Complexity, interiority, subjectivity: these are qualities that every human being possesses by virtue of living in a tumultuous world full of obstacles and contradictions that keep its inhabitants constantly evolving just to stay afloat.

Dignity, power, respect: these are virtues we bestow upon our fellow citizens, recognizing the intricacy and distinction of their being. It's easy to feel degrees of compassion for those in our immediate circles. We observe our family, friends and colleagues' struggles and triumphs firsthand.

For centuries, though, art and literature and film have allowed us to see and begin to understand people outside of these circles. Through this secondhand contact, we empathize with people from times, places and circumstances worlds apart from our own. 

For centuries, however, people of color were not visualized with veracity and careful attention in photographs or books or movies, but reduced to one-dimensional black bodies. Their images existed only as objectified stereotypes that failed to accurately represent the realities of black lives, rendering them virtually invisible. 

That time, thankfully, is no longer. Contemporary photographers and filmmakers are capturing the black experience in its full nuance and complexity, and the world is watching. Aperture magazine's most recent 152-page edition, titled "Vision & Justice," celebrates the artists responsible for this current cultural moment, in which black lives are immortalized through images that contain multitudes -- just like their subjects. 

"The endeavor to affirm the dignity of human life cannot be waged without pictures, without representational justice," Sarah Lewis, assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at Harvard University, as well as Aperture's guest editor, writes in an introduction to the magazine's new edition. "American citizenship has long been a project of vision and justice ... The centuries-long effort to craft an image to pay honor to the full complexity of black life is a corrective ask for which photography and cinema have been central, even indispensable."

Lewis describes the influence of abolitionist Frederick Douglass on the magazine. Douglass, the most photographed man of the 19th century, knew that pictures, not just logical arguments, alter perceptions. Photographs spark images in the imagination that otherwise would not exist, images that change minds and hearts. For Douglass, the fight for civil rights didn't end with abolition. He wanted to disassemble and rebuild the symbolic image of blackness, endowing it with the dignity black lives had so long been denied.

Today, images of black stories, both extraordinary and harrowing, are all around us. An image of Barack Obama hugging Michelle after being reelected as president of the United States soon racked up millions of likes on Facebook, becoming the social media site's most liked photo of all time.

The devastating image of high-school senior Michael Brown in his cap and gown circulated the web after the unarmed teenage boy was shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson in 2014. Social media movements including Black Lives Matter and Black Girl Magic spread like wildfire across the internet and communities such as Black Twitter, giving voices to those who had once been voiceless and faces to those who had once been invisible.

The stunning Aperture magazine edition celebrates a variety of current photographers who are reframing blackness and radically restructuring the contemporary perception of it. Khalil Gibran Muhammad reflects on the work of street photographer Jamel Shabazz, whose theatrical images depict black citizens adorned in various forms of contemporary regalia: a Freemason grand master in a top hat and tuxedo, a single line of soldiers in blue suits and white gloves, a group of young women in matching white hijabs.

Many of Shabazz's subjects are caught in the midst of economic depression, having inherited a history of systemic oppression. And yet, as Muhammad writes, "Their proud belonging to each other -- communal, disciplined, active -- depicts a people refusing to be defined by deprivation or deficit."

Photographer and historian Deborah Willis grew up around beauty parlors; her mother worked in one. So it's no surprise that Willis' photographs often revolve around the idea of black beauty, fractured and layered like the overlapping mirrors and echoing chatter in a busy salon.

Her "Framing Beauty" series explores beauty in relation to history, memory and power, simultaneously exposing the infinite, delicate strata that make up every image and truth we encounter. As Cheryl Finley notes in Aperture, "Willis' images remind us of the spectral quality of beauty and its multiple frames of reference."

When the city of Baltimore, Maryland, joined in peaceful protest after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in April 2015, Devin Allen brought his camera. The 26-year-old self-taught photographer only had two years of experience when he posted his black-and-white photos on Instagram, and yet before long his image of a man running from an army of policemen in riot gear was on the cover of Time. 

Allen has since continued to capture what curator Aaron Bryant calls "the zeitgeist of a social movement," representing Black Lives Matter in all its cohesion and exasperation. "Allen's visual documentation," Bryan writes, "demonstrates how protests that may operate below the surface, or above the surface at flashpoint moments such as Freddie Gray's death, form communities of engagement, solidarity, and revolution."

Lyle Ashton Harris, on the other hand, takes portraits -- close-up portraits of faces and the backs of heads, which strangely are just as evocative as the front. Using a large format, 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera, Harris snaps confrontational portraits of individuals from Al Sharpton to Yoko Ono, with the camera rigged to take only brown-toned images.

Too often the phrase "color blind" is used in an attempt to look beyond race, while denying the weight and residue of black history and erasing the wounds of racism. In "The Chocolate Portraits," Harris doesn't erase race, in fact, quite the opposite. All of his subjects don a chocolate-colored skin tone, illuminating the fallacy of whiteness, revealing that all skin is, really, a shade of brown. The images toy with racial differences without confirming the status quo or effacing it completely.

Also featured is Jamaica-born, New-York-based street photographer Radcliffe "Ruddy" Roye, who prefers to travel for work by foot. As Darnette Cadogan writes in his Aperture description: "He roams around tirelessly, alert to the ways in which people move past each other. Whom they ignore, what they admire, how they interact: These are abiding concerns."

Walking voraciously through the city streets, Roye photographs humans so close up it's nearly impossible to look away; it feels as inhumane as ignoring someone you encounter on the street. The charged connection between subject and viewer puts the spectator in close proximity to the disenfranchised and dispossessed, able to witness contradictory states of rage and pride, sorrow and dignity. 

These are a small fraction of the photographers chronicled on Aperture's pages. From Awol Erizku's stylish remixes of classical paintings to Lorna Simpson's delicate paper collages cut from old issues of Jet and Ebony, each series communicates a different picture of blackness, simultaneously personal and universal in the way true stories often are.

