This article originally appeared on artnet News.

That gender imbalances continue to plague the art world in 2016 is a matter of fact. However, to employ an old adage, Rome wasn't built in a day -- and we'd be remiss to overlook progress when we see it. As The New York Times puts it, women in the arts today are "(finally) getting their turn."

Among living female artists in particular, a special tier have reached new heights in art-market recognition. The last four years alone saw new names elevated to the top of auctions, which is a small, but formidable group.

Out of the top 2000 artworks sold at auction from 1985 onward by living artists, see which women made it in the ever-growing club. 

1. Cady Noland
Cady Noland, who previously led the pack with her 2011 Sotheby's sale of "Oozewald," reclaimed her seat at the throne with a 2015 sale of "Bluewald" at Christie's New York. As the most expensive lot sold by a living female artist to date, "Bluewald" was snagged in May of 2015 for a cool $9,797,000.

2. Yayoi Kusama
Not to be outpaced, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who currently ranks as the most expensive living female artist on aggregate, takes a firm second place with the sale of "White No. 28" at a 2014 Christie's New York, which won a handsome $7,109,000.

3. Cindy Sherman
The art world's queen of disguise Cindy Sherman joins Noland and Kusama in the top three with a 2014 sale of "Untitled Film Stills" which were produced in the mid to late '70s. The photos caught the eye of a collector during a Christie's auction, and the premium paid closes in on $7 million.

4. Marlene Dumas
South African artist Marlene Dumas claims fourth place with a Sotheby's sale of her 1995 painting "The Visitor," which fetched nearly $6.5 million in 2008. For a closer look at Dumas's work, the artist's 1994 "The Painter" is currently on view at the Met Breuer.

5. Bridget Riley
Optical illusions are Bridget Riley's specialty, and the most expensive of them all is a 1967 painting titled "Chant 2." The English artist saw this canvas sold at a Sotheby's auction in 2008 for a little over $5 million.

6. Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel makes the list with her 1988 "Untitled (in 2 parts)," which sold at Sotheby's in 2014 for close to $5 million. Trockel's work, which typically tackles arbitrary distinctions between craft and fine art (among other equally gendered differences), serves as much-needed counterweights to Germany's male-dominated art scene.

7. Julie Mehretu
Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu has seen several of her canvases sold for high sums at auction, but the highest peak among them belongs to a 2013 sale of her painting "Retopistics." That year, the work sold at Christie's for a little over $4,6 million.

8. Tracey Emin
As an object of art historical and socio-political value, Tracey Emin's 1998 sculpture installation, "My Bed," raked in $4,365,678 in 2014 at Christie's. The English artist, who recently made headlines for committing to a stone in matrimony, has long-served as a rebel-rouser of the finest variety.

9. Jenny Saville
When it comes to figurative painting, English painter Jenny Saville comes as quickly to mind as Lucien Freud. It comes as no surprise, then, that Saville settles into the top ten with one of her portraits. "Plan," a canvas painted in 1993, took home $3,491,681 at a Christie's auction in 2014.

10. Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins's photo-realistic paintings have won the favor of many a collector. In 2005, the late real estate developer Edward R. Broida donated 17 pieces by the artist to the MoMA that was cumulatively valued at $50 million. Less than a decade later in 2014, Celmins's "Burning Plane" took home just under $3.5 million at Sotheby's.

11. Chen Xi
According to the artnet Price Database, Chinese artist Chen Xi works have sold at auction in the $50,000 range. But with the 2011 sale of her work "被记忆"系列作品 (Works by memory)," Xi takes a seat at our roundup. The piece, which sold at Holly International Auction, took home $3,267,045.

12. Tauba Auerbach
As the youngest member of our lineup, Tauba Auerbach, who was born in 1981, has already seen a number of her works sold for millions at auction. The highest price paid for her work was transacted at a Phillips auction in 2014 for $2,285,000, which won the collector "Untitled (Fold)," a painting done in 2010.

13. Beatriz Milhazes
Beatriz Milhazes's playful canvases conjure up brilliant storms of Brazilian cultural imagery and modernist references, and they've caught the attention of big collectors in recent years. Her painting, "Meu Limão," took home $2,098,500 in a 2012 Sotheby's auction. Two years later, her painting "Palmolive" sold at Christie's for $1,685,000.

14. Paula Rego
2015 was a good year for Portugese artist Paula Rego, who saw two of her paintings, which resemble storybook illustrations, fetch high sums at Sotheby's auction in June: "The cadet and his sister" took home nearly $1.8 million while "Looking out" was claimed at a little over $1.5 million.

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One of New York's sassiest funnymen, Justin Sayre has made a name for himself with his monthly variety show, "The Meeting,” paying tribute to gay icons like Judy Garland, Cher and Julie Andrews, among others. His new solo play, however, takes a turn for the poignant, romantic and deeply personal.

"Love's Refrain," which continues at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York this weekend, is billed as "romanticism for the modern age." In it, Sayre pairs personal anecdotes about the pursuit of love with observations about the science of astronomy. 

The writer-performer, 34, told The Huffington Post that he began developing the concept for "Love's Refrain" after listening to an NPR story about astronomy. The story, he said, described "how one day in the distant future, the stars will go out," which made him "incredibly sad."  

"My mind immediately thought about love, how much will be lost when space is dark and that started the thoughts for what the show became," Sayre said. His next step was to give himself a crash course in astronomy before starting to weave his personal experiences into "the physics of the star life cycle." 

