If you read one book before fall briskly ushers in a new season, it should be the story of August, a black girl living in Bushwick in the 1970s, when jazz gave way to poppy, promising disco hits, and she had no outlet for her sorrow. Her story is told in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn.

As a child, August moves with her father and brother to Brooklyn from Tennessee, leaving behind the memory of her mother, who began hearing voices after her brother, Clyde, died in Vietnam. In Brooklyn, August remarks that she’s “never been that high up before,” as she sits with her brother at a living room window and watches children her age run through the streets, forming bonds and linking arms.

A group of three girls stands out to her. As in Emma Cline’s The Girls, a novel with a preteen heroine who gets roped into a seedy cult scene, August is first intoxicated by the girls’ laughter. But August’s relationship with the young women she grows to know and love doesn’t wind up harming her; their tight bond arms her against her grief, and against older men’s advances for years.

She, Gigi, Sylvia and Angela each come from different backgrounds, especially Sylvia, whose French-speaking family pushes her to study to become a lawyer. Still, they cling to their similarities and their unending empathy for one another, braiding each other’s hair and kissing each other’s stomachs after hard days at school or at home.

Her place within the foursome helps August accept the truth about her mother and salve month’s worth of lonely worry, but she worries that the friendship, too, will fracture if they aren’t careful. “I wanted to step inside of Sylvia’s skin,” August observes almost off-handedly, vaguely aware that her love for her friends is big and fragile.

With warm, gleaming, gem-like sentences, Woodson captures the rare treasures of girlhood friendships, but the book contends with so much else, and the taut plot balloons with tension as August grows to understand a tragic realization about her family, one that will shape her for decades after.

As August’s father leaves the memory of her mother behind, he begins spending time with a woman whose Nation of Islam faith shapes her habits. She covers herself from head to ankle, cooks meals without pork, and works to keep their home clean and otherwise domestically run. Woodson lightly touches on Sister Loretta’s wants and motivations, just as she introduces us to August’s neighbors with swift grace. Although the core of the book is the friendship shared between August, Gigi, Sylvia and Angela, the impoverished children who live next door and the friendly woman whose son died in Vietnam, are real, powerful characters that pull you further into Woodson’s Brooklyn.

Once she’s immersed you fully into her bustling Bushwick streets, the author comments saliently on early modes of gentrification, and how racial prejudices have led to bright lines dividing streets and neighborhoods. August observes that while she didn’t get to know the German or Italian families on her block ― the kids weren’t allowed to play with her or boys her age ― she “knew their moving vans.” “We knew the people who came to help, checked their cars many times, then glared at the boys in the street,” Woodson writes.

If she writes honestly and valiantly about racism, a force that looms large over America, she writes even more evocatively about grief, another noxiously universal experience. Another Brooklyn is told from the perspective of 30-year-old August, who’s now an anthropologist reflecting on the loves and sorrows of her youth. Although she’s learned to think logically as a coping mechanism, the story is the character’s reluctant revisiting of sunnier, simpler days, when feelings came raw and unfiltered. The result is a short, lyrical book that with tells a tragic story with a pretty, upbeat veneer ― not unlike the disco hits of the ‘70s.

What we think:

Woodson writes lyrically about what it means to be a girl in America, and what it means to be black in America. Each sentence is taut with potential energy, but the story never bursts into tragic flames; it stays strong and subtle throughout.

What other reviewers think:

Publishers Weekly: “Woodson draws on all the senses to trace the milestones in a woman’s life and how her early experiences shaped her identity.”

Kirkus: “A stunning achievement from one of the quietly great masters of our time.”

Who wrote it:

Jacqueline Woodson is a National Book Award-winning author, and the Young People’s Poet Laureate. Her book Brown Girl Dreaming, a young adult book written in verse, is a winner of the Newbery Honor Award.

Who will read it:

Anyone interested in coming-of-age stories, stories about girlhood, or stories set in cities.

Opening lines:

“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story.”

Notable passage:

“I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.”

Another Brooklyn
by Jacqueline Woodson
Amistad
Published Aug. 9, 2016

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

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

This article originally appeared on ArchDaily.