The photographs, immensely valuable in their own right, also serve as flares in a larger cultural consciousness, images that turn witnesses into activists. "How many movements began when an aesthetic encounter indelibly changed our past perceptions of the world?" Lewis asks in her introduction. "The imagination inspired by aesthetic encounters can get us to the point of benevolent surrender, making way for a new version of our collective selves." 

Purchase a copy of Aperture magazine #223 Vision & Justice here.

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Attaining that sense of effortless cool is an art that takes years to perfect. But 2-year-old Kayli has clearly mastered it at a young age.

In this viral video, the toddler shows off some serious moves and attitude as she dances alongside her mom and big sister.

The Instagram video has reached over 121,000 views and converted some new Kayli fans. As one commenter wrote, "why does this baby dance better than me?"

That smirk, those moves -- it's all too much to handle!

H/T Jezebel

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A scene: You’ve just read (and re-read) the final paragraph of a novel you’ve been savoring, and you’re almost mad at the author for wrapping the story up so neatly, so poetically. How dare she refuse to imply the possibility of a sequel? What are you supposed to read now?

It’s tempting to peruse Amazon, your cursor hovering over what Customers Also Bought. You find a big, 800-page tome -- a Pulitzer winner that should hold you over for a while -- but wait, what’s this? A 3.5-star rating? You don’t want to be dissuaded -- the book sounds smart, fast-paced and full of heart! But, alas, you decide look elsewhere, hoping for something in the four-to-five-star range.

It’s something so many of us readers are guilty of: allowing aggregated user reviews to influence which books we pick up. But while these star systems featured on Amazon and Goodreads serve a purpose, they loom too largely over reader activity. Which makes sense; they’re the only quantitative assessments we have of books' worth.

That's why Literary Hub, a site dedicated to book news, essays and excerpts, has launched Book Marks, which they call a "Rotten Tomatoes for books," aggregating professional critics’ takes on new literary novels and assigning them a letter grade.

Andy Hunter, publisher of Lit Hub, told HuffPost how the endeavor will work. The site currently has a stable of 70 outlets with professional book reviews, ranging from The New York Times to blogs like The Millions and including HuffPost’s weekly book review, The Bottom Line. Once three of the 70 have covered a title, it gets added to Book Marks.

Because book reviewers aren’t prone to slapping a rating on their takes, Lit Hub editors -- many of whom have worked as professional critics themselves -- assign the reviews letter grades. But, Hunter notes, the site welcomes reviewers to submit letter grades of their own, to avoid any miscommunication. “We want this to be an open, collaborative thing that book reviewers are happy about,” he said.

“I think books are an extremely important part of our culture, and I think professional critics are people who devote their lives to engaging with books in a substantive way,” Hunter said, explaining why Lit Hub embarked on the project. “A book reviewer has a responsibility to talk about a book’s worth within the context of its peers and the history of its genre and the works of other authors that are tackling similar subjects.”

Hunter’s neat summation of the value of literary criticism makes sense; professional reviewers are tasked with understanding which works might’ve inspired a book, how a book compares with an author’s larger body of work, and how a book fits into a broader cultural context. Reviews, then, aim to be more than glib appraisals -- they’re meant to be thorough, thoughtful assessments.

But reviews aren’t embraced by everyone in the book world. Many sites -- including BuzzFeed Books and the popular blog Book Riot -- have explicitly stated missions that exclude reviewing books, in order to avoid the flak that comes with a negative critique. “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” BuzzFeed Books Editor Isaac Fitzgerald said shortly after he was hired.

The climate of positivity that these approaches have created has been, in many ways, well, positive. Women and writers of color have been empowered to discuss their own literary preferences, rather than feeling invalidated by the old guard, which, as the equity-focused nonprofit VIDA points out each year, is still run by white dudes. But a more favorable long-term solution, it would seem, would be for outlets to employ women reviewers and reviewers of color, rather than eschewing professional book reviewing altogether.

Further complaints, most recently slung by Bookslut founder Jessa Crisipin, center on the perceived nepotism of book reviewing. Reviewers, she purports, are influenced too heavily by publishers, contributing to an insular community that doesn’t allow room for subversive takes. It is perhaps due to these criticisms of criticism that Hunter noticed “so much change in terms of the media [...] newspapers moving to websites and cutting down book review sections or hiding them on sub-menus.”

It’s an altruistic move on Lit Hub’s part to offer a solution to the multifaceted, hotly debated problem of professional book reviewing. Critiquing may have its critics, but it still serves a function that's practical for readers, and, often, supportive of writers. 

“We felt that we could do something positive in terms of bringing these reviews to the fore,” Hunter said. “Putting them in front of people, where they could be useful.”

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Being different is a gift that more of us should open our eyes to.

Cara Reedy, a woman who lives with achondroplastic dwarfism, perfectly explains why in the video above posted by Digg on Monday.

The comedian, actor and writer talks about why living with her condition -- which can "happen to anyone," she says -- doesn't prevent her from living a normal life contrary to popular belief.

"Growing up is hard anyway and you add something like this it's even harder," Reedy says. She opens up about being adamant to go certain places out of fear of hearing negative comments. Reedy says with the help of her mom, she was able to overcome that fear and "show up" again and again.

"I have to do everything better because everyone already believes I can't do it," she says. "I'm a female, black little person. It's a lot because you kinda have no where to turn."

I'm a female, black little person. It's a lot because you kinda have no where to turn.
Cara Reedy

Reedy says the comedic world can be cruel since many acts make jokes about little people, often referring to them as "midgets."

"'Midget' is the 'n-word' for little people," she says. "There's a bug called the midge and that's where it comes from. So basically, you're calling a human a bug."

Despite it sometimes being hard for her to look past the frequent objectification by other people, Reedy says she's worked hard to never let society's view of her keep her down.

"When you're thrown things and barriers are put up, you have two options. You can turn around and walk away from it or you can push or climb over it. That is the gift of being different. You end up with this strength."

Let Reedy's word serve as a reminder that different is beautiful.

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Ever wonder what would happen if the gang on "90210" raged out on steroids?