In keeping with that shift in tone, Sayre even debuted a new look for "Love's Refrain," swapping his trademark, shoulder-length mane for a simple buzz cut. A bit of the old Justin, however, is very much present, as evidenced by the silver evening gown he wears in his performance. 

"It goes to spots where I don't think many people expected me to go," he told HuffPost. "It's a tall order, but if you just succumb to the experience and go with it, I think you'll be happily surprised and hopefully moved."  

The show certainly resonated with audiences after it opened April 1, garnering solid notices in The New York Times and Out magazine, among other publications. Making Sayre prouder still was the fact that "Love's Refrain" was mainly financed through a successful Kickstarter campaign. 

"It was an absolute wonder. It was so touching to know that my work means that much to people," he said. "It gave the whole project a feeling of permission and love from the very start."

Justin Sayre performs in "Love's Refrain" at New York's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on April 8 through 10. Head here for more details. 

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Do you ever wish you could tap a stranger on the shoulder and ask what they're listening to? Inquiring reporters Kyli Singh and Minou Clark did just that, using The Huffington Post Snapchat to peek into the playlists of unsuspecting New Yorkers. 

If you're in need of a podcast shake-up, consider some of the recommendations they received below, which range from hilarious interviews to thoughtful storytelling. Don't forget to check out HuffPost's own cadre of original podcasting. Did you know we cover everything from "The Bachelor" to sexytimes to politics? Well, now you do.

Go forth and listen.

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Here's one video that'll stop you in your tracks. 

Marc Settle, a BBC academy trainer who lives in London, shared a mind-blowing video of an optical illusion featuring his son's toy train tracks. 

At first you'll think the train tracks are different sizes. But then your world comes crashing down around you. 

The clip unsurprisingly went viral on Twitter. And as it turns out, these aren't just some strange alien train tracks.

Some very sharp people on the social media site identified the creepy occurrence as the Jastrow Illusion, which was discovered by psychologist Joseph Jastrow back in 1889.

When identical curved objects are placed next to one another, with the longer side of an object juxtaposing the shorter side of the other identical object -- as it is in the video -- the illusion is created. 

So you can chill out and take comfort in the fact that you aren't just seeing things. 

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The first person everyone meets is her mother. Whatever else may follow, she's there from the start, and her presence, or absence, looms.

It's a truth that sounds throughout literature, not to mention psychotherapy -- your mother is accountable for your neuroses, your ambitions, your wants and your fears. That's the case, at least, for Betsy Crane, one of the two narrators in Elizabeth Crane's inventive new novel, The History of Great Things. The other narrator, as it were, is her mother, Lois. 

Chapter by chapter, the pair works to tell each other’s life stories, embellishing or altering the truth wherever possible, and in doing so revealing their own biases and opinions. While Betsy is prone to writing emotionally honest if melancholic accounts of her mother’s life, Lois is hyperbolic, penning high highs and tragic lows.

This makes sense, given that she’s built a career as a successful opera singer. Betsy’s account of her mother’s artistically ambitious life begins in Muscatine, Iowa, where she was born in 1936. Hazy on the details, Betsy begins conversationally, glossing over fits of the croup, and giving extra care to scenes that she views as formative: Lois’ father’s horrible rage after she has a black friend over to play, her sister’s off-putting aloofness when their West Highland Terrier dies under the porch. These stories are related casually but with gravity, reflecting the tone of time-worn, passed-down tales.

Lois uses the same approach when telling Betsy’s story, but she’s inclined to reveal her maternal concern for her daughter’s well-being, especially during Betsy’s aimless post-college years, spent waitressing, drinking, writing and bouncing between New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Although she takes after her mother physically -- both are beautiful, and sought-after -- she’s less focused when it comes to romantic pursuits or career ambitions.

The pair’s differences are revealed in their witty exchanges at the end, or in the middle, of each chapter. They interject, amend, bicker, and reveal their warring perspectives on art, storytelling and their own fraught relationship. While Betsy believes her mother encouraged her not to pursue the arts, contributing to her own lack of drive, Lois begrudges Betsy, occasionally admitting to herself that motherhood interfered with her otherwise fated success.

At times, these quippy asides veer into the conceptual, distracting from an otherwise warm and uniquely told story. There’s talk of “POV,” and the value of novels-from-life versus straightforward memoir. But, the post-chapter conversations also work to reveal a touching truth about Betsy’s project: these conversations with her mother are taking place in her head, as a means of working through her own thoughts about their relationship. 

The insular world created by her imagined conversations speaks to just how encompassing one’s relationship with her mother can be.

After she dies from lung cancer at 60, Lois, as written from Betsy’s perspective, sweetly says to her daughter, “Look at you. You’ve done better without me.” To which Betsy replies, “You were there for thirty-seven years of my life. There is no me without you.”

The bottom line:

Crane’s inventive novel of loss and reflection is told in the alternating perspectives of a headstrong mother and her daughter. Though sometimes too clever for its own good, the book brims with warm revelations.

What other reviewers think:

Kirkus: "Her mother is right: one wishes this endearing stylist, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert, would have done it the easy way. A memoir would have been just fine."

Publisher's Weekly: "Peppered with touching moments in which the women find unexpected common ground, as well as hilariously snarky asides between Betsy and Lois at the end of each chapter, the mother-daughter dynamic feels genuine. However, the gimmick of an author named Elizabeth Crane writing about a character named Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Crane strains the book, and the narrative voices are so similar it’s often hard to tell where Lois cuts off and Betsy picks up."

Who wrote it?

Elizabeth Crane is the author of We Only Know So Much, which will be released as a film this year. She’s also the author of three collections of short stories.

Who will read it?

