Feb 2015: "It wasn’t obvious at the outset that a book by a Japanese home-organizing consultant would translate across cultures." 

The Wall Street Journal

--

Oct 2015: "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up [a half-hour comedy show] centers on a young woman in a moment of crisis who attempts to get her messy life in order."

Deadline Hollywood

--

"Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams."

Pretty Woman

--

Setting: A living room in Tokyo. In the center sits a red sectional couch, the same one from "How I Met Your Mother." In fact, the room is the same one as in "How I Met Your Mother." It’s the only living room in Hollywood.

A heap of clothes obscures all but a few telltale patches of red couch. The chaos echoes through the apartment. It is of a genteel "Japanese" kind. Stacks of books rise in towers on the floor. Empty tea cups litter the coffee table. An easel propping up a muted canvas holds fashionable coats and scarves on its eaves. Curled shells and dried starfish stud the walls.

Enter a white man. By his dress, he could be a student or a young professional in his off-hours: jeans, hoodie, printed T-shirt. He looks like Ted from "How I Met Your Mother."

MAN: Meiki?

The clothes pile starts to quiver. Suddenly, an adorable head pokes through. It belongs to a young Japanese woman, played by Emma Stone.

WOMAN: (In delicate, almost imperceptible accent.) Yes?

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES AND APPLAUDS]

MAN: Well, this looks normal.

[AUDIENCE EMITS SHARP BURST OF LAUGHTER, LIKE PEPPER SPRAY]

WOMAN: Step one. (Out of the clothes heap she raises a dainty finger, her eyes suddenly wide.) I promise, everything will be transformed soon enough. I am in a moment of crisis soon to end. First thing’s first, though: pile all the clothes onto a single surface.

MAN: (Audible sigh.) Yes, you told me yesterday, when I found you in a corner of your closet. Or, you didn’t so much tell me as chant that directive to yourself, over and over. Loud enough so I could hear.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS HEARTILY, LIKE AN ELEPHANT AFTER A GOOD MEAL]

WOMAN: I detect your sarcasm, Dan. Apparently those who teach English in a Japanese public school system for a year while Snapchatting for the entertainment of liberal arts friends back home are not always intellectually curious.

MAN: I guess I just don’t see how a slim book on cleaning can possibly act as a foundation for a sitcom.

WOMAN: You are saying you doubt the potential of our source material? 

MAN: Yes.

WOMAN: Have you even read it? Socks are alive, dear friend Dan. If this is not grounds for televisual magic, what is? Now watch as I thrill you. I begin by touching each item for energy transfer. I am determining which spark joy, which I should keep, which to discard.

Emma Stone shakes herself out of the clothes and moves to stand behind the couch. She extracts a black garment from the pile. She holds it against her face.

MAN: So this is …

WOMAN: SHHH. No sound is to break my concentration. I am engaged in the cleaning version of the ancient Japanese art known as tei-at. White devils know this as “healing.”

[END SCENE]

A mostly silent montage rolls. The woman stays in her same position behind the couch, picking up various items, feeling them, casting each either to her right or left. Man moves in and out of frame. Sometimes he’s eating cereal, or doing pushups. By his changing outfits and the light outside the window, we gather that days are passing. The audience laughs at random, like subatomic particles in a breeze.

[END SCENE]

The couch now holds only a small pile of clothes. A pair of jeans, a few sweaters, a handful of dresses. All look stylish and new. By the door hulk four large black trash bags. Emma Stone crouches next to the one closest to the door. She appears to have opened it, and is in the process, it seems, of inspecting its contents.

The man known as Dan walks in.

MAN: Well, what’s happening now?

WOMAN: Dan-san. I can’t do it. The clothes hold too tight a grip on my spirit, and I must rescue them from the trash. Such is the consumerist nightmare we collectively dream. What can I say? I need more time to speak a mix of wisdom and gibberish in my accent -- which is appropriately faint, don't you think? And to learn from your no-nonsense sensibilities. Thank goodness for Episode 2!

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In the American South in the 1950s, black Americans were forced to endure something of a double life. In and around the home, children climbed trees and played imaginary games, while parents watched on with pride. Families shared meals and stories, went to bed and woke up the next day, all in all, immersed in the humdrum ups and downs of everyday life. Leave the home, however, and in the segregated Jim Crow region, black families were demoted to second class citizens, separate and not equal. 

In 1956, self-taught photographer Gordon Parks embarked on a radical mission: to document the inconsistency and inequality that black families in Alabama faced every day. He compiled the images into a photo essay titled "Segregation Story" for Life magazine, hoping the documentation of discrimination would touch the hearts and minds of the American public, inciting change once and for all. 

The images, thought to be lost for decades, were recently rediscovered by The Gordon Parks Foundation in the forms of transparencies, many never seen before. The images are now on view at Salon 94 Freemans in New York, after a time at the High Museum in Atlanta.

Parks was born into poverty in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, the youngest of 15 children. He attended a segregated elementary school, where black students weren't permitted to play sports or engage in extracurricular activities. One of his teachers advised black students not to waste money on college, since they'd all become "maids or porters" anyway. Over the course of his career, he was awarded 50 honorary degrees, one of which he dedicated to this particular teacher. 

After graduating high school, Parks worked a string of odd jobs -- a semi-pro basketball player, a waiter, busboy and brothel pianist. He bought his first camera from a pawn shop, and began taking photographs, originally specializing in fashion-centric portraits of African American women. 

In 1941, Parks began a tenure photographing for the Farm Security Administration under Roy Striker, following in the footsteps of great social action photographers including Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein."I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs," Parks told an interviewer in 1999. "I knew at that point I had to have a camera."

"Having just come from Minnesota and Chicago, especially Minnesota, things aren't segregated in any sense and very rarely in Chicago, in places at least where I could afford to go, you see," Parks explained in a 1964 interview with Richard Doud.

"But suddenly you were down to the level of the drugstores on the corner; I used to take my son for a hotdog or malted milk and suddenly they're saying, 'We don't serve Negroes,' 'n-ggers' in some sections and 'You can't go to a picture show.' Or 'No use stopping, for we can't sell you a coat.' Not refusing but not selling me one; circumventing the whole thing, you see? ... I came back roaring mad and I wanted my camera and [Roy] said, 'For what?' and I said I wanted to expose some of this corruption down here, this discrimination. And he says, 'How you gonna do it?' 'Well, with my camera.'"

The photo essay follows the Thornton, Causey and Tanner families throughout their daily lives in gripping and intimate detail. Parks captures the stark contrast between the home, where a mother and father sit proudly in front of their wedding portrait, and the world outside, where families are excluded, separated and oppressed for the color of their skin. 