"The Place We Live," the new web series from UCB's Betsy Kenney and Dara Katz, takes the "Melrose Place"/"Beverly Hills 90210" keys to success (attractive people hooking up + drama) and brilliantly takes them down a turn for the worst.

Candice, Robin, Lee, Corey and Autumn's otherwise sexy-chill lifestyle is disrupted when they're forced to help each other through extremely dark situations like talking Robin out of joining a cult, escaping the country after a hit and run, and having to move back in with your lame parents, who live in their car.

"TPWL" also harkens back to the days of "The Bu," Lonely Island's OC parody made before the group become kings of the world. However, "TPWL" might have the edge due to it's higher production value and original instincts, which cater to the Adult Swim crowd. I could definitely see "TPWL" playing at midnight between episodes of "Tim and Eric" and "Check It Out!"

You can find out more about the show at theplacewelive.us. Or check out the series below.

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When choosing paint colors for your home, you'll encounter a whole bunch of earthy tones that warm up a room and create a sense of drama. 

But opaque couché -- also known by its technical name, Pantone 448 C -- is too much drama for its own good. 

A team of Australian researchers named Pantone 448 C the ugliest color in the world after surveying some 1,000 people over seven separate studies in 2012. Respondents described the "sewage-tinted" color as "tar," "dirty" and "death," according to Brisbane Times. We can't help but agree.

WARNING: The color pictured below may cause serious nausea, panic or instinctive recoil. View at your own risk.

Now before we totally write it off, let us consider the redeeming qualities of Pantone 448 C. We imagine it's what you'd get if you combined all the top paint colors for 2016, for whatever that's worth. And earth tones are hot for home exteriors, and Pantone 448 C is pretty darn earthen.

What's more, the color is SO ugly that some countries have started putting it on cigarette boxes to dissuade potential smokers from buying a dangerous product. Hooray for Pantone 448 C, making a public impact! 

But at the end of the day, nobody should paint their home this color, because everyone will hate it. It's research-backed science! For some sizzling alternatives, check out our latest coverage of paint colors. 

Happy painting!

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A photography exhibit, on view at El Tejar del Mellizo community center in Seville, Spain, presents photographs of the descendants -- the living remains — of those who lost their lives during the Spanish Civil War. 

Organized by the Our Memory association, "DNA of Memory -- Graves from the Franco Regime" features photographs by more than 30 Spanish artists. The images, on view until June 11, capture descendants carrying photographs of relatives killed at the beginning of the Civil War.

Many of the victims, killed by fascist forces, are currently buried in mass graves --  there are approximately 2,300 of these across the country. Amnesty International has reported that only Cambodia has more mass graves than Spain. Up to 200,000 people were killed in Spain’s three-year Civil War (1936-1939), which pitted Nazi-backed Fascists against Communist-backed Republicans.

Victims and their relatives have not yet seen justice. In a report titled “Time passes: impunity remains,” Amnesty International states that “Spain is not investigating the crimes committed during the Civil War and under Franco, thereby failing to comply with its international obligations.”

Instead, this exhibition affords the living relatives an opportunity to revisit the memory of the victims of the crimes committed during Spain's Civil War. See some of the heart-wrenching images on view below. 

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Dan Bannino’s models are beautiful, fussy, and they definitely eat like birds.

His photo series, “Chic Chicks,” depicts Paduan chickens — a breed of chicken native to Padova, Italy — in a glitzy light not normally bestowed on farm animals.

But that’s exactly the point, the Italian photographer says.

Bannino says he started the project to portray "these beautiful chickens like glamorous models of high-fashion magazines."

“The reason why I wanted to use this particular style, was due [to] my urge to underline the fact that some of us don't even know how beautiful a 'common' chicken is," he told The Huffington Post in an email. "In modern society, food is highly industrialised and often comes to our tables in a completely different shape from its original form.”

His subjects are all chickens belonging to breeder Andrea Pozzato in Padua. Working with the “surprisingly patient and collaborative” birds, he said, reinforced his strong belief in respecting other living things.

“Every time that I'm lucky enough to work with animals and closely with nature, I realise how important it is to make this word a better place by paying attention to our behaviours, so fundamental to the environment and its inhabitants,” he said. “Not to spoil and respect the wonderful things that mother nature give us every day, that's my main focus.”

See more of Dan Bannino's work here, and the entire "Chic Chicks" series below.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes had a feeling back in 1999 that Hillary Clinton would become much more than a first lady.

On Wednesday, the morning after Clinton made history by becoming the first woman to clinch a major party's presidential nomination, Telnaes tweeted a cartoon she'd first published in The Washington Post 17 years ago.

The illustration depicts two men in an office looking up at a large portrait of a glamorous Hillary Clinton, who in the 1999 cartoon looks eerily like the Hillary Clinton of 2016, blonde bob and all.

"Sir, I think I figured out what the Clinton legacy is," one man says to the other, hinting that President Bill Clinton's political career would be followed by his wife carving out a space of her own. (The non-speaking man is probably meant to be Bill Clinton himself -- he's got the shock of grey hair, the ruddy nose and the pronounced chin usually associated with the former president in caricatures.)

“It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one. Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone,” Clinton said in a victory speech at Brooklyn's Navy Yard on Tuesday evening. “If we stand together, we will rise together, because we are stronger together."

The Associated Press declared Clinton the presumptive nominee on Monday, a claim that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), her rival for the Democratic nomination, denounced as premature. Clinton's primary victories in California, New Jersey and New Mexico on Tuesday, however, were widely seen as the final word in the Democratic race, despite Sanders' pledge to carry on his campaign.

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A Polynesian crew navigated their wooden voyaging canoe some 23,000 miles to lower Manhattan using only the stars this week, as part of their goal to make the world better.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society has spent the past 13 months sailing the Hokulea canoe from Hawaii to ports around the globe to inspire people to take care of "island Earth" and demonstrate how the seas connect us all.  

They've already met with several prominent global leaders and on Wednesday, master navigator Nainoa Thompson will present their message to a World Oceans Day event for the United Nations in New York City.  