Anyone interested in unconventional narratives a la Sheila Heti or “Adaptation.” And, of course, those interested in stories about familial relationships.

Opening lines:

"You’re late. Two weeks, forty-one hours late, nine pounds, ten ounces. That’s a lot. That’s like a bowling ball coming out of me."

Notable passage:

"You and Victor have been married for five years now. You love him, in your way; he adores you, still, always. You fight, loudly, sometimes every day. You always, always believe that each fight will be the last, though evidence over time suggests otherwise. Notably, in one of these fights, the kitchen telephone gets ripped off the wall on New Year’s Eve.

"-I think it was Christmas Eve, Betsy.

"-Okay, it doesn’t matter."

The History of Great Things
By Elizabeth Crane
Harper Perennial, $14.99
Published April 5, 2016

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

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When one teen’s parents tried to sell her into marriage, she stopped it -- by writing a viral rap song.

Sonita Alizadeh is one of the youngest female rappers in Afghanistan. At age 10, her parents considered selling her into marriage for the first time.

“It was a painful moment,” Alizadeh said at the Women in the World summit in New York on Thursday. “I couldn’t understand that I’d have to forget my dreams.”

At 16, it happened again. Alizadeh’s mother told her she would be sold for $9,000 to pay for her brother’s marriage. But this time Alizadeh was having none of it.

She created a music video, “Brides for Sale,” that soon gained fans around the world -- accumulating almost half a million views to date.

“I am perplexed by this tradition of my people / They sell girls for money, no right to choose," the lyrics read. "Tell me what can I do to prove my personhood.”

“My parents tried to sell me,” Alizadeh said at the event. “I was looking for a way to share my feelings, so I started to rap to talk about the painful experience of being a girl.”

After watching the video, Alizadeh’s mother agreed not to sell her into marriage. Her future as an unmarried, educated young woman was secured when a high school in Utah saw her video and offered her a scholarship to attend.

“This is my first time in a real school,” Alizadeh said. “At first it was really hard, because I couldn’t speak English. I knew two words: 'hi' and 'bye.' But now I get A's -- and I’d like to go to Harvard.”

In Afghanistan, the legal age for a girl to wed is 16, according to the U.N. As a result, 40 percent of women are married before age 18 in the country, and an alarming one in six are married before 15, according to UNICEF.

Even though child marriage is illegal, it is still widespread in rural areas, where poor families sell their daughters to settle debts or dowries. Marrying underage affects girls’ development, interrupts their education and puts them at higher risk of domestic violence.

“My friends, they get married at 15 years old,” Alizadeh said at the event. “I saw them with bruises on their faces. I realized: This is the real face of child marriage.” 

Now Alizadeh dedicates her life to speaking out against child marriage.

“It’s not just Afghanistan, it’s happening all over the world,” she said at the event. “I’m here to talk about all those girls who can’t share their feelings.”

The teen said it will take a multi-pronged approach to end the practice: First, families need to understand that there are other possibilities for their daughters. Second, communities and religious leaders need to promote a change in tradition. Finally, governments need to support local programs to end child marriage.

Ultimately, Alizadeh wants to become a lawyer to help defend victims of child marriage herself.

“I want to go back to my country to help other girls,” she said. “We need to support girls to see other possibilities for themselves, to have a vision for their own future.”

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North Carolina's controversial new anti-LGBT law doesn't sit well with Bruce Springsteen. 

The Boss, 66, has been thrilling audiences across the country on The River Tour with his E Street Band since the start of the year. Although he and his bandmates had been slated to perform at the Greensboro Coliseum on April 10, Springsteen announced Friday that he was canceling the show following North Carolina's passage of House Bill 2, or HB2, last month. 

Springsteen blasted the new legislation, which Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law March 23, in a lengthy statement on his official website April 8. 

"HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use," Springsteen wrote in the statement. "Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden."

Calling the law "an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress," he added, "Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them."

Canceling the concert, he said, is "the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards."

According to Springsteen's website, all tickets for the April 10 concert will be refunded at point of purchase. No word on whether or not he'll return to the Tar Heel state in the future. 

The legendary rocker is the latest to join a growing chorus of celebrities and public figures who've spoken out against HB2. On April 3, basketball legend Charles Barkley cited the law when he called for the NBA to relocate its 2017 All-Star Game, which is slated to take place in Charlotte, in an interview with CNN.  

Meanwhile, stage and screen composer Stephen Schwartz has said he'll deny the production rights to his Broadway musicals, including "Wicked," to all North Carolina-based theaters and performing arts groups until the law is repealed. 

Just further proof that they don't call Springsteen "The Boss" for nothing. 

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Vice Media, a company valued at $2.5 billion whose CEO once spent $300,000 on dinner, wants ViceVersa, an unsigned Los Angeles indie band whose members are struggling to pay rent, to change its name -- or else. 

In a cease-and-desist letter sent to the band, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, the media behemoth says the three-piece rock outfit's name and logo both sound and look too similar to Vice's own name and logo. 

The band, the letter argues, is "infringing on the exclusive rights held by Vice Media in the VICE® Mark" and is "likely to confuse consumers as to the source of services offered under [ViceVersa's] mark, and wrongly implies that Vice Media sponsors, endorses or is otherwise affiliated with [ViceVersa]." 

The December cease-and-desist came a month after the United States Patent and Trademark Office gave provisional approval to an application by Christopher Morales, the band's guitarist, to trademark "ViceVersa."

In the letter, Vice accuses Morales, who goes by the stage name Zeke Zeledon, of "unauthorized use of Vice Media’s intellectual property." Vice argues the band's trademark application is "clearly for Mr. Morales’ commercial profit and gain, to the great detriment of Vice Media." 