In the image above, Joanne Wilson was spending a summer day outside with her niece when the smell of popcorn wafted by from a nearby department store. On the door, a "colored entrance" sign dangled overhead. "I wasn’t going in," Mrs. Wilson recalled to The New York Times. "I didn’t want to take my niece through the back entrance. She smelled popcorn and wanted some. All I could think was where I could go to get her popcorn."

These quiet yet brutal moments make up Parks' visual battle cry, an aesthetic appeal to the empathy of the American people. When the Life issue was published, it "created a firestorm in Alabama," according to a statement from Salon 94. The iconic photographs contributed to the undoing of a horrific time in American history, and the galvanized effort toward integration over segregation. 

Almost 60 years later, Parks' photographs are as relevant as ever. Although, as a nation, we focus on the progress gained in terms of discrimination and oppression, contemporary moments like those that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; and Charleston, South Carolina; tell a different story.

Many photographers have followed in Parks' footsteps, illuminating unseen faces and expressing voices that have long been silenced. One such photographer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, who was recently awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant," documents family life in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, which has been flailing since the collapse of the steel industry. 

For Frazier, like Parks, a camera serves as a weapon when change feels impossible, and progress out of control. "I feel very empowered by it because when you can take a strong look at a crisis head-on ... it helps you to deal with the loss and the struggle and the pain," she explained to NPR. "And it also helps you to create a human document, an archive, an evidence of inequity, of injustice, of things that have been done to working-class people. It's a testament, you know; this is my testimony and call for social justice. And it's also a way of me writing people who were kept out of history into history and making us a part of that narrative." 

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Every writer needs a reader. Hopefully more than one, even. There’s just one problem: Most people don’t want to read most books. Every year, many thousands of manuscripts are rejected by agents and publishing houses, and many of those published end up being commercial flops. Writers can now publish their books independently online, but while a small minority achieve huge success by going direct to the consumer, most languish. 

Despite this, each November, aspiring novelists overtake Twitter with hashtags: #amwriting, they say. After all, it’s #NaNoWriMo.

If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, clearly you don’t frequent Books Twitter. In short, it’s an initiative called National Novel Writing Month, held in November since 1999, when it was founded on a whim by San Franciscan Chris Baty. NaNoWriMo registered as a nonprofit in 2005 and has rapidly expanded, with community liaisons all over the country organizing local chapters for meet-ups and writing events. The organization’s website, which features forums for laboring writers, inspirational blog posts and advice, and a shop with NaNoWriMo-branded USB bracelets and laptop bags, boldly promises at the top: “The World Needs Your Novel.”

Strictly speaking, the world doesn’t exactly need your novel. Starry-eyed DFW enthusiasts alone ensure an always-abundant supply of fresh manuscripts. As Laura Miller pointed out in 2010, “while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books.”

Yet it’s writing that we encourage, even as reading books as a hobby dwindles in popularity in the U.S. and publishers struggle to make ends meet. "Everyone does have something to say," joked L., a writer who recently published her first book, "but perhaps it's not best said in the form of a novel, for everyone." (L., who met with me over coffee, preferred not to risk alienating fellow members of the writing community who might be participants.)

NaNoWriMo, which challenges participants to complete a novel draft in just 30 days, remains popular despite something of an industry backlash. “It used to be something people would say outright in their queries a lot more often,” literary agent Katie Grimm told me. “When it first started, it was definitely a badge of honor to have participated.” But a flood of unrevised, hastily composed manuscripts hitting gatekeepers in December and January didn’t exactly warm agents or editors to the project, and she suspects the organizers of NaNoWriMo now place stronger emphasis on the value of extensive revision after the official month has drawn to a close.

These days, agents and editors told me, they don’t notice a particularly onerous pile of submissions in December. Nor do they frequently see NaNoWriMo mentioned in queries, though the popularity of the event seems as strong as ever. The agents I spoke to told me they prefer to work with authors who have been honing their writing chops consistently for years -- not necessarily inconsistent with participating in the public novel-writing sprint, sure, but touting your NaNoWriMo completion badge can take the focus off your total body of experience. 

The organization’s website, which features forums for laboring writers, inspirational blog posts and advice, and a shop with NaNoWriMo-branded USB bracelets and laptop bags, boldly promises at the top: “The World Needs Your Novel.”

Besides, the whole set-up of the event seems primed to exacerbate the most irritating aspects of creative culture today. The worship of “makers” over “consumers,” even though the production of ever-growing piles of novels is meaningless without engaged, thoughtful readers; the special-snowflake-ism of “The world needs your novel,” when most of us can’t and won’t produce novels that will affect the world or even be read; the commodification of aspirational creativity, as with enormously expensive arts or creative writing degrees that offer no benefit to most graduates; the emphasis on stats over substance. 

NaNoWriMo requires only one thing for a participant to “win”: They must submit their manuscript of over 50,000 words by the end of the month. What about novellas? Short stories? Poems? What about, as The Millions cheekily suggested, one really good paragraph? The obsession with length is democratizing in certain ways -- judgments as to quality always risk subjectivity and bias -- but it also puts the focus on the least important aspect of creative writing. The glamour of writing a novel surpasses that of writing a fantastic short story; it allows you to tell people that you wrote a novel and to check that adventure off your bucket list. Baty himself jokes about having started the project so he and his friends could tell romantic prospects they were "novelists."

This set of criteria can raise distorted ideas of what writing a book entails for the incautious participant. “I just think writers should be careful -- I don’t want them to believe that it’s ‘normal’ to write a book in a month,” Jenn Fisher, assistant editor at Berkley Group, told me. For aspiring first-time writers, she worries this expectation can encourage unrealistic writing habits. “It takes time to develop an idea, characters, plot, never mind actually writing the book and then refining it,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s a good thing for new writers to churn out a book in a month.”

L. had similar concerns, ultimately avoiding NaNoWriMo as she wrote her debut novel. "I didn't want to force myself to just put words on a page. I didn't think that it would be very high quality," she said. Though she supports revising, and reworked her own book through several drafts, she pointed out that the "mad flush" of setting down an entire draft at once, no matter how flawed, doesn't work for all writers. NaNoWriMo, among her writing friends, she admitted, doesn't have "a reputation of producing works of quality." 

To be fair, there have been a couple highly touted successes: Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and Sarah Gruen's Water for Elephants are the most commonly cited. Still, for an event that by now claims hundreds of thousands of participants each year, this isn't a notable success in terms of producing works of superb craftsmanship.

Still, for many writers, NaNoWriMo can offer a moment of communal solidarity in an artistic pursuit that’s notoriously lonely and often isolating. Plus, there’s the external motivation to keep putting words on paper. “It’s a craft,” Grimm told me, so she sees value in “anything that encourages people to practice.”

Fisher strongly agreed. “Writing is a solitary endeavor (most of the time) and to have a sense of community can be really helpful to writers, especially new writers who may need a bit of extra encouragement or motivation.”