The crew has used the same navigation methods as their ancestors did centuries ago to reach lower Manhattan on Sunday, where Native American tribes and New York officials were there greet them -- along with thousands of other people, The Associated Press reports.

The Hokulea has traveled across five oceans, stopping at 55 ports in 12 countries so far, according to the AP. Along the way, the crew has met with Desmond Tutu in South Africa, explored the Great Barrier Reef and had Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, sign a pledge to be a better environmental steward in Samoa.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society estimates the crew has reached more than 47,000 people around the world via the Hokulea, connecting communities across the South Pacific all the way to the Atlantic.

The crew will continue to sail up the New England Coast after the address. They will embark on the last leg of their journey through Panama, the Galapagos Islands and, eventually, back to the Hawaiian islands during the summer of 2017.

And if photos of their journey thus far are any indication, the Hokulea's Mālama Honua voyage is one of the most beautiful odysseys of our time.

Below, see what life at sea is like for these ocean navigators.

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Even if your required reading days are long over -- a sprawling period of book reports and forced enthusiasm for anachronistic classics condensed into a glinting blip in your memory -- there’s something about summertime that recalls freedom.

You can wear shorts! You can sit outside with few repercussions! Perhaps most importantly, you can read whatever the heck you want! There is no need to hide an anticipated comic issue inside your work of Important Realism. Tou can savor it in broad daylight.

To celebrate these solstice-brought freedoms, we’ve wrangled up a few wild new books, books that are unlikely to be assigned on a high school syllabus, but are whip-smart and wonderfully weird.

Enjoy. Or don’t! The choice is yours.

The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder

It’s a cliché that bears deeper exploration: Men, socialized as they are to be tough, have a hard time connecting with their friends on an emotional level. Unless, of course, there’s an activity involved; a spectacle to be commented on quantitatively, if haughtily. That’s where football comes in. Bachelder’s novel doesn’t dismiss the stereotype, but embraces the heart of it -- that the poetic eccentricities of football can unify a group of otherwise dissimilar friends.

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel

Fern and Edgar lead an airy dream life, summering on East Coast beaches and raising their three children, including their plucky daughter Cricket. The couple met in high school and hasn’t wanted for much since. They’ve been comfortable living off Fern’s inheritance until, abruptly, it runs out. Fern, Edgar and Cricket each find different ways to cope with how this news conflicts with their ideals, in a '70s-set story that’s full of heart. 

The After Party by Anton Disclafani

“Joan had always held her liquor like a man,” Disclafani writes, setting the scene for an intimate love story between two friends, set among the whirring, moneyed social circles of 1950s Houston. Joan may have garnered attention thanks to her displays of feminine power -- she’s been seen on the arms of some well-known male suitors -- but she and narrator Cece are reminded that, as women, their strength is easily squelched.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

It is, unfortunately, never a bad time to discuss the persistence of violence committed against women, and the perceived ownership of women’s bodies. Wood comes at the issue with a fresh, thrilling perspective: that of a dystopian novelist, one who constructs worlds in dire disrepair, but woefully similar to our own. Protagonist Yolanda wakes up in a strange new place and soon learns that it’s a holding cell for women who are punished for their brazen speech. But, with the help of an ally, she’s able to fight back.

The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray

A New York City farmer’s market in the present-day, a Viennese café at the turn of the century, and, oh yeah, a dusty room stuck in space-time: to call John Wray’s adventurous new novel expansive would be an understatement. The love story between Waldemar Tolliver and the object of his affections is the pulsing heart of a book about war, physics and family.

Read our review here.

Albina and the Dog-Men by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Jodorowsky’s storytelling chops are spread out over so many mediums, it’d be difficult for fans to feel parched and rabid (George R.R. Martin, take note). His 2011 film “The Dance of Reality” is based on an autobiographical story, although it takes liberties when drawing the line between real and unreal, allowing his childhood fears and perceptions to come to life onscreen. Similarly, his surreal novel, newly translated into English, is as weird and imaginative as it is emotionally satiating. A female giant traverses a dangerous Chilean landscape in search of a magical plant that will cure her and the men who pursue her of their ailments. And yes -- it gets weirder.

The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell

You may want to read Bushnell’s latest effort if you find yourself on a lackadaisical beach trip, rather than, say, a Da Vinci Code-inspired romp through Europe. It’s a madcap tale about a retired street musician who puts her quick hands to use as a butcher, swearing off street performances for good. UNTIL! She discovers a magical knife, and gets wrapped up with a seedy crew that covets it. 

The Girls by Emma Cline

Unearthing the violent, true story of Charles Manson and his cult of women followers, Cline’s The Girls tracks a lonely 14-year-old on her hazy, short-lived involvement with the Family. Evie Boyd is recently best friend-less, and, after her parent’s recent divorce, finds herself in the throes of domestic upheaval. To cope, she does what any teen might do: she shoplifts to break up the monotony and listens to the dogmas of a group that purports to value togetherness rather than greed.

Read our review here.

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"What does feminist work look like without women as the subject?"

That's the question at the top of choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh's Kickstarter for a new work entitled "The End of Men; An Ode to Ocean." Anspaugh, a lesbian and feminist who says she typically works with women and identifying dancers, decided to take a dramatically different tack for this project: She cast only cis-male dancers in a choreographed piece about masculinity and cultural tropes. 

So what does a feminist dance look like without women onstage? In an email to The Huffington Post, Anspaugh seemed more coy about the question than on her Kickstarter page. "I didn’t begin working on the piece by setting out to illustrate a feminist perspective, per se," she explained. "Rather, the question was there in the room ... if I switch up who I work with and that who is a group of all cis-men, then what kind of work do I make? Is it still queer and feminist work because of my own subject position?"

She pointed out that choreography has traditionally been a male-dominated field, with men imposing their performance vision on female dancers. Anspaugh wrote that she saw the casting as "playing with power structures by being a woman director/choreographer, reversing the more standard paradigm. In a female-dominated form such as dance, still the male choreographers are the most well-known, well-funded, and the ones teaching all the young women how to be pretty dancers."  