The letter goes on to make a series of demands: The band must immediately halt usage of the name “ViceVersa”; take down its website and social media pages; and stop the sale of band merchandise bearing the ViceVersa name. The letter also says the band must produce documentation of revenue earned since it formed in 2012. 

If those demands aren't met, the letter says, Morales could face "claims for injunctive relief and monetary damages." 

But Morales says it never occurred to him or his bandmates -- drummer Ariel Fredrickson and bassist Sarah Corza -- that they were infringing on Vice's trademarked name and logo. In a statement, ViceVersa said it "has never claimed to be affiliated or supported by Vice Media. A name change and complete brand makeover could potentially set the band back thousands of dollars and gravely harm their growing fan base and social media presence." 

The band also released a video in which they compare their logo to Vice's: 

Asked Friday if fans ever thought ViceVersa was affiliated with Vice Media, Morales replied, "Absolutely not!" 

Harry Finkel, ViceVersa's attorney, says these kind of cease-and-desist letters are common. "You have a big company that is overzealous in protecting its mark," he said. 

Finkel says he wrote a letter back to Vice offering to change some of the language in Morales' trademark application, so that it was clear that the band "would not be doing anything with TV shows or magazine publishing or publishing in general" that could be seen as encroaching on Vice's territory. He says he never heard back from the company. 

Instead, Vice in March filed a letter of opposition to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, asking that ViceVersa's trademark application be denied. 

Finkel said he thinks legal precedent will ultimately work in his client's favor. Companies, he said, "can't protect commonly used words or phrases like 'vice,' when used inside of another word or phrase that is unique." It's especially true in this case, he said, because the word "vice-versa" has "little to do with Vice itself."  

"There is clear legal precedent they're ignoring by moving ahead with the opposition," Finkel said. 

Reached for comment, A Vice spokesperson said that ViceVersa's trademark application "overlaps with the scope of our already existing federal trademark. This is a standard, cut-and-dry trademark matter and we are not involved in litigation with this band."

Vice's opposition to ViceVersa marks another instance in which Vice -- which started in the early '90s as a small punk zine -- has upset those in the indie rock community. 

Billboard magazine reported in 2014 that the media company, in the process of expanding its Brooklyn headquarters, was likely responsible for the shuttering of two beloved music venues : Glasslands and Death by Audio. 

Morales said Friday that his band, which can barely pay the rent as it is, has very recently started to gain some traction. Their recent release, Da EP Vol 2, was voted #1 EP for LA Record Magazine’s “Best of 2015 Reader & Contributor Poll.”

Having to change the band's name, he said, could mess everything up. 

"This is our life and dream," Morales said. "All we want to do is rock out." 

CLARIFICATION: This article has been edited to make clear that ViceVersa attorney Harry Finkel was referring to words like "vice," not "vice versa," when he said companies can't protect commonly used words or phrases "when used inside of another word or phrase that is unique."

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Robots have arrived. They're sorting your packages, deciding what you see on Facebook and might be coming for your job.  

But have you ever wondered where the word "robot" comes from? 

It traces its roots to the Czech word "robotnik, which means "slave," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. "Robotnik" comes from "rabota," the Old Church Slavonic word for servitude. 

In English, the word "robot" first appeared in a translation of Czech playwright Karel Capek's 1920 sci-fi drama "RUR," or "Rossum's Universal Robots." In his play, Capek describes a company that manufactures and sells workers that look and act like humans, but lack souls. 

"The Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul," says the play's human protagonist, Harry Domin. (His surname, it's worth noting, is also a Latin prefix meaning "master.").

In Capek's story, the intelligent servants rebel against their human masters. It's a tale that's been echoed again and again as artists and writers grapple with rapid technological change. Books and films like "Frankenstein," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," "i, Robot" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" all depict mechanical beings struggling to throw off the yoke of human mastery.

These books and films express the deep, nagging human fear that our uniqueness, and our dominance, will be threatened by our own creations. 

We fear, in other words, the battle cry of the robot Radius in Capek's play: "You will work! You will build for us! You will serve us!"

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When it comes to date nights, Bernie Sanders showed on Friday night that he's one helluva class act.

The Vermont senator and his wife, Jane, took a brief respite from his Democratic primary campaign to catch the critically acclaimed Broadway musical Hamilton in New York City.

Sanders seemed to really enjoy himself!

Though perhaps not as much as the other attendees who got to see both an amazing play and a presidential candidate. 

Hope you had a nice evening, lovebirds. 

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Earlier this week, dozens of boys in Thailand took part in Poy Sang Long, a traditional rite of passage for young Buddhists from the Shan ethnic group.

The annual ceremony, which normally spans three days, marks the initiation of boys, typically 7 to 14 years old, as novices in the Buddhist community. The boys' participation in this rite helps them and their families accumulate merit, which Buddhists believe moves them along the path to achieving enlightenment.

As part of Poy Sang Long, the boys have their faces decorated and dress up in lavish costumes -- a reference to Siddhartha Gautama, who was said to be a prince before embarking on the religious journey that led him to become a Buddha.

At the end of the three days, the novices remove their colorful costumes and begin their study of Buddhist doctrine.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Thailand-based photographer Taylor Weidman followed two youngsters, 10-year-old Han and 11-year-old Kemachart, as they prepared for their initiation. According to Getty Images, the boys are neighbors from Chiang Mai who traveled to Mae Sariang, a small town in northern Thailand near the Burmese border, for the ceremony.

