small screen, in front of and behind the camera. Check out their incredible achievements below.

Editor's note: This list celebrates the achievements and inspiring legacies of black artists. As such, Bill Cosby, the first black actor to win an Emmy for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series in 1966, has been excluded. 

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A Facebook photo post is prompting widespread discussion of an emotional topic for many parents: rainbow babies. 

A rainbow baby is a child born after a miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death or infant loss. Just as a beautiful rainbow gives people hope at the end of a frightening storm, a rainbow baby gives parents the hope of life after suffering a terrible loss.

On Sept. 20, blogger Chasity Boatman, who often writes about pregnancy and birth struggles, shared a photo that she felt illustrated the idea of rainbow babies on the Facebook page for her blog, "Every Child is a Blessing: My Journey from Pregnancy through Parenthood." 

"Every baby is special and should be celebrated, but rainbow babies absolutely warm my heart. There's such a healing that comes from a rainbow baby," Boatman wrote.

The post has been shared over 120,000 times, and the comments section is flooded with parents' stories of loss and photos of their own rainbow babies. 

"There was a rainbow outside my hospital room window the day she was born," mom Christy McElwee captioned the photo of her rainbow baby daughter. "I thank God for sending me my 'rainbow' after experiencing such a heartbreaking 'shower of tears' when I had a stillbirth," wrote Yardley Hunter. 

Many moms and dads who weren't familiar with the term expressed comfort in learning a new way to think about their own children born after loss. "I had never heard of this," commented Christine C. Pellegrino, adding, "Thank you for sharing, made my heart hurt a little less today."

Boatman told The Huffington Post that the response to the photo post has been "overwhelming." Pointing to the powerful personal stories that fill the comments section, she said, "My goal in posting this photo has been for women to help support and heal one another. For women to know that they're not alone in their struggles ... And that has certainly happened."

Though she has never personally experienced miscarriage or infant loss, Boatman and her husband were both adopted by mothers who couldn't carry pregnancies to term. As a result, the struggle is close to her heart, she said."That's why I wanted to reach out to other mothers who have struggled with miscarriages and helping them find healing."

"People glamorize pregnancy and parenting. People don't often discuss things like miscarriages," she continued. "So women who experience miscarriages feel isolated, and often find little to no support. That's why I'm so overwhelmingly happy at how well this photo has done in bringing women together. Beautiful, amazing things happen when women support one another." 

Boatman told The Huffington Post that she stumbled upon the image collage on Pinterest and "absolutely fell in love with it." The blogger added, "Because I'm so actively involved in the online miscarriage community, 'rainbow babies' was the first thing that came to mind."

Boatman says she was finally able to trace the photo back to a Russian photography duo, Natalia Karpovovy and Elena Gannenko. Though she says the photographers likely did not have rainbow babies in mind when they took the photos, Boatman "thought it beautifully demonstrated the concept." 

It certainly did.

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There are more than a few famous men who have (allegedly) beaten or raped women and have just kept on being famous. They try to bury their reportedly dark pasts, stomaching the times they may have used physical force to assert power over another human life. Glass half empty, they have (allegedly) beaten or raped women. Glass half full, they are still famous, so, it's fine, not a big deal. 

Except, that is, when pot-stirrers like Lee Daniels bring up the fact that the past still exists. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Daniels defended "Empire" actor Terrence Howard, who has previously been accused of violence against women, saying, "that poor boy ain’t done nothing different than Marlon Brando or Sean Penn, and all of a sudden he’s some fuckin’ demon."

Marlon Brando is dead (RIP), but Penn is alive and his feelings were hurt. So hurt, in fact, that he is suing Daniels. "Can you really put a price on feelings?" you may be wondering. And the answer is, yes, feelings cost $10 million. Or anyway, that is how much Penn's lawsuit against Daniels is seeking.

The whole thing is online and makes some really good points about how great Penn is. According to the aforementioned lawsuit, he is:

• An "American icon"


• An "internationally-known film actor recognized for his humanitarian work, journalism, and advocacy for peace and human rights"


• And "one of this generation’s most highly-acclaimed and greatest artists and humanitarians, Sean Penn." 