An all-male cast hardly seems to scream "feminism" to the casual viewer, but the patriarchal structures of dance have long rested on all- or mostly-female troupes of willowy girls in tutus, their movements decided by a male choreographer with his own vision that, unlike an individual dancer's performance, can live forever. In "The End of Men," audiences will only see men onstage, but the more powerful force -- the guiding consciousness -- will be that of Anspaugh. 

This particular project, a departure from Anspaugh's usual approach, sprung from her quest to become pregnant around a year ago. "As a lesbian who was trying to have a baby I found myself in a predicament not having a very crucial ingredient to make a baby -- sperm, obviously. I had gone so much of my life not needing much from men, and here I was REALLY needing something important from them," she recalled.

Her infant son, Ocean, who is referenced in the title of the piece, offered further motivation to explore masculinity. "It’s both a critique AND a celebration of these masculine archetypes and also an inquiry into what it is that my baby is stepping into if he chooses to identify as a man in the world," she explained. "Like, what is the legacy of maleness he will be contending with?" Working closely with the dancers she cast, Anspaugh says she sought to explore their masculinity both in archetypal ways and in "more tender and vulnerable, less expected expressions." 

As the daughter of David Anspaugh, director of such cinematic explorations of masculinity as "Rudy" and "Hoosiers," Anspaugh says that, in retrospect, she sees parallels between her father's films and her new piece. Her father's movies, she told HuffPost, were "hyper-masculine manifestation[s] of maleness but with these very emotional cathartic endings that can cause the most tough and stoic of men to cry their eyes out." Her "End of Men" dance also draws out the sensitivity behind the male bravado.

"I’ve been reflecting on that recently ... how I might have just accidentally made a contemporary dance version of 'Hoosiers' or 'Rudy.' Whoops! Or, maybe 'The EOM' is a kind of response, a continuation, and a feminist counterpoint to my father’s film legacy," she said. "The piece embodies a great deal of masculine vulnerability, which I also think is a rare affect for people to experience," she said. 

When it comes down to it, despite that provocative question on the Kickstarter page, Anspaugh said, "for me the success of the work doesn’t lie in if it’s read as 'feminist' or not. To me the success of the work is dependent on if it moves you in any way, if it ruffles your feathers, stirs conversation, breaks your heart, confuses you because you could never pin it down. Any of these responses will do for me to call it a 'success' or not."

"The End of Men" will run June 8-11, 2016 at Abrons Arts Center as part of the Joyce Unleashed series.

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Non-queer people aren't the only ones who celebrate big occasions like weddings, births and anniversaries, so why aren't there more cards for queer folks?

A new company is working to change all of that. 

The brainchild of co-founders Daniel Malen and Mark Uhre, "Mark It Proud" is currently engaged in a Kickstarter campaign to fund queer-inclusive greeting cards after the duo discovered a lack of options for the queer community. The venture was specifically inspired by Malen's wedding when he received countless generic greeting cards from his guests because they couldn't find any for a same-sex couple.

"The 'Mark It Proud' project is our way of telling generations of past, present and future LGBTQ that it can (and does!) in fact get better," Malen told The Huffington Post. "It is our hope that the next time someone walks down their local greeting card aisle, they see that a wedding, anniversary, Valentine's Day or baby shower card isn't just reserved for those with the title "Mr. & Mrs.'"

Want to see more? Head here to check out the Kickstarter campaign for "Mark It Proud."

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“Hamilton” is the most beloved show on Broadway that few can actually see.

For even its diehard fans, the sold-out musical tends to exist in a digital ether, somewhere between Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Twitter account, the #Ham4Ham channel on YouTube and Spotify. Especially for those outside of New York City, “Hamilton” can seem more like an internet phenomenon than a real, physical, Tony-nominated production that exists in a finite space eight times a week.

And yet, “Hamilton” exists, in a finite space, eight times a week -- and we have designer David Korins to thank for that.

“There’s a million things I haven’t done, just you wait.”

"I don’t think that people realize -- relative to the amount of people in the world -- no one’s seen the show," Korins, set designer for "Hamilton" and head of David Korins Design, explained from his New York City office in May.

I think it's safe to say some people have noticed, but it doesn't change the fact that only 1,400 ticket holders can feast their eyes on Miranda's sweeping, hip-hop-inspired celebration of the Founding Fathers every night. It's unlikely you'll meet a single person unaware of the significance of the lyric, "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" But you're even less likely to meet someone who's sat in the Richard Rodgers Theater and watched Miranda, Leslie Odom, Jr., Daveed Diggs, Phillipa Soo and the rest of the "Hamilton" cast dance across a rotating floor painted to look like wood.

Even Korins -- responsible for the design of past shows including "Misery," "Annie," "Motown" and "The Pee-Wee Herman Show," and whose work on "Hamilton" earned him one of the 16 Tony nominations associated with Miranda's critically acclaimed musical -- thinks of "Hamilton" as the first internet show. But that doesn't make him any less proud of the massive, highly detailed set design that endeavors to bring the tale of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to life.

From delicate ropes and pulleys to sizable staircases that move and walls that grow, Korins built the "Hamilton" universe from scratch, faux wood and all.

"I’m not throwing away my shot."

Before "Hamilton" won a Pulitzer, before its Tony nominations (Korins is nominated for Best Scenic Design of a Musical) and its Billboard Chart domination, before it sold 200,000 advance tickets and brought in nearly $30 million ahead of its debut, Korins had to interview for his current job. 

"I’d worked with Lin a couple of times, I’d worked with Tommy [Kail, director] several times, I’d worked with Andy [Blankenbuehler, choreographer] a lot of times, and I’d worked with Alex [Lacamoire, orchestration] many, many times. They’re all my friends," Korins explained.

He'd heard rumblings of "Hamilton," based loosely on Ron Chernow's 800-page biography, while it was still in the works. And he became intrigued enough to throw his hat in the ring for the role of set designer. "Really, no one knew what it would be," he said. "It wasn’t like, 'Oh god, I want to try to hook onto this juggernaut.' It was just like, these are my friends! These are my guys."