This might be particularly valuable to writers from marginalized groups, who may find less encouragement to follow their authorial dreams elsewhere than the more privileged -- though it also targets those privileged with the time to dash off an entire novel in just four weeks. “If it’s the impetus that gets some people writing, and connects them to other people who love to write, that’s great,” said agent Jody Kahn.

If you love books, please know you don’t have to write one to validate your passion.

But while National Novel Writing Month can be a convenient motivational tool for aspiring writers, most of us don't really need to participate. There's something we should all be doing, if we care about literature: Read. A lot. 

Miller writes that many new writers have told her they don’t have time to read because they’re working on their writing. Grimm pointed out how flawed this is for authors who want to actually produce good, publishable work: “It’s terrifying how many authors try to write in a particular genre and don’t seem to read it,” she observed. “If you don’t know what the tropes of the genre are, you can’t play with those ... or subvert it in a way that fans will delight in.”

Writing a novel as a hobby isn’t exactly wrong, but the world probably doesn’t need it. So let's just say this, once and for all: If you love books, please know you don’t have to write one to validate your passion. Reading is more than enough, and it adds more to the literary ecosystem to read avidly than it does to write a novel for kicks. “We’re encouraging tons of people to write,” pointed out Grimm, “but once you’ve actually published, all you’re really wanting is readers.”

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Warning: This post contains nudity and may not be suitable for work.

Barcelona-based photographer Katia Repina met Marta on her second week on the job. Marta was a pornographic actress and Repina was working on a documentary about the industry. Marta was 23, and she was not forced into the porn industry; she has no extenuating circumstances forcing the situation upon her. She chose a career in porn. 

"When I first met her, I was so surprised by how open and sincere she was," Repina explained to The Huffington Post. "I felt that she was very different from other porn actresses. I remember thinking, probably, it's because she is just two weeks in. All girls change when they enter the industry."

Repina resolved to find out for herself. She reached out to Marta, asking to meet up. The two maintained a friendship for three years and, for two of them, Repina chronicled the relationship on camera. The resulting photo series, called "Llámame Marta" or "Call Me Marta," documents a young woman's initiation into the porn industry, and the moments ordinary and not-so-much that arise along the way. 

"I was fascinated with her strong character and obsession to control everything, and at the same moment, she was so tender and sincere," Repina said. "I just wanted to document how all these characteristics were coexisting with her new job in pornography."

The black-and-white photographs chronicle a woman who is so much more than just her job title. In one image, Marta applies makeup before a shoot, in another she lifts weights at the gym. She walks her dog, climbs atop a nude body during a shoot, recruits her boyfriend to help remove her pubic hair. The series is presented by Repina without judgment or agenda, neither a defense of the porn industry nor a takedown of it, far removed from documentaries like "Hot Girls Wanted." Instead, the images paint a shadowy yet revealing portrait of a complex young woman. No overarching message, no moral. Just Marta.

"She is an amazing person with a big heart," Repina said, "and if she loves somebody, it is for real."

H/T Narratively

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You oughta know that Alanis Morissette has re-released her seminal 1995 album "Jagged Little Pill" and penned an essay on her website reflecting on her experiences making it.

"When 'You Oughta Know' was first taken to radio, the consistent response was, 'We are already playing two female artists, we don’t need another one,'" Morissette wrote on her site, describing the tough time she had finding collaborators after her first record label dropped her. Twenty years later, Morissette can boast that "Jagged Little Pill" sat atop the Billboard chart for 13 consecutive weeks, produced four No. 1 singles and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. 

"There were attempts to clean it all up, 'perfectify' it all … " the singer wrote. "I was admonished on more than one occasion for the record sounding 'too caustic' and 'too imperfect.' I got a lot of dirty looks for that one. I remember telling them, 'Well, if you wanted a record that sounded like Dan Steely, then maybe you should have signed someone in their thirties, rather than me, a 19-year-old.' This was met with silence, in typical form. My friend quickly leaned over and said, 'It’s Steely Dan, Alanis.' Oh, jeez. I said, 'Well, regardless, this record represents me, and anything other than this is not a record I am interested in being a part of.'” (It wasn't until she played the material for Guy Oseary at Madonna's Maverick Records that Morissette found a home for her music.) 

The "Jagged Little Pill" re-release revisits Morissette's journey making the record. It contains 10 demos she recorded with producing partner Glen Ballard before diving into the tracks that now comprise the album. They've been in the "archive vault" since "Pill" was released, Morissette said Monday on "Good Morning America."

Read Morissette's full essay on her blog. The 20th-anniversary edition of "Jagged Little Pill" is now available. 

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Imagine experiencing the world for the first time at 5 years old when you've never even seen yourself in a mirror. The stellar new movie "Room," based on Emma Donoghue's acclaimed novel, explores exactly that. Brie Larson plays a young mother who manages to escape from the garden shed where she has been held captive for seven years. While confined, she gave birth to Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who can now explore the joys and mysteries of a universe he didn't think existed. In this clip from the movie -- exclusive to The Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL -- the newly freed mother and son explore the hospital room where they rest on their first night outside of the insular home they called Room.

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, "Room" is now open in limited release. It expands to additional theaters throughout November. 

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Veronika Kahrmadji is graphic designer turned stay-at-home mom, but she's found a new outlet for her creativity. The Western Australia-based parent created "Veronika's Little World," a series of comics based on her often action-packed days with her 6-year-old and 2-year-old daughters.   

Kahrmadji told The Huffington Post that she describes her comics as "semi-autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek family and parenting (mis)adventures."

"I love finding humor in most of the annoying and stressful parenting moments, and I also use the comic strip to express the love, the simplest pleasures and the pride of being a mother of two highly active little girls, which I hope is shared with mothers all over the world," she said. 

"Veronika's Little World" covers many common parenting experiences -- from all the frantic rushing around to the useless desire for alone time. Kahrmadji started drawing the comic series earlier this year, and when she started sharing them on social media, she received positive responses from friends and family. "Some of them actually started to share their own similar experiences in the comment section," she said. Her older daughter especially loved reading the comic strip. 

Kahrmadji said she hopes her comics can bring smiles to people in the throes of parenthood. "By poking fun at some of my own parenting moments, I hope readers will turn some of their own frustrations into funny memories," she told HuffPost, adding that she'd like her comics to make other parents feel less alone. 

"I'd like to think of the comic strips as something akin to a mothers group where we complain and laugh a little about everyday dealing with our children," she continued. "We really need a great sense of humor if we want to get through parenthood with our sanity intact!"

Keep scrolling and visit Kahrmadji's website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to see "Veronika's Little World." 

H/T BoredPanda

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You WILL freak out after seeing this. Don't say we didn't warn you. 

A Twitter user shared a video of her precalculus teacher doing Halloween the right way -- by dressing up as Drake and dancing to "Hotline Bling." The clip, which was shared on Friday, quickly went viral with more than 44,000 retweets as of Tuesday morning. Probably from people who all want to take this dude's class. 