It also states that "Daniels has falsely asserted and/or implied that Penn is guilty of ongoing, continuous violence against women." (Which, what does "ongoing" and "continuous" even mean in the context of violence against women? Is it just punching every member of a Girl Scout troupe, going to sleep, waking up and punching every member of a different Girl Scout troupe?)

Daniels was attempting to highlight the racial discrepancies between Howard and his white counterparts, but -- cue "Ebony & Ivory" -- it's actually not OK to hit women whether you're black or white. Daniels is basically encountering the issue by saying, "Whatever, guys! Sean Penn did that, too!" And Penn is basically responding by saying, "Actually, I'm a humanitarian and now you owe me $10 million."

Penn's attempt to censor Daniels is only further publicizing the quote, though not because we're suddenly rightfully enraged by the Madonna incidents, both of which are recapped by the New York Post in a piece titled "Why Would Anyone Want To Date Sean Penn?": 

In 1987, Penn reportedly struck his then-wife, Madonna, across the head with a baseball bat....

In December 1988, Penn allegedly tied Madonna to a chair in their Malibu home and attacked her. The nine-hour ordeal only ended when the singer was untied to use the bathroom and she fled to a police station.

Madonna did not press charges in either case, so in a sense, Penn's suit saying he was never convicted of domestic abuse is accurate. Still, a case against Daniels will only work to draw more attention to his past. And after being famous for more than three decades, Penn has to understand that, right? Maybe he just wants to remind us he's an "American icon." Maybe he needs $10 million dollars so he can buy this diamond chandelier.

What's clear is the impact of both Penn and Daniels. Here is yet another dialogue about violence against women driven ... by men. Men who, in an attempt to protect their professional interests and reputations, are using their privileged male voices to dominate media conversations. 

Whether it's an accused man making statements to the public, or another man making jabs at the accused, men's accounts of abuse speak volumes. (Remember, women were accusing Cosby of rape for decades before Hannibal Buress got our attention with a joke.) This dynamic not only perpetuates the culture of silence for victims of abuse, but is implicit in allowing abuse to continue at the highest stratospheres of fame.

We have to recognize what voices are the loudest and refuse to let them stop us from making the right kind of noise.

Middlebrow is a recap of the week in entertainment, celebrity and television news that provides a comprehensive look at the state of pop culture. From the rock bottom to highfalutin, Middlebrow is your accessible guidebook to the world of entertainment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.

Follow Lauren Duca on Twitter: @laurenduca

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Four years of brutal civil war in Syria could not keep Ayham Ahmad from singing. Neither could his harrowing voyage to Europe.

The 27-year-old musician fled Syria and took a rubber dinghy from Turkey to Greece last week. As soon as he arrived on the shores of Europe, he sat down in front of the waves and began to sing of his home -- the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk near Damascus.

“Europe is a land of freedom. Now that I'm in Europe I can continue to keep singing about life in Yarmouk and the people who live there,” he told The WorldPost after he arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos.

As he trekked across the Balkans, trying to find a safe route to enter Austria, he reprised the ballads to Yarmouk that he once sang on the camp’s war-shattered streets.

On Monday, Ahmad made it to Austria, the country of Mozart and Schubert. The same day, he came across a piano made by historic Austrian instrument-maker Bösendorfer in Vienna and sat down to play a song about Yarmouk.

“Yarmouk is in my heart, and it will remain in my thoughts and in my music,” he wrote on Facebook that day. “We will keep on singing.”

Ahmad arrived in Germany on Tuesday, where he hopes to find a better life and provide for his wife, two young children and elderly parents back in Syria.

On his first day in Munich, he got a German volunteer at the refugee reception center to join him on guitar as he sang stories of Yarmouk to the other refugees. He posted another video of him playing the piano in Munich on Thursday, wishing everyone well for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

For years, Ahmad has posted videos of his recitals amid the ruins of Yarmouk to draw attention to the plight of the camp’s besieged residents. Earlier this year, Ahmad's piano was burned by Islamist militants as he tried to move it out of the camp.

As he finally fled the country, Ahmad has meticulously documented his voyage on Facebook, and provided further materials to The WorldPost for a diary of his voyage.

“To speak the language of music is better than speaking English, Arabic, German, Dutch, Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian,” Ahmad wrote on Facebook from Munich on Wednesday.​ “This is what I felt through the interaction with foreigners on my journey to Germany.”

Mehreen Kasana contributed to this report.

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