After a few subtle nudges to Kail and his team, Korins finally got the call from the Public Theater, the original "Hamilton" home before it moved to Broadway, asking him to come in for an interview. Korins says he took the opportunity very seriously. He did a lot of research beforehand, studied the architecture and shipbuilding methodology of the time, created a scene breakdown, sketches, and collected a bunch of ideas both good and bad. He likened himself to James Madison (and Kail to Thomas Jefferson) in the actual interview. "I literally said, 'I’m not throwing away my shot. You’ve got to hire me.'" 

And they did.

"I was chosen for the Constitutional Convention!"

From there, more research followed. Korins had no blueprint for the show -- where it was located, when exactly the scenes took place. So he started abstract. "I had, from the very first reading of the show, this feeling of swirling momentum," Korins said. "I don’t know if it was the hurricane that swept Hamilton in Nivus, or the political storm that he finds himself in, or his cyclical relationship with Aaron Burr, but I always kind of felt like this thing was swirling."

Inspired by the Capitol Building's round dome and the dramatic concept of operating theater, Korins quickly landed on an essential component of the "Hamilton" staging: the turntable. As early sketches like the ones above show, Korins' set involves a double turntable arrangement, framed by scaffolding and a second-level catwalk, designed in the style of the ships that brought Alexander Hamilton from the British West Indies to America. The spinning turntable allows the musical to swirl, the choreography and period garb to leap off the stage.

As Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, "The use of a revolving stage in a set has seldom seemed more apt; this world never stops spinning."

There are other, more subtle components of the two-level set that resulted from Korins' research into the depths of early American history, including the painted floors, made to look like rough-hewn wood and the ropes and pulleys meant to look like details from the inside of a boat. "There are really overt and obvious things that the set is doing. And then there are incredibly subtle things that the set is doing, that are just as impactful that no one knows about," Korins explained.

For example, at intermission, the walls grow. Korins' team physically brings in eight-foot sections of brick wall and the entire set expands from Act I to Act II. They also change out some of the more militant, utilitarian elements of the prop design. "We go from rifles and racks to scrolls of parchment and maps and fine china, because now they are coming home to govern the country, and start writing laws," he said, noting that the musical follows the Founding Fathers through the Revolutionary War and straight into independence. "And you know, no one sees it. We lose ropes, we tie things off, we buoy and hunker down and become the fledgling nation that we are. No one sees it. They see the turntable, and they’re like, 'Congratulations, you made a turntable!'"

“What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”

Though the turntable was an early idea that made it into the final scenery, it was actually scrapped for a bit in favor of some more spectacular design ideas that would eventually fall by the wayside. "There were a million bad ideas," Korins underscored. 

One of his first sketches revolved around a giant, gilded picture frame that would have been used to create a tableau scene of the Founding Fathers, one that the characters would break through to begin the show. Another idea involved a huge piece of parchment paper with a quill sticking out of it, and another around an opening montage where the Founding Fathers, six of them, were on tall columns that would lower to the ground.

Korins went "very, very far down the road" with a set that centered on a reflecting pool. The pool, consisting of real water built into the stage, was meant to evoke an "otherworldly place," a "heaven, kind of." Korins' team built it, and subsequently cut it after two previews at the Public Theater. "We drained the pool, we plugged the hole, and we opted for storytelling over spectacle," he said. "It was beautiful, but it wasn’t right."

Most surprisingly, Korins says, they almost did the show entirely in modern dress -- on a modern set. The cast members were going to be in high-tops and jeans, singing and dancing amidst an all-black set with a metal catwalk. "It was going to be a slick modern thing to match the language," he said. 

Thankfully, the turntable came back in the nick of time, elevating scenes like the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr to new heights.

"I’m past patiently waitin’. I’m passionately smashin’ every expectation."

Korins describes the set he built as "aspirational." Why? Because he believes it’s not the designer’s job to tell the story; it’s the designer’s job to help tell the story. "Designers have the ability to make really cool and interesting things," Korins explained. "But you have to always buck against that impulse to try and find the truth of the storytelling."

His "Hamilton" design, he says, subconsciously affects viewers. With scale, texture, line, perspective, color -- his team uses these tools to subtly affect how an audience member feels. "Emotionally, the growing of the walls does affect people," he said. "They might have no idea, but it does affect you. The walls get taller! Eight feet taller. Imagine this room growing like that!"

Theater is not realistic, Korins is quick to remind you. Even if a play or musical is meant to take place in a perfectly recreated time period or place, there’s always a level of resistance amongst the audience and actors. "I’ve always come from a place of: We all know it’s not the real thing, and it’s not the real thing," he added. "Hamilton," he notes, is not the real thing. Every single prop, from the Reynolds Pamphlet to the letter to Washington to the quills on the president's desk, cues viewers with pops of historical accuracy. But there's room to see "Hamilton" as not necessarily the tried and true biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury, but a more universal story of ambition, growth and progress.

"That’s what great theater does," Korins said. "Of course, 'Hamilton' is about Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers, but when George Washington steps down you can’t help but think about Obama stepping down. When he says he’s teaching a nation to move on by stepping down, you think about what it must feel like in the current sitting president’s presidency, what goes on in a leader’s mind. Through the minuscule, it gets magnified into a total universal human experience."

“But when you’re gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame?”

This year, a nod for Best Scenic Design marks Korins' first Tony nomination. In fact, he's never been to the Tonys before, despite several of his past 15 shows securing nominations beyond set design. With the ceremony just around the corner, and a national tour on the horizon, Korins seems more fixated on the musical's move to Chicago in the fall of this year than on any awards preparation. 

He's already figured out a way to put his design in Chicago's PrivateBank Theater. It’s done and being built as we speak, he noted. His team is just starting to wrap their heads around how to tour it, though. His mammoth design has to fit into a certain number of trucks and work under a certain set of loading parameters.

"Our set is deceptively simple-looking, but it’s an incredibly complicated set, actually," Korins said. "There’s a huge amount of square footage of it. You don’t realize how big and tall those walls are, and when we loaded it into Broadway it took many, many, many, many weeks to load it in. And we took so much time and effort to patch everything that came off-site, so that the bricks seemed solid and singular. And of course we can’t do that on tour, because we’re going to be breaking it down and putting it back together. That challenge falls pretty squarely on this office."