Just watch as the teacher gives the dance his best shot, successfully fulfilling the title of coolest teacher ever. Who cares if he didn't perfectly recreate Drake's moves -- he probably did, however, get a bunch of people way more pumped up about math. 

Ever since we watched this video we ... haven't been able to stop. And don't have any plans to do so. 

H/T BuzzFeed

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The Front, a pioneering new media startup founded entirely by women, premiered a web series this week elevating the voices and stories of queer youth living in the American deep south.

Titled "New Deep South," the video series explores the complex queer culture operating out of these spots of extreme social conservatism at a time of national change in attitudes towards the queer community. Unpacking queer realities such as alternative kinship systems, survival tactics and the way technology is shaping and informing the lives of these communities, each episode of "New Deep South" will focus on a different set of stories.

Thalia Mavros, founder of The Front and executive producer of "New Deep South," told HuffPost: "We love to pinpoint areas of tension in the world and tell unique stories in a way that humanizes the issues while exposing the forces that are shaping them."

This first episode, "Instababy," follows Keeta and Toni, a young couple from Jackson, Mississippi with a desire to start a family who pursue the adoption of an unborn child through social media app Instagram.

Mississippi remains the only state that still bans adoption by same-sex couples. The "New Deep South" team chose to time the release of "Instababy" to coincide with this week's federal court hearing challenging the ban.

The Huffington Post talked with Mavros this week about her team's vision for "New Deep South" and what we can expect from the forthcoming episodes in this series. 

What is your overarching concept for "New Deep South"?

In terms of "New Deep South," it’s one of our premier series, mainly because it explores vibrant and multifaceted queer culture in a place that is known for its social conservatism, economic stagnation, and its adherence to traditional values and institutions. We love to pinpoint areas of tension in the world and tell unique stories in a way that humanizes the issues while exposing the forces that are shaping them. In this case, the American South was a strong backdrop for examining the tangled and complex natures of sexual identity, family and legacy for queer youth in a time of transition and national change.

How did you find the couple this first episode focuses on? Why did you decide to elevate their story?

Our first stop was Jackson, Mississippi and the surrounding Delta area. One of the creators of the show, Lauren Cioffi, lived there for three years before moving back to LA to work for Sundance and she always felt like like she wanted other people to experience the Mississippi that isn’t really shown in the media -- really fascinating and dynamic and a lot more vibrant than what people think Mississippi is. She teamed up with Rosie Haber and they went on an adventure together and the deeper they delved into the stories and the people, the more they found other stories. So from the Rainbow Family storyline (featured in our upcoming NDS Montage episode), they found the Instababy story. Our "Instababy" protagonist Toni belongs to a Rainbow family and our team saw her and Keeta at the club and they stood out, because they are inter-racial and look very young. Documentary filmmaking is a cross between being a detective and piecing together a puzzle and a being a psychotherapist unraveling people’s psyches.

Fundamentally, the what-the-fuck nature of having an unborn child offered to you over social media was reason enough to start filming with them. And add to that, the fact that Mississippi is the only state that still bans adoptions by same-sex couples. (We postponed the release of the episode to coincide with this week when the hearing is taking place in federal court). It seems like they’re struggling to create a new kind of present, because everything they know -- community, family, religion, tradition -- are all really heavy concepts that carry the weight of the past. Every sense that we get is that they’re just trying to figure things out in the moment and trying to make sense of what the world is telling them is ok and not ok.

How can seeing the way these relationships operate in extremely conservative parts of the country help us have a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be queer in 2015?

While queer people have grown increasingly present in mainstream media, their depictions are almost uniformly well-off, usually urban, often white and in parts of the country where legal and moral questions about sexuality were put to bed long ago. But this represents only a slim portion of queer people across America.

This show also helps dispel myths on the other side of the equation. On paper, places like Mississippi seem like hell for LGBTQ, but queer people live and thrive in these places, and often love where they live. Our whole country is in a state of crucial flux regarding sexuality and gender, and conservative places like the Deep South are where this change is happening at the swiftest pace and with the most friction.

Lastly, it definitely makes us think about the resources we’re allocating towards supporting queer youth. Marriage is a step in the right direction (although I have my personal issues with the institution), but it doesn't solve the problem, especially in parts of the country where LGBT acceptance is still a hard sell. Prejudices run deep; there are still kids that are being thrown out by their parents and end up confused, alone and homeless.

How have you seen technology shape and inform the experiences of queers in the deep south through this project?

The social conditions for queer people are changing positively and rapidly in most of the US, but how does personal growth and queer expression happen in a place where young people don’t necessarily have a template or a roadmap? It’s fascinating to see how these young people use technology to fill the vacuum. Lauren Cioffi told me that thing that endeared her to Jackson was the really strong queer pockets that banded together, persecuted by and hidden from the traditional majority, creating communities and growing and becoming empowered together. Nowadays, people are able to connect regionally, nationally and globally on the Internet. Technology creates new realities and changes what young people perceive as possible and now those small pockets of support and community are created online.

In one of our next episodes, our trans protagonist finds his role models online. The desire to escape the constraints of daily life is universal, and technology and the connection they feel through the Internet grants them the motivation and freedom to radically realign the relationships in their lives.

What else can we expect from this web series?

So far all our stories have to do with family and queer creation of family, which is something we’re fascinated with. In one conversation, Rosie told me: “In modern society as queers, we kind of Frankenstein families together and we do it in whatever way we know how.” That Frankensteining is great source material and reveals so much about human nature and our ever-changing responses to our deepest needs and desires.

After Jackson, Cioffi is excited to visit Louisiana and Arkansas next.

I’m excited for all of us to continue having conversations like this one and Mississippi's adoption laws will hopefully join the rest of the country's before the end of the year.

Lauren Cioffi and Rosie Haber are co-creators of "New Deep South," with Haber functioning as director/producer and Cioffi as producer/cinematographer.

Watch "Instababy" above or head here to see more from The Front. Stay tuned for more from the "New Deep South" video series.

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Much like a self-centered SO, Twitter keeps shaking things up just when its users are getting comfortable, making stability seem like a far-off dream. In spite of pleas to go back to the way things were, the company seems to have no current plans to reverse its decision to replace the "'fave' star" with the "'like' heart," a shift that irked many of its users Tuesday. 

While dismay is a common response to social media changes (remember the switch to the Facebook timeline?), some critiques of using a heart symbol as an avenue for quick social interaction seem justified. It's a much higher bid to profess your love of something than it is to express your approval of it. It also makes positivity a valuable currency -- users are less likely to "heart" a tweet commenting on tragedy, for example. 