Take a look at more of Weidman's photos of the runup to Poy Sang Long below:

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The next smokin' hot thing in wedding photography? Colorful smoke bombs.

With their pretty plumes in all colors of the rainbow, smoke bombs add a dreamlike quality to wedding portraits that sparklers just can't compete with. 

But don't be fooled by their billowing beauty; these smoke bombs can get quite hot, so be sure to give them time to cool down before properly disposing of them. And use common sense -- i.e. avoid dry fields, forests or any other area that could potentially catch fire. Head here for even more safety tips.

Below are 19 magical wedding pics that are quite literally "the bomb."

 H/T Elite Daily

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This person is in the art of healing. 

Auberon Wolf, a 29-year-old tattoo artist who identifies as genderqueer, has attracted media attention for their tattoos over scars of trauma survivors. The artist, who is a self-harm survivor, aims to help people turn a new leaf and reclaim their bodies. 

The 29-year-old, who works at Birthmark Tattoos in Vancouver, British Columbia, inks survivors of self-harm, domestic violence and attempted suicide, among other forms of trauma.

Wolf said that the healing work is inspired by their own experiences with self-injury. The artist told The Huffington Post that they'd self-harm on-and-off for years and tattooing over the scars turned out to be cathartic. 

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Have we run out of would-be satirists yet?

Venerable food writer Calvin Trillin, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, poses the question to us all once again, in the form of a humorous poem entitled "Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?"

If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.
Long ago, there was just Cantonese.
(Long ago, we were easy to please.)
But then food from Szechuan came our way,
Making Cantonese strictly passé.

The poem concludes with nostalgia for long-past days "When we never were faced with the threat / Of more provinces we hadn’t met." 

The oddly tone-deaf poem faced sharp backlash on Twitter, with many Asian writers voicing dismay with the doggerel verse's undertones of yellow panic and xenophobia. But of course, Trillin and various defenders made a common reply for those who run afoul of social justice activists these days: The poem was satire, and therefore the outrage was misdirected. As author Celeste Ng pointed out, the label of satire is all too often used as a retroactive excuse for simple bigotry.

A nasty outburst brushed under the rug (“he’s just a satirist, you know”) or a comedy piece with racist undertones recast in a more positive light (“it was meant to be satire”) fit this bill, and Trillin’s might. He clearly aimed for humorous poetry, not aggressive racism, but the satire bit ... eh, that’s unclear. But the satire excuse isn’t just problematic because it’s used to cover up for offensive, non-satirical garbage, but because it erases the responsibility to execute satire well. If something is intended as satire but poorly done, satire is no get-out-of-jail-free card, something many authors -- Michel Houellebecq and Jonathan Franzen, for example -- and their admirers don’t seem to grasp.

Like ironic racism, misguided satire is a favored pastime of the denizens of certain pockets of white male privilege. Also like ironic racism, bad satire often manifests as a pointless reenactment of hurtful stereotypes and tropes. “Look, here I am, saying horrifying things that are painful for the less powerful to hear, as people in positions of hegemonic privilege tend to do!” say these writers, chortling at their self-deprecation. Such satire doesn’t really achieve anything because it fails to puncture a widely accepted and yet problematic way of thinking; it’s performative both of one’s own enlightenment and, in a perverse way, the regressive thoughts lying underneath.

Perhaps Trillin really did want to make a point about moneyed white food critics, but it feels akin to taking a group of affluent students on a field trip to gaze upon the difficult living conditions of homeless people in their town. Those kids might learn a valuable lesson, but their education is being won at the expense of the dignity of those from whom they’re learning. Every marginalized group or person is not a potential tool in the enlightenment of a white man. (For what it’s worth, white men don’t even hold a monopoly on clumsy satire and ironic racism -- see Chelsea Handler’s "Uganda Be Kidding Me" and Chris Rock’s appalling Asian accountant gag at the Oscars.)

Well-off white dudes aren’t new to using minority cultures as props to playfully skewer their own highly entitled communities’ foibles -- in theory, it might be satire of the white community, but ultimately more insulting to, in this case, Chinese people, whose varied cultures and cuisines play no more than a bit role in this charming tale of American foodies who are just a bit too obsessed with keeping up with their fellow gourmands. Chinese cuisines merely make the grade as props in a discussion by and about white American restaurant culture, of which Trillin is very much a part.

As Jezebel editor Jia Tolentino put it in the comments section of the site’s truly brilliant takedown, A Sixth-Grader Writes a Book Report About the New Calvin Trillin Poem in The New Yorker, “the call is deeeeeeply coming from inside the house in a way that makes me stop and say ... why.” 

Another commenter responded, calling it “Columbusing Columbusing” -- basically, acting like he’d discovered how white people act like they’ve discovered things that were actually invented by people of color. (Hint: Asian activists and writers have been talking about the problematic way white people talk about and appropriate Asian cuisines for a long time.) Worse, he was doing it in a way that clumsily missed that target and seemed to mock white food enthusiasts merely for chasing trends rather than for insensitivity toward Chinese cultures -- while making a bit too much comical hay from the “too many to name” provinces from Szechuan to Shaanxi.

This poem, at best, achieves painfully muddled messaging. “Have they run out of provinces yet?” the poem repeatedly asks, not specifying who “they” might be, but in context, implying a vague Asiatic other of threateningly indeterminate hugeness. “They,” the entity throwing out province after province of Chinese cuisine, juxtaposes with “we,” the gormless Western foodies slurping up each dish in turn. It is, quite literally, us vs. them.