The "Hamilton" set has only been in this world for 10 months, glimpsed by only those special crowds of 1,400 each. But this time next year, Korins explained, 10,000 people per night will see it. Theaters outside of New York, in Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and beyond, are much bigger, he pointed out. The reach of his "internet show" is about to get even bigger.

For Korins, this moment -- just one over the course of a 17-year career encompassing approximately 468 design projects including stages for Kanye West and "Grease: Live" -- is monumental enough.

"['Hamilton' is] an obvious career highlight, because even as a show, it has put theater at the center of cultural conversation," Korins concluded. "And as a theater geek from way back, that is so cool to see a word-driven medium in a world filled with visual assault become this important. That it's my show is a total 'pinch-me' moment."

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The inimitable artist Carmen Herrera turned 101 last week. Born in Cuba in 1915, she pursued her craft for over 60 years with little recognition from the mainstream art establishment, persevering out of a deep love for painting before being "discovered" by the market as an octogenarian.

It was not until the age of 89 that she sold her first painting, and in her 90s prestigious museums such as MoMA, the Hirschhorn, and Tate Modern acquired her works, which are characterized by a hard-edge painting style applied in vivid colors.

Remarkably, she's still going strong. In May, she inaugurated the Lisson Gallery's New York space with an exhibition of new works. And in September, the Whitney Museum will present a survey of over 50 of her paintings spanning three decades.

She still works most days, although her process has understandably changed. Now, Herrera sketches out her designs in her studio and apartment in Chelsea before they are transferred to canvas with the help of an assistant.

artnet News spoke to Herrera about how the art world has changed, and how she celebrated her birthday this year.

How did you celebrate your 101st birthday?

We had a party -- a lunch for 20 or 30 friends at Craft, the restaurant next door. I had a cake that had the design of a recent painting of mine.

Why and when did you decide to be an artist?

As a child art was present in my home environment. The house was full of paintings and books and visiting artists and musicians and writers. Both my parents were journalists and very interested in the arts. My brothers were also interested in politics and always getting into trouble with this regime or that. It was for me a very natural process, that of becoming some kind of an artist. My first attempts as an artist were with watercolors and wood carvings. I remember how easy we could get mahogany and how beautiful it looked and felt.

What inspired you to paint in the abstract, hard-edge style for which you are known?

I was familiar with the work of [Oscar] Niemeyer and had seen magazines about the Bauhaus. All modern architecture was interesting to me. I loved spaces, shapes and lines. I was in Paris when I painted Iberia in 1948. That city was an amalgamation of the world's artists in those days. The spirit and challenge of the new and the daring was stimulating. I always appreciated and liked [Lygia] Pape and Lygia [Clark] and later [Hélio] Oiticica and others I cannot today remember. But we all had similar sources in the Suprematists and the Dutch.

What drove you to continue working for so many years without selling?

I was liberated by being ignored. I was free to do as I wish. Frankly, it never bothered me that much.

Why do you think it took so long?

I do not know. Sometimes I have this theory, or that theory. It just was not my time, I guess.

What are some of the positive and negative changes you've observed in the art world since you started painting?

The world has changed, America has changed, New York has changed. It is then only natural that the institutions have also changed. I first knew the Whitney when it was on [West] 8th Street, then it changed and went uptown. Then it came back downtown and found that I was still there. And there I am, exhibiting there. And of course, I am honored to be included among such great art and artists.

What advice would you give to young artists today?

Paciencia, querida, paciencia. (Patience, dear, patience.)

(This interview has been edited and condensed.)

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"I remember the first time I met Tiny," late photographer Mary Ellen Mark explained in an interview with Leica News. She was visiting Seattle in 1983, on assignment for Life magazine, documenting Seattle’s homeless and runaway youth. Mark waited outside a club called the Monastery, where street kids were known to frequent.

"A taxicab pulled up and these two little girls got out," she recalled. "They were very young teenagers. They were made up like they were playing dress-up with makeup and short skirts. They were dressed like seductive prostitutes. And one of these young girls was Tiny."

Tiny, born Erin Blackwell, was 14 years old when she met Mark and working as a sex worker to support a fledgling drug addiction. In the circle of street kids she ran with, everyone had a nickname. There were Rat, Lulu, Smurf, Munchkin, and there was Tiny, blessed with her nickname because, in her words, "I was exceptionally small."

Mark directly approached Tiny, hoping to photograph her. Tiny, afraid Mark was the police, screamed and ran away. But eventually Mark tracked Tiny down, visiting her at her mother's house. Thus began a relationship that would extend until Mark's death in 2015. An ongoing exhibition titled "Tiny: Streetwise Revisited" spans the course of Tiny's life, from her time taking dates on the Seattle streets to her life as a middle-age mother of 10. 

In her photographs, Mark captures Tiny with unflinching honesty and compassion. Tiny, as a subject, held nothing back. "I’m just drawn to her openness and her ability to tell her story in the most honest way," Mark said. The black-and-white images capture a young woman at once tough and vulnerable, jaded and naive, distressed and optimistic.

Mark's photo essay became the foundation for a documentary, also called "Streetwise," expanding on the lives of these magnetic, down-and-out youths. Her husband, Martin Bell, was the director and Tom Waits scored the Academy Award-nominated film. "When you're making a documentary, what you're looking for are people who, in some way, are stars -- like movie stars," director Bell explained in an ABC News special. "And Tiny was exactly that, she was like a movie star."

"I want to be really rich and live on a farm with a bunch of horses which is my main, best animal and have three yachts or more," Tiny says in the documentary. "And diamonds and jewels and all of that stuff." The looming comfort of fantasy is evident in Mark's photo "Halloween," pictured above, in which Mark dons a dark veil and stylish black gloves. Suddenly, she seems ripped from a high fashion editorial. Mark explained Tiny was dressed as a "Parisian prostitute." 