And, because the symbol of the heart has come to represent a very specific feeling, it seems the change will either result in less engagement on Twitter, or, more likely, a weakening of the power the symbol carries. In Twitter's tweet about the change, the company wrote, "♥=yes! ♥=congrats! ♥=LOL ♥=adorbs ♥=stay strong ♥=wow ♥=hugs ♥=aww ♥=high five."

That is a lot of things for ♥ to =. It seems like a good time, then, to revisit the history of the heart as an expression of love -- and consider whether that symbol is worth preserving. 

Though it's ubiquitously used today (at least among the emoji-reliant set), the heart hasn't always been a stand-in for romantic feelings. A quick Wikipedia scour confirms its use was popularized in 16th century, but no one’s entirely sure why. A Slate explainer from 2007 offers a few theories: the heart resembles the leaves of a plant once used as makeshift contraceptive pills; unskilled artists tried, and failed, to replicate the actual appearance of the human heart, which Aristotle said was the source of feeling. Gloria Steinem wrote her own theory in an introduction to The Vagina Monologues, explaining that the heart replicates the curves of a womanly figure, the source of erotic love.

Regardless of the reason for its rise in use, the heart symbol wasn’t around -- at least as a metaphor for love -- until the mid-13th century, when its first known use was recorded. In a small drawing adorning a decorative letter preluding a block of text in Roman de la poire, a suitor kneels before a crowned lover, granting a heart-shaped offering. The text is a medieval French work about falling in love. "Poire" means "pear," and the figure in the image resembles both a heart and a pear. As in the story, the image uses a pear, pictorially similar to a modern-day heart symbol, as a metaphor for romantic love. 

Before that, the sloped-and-pointed symbol was used to decorate manuscripts, but it typically represented a leaf, not the profound and enigmatic feeling of romantic love. So when it comes to the Twitter change, if your heart’s not in it, remember that historically speaking, the symbol is interpretable.

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It may be 2015, but many public figures still don't understand what feminism means. Luckily, there are young women like Zendaya who use their elevated platforms to set the record straight.

In a cover story for the December issue of Flare magazine, the 19-year-old singer and actress -- and recent high school graduate -- explained how she defines feminism. Her answer was wonderfully straightforward: 

A feminist is a person who believes in the power of women just as much as they believe in the power of anyone else. It’s equality, it’s fairness, and I think it’s a great thing to be a part of.

 Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. (Meryl Streep, take note.)

And Zendaya brings that ethos of female independence and professional capability to her work as a musical artist. The star told Flare that her career choices are completely her own.

“I’ve had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making," she said. "Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn’t allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.”

Sorry, old dudes. Zendaya's going to make her own mistakes -- and her own successes.

H/T Bustle

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This is one charming band.

El Mariachi Manchester, a Los Angeles-based mariachi band that covers Morrissey and The Smiths, spoke with NPR this week after performing at this year’s Day of the Dead celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Listen to the whole interview at NPR.

Check out the group's rendition of “Girlfriend in a Coma” from a few months ago:

Mariachi and Morrissey might seem like an curious combination to some people, but the musician has long enjoyed immense popularity in Mexican and Mexican-American communities. Singers Moises Baquiero and Alexandro Baquiero explained to NPR that being of Mexican descent while living in the U.S. isn’t so different from being of Irish descent and living in England -- in both cases, they said, people are influenced by Catholicism and have the feeling of being second-class citizens.

Contact the author at Hilary.Hanson@huffingtonpost.com

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Dirty Looks, a platform for queer experimental film and video and an institution in the NYC queer arts scene, will mark its five-year anniversary on Wednesday, Nov 4 with the screening of a "lost" Riot Grrrl film, "In Search of Margo-go."

Since its inception, Dirty Looks has established a bi-costal presence, extending its reach to Los Angeles and beyond. Headed up by Bradford Nordeen and Clara López Menéndez. Dirty Looks curates installations, events, and festival-esque screening projects in various art spaces, institutions and venues. In the words of the pair, "we began approaching these screenings as installations that activate queer spaces through moving image and performance."

The Huffington Post chatted with Nordeen and Menéndez this week about the five-year anniversary in order to get a better understanding of Dirty Looks and how the platform plans to evolve in the future.

The Huffington Post: What is Dirty Looks?

Bradford Nordeen & Clara López Menéndez: DL is a bi-coastal platform for queer film, video and performance operating out of New York and Los Angeles. It started as a gap-filler for the New York city cultural landscape. There wasn’t a regular space to see queer experimental film practices, which [founder Bradford Nordeen] found surprising in a city like New York. After several screenings in venues like Participant Inc., PPOW and SilverShed, there was a robust enough following to take the project on the road.

Dirty Looks began as a monthly series curated by [Bradford] with Karl McCool joining towards the end of the first year. Realizing that the project carried with it a large social -- or even, installation -- component, we launched our most ambitious and successful public program in our second year: On Location. Together with a selection committee of 12 emerging curators, the DL team organized a series of 31 screenings during the month of July (one screening per day). Initially devised as a yearly program in 2012, we reconfigured the model to become a biennial effort after 2013. Our recent edition this past summer was an incredible success, with even greater crowds than attended years prior, serving as a total reminder of the importance for spaces and occasions to present queer historical and contemporary work of this kind. On Location mobilizes viewers in such an engaged way due to its use of space. Working with a diversity of art spaces, institutions and venues, we began approaching these screenings as installations that activate queer spaces through moving image and performance. So with On Location 31 days corresponds to 31 locations across New York City, from art spaces like MoCADA or White Columns to music venues like the Pyramid Club or spaces for queer/gay sociability like Le Petit Versailles or The Eagle.

How has Dirty Looks grown and evolved over the past five years?

From the start we’ve been pretty bowled over by the interest in our programming, which emerged outside of New York pretty quickly. It’s always pretty thrilling to take these shows, which may or may not have a kind of New York slant on them, elsewhere. We’ve been to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, but also midwestern cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee. We even just installed an exhibition of video work in a small non-profit gallery in São Paulo!

During On Location 2013, we started working with Clara López Menéndez, a Spanish contemporary curator who had just moved to the states from Berlin. We developed a strong relationship with López through On Location, and she joined the Dirty Looks team to help launch programming in Los Angeles, which launched this year in institutions like REDCAT, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archive, Machine Projects and Human Resources. It’s interesting that in a city so rich with cinema, our efforts to feature queer experimental content were extremely well-received and encouraged, proving the need for this type of programing and its ability to build communities in very different urban contexts.

What do you have planned for the five-year anniversary?

We’re organizing a benefit fundraiser on Wednesday, Nov. 4 at DCTV in Soho to begin a series of celebratory events, commemorating five years. These have been five years filled with over 150 screenings and performances featuring the work of artists like Luther Price, Dynasty Handbag, Kenneth Anger, Charles Atlas, Colin Self, Chris E. Vargas, Tom Rubnitz among so many others.