Trillin defended himself to The Guardian's Julia Carrie Wong, saying that he’d previously written a similar poem about French food published in The New Yorker. “It was not a put-down of the French,” he said. The poem, “What Happened to Brie and Chablis,” however, doesn’t at any point seem to take aim at a proliferation of French cuisines, or seem overwhelmed at the innumerable French regions, instead more directly tweaking foodie culture for chasing trends and abandoning long-established classic dishes like coq-au-vin:

You miss, let’s say, trout amandine?
Take hope from some menus I’ve seen.
Fondue has been spotted of late
And -- yes, to my near disbelief --
Tartare not from tuna but beef.
They all may return. Just you wait.

The notable difference -- it’s clearly a lamentation about beloved foods going out of style, not about a more diverse array of regional cuisines being brought to the marketplace. Besides, as author Matthew Salesses pointed out:

Others pointed out that he loves Chinese food and would never intentionally write such a poem with any intention but to mock white foodies. On The Stranger, Rich Smith quoted English professor Samuel Cohen: “He's been a food writer and poet of doggerel verse for a million years and I've seen him riding his bike around Chinatown, where he loves to eat. He is not actually complaining about the variety of regional Chinese cuisines and he is not actually nostalgic for the days of chow mein.“ Fair enough. As Smith added, “I think that's a bold bit of irony! ... It rests on Trillin's reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of.” 

Guess what: Good satire shouldn’t rest on the author’s reputation. It’s not in the intent, or the reputation -- it’s in the execution. Cohen, and Trillin, are old enough, and well-educated enough, to know this. As a mere high schooler completing an assignment to write a 500-word satirical essay in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, I turned in an over-the-top piece making an argument I personally found absurd, and was surprised to receive it back with the comment that it wasn’t really satire. “There are people who would write this without any satirical intent,” my teacher told me. “But ... you know I don’t think this!” I said. “You can’t assume that your audience already knows what you think,” he explained.

If the success of a satirical piece depends on your audience already knowing what you think, that piece is in trouble -- even if you’re Calvin Trillin. If you find out that everyone is reading it dramatically differently from how you intended it, that's an opportunity for reflection on your subconscious biases, and your writing skills. Unfortunately, stomping your feet and saying "it's satire" doesn't make it so.

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LONDON (Reuters) - Usually concerned with top secret matters affecting national security, Britain's eavesdropping spy agency GCHQ was also on the lookout for leaks of a yet-to-be-published Harry Potter book, its publisher has revealed.

Shortly before the publication of one of the volumes in J.K. Rowling's seven-part wizarding saga, with millions of fans worldwide at a fever pitch of anticipation, publisher Nigel Newton received an unexpected phone call.

"I remember the British spy eavesdropping station GCHQ rang me up and said 'we've detected an early copy of this book on the Internet'," Newton told Australia's ABC Radio in an interview last week that gained attention in Britain on Sunday.

"I got him to read a page to our editor and she said 'no, that's a fake'," said Newton, founder and chief executive of Potter publishing house Bloomsbury, describing the spies as "good guys".

A spokesman for GCHQ said: "We do not comment on our defense against the dark arts."

As any Potter reader will know, Defense Against the Dark Arts is a subject taught at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in which pupils learn how to defend themselves and fight back against the evil deeds of Dark Wizards.

(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; Editing Ros Russell)

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A young man stands in the dark, waiting to take his shot. It is May 5, 2009, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is listening at the back of the East Room for his cue. 

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When Kanye West released his sixth solo album, titled "Yeezus," in 2013, he --with a single turn of phrase -- fused his identity with that of the central figure of Christianity. The connection between Ye and JC was more than just an egotistical outburst from a narcissistic rock star, but a message about power, sacrifice, influence and vision, albeit a bombastic one.

Now, three years later, Ye has received another rather complimentary comparison. On April 16, at the Artani Theater in Los Angeles, the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra will perform "The Great Music Series: Yeethoven," comparing Mr. West to Ludwig van Beethoven, and thus exploring the overlap between classical and hip-hop, 18th-century poofy collared shirts and 2013-era leather pants. 

Yuga Cohler is directing the performance, along with project co-creator and composer Stephen Feigenbaum. The two, natives to the classical music world and longtime fans of Kanye's work, have played music together since high school.

The Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra is made up of 70 Los Angeles-based musicians between 15 and 25 years old. Cohler was appointed director last year. "I knew one of the things I wanted to do was make classical music engage with music of today, music that is very widely heard and massively popular," Cohler explained to The Huffington Post. 

From the beginning, Cohler and Feigenbaum were interested in "Yeezus," the dark, grating, vinegary album that at once feels like a protest, a divine revelation, a nightmare and an industrial rave. "There are a lot of things in the album more reminiscent of classical than pop or hip-hop," Feigenbaum said. "We tried to examine that and make that case that the commonalities across genres are more interesting than genre barriers."

With "Yeezus" as a starting point, Cohler and Feigenbaum set out to find an unlikely musician whose sound reverberated with Ye's. And if said musician happened to have an extremely punnable name, so be it. "We quickly came to Beethoven as someone similarly controversial in his time, someone brash and aggressive," Cohler said. "Beethoven was rough around the edges. He's one of the earliest examples of modernity, and often the audience really didn’t like it."

They then began matching up Yeezus songs with analogous pieces from Beethoven's oeuvre. For example, Kanye's "New Slaves," an epic harangue encompassing everything from systemic racism to fashion addiction, showed similarities to "Egmont Overture" in its dark, tumultuous energy. "In both songs, the endings are bizarrely uplifting, it almost feels bitter," Cohler explained. 