Mark was born March 20, 1940, in Philadelphia. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, with a degree in painting and fine art, and two years later received her master’s degree in photojournalism. After graduation, Mark traveled to Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship, capturing the images that would later constitute her first book, Passport. This is when Mark took the photograph that, in her eyes, solidified her fate as a photographer. 

The photo was of a young girl named Emine, posing on the streets of Trabzon in a babydoll dress and white hair bow. There is something disarming about the way she comports herself, a sensual adult in a kid's body, daring the viewer to keep looking. "I don’t like to photograph children as children," Mark said of the image. "I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I’m always looking for the side of who they might become."

Inspired by photographer Diane Arbus, Mark was drawn to those living on the margins, exploring representations of beauty entirely different from those on magazine covers or most museum walls. "I’m interested in people who haven’t had all the lucky breaks in life," she told American Suburb. "People who are handicapped emotionally, physically or financially. Much of life is luck. No one can choose whether he’s born into a wealthy, privileged home or born into extreme poverty."

Even when "Streetwise" came to an end, Mark and Tiny never lost touch. For 32 years, Mark continued to photograph Tiny as she had children, fell in love, got clean. At one point, Mark and her husband Bell offered to take Tiny to New York with them under the condition that she attend school, and she turned it down, saying school wasn't for her. "You can try to help, but there’s a line you have to draw about how much you can interfere," Mark explained to Peta Pixel. "It’s how far you can go. Sometimes you think you’re helping and you’re not, but you know you’re there to observe. You’re there to tell a story."

The life Tiny lives now doesn't involve diamonds and yachts. But Tiny does have her life, comfort and safety, something she never takes for granted. When Mark interviewed Tiny in 2005, she explained: "I'd be proud to have my friends see that I made it. That I didn't end up dead, or junkied‑out. I am surprised." 

Mark died in 2015, leaving behind a vivid portrait of a human life, brimming with pain and struggle and freedom and survival. Through Mark's lens, viewers are put face to face with the brutal reality of poverty, which plagues Tiny's children's lives just as it shaped hers. We see the effects of destitution, drugs, and hustling, the marks they leave on her flesh and in her eyes. And we see the vitality of spirit that enables one to carry on, to dream of horses and fight to be seen. 

"Tiny: Streetwise Revisited, photographs by Mary Ellen Mark," runs until June 30, 2016 at Aperture in New York.

On Saturday, June 25, the films "Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell" and "Streetwise" will play at BAM Rose Cinemas as part of BAMcinemaFest 2016, with a Q&A by Martin Bell. The exhibition "Attitude: Portraits by Mary Ellen Mark, 1964–2015" is also on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery through June 18.

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When the power of man intersects with the beauty of nature, mesmerizing moments are born. And nothing makes those moments possible like extreme sports.

This week, Red Bull released a random selection of photographs from their 2016 Red Bull Illume Image Quest -- an action sports photography contest -- and the submissions, revealed below, are nothing short of badass.

More than 5,600 photographers from around the world submitted their work, giving us a glimpse into the heart-pounding world of action sports.

A panel of photography and magazine editor judges are currently reviewing the submissions. Eleven category winners and one overall winner will be announced on Sept. 28, with each winner receiving a prize package of photography gear. Red Bull Illume will then tour the winning images around the world on life-sized light boxes as part of a nighttime photography exhibit.

"I believe action and adventure sports photography represents a kind of pinnacle of human spirit and achievement," Apoorva Prasad, a contest judge and founder of The Outdoor Journal, said in a press release. "I feel that spectrum of human achievement can be encapsulated in an action sports image."

Below, see these extreme athletes conquer their craft by reaching terrifying highs, exhilarating speeds and mysterious depths.

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The cast of "Girls" is on a mission to fight rape culture and sexual assault. 

In a video for NowThis News, actresses Lena Dunham, Jemima Kirke, Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet deliver a powerful PSA about sexual assault and victim-blaming.

The women of "Girls" remind those watching that sexual assault is not a crime that's usually committed by strangers lurking in the shadows. Eighty percent of attacks are perpetrated by someone the victim knows.

"This isn’t a secret. It’s reality," the actresses say in unison. "So why is our default reaction as a society is to disbelieve or to silence or to shame?"

Nearly one in five women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. "You already have the power to create a safer, healthier environment for women to come forward,” Williams says. 

"Please support, listen, take action," the women say together. "Not because she’s someone’s daughter, or someone’s girlfriend, or someone’s sister, but because she is someone."

Yes, yes, and more yes. 

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Sure, having a whole gaggle of gal pals is great, but who’s the one you really want to hang with at the end of the day? No, rosé and sweatpants are not the answer. It’s your ride-or-die best friend. The person you can be the realest with. The person who’s there through work crises, relationship woes and Netflix binges — when all your other friends bail.

Here’s why a BFF trumps a whole group any day.

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This will give you paws.

A painting that appears to be of a howling wolf is actually three women covered in body paint. Artist Johannes Stötter has utilized a combo of body paint and shading to cleverly conceal a trio of models named Valeria Hasler, Nina Mur and Nina Rhomberg.

If you look closely at the picture, which is actually a moving sculpture, it’s hard to identify where the models are. You can kind of see the back of a woman acting as the wolf’s belly, and even a foot subbing in for a tail. But nothing can prepare you for the sculpture’s brain-melting deconstruction:

The reason why the Italian-born Stötter is so successful in his attempt to pack three ladies into an image of a lone wolf is because he’s pretty much a body-painting baller.

He’s made similar sculptures of a fish, frog and even camouflaged a few folks into a sculpture of a chameleon. He’s also tackled inanimate objects like rocks and stacks of wood.

According to The Telegraph, Stötter spends five months planning each creation and some take up to eight hours to complete.

But his hard work has paid off, in 2012 he won the title of Bodypainting World Champion, though, it seems some people never got the memo.

“I think most people don’t realize that this is a human being,” he joked on his Facebook page about one of sculptures of a scarlet macaw. “Some of my closest friends are trying to find out why I posted the photo of a parrot.”

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