To kick off our five-year celebration, we decided to do what we know to do best: screen an elusive queer gem. So, we’re premiering "In Search of Margo-Go," a film by Jill Reiter that became the stuff of legends in Riot Grrrl zines of yore, not least of which because it stars Bikini Kill front-woman Kathleen Hanna. Shot in 1994, the would-be-a-feature got stalled in a production process that saw its filmmaker move to San Francisco. That existing material never saw the light of day, but having worked with Jill for the past few years, we were thrilled when she told us of a 40-minute version that she was readying with animator Katie Bush. We’ll be showing this material -- much of which was shot in New York -- for the first time on the East Coast. And to get a sense of scenes that never came to light, we’re preceding the screening with a short, original script reading where a group of very special guests and supporters of Dirty Looks will read excerpts of the original film script. Artists Seth Bogart, K8 Hardy,  Johanna Fateman, Jill Pangallo, Cy Gavin and Brontez Purnell will be performing and JD Samson, Peppré Ann, Macy Rodman and Shannon Funchess from Light Asylum will be animating the after-screening party with their DJ sets and music acts.

What do you hope Dirty Looks evolves into in the future?

Right now we are transforming Dirty Looks into a non-profit organization, expanding our team to embody a more collaborative structure, which will allow us to include more voices and queer experiences in the works we feature and the conversations we are striving to foster. This is a very important moment for us as this transformation will create jobs out of this kind of exciting archiving and excavating and allow us to improve these resources. It is a really exciting moment, a coming of age, the beginning of a new and very important phase for Dirty Looks. Five years was never really a goal when we first started out with a one-off screening and a borrowed 16mm film projector. We have a very exciting project that we’ll be announcing at the benefit, something that will expand DL’s imprint on a national level. We’re very excited to share -- won’t you join us?

The five-year anniversary of Dirty Looks will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 3 in NYC. Head here for more information.

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There's no need to explain that bullying is horrible, but the problem might be worse than you realize. Kids who witness bullying are more likely to struggle with problems like substance abuse and truancy even if they're not bullied themselves, so the issue radiates well beyond the individual young people who experience abuse.

A new initiative that launched in late October hopes to give those witnesses a simple way to express themselves and shut down bullying as soon as it starts. 

Dubbed "I Am A Witness," the campaign is a collaboration between major tech companies and marketing agencies. Its logo, a simple icon depicting an open eye within a speech bubble, has already made its way into your iPhone's emoji set, though you might not have noticed it yet:

The idea is to give kids a way to call out bullying in text messages or online communications. If someone's trashing a peer, you can simply respond with the emoji instead of using words.

"This emoji felt like it could give teens something to say when they don't know what to say," Lisa Sherman, CEO of Ad Council, told The Huffington Post in a phone interview.

Ad Council spearheaded the I Am A Witness campaign, which pulled financial and creative support from companies like Apple, Adobe and Facebook. Advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein and Partners designed the campaign's logo, which was then converted into an emoji and presented to the Unicode Consortium, the organization that standardizes special characters across platforms. (You could think of it as the group that makes sure " " communicates a winking face regardless of what device you're viewing it on.) 

Of course, there's a unique challenge to emojis: It's not always clear what they mean, exactly. Sometimes they take on a life of their own. The eggplant emoji " " is used to refer to a certain part of the male anatomy, for example.

Weeks before the I Am A Witness campaign even launched, people uncovered its emoji in a preview version of iOS 9.1 and speculated about what it might stand for -- iMessage or read receipts, for example.

But Goodby thinks the message is clear. 

"Victims of bullying feel so isolated. And online, bullies feel they have the power to bully because they think they have anonymity," Kate Baynham, a copywriter at the agency told HuffPost. "So an eye felt like a no-brainer. It says, 'I see what’s happening here and I’m not into it.'"

Adobe, which provided financing to the campaign and helped put the emoji in front of Unicode, agrees.

"This is an easy mechanism for kids to take a quick stand against something awful that they see," Ann Lewnes, Adobe's chief marketing officer, told HuffPost.

If you remain skeptical about the emoji, though, Ad Council is also rolling out a series of videos on YouTube that explore bullying prevention. Three different clips debuted on the site just last week.

Sherman told HuffPost that there's more to come.

"At the end of the day, our hope is that this truly incredible and unprecedented collaboration is really going to move the needle on this issue," she explained.

Clarification: An earlier version of this post stated that the Unicode Consortium approved the anti-bullying emoji prior to its release. However, since the icon was intended only for Apple's platform, it did not end up needing Unicode's official approval.

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Ted Dintersmith is on a whirlwind tour of trying to change education in America, one community at a time. 

Dintersmith, a former venture capitalist, is executive producer of "Most Likely To Succeed," a self-financed documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The documentary argues that modern American schooling is outdated, promoting rigid coursework and rote memorization of facts at the expense of creativity and natural curiosity. 

Since the film's premiere, Dintersmith has been on a 50-state tour to screen the film and promote its ideas. He has been appearing in front of crowds of students, teachers and education leaders, encouraging them to form local committees that would reimagine public education in their communities. 

Below is the trailer for Most Likely To Succeed:

The Huffington Post spoke recently with Dintersmith about his film, his motivations for transforming education, and what he has learned so far on his tour.

Tell me a little bit about your background and what got you interested in investing so much time and energy in education.

I started my career squarely in the world of innovation. I was with a startup business and then I was with venture capital for 20+ years. From that, two things emerged. I had a clear understanding of how fast technology is moving ahead and how quickly it is going to erase huge numbers of jobs in the economy, and also what skills and characteristics kids need to have coming out of school to take advantage of innovation instead of being crushed by it.

It continued with my own kids. I saw these experiences my kids were having and I said, "My gosh, it's almost as if school was designed to crush innovation and creativity." When I started researching, I thought, wait a minute, there’s no "almost" in that statement. Our school system was carefully and thoughtfully designed 125 years ago and had the explicit goal of eliminating creativity in kids going through school. And what have we done in the last 125 years? For the most part we said, "Let's take a model we know isn’t working and up the intensity of it."

What happened with your own kids that made you want to take action?

There were a few signature moments. In third grade with my son, there was a week or two when they were studying simple machines. We went to the hardware store, we bought for 20 bucks everything you need to study simple machines. We spent a few nights at home playing around with things and having fun. At one point we asked, "What would it take my son to lift a cinderblock with the little finger on his left hand?" We came up with the design. I made this comment in passing, kind of as a throwaway joke, but I said, "With that design, you could lift Coach Meyers." Coach Meyers was a big, easily 250-pound basketball coach at the school.