At first, the concert will juxtapose songs by Kanye and Beethoven to illuminate the comparisons aligning them. As the concert continues, the artists' work will become ever more integrated, until the line between them becomes jagged and molten. "I think the boundaries we set up [in music] are necessarily artificial and don’t need to be adhered to," Cohler said. Feigenbaum added: "We're interested in getting out of the box that classical music puts us in."

Although Cohler and Feigenbaum stress that their project is less concerned with the personas of the artists at play, and more concerned with their work, it's hard to ignore the fact that, like Kanye, Beethoven was also something of an egoist. When a review of his "String Quartet No. 13" declared the work "incomprehensible, like Chinese," he responded indignantly and without a hint of self-doubt, calling his audience "Cattle! Asses!" One of his most iconic quotes, "There are many princes and there will continue to be thousands more, but there is only one Beethoven," sounds similarly familiar. 

The show concludes with a comparison of the last movement of Beethoven's "String Quartet No. 14" and Kanye's "On Sight," which opens his album. "If you don’t know the pieces you would have no idea where one piece starts and the other ends," Cohler described. "It's so emblematic of the artistic embryo that characterizes both Beethoven and Kanye -- that propulsion, impulse and drive." 

Not everyone is psyched about the performance. Pitchfork Senior Editor Jayson Greene called the project "spectacularly ill-conceived." Greene, who writes about both classical and hip-hop music, sees little connection between the two artists beyond a catchy conjoined nickname, and described the effort as a lazy attempt to bridge high and low culture that underestimates both artists and their audience.

"Lumping things on two sides of a room and drawing a line is less difficult than figuring out where each individual element belongs in a space," Greene wrote. "And if you are going to start mixing and matching -- say, by establishing a parallel between a rapper and a composer that leaps over genre boundaries, countries, and hundreds of years -- for god’s sake, think hard about what you're doing."

Whether or not you like the resulting Yeethoven mashup, after speaking with briefly with both Cohler and Feigenbaum, it's difficult to deny that they've put quite a lot thought into the pairing. This concert has been in preparation for about a year. And while Greene posits Igor Stravinsky as a stronger parallel to West, his argument is based as much upon the artists' characters and visions as the actual content, which Cohler and Feigenbaum privilege. 

As someone who knows far less about classical music, I cannot confidently comment on the solidity of the parallel between Ye and Be, at least not until the show takes place on April 16. However, I fully support the mission of a free, instructive concert performed by an orchestra of young people, illuminating bridges between unlikely artists that can be embraced or rejected by the audience as they see fit. 

Rather than insulting their audience, Cohler and Feigenbaum invite people to participate in an imperfect experiment, one that can illuminate the tenuous nature of boundaries and categories confining all art forms. "The more young musicians that realize they can learn Bach and also improvise and play in a band and [learn that] those don’t have to be totally separate," well, these are all good things, right?

Besides, the potential for "Yeethoven" to result in outrage, disagreement, slippage, disharmony and even misguided overconfidence sans apologies seems quite appropriate for the subject matter, no? 

"The Great Music Series: Yeethoven" takes place Saturday, April 16, at 7:30 p.m. The event is free, but tickets are required, available first-come first-serve starting at 6:00 p.m.

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The ideal emotional state for reading Melissa Broder's essay collection So Sad Today is right there on the cover.

As someone who likes books and writing about them, I looked forward to this one's release. I knew Broder was the brilliant mind behind @sosadtoday, a Twitter account that's captured daily angst in the age of short attention spans since 2012.

Broder, who tweeted anonymously from the account for some time, struck a chord with her "comically depressing" sentiments. The account has over 300,000 followers and countless retweets and faves beyond that, a chain reaction of dysthymic Internet users who see themselves in her sparsely punctuated statements.

The publication date came and went. Well-thought-out reviews and responses entered the world; the relevancy train rolling up to the station, its doors ready to close, and still. It wasn't until an evening came when I was anxious about my plans, canceled all my plans, and felt more anxious about canceling the plans, ultimately desiring nothing more than to stay in on a beautiful spring day. I curled under my covers with the sun still up, one hand in a bag of veggie chips, the other propping open Broder's paperback. 

Depression is a funny thing when you gain enough distance from it, however temporary, to see its contradictions: I want everyone to know I'm sad; I want no one to know. It's not a big deal; it is a big deal. I'll try to make you understand; you could never understand. In my low state, I sought out a voice that wouldn't cheerily try to commiserate and blame the weather or a bad commute.

The opening essay in So Sad Today describes the injustice of being born. No one can consent to their existence, so no wonder we're all messed up. According to Broder's mother, the doctor who delivered her those years ago said she was a pretty baby. "I wanted to believe him, because I love validation. Validation is my main bitch," she wrote, her prose fitting in the same funny-sad Venn diagram overlap as her Twitter presence. And she's nothing if not self-aware of how her own destructive thoughts work:

An external attribution exists to make you feel shitty. It's a handy tool, wherein you perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they're always your own fault. 

"The doctor's perspective was only an error of opinion," she concludes. "He obviously had shitty taste in babies." Take the feeling outside of infancy and I assume a not insignificant portion of the population has felt this way once or twice: that happiness was mere luck, a tense waiting of the other shoe to drop, and its opposite was a direct result of whatever poor choices were made.

Throughout the collection, Broder handily articulates the difficult-to-pin-down, nagging feelings of dread and self-flagellation. She ruminates on food and body image, the simultaneously repellent and addictive nature of the Internet, how easily it is to feel shitty and then boosted up once more in a few open browser tabs. 