Two days later my son comes home from school and clearly something hasn’t gone right. He shows me this test, and the test said, "What simple machine would you use to lift a grown man?" He had an answer. He said "a six pulley system" and he sketched out the man and how it would all work. But there's this big red X on it with a minus 17, and it said “lever” with three underscores. I went and met with the teacher and I said, "Why did you ask the question this way, why didn’t you say, 'Show one or more designs using simple machines that would let you lift a grown man' or use a question that's open-ended and expansive and creative?" The answer floored me. She said, "We have found giving kids open-ended, ambiguous questions is bad for standardized tests."

Who is the documentarian that you worked with on the film?

Greg Whiteley. There is an irony -- I was on the first national campaign finance committee for President Barack Obama. He worked on a film about Mitt Romney. So we were the ultimate bipartisan pair. It has been great; the film appeals equally to Democrats, Republicans, rich, poor, urban, rural. 

When people see the film, they say it's this aha moment of, "Why aren’t our schools engaging kids and inspiring them?" It’s a really hard proposition to argue against. But if you visit classrooms, you find most schools in this country don’t do what I just said. Kids are mostly memorizing things that they won't remember.

What has your life been like since the movie came out?

Every day is a new place. But people are so receptive. In a typical week I take at least four 6 or 7 a.m. flights. I am up most days when the alarm clock still says 4 a.m. on it. You would think, "Gosh what a horrible life." It's actually not, it's actually incredible. You hear these people and what they have to say and you realize this is a fight worth fighting. 

In Michigan we did this event, and this guy stands up, and he's one of these people you instantly relate to. He's a fifth-grade science teacher, and he's almost tearing up. He's been to the White House as one of the outstanding teachers across America, he's been in something called the National Teachers Hall of Fame. But the key thing is, you can tell this guy gets fifth-graders incredibly interested in science. He said to the room, "Every day I get up and I have to make the choice: Do I go to school today and do what's best for my kids, or do I go to school today and do what the state tells me I’ve got to do?"

People are blown away when they realize that’s the dilemma we’re putting our teachers in.

What impact do you hope this film has on schools?

The thing we really hope for is behind our whole distribution model. The reason why you can't see the film at home on your laptop is because we organize screenings. We want to bring people together because it enables schools to innovate and change. It is very hard for a teacher or principal or superintendent or education commissioner to announce anything bold and different, because the antibodies just come out and attack. People will whine and complain and say, "Why are we doing anything different?This isn’t how I went to school." We bring people together to see the film and then people are sort of fired up and say, "We are changing things, we are going to make a difference."

Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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Becoming Insta-famous is no easy feat. 

Just like any other social influencers, Instagram celebrities invest a lot of time and effort into curating their digital presence, growing their audience and staying relevant. To succeed, they need a mix of creativity, entrepreneurship and luck. 

We recently sat down with a group of top Instagrammers -- people with thousands or millions of followers -- to learn what it takes to become an Instagram sensation.

Some of their best strategies? Pick a unique point of view, keep an eye out for emerging trends and make sure to post at peak times. 

Here's what else they told us about growing a social media following:

MORE ON HUFFPOST: 

8 Very Easy Ways To Get More Instagram Likes And Followers

9 Things Teenagers Can Teach You About Instagram

11 Instagram Tips For Beginners: Etiquette Rules Every User Should Know

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The storm doesn’t always have to pass before we see a rainbow. In fact, this group of artists would like passersby to witness a burst of color during a storm.

Students and recent graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have created a concept design for sidewalk illustrations that are revealed only when wet. The members of the design team, who are all South Korean, envisioned the project as a way to provide relief during Seoul's severe monsoon season. 

“Seoul, South Korea, is a vibrant and colorful city,” the group wrote on its portfolio page. “But during the annual three-week monsoon season, Seoul's energy and color disappear under the dark cloud.”

Using this weather as inspiration, the SAIC team developed Project Monsoon for a contest with Design and Art Direction -- a British group that promotes education in design and advertising. The Chicago team submitted their project for the Pantone Challenge, which asks contestants  to “reimagine [their] hometown through the language of color,” as written on the D&AD website.

"When [the challenge] asked us to reimagine our hometown, it was natural for us to try to reimagine Seoul," James Lee, one of the designers, told The Huffington Post in a Facebook message.

Project Monsoon won a D&AD New Blood Black Pencil, which is the highest possible accolade to be awarded for young creatives.

The designs, which are currently only concept renderings and have yet to actually be installed, are “inspired by South Korea’s culture of emphasizing the importance of the flow of rivers,” as well as the country’s topography, and feature illustrations of marine life moving downstream. The group hopes to someday obtain the resources to implement Project Monsoon in Seoul. 

"It looks like people are noticing the work and maybe we might be able get connected with someone who could bring this idea to life," Lee said.

Now, that is a great idea that goes against the current. 

To learn more about Project Monsoon, click here. 

H/T Bored Panda

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I love a good #slatepitch, the contrarian-to-the-point-of-absurdity think pieces for which the online magazine Slate has become notorious. Not for hate-reading either: Sometimes the Slate writer voices an unpopular opinion I happen to agree with, and sometimes not, but regardless, #slatepitches provoke us into reexamining our comfortable assumptions.

Which is why I was so excited when Slate published senior editor Forrest Wickman’s polemic, “Against Subtlety,” this week. “Let me be blunt: Subtlety sucks,” Wickman commenced, ambitiously. “This statement might anger you.” Not the most subtle opening, so let it be said that the guy aims for intellectual consistency.

I don’t agree with Wickman, but the piece fascinated me, prompting me to think about how we talk about narrative art, particularly literature, and what qualities make it resonant. Do we overvalue subtlety, as he argues? “Most of us take for granted that subtlety, in the arts, is a virtue,” he writes. “You can see it in our critical language: It’s common to say that a book or movie lacks subtlety -- the implication being that subtlety is an essential quality.”

Wickman cites great works that supposedly lack subtlety -- Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, even, perhaps Jonathan Franzen's Purity -- though in truth they all interweave moments of sentimentality and obvious symbolism with profound subtlety. His own praise for The Great Gatsby’s obviousness rests on a surface reading that denies the book’s textured moral portrait of the Roaring ‘20s:

The whole book is about the appeal of a man who favors loud colors and bold gestures, bright, monogrammed shirts and great fireworks displays of exuberance and wealth. Jay Gatsby comes out and says what he means, even when it means spelling out the themes of the book. (“Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!”) There’s one character in that book who hates Gatsby’s parties, who thinks he can’t be an Oxford man because of his pink suit. When we demand subtlety, privileging masks and minimalism over on-the-sleeve feeling and on-the-nose meaning, we turn ourselves into a bunch of Tom Buchanans.

But The Great Gatsby isn’t really a celebration of over-the-top parties; Fitzgerald nudges us to realize, slowly, that Gatsby himself only favors these things because he wants to prove himself deserving of acceptance among the wealthy and famous, and to win over a girl who married for money. The Great Gatsby is about a man whose insistence on proving himself successful only draws attention to his desperation and unhappiness. His desire to simply dive back into the past, meanwhile, is fatal, to him and at least one unfortunate bystander. The bold symbolism and overt messaging indeed lack subtlety, but they’re not the whole story of a book that’s so subtle many readers apparently come out believing the message is that opulent displays of wealth are cool and a nostalgia that prevents moving on is romantic.