In an essay on the benefits of meditation, Broder manages to explain how essential it is to experience just a few moments of quiet in her mind without coming off as holier-than-thou. This feat is helped by her thoughts on the "committee in my head," a chorus of "cosmic judge" voices that ensure everything is filtered through a negative lens. "If I get really still and quiet, sometimes the committee will talk and talk until it has nothing left to say and then it finally shuts the fuck up."

This unapologetic language might rub against some readers, but what makes Broder's voice so refreshing is her admission that she has no solutions for the problems she presents. When you're in the muck, sometimes the most helpful thing is a sign from another human who will readily admit this existence thing is hard without spouting platitudes or step-by-step plans to work away the sadness. She tells a love story and concludes, "for a few moments, I was not sad," with the implicit acknowledgement that sometimes, that's all you can ask for. 

Reading So Sad Today won't quick-fix your depression or help you lose 10 pounds in a week, of course. When I put the book down -- after an interlude of pasta-making, where I rested the paperback splayed open on the kitchen counter and brought it back up with its corner wrinkled and wet, my own internal committee chiming in to remind me of the futility of pretending to be an adult who can properly care for her possessions -- I was the same anxious writer. Now, though, I'd had a few hours from the anxious buzz of the Internet and a short reprieve from my own worry.

After reflecting on Broder's book and Twitter name, I realize the specificity in it: she's so sad today. It's a small detail that, to me, reads as both understanding and hopeful in its immediacy. On one hand, you might be so sad today, and the next day and the one after that. On the other, you might be sad today but feel differently in the morning. Both are normal, both are OK. Broder's essay collection disproves the notion that either feeling has to be experienced in solitude.

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Ukrainian artist Snezhana Soosh believes father-daughter relationships can be truly magical. That's the inspiration behind her series of illustrations that depict the bond between a dad and his little girl. 

From playing board games and puppet theater to chasing the monsters away at bedtime, each illustrated scene is incredibly sweet.

"I always wanted to have a tender and loving relationship with my own father, but he didn't know how to show his love so most of the time was distant and cold," Soosh told The Huffington Post. "I was observing other fathers with their daughters and so loved each tender moment they had together. I think I drew what I lacked and very much wanted -- to feel loved and protected by my big papa."

The artist applied the image of the father to her real relationship with her 9-year-old son Frol, whom she homeschools. Thus, they spend a lot of time together doing many of the activities depicted in the father-daughter series.

"Frol is the world to me," the mom said, adding, "He is the first one to see my illustrations and give his opinion on them." She also noted that she wants the images to help her son "grow to be a good man" and "understand what it's like to be one."

Soosh also hopes her images reach other parents, particularly dads. "I hope fathers will see how important they are in their kids' lives and feel appreciated and inspired to show their love and affection," she told HuffPost. "I also want to say that real strength shows itself through love and tenderness."

Keep scrolling and visit the artist's Instagram to see her beautiful father-daughter illustrations.

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You can’t keep Chita Rivera down for long.

The singer-actress had originally been slated to debut her new cabaret show, “An Evening of My Favorite Songs,” at New York’s Café Carlyle in January, but a pelvic stress fracture required her to postpone her performances until April.

Of course, Rivera, 83, isn’t one of Broadway’s most venerable icons for nothing. If her dazzling performance at “Broadway Backwards” on March 21 is any indication, the two-time Tony Award winner will be back with the same vigor and vim that’s made her a star for over 60 years when she takes the Carlyle stage April 19. 

“An Evening of My Favorite Songs,” she said, is very much a “trip down memory lane” through her beloved turns in the original casts of “West Side Story,” “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Chicago” and, most recently, “The Visit.” With such a wealth of material to draw from, Rivera hopes the intimate space will cast many of the best-known songs from those musicals in a new and thrilling light.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some of the greatest in the business. It’s wonderful to go back and revisit these pieces, and hopefully we’ll bring some nice memories back to the audience,” she told The Huffington Post.

It’s been almost a year since Rivera was last seen on Broadway in “The Visit,” John Kander and Fred Ebb's dark, challenging musical that faced its share of struggles during its 15-year journey to the Great White Way. Rivera’s co-star, Roger Rees, withdrew from the production because of an illness just weeks before it closed in June 2015; he died July 10.

Still, most reviews of “The Visit” offered praise for Rivera, who starred as a wealthy widower seeking deadly revenge on a former lover who betrayed her. She remains hopeful that she’ll be a part of a future incarnation of the musical, possibly in Europe.

“It’s had its hard time, but what director John Doyle and the cast did with that show was just so wonderful. It’s an amazing story and, very much, the subject of today,” she said. “It’s very European. They don’t put dimples in cheeks and chins; they just tell it like it is. I like stirring up people’s feelings like that.”

As she looks to the future, Rivera said she only hopes to “pick my feet up, put them down, and wake up every morning breathing and laughing.” She’d also love to work with “Hamilton” creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, who she called “a great theater person and a very bright man.”

There are, of course, other things on her mind, too. Pointing to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, she said, “I would like very much for this world to attempt to straighten itself out a little bit. There are many more important things to think about than my career at this point. There are too many things to pray for, and that’s a big one.”

As to what keeps her motivated after 60 years in show business, Rivera said, “Everything – absolutely everything. Every day is a new day – it’s the honest-to-God truth. Every audience is a different audience. It’s a tremendous responsibility, and an honor, to tell your stories.”

Chita Rivera will perform "An Evening of My Favorite Songs" from April 19 through April 30 at New York’s Café Carlyle. Head here for more information. 

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