Our love for subtlety is an inevitable, and in many ways admirable, value. It means art and its audience is evolving, becoming more sophisticated.

Meanwhile, many classic authors are known for subtlety. George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov wielded it to memorable effect, and few would argue that Hawthorne, with The Scarlet Letter, had more fully mastered the art of novel-writing than any of these.

Our love for subtlety is an inevitable, and in many ways admirable, value. It means art and its audience is evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Simply recycling the same techniques and narrative approaches used by earlier generations of artists will fail to achieve the same engagement from the audience -- call us jaded, but we’ve seen it all before. Earlier works of literature (see Dante’s Inferno and The Odyssey) tended to lean more heavily on thorough exposition, clear symbolism, and telling rather than showing. Over time, authors found new and more subtle ways to convey their meaning to readers who had grown used to and less intrigued by more obvious techniques.

The more familiarity audiences, and budding creators, have with basic methods for generating an emotional reaction, the more suspect those techniques become -- with reason. It’s easy to pack tried-and-true heartstring-tuggers into a book or movie rather than exploring new or more complicated territory, and it’s less interesting to see the same old schmaltz. Corny stuff, like The Scarlet Letter, seemed far less obvious to contemporary readers: One reviewer even accused it of using subtle techniques to disguise its licentious message, saying Hawthorne, “like Mephistopheles, insinuates that the arch-fiend himself is a very tolerable sort of person, if nobody would call him Mr. Devil … TheVicar of Wakefield is sometimes coarsely virtuous, but The Scarlet Letter is delicately immoral.”

By the time we hit Henry James, it’s undeniable that some writers sought to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Wickman wonders what the point of this is, suggesting classism on the part of Modernists, but as my English professor once said, “sometimes just saying it doesn’t get it quite right.”

The beauty of fiction lies in how it cloaks its messages in non-literal language, creating a more powerful and complex experience than utterly straightforward declarations can ever be. The Great Gatsby could have been a critical essay on consumerism, but Fitzgerald made something far more compelling and thought-provoking by asking us to read a story that conveys his ideas through metaphor, characterization, thematic choices and narrative structure. By its nature, novels will be more subtle than they must be to convey a message; that’s why they’re challenging and fun and can surprise us repeatedly on renewed readings.

Wickman correctly points out that strong, pure emotions feel real and honest. But complex, muddled emotions and thoughts, ones we struggle to understand even if they’re our own, are real and honest as well. Growing older entails learning how much of life resists easy resolution, simple reactions and clear binaries. It also involves plenty of moments of pure emotion, all the more powerful because of their rarity. The rarity allows them to feel special, real. Subtlety can draw us ineluctably into a story, allowing us to be slammed with the blunt force of pure emotion. It can also capture those troublesome moments in life when we feel uncertain of what the right action is, of how something makes us feel, of how we should feel.

Wickman worries that our concern with subtlety and our dislike for “anvils” stems from a desire for entertainment that makes us feel smart. “This is made plain when we complain that something ‘talks down to us’ or ‘insults our intelligence,’ as if the point of a book or TV show is to stroke your ego,” he wrote.

Well … who wants to read a book or show that makes you feel stupid? In actuality, pedantry is just dull; it’s the exact reason many of us prefer to read or watch stories rather than attend lectures. It’s obviousness that actually strokes our egos. That’s why most readers prefer not to struggle through books that make them work hard to understand; most of us would rather feel smart enough to have picked up on everything, even if that entails a book being easier and less subtle.

Pedantry is dull; it’s the exact reason many of us prefer to read or watch stories rather than attend lectures.

In short, Wickman had the germ of a great point in there, but then he had to ruin it with all the lack of nuance. (To be fair, he goes out of his way to applaud nuance, though not to address how nuance and subtlety can go hand in hand.) This encapsulates why I love #slatepitch, however: Sometimes, a blunt contradiction can crack open a fascinating, nuanced consideration of why we value what we value, when all too often we fail to question our value structures.

It’s interesting that Wickman applauds lack of subtlety solely through examples of male authors (and directors), when female authors are often criticized for being less “artful,” in works from Jane Eyre to The Goldfinch, than their counterparts. Perhaps white boy geniuses like Jonathan Franzen and F. Scott Fitzgerald coming in for such critiques is just what it takes to get this value structure reexamined, and I only hope critics will take his words to heart the next time they dismiss a purposefully fairy-tale-esque novel from Donna Tartt or Hanya Yanagihara for being too unlikely, too extreme in its emotions, or too unsubtle. As Wickman points out, sometimes writers deploy these techniques judiciously and with calculated intent, yet we prefer to review another book, the one we wish they’d written, out of prejudice against bold choices.

But having thought about it, all the same, let’s keep subtlety, even if we’re not sure whether it makes us smarter. It definitely seems to intrigue us more, and that in itself seems pretty worthwhile.

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Eat your heart out, Harry Potter. 

The film version of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" prequel, "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," has been shrouded in secrecy ever since the project was announced in 2013. That is, until now. 

Entertainment Weekly's newest cover star is Newt Scamander, the movie's protagonist and world renowned magizoologist (a person who studies magical creatures) played by Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, who sets out on an adventure in 1926 New York. 

Things to note: Redmayne is sporting Scamander's signature briefcase and standing in the hallowed halls of the Magical Congress of the United States of America (or MACUSA), the magical governing body for the American witches and wizards. 

Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Ezra Miller and Katherine Waterston are also set to join Redmayne on the magical adventure. 

The official title design for "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" was released on Tuesday on the film's Instagram account with a mysterious caption that reads, "Prepare yourself for the beasts are coming."

Bring on the beasts. 

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Welcome to For Your Consideration, The Huffington Post's breakdown of all things Oscar. Between now and Feb. 28, 2016, entertainment editors Matthew Jacobs and Joe Satran will pore over awards season and discuss which films will make the most noise at the 88th annual Academy Awards.

It is time, once again, to turn our eyes to the Oscar race. By most accounts, the derby began around Labor Day with the fall-festival triumvirate (Venice, Telluride and Toronto), but now that the holidays are upon us, studios' multimillion-dollar campaigns begin in earnest.

Which Best Actress contender can charm the Academy's massive acting branch the most? As things currently stand, it seems the category has four front-runners (Cate Blanchett, Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence and Saoirse Ronan) and one wild-card spot that could go to any number of worthy ladies. But this is the Oscars we're talking about. A lot could change over the next few months, especially as the Golden Globes and other precursor prizes influence the race. Here are 21 women whose names will be plastered across awards season, ranked in ascending order of likelihood. 

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