Photographer and filmmaker Joe Capra, known for Scientifantastic, filmed and produced the video “10328x7760 ― The 10K  Demo,” which is exactly what the title implies, a time-lapse video in 10K resolution of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

For those who aren’t familiar with the technical specifications, this resolution is about 10 times higher than the traditional Full HD (1920 x 1080px), which is the maximum resolution of most monitors sold today.

The video consists of a compilation of aerial images of Rio, framing iconic landscapes of the city, showing everyday life in fast motion and capturing the frenzy of the metropolis, all with time-lapse techniques.

The high resolution of the video allows you to see in detail the movement of people, vehicles, the Guanabara Bay waters, life in the favelas, the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, the Sugarloaf cable cars and other emblematic points of the city.

Visit Joe Capra’s website for more of his work. 

For more Olympics coverage:

• Street Artist’s Epic Ode To The Olympics Might Break World Record For Largest Mural


• In 1912, Someone Actually Won An Olympic Gold Medal In Painting


• These Photos From Rio Show The Stark Contrast Of Life Outside The Olympics

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Warning: This article contains graphic drawings that may not be suitable for work environments. 

Not much is known about the exterior life of the man named Maurice François Alfred Martin van Miële, who went by the pseudonym of Martin van Maële. He was born in Boulogne sur Seine, France, in 1863. He worked as an illustrator in Brussels and Paris, drawing artworks to accompany poems by Paul Verlaine, a novel by H.G. Wells, and French translations of Sherlock Holmes stories. He married and had no children. He passed away at 62. 

While the conventional details of van Maële’s life remain largely unknown, the intimate fabric of his sexual imagination we know quite well. Throughout the course of his life, van Maële created stacks on stacks of erotic illustrations, allowing others to glimpse into the most private nooks and crannies of his mind’s eye. The explicit drawings range from playfully sexual to graphically bizarre, showing religious symbols interwoven with surrealist visions like penis-geese and horny skeletons. 

You can find van Maële’s work in the NSFW treasure chest that is Delta of Venus, an online compendium of vintage smut founded by Robert Stewart. Quite knowledgeable in the field of old-school erotica, Stewart graciously provided additional context to van Maële’s imagery, explaining how the deliciously nasty drawings relate to the artistic climate from whence they came, as well as the impact they had on the world of drawing to come. 

The Huffington Post spoke with Stewart over email; read on to hear his take on the life and work of Martin van Maële:

How did you discover Martin van Maële’s work? What was your initial impression of it?

The past couple decades, his prints have been included in a lot of anthologies of erotic art, so I was familiar with his style from reproductions. But I took a closer look after purchasing some original prints maybe five years ago. They ended up being some of the highlights of my collection ― whimsical, macabre, sexy and technically impressive etchings with an easy naturalism you don’t always find in illustrations from that period. Many of them were hand-colored and even over a century later had really vibrant and rich tones.

Digital scans don’t quite do them justice, then again that’s the case with most art ― in this age of online images, it’s easy to forget how much depth is lost in the conversion from tangible to virtual.

How would you describe Maële’s work in terms of the mainstream views on sexuality and eroticism during the 19th century? Was creating such explicit work forbidden? 

It helps to look at his art in the context of the late 19th century’s Decadent movement, which, along with van Maële, included artists and writers like Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Franz von Bayros ― to name a few. The term “decadent” was originally used as criticism by the Victorian mainstream, but many of its targets embraced it as a symbol of dissent against popular notions of “progress” both moral (Victorian social norms) and physical (the Industrial Revolution’s rapid changes).

As such, Martin van Maële intended to provoke and prod at prevailing bourgeois values by creating art that could variously be described as absurd, unsettling, sarcastic, anti-Church, grotesque and all held together by that implacable foil of proper Victorian behavior ― human sexuality.

On the flip side, though, another aspiration of the Decadents was “aesthetics for their own sake” with no higher moral purpose required. Wilde, for example, was a big proponent of this. So van Maële also created plenty of less “confrontational” art that was merely beautiful and/or erotic, intending to do nothing more or less than give pleasure. Examples would be his sensual illustrations for Ovid’s Art Of Love or Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, some of which are really quite lovely.

Was van Maële’s passion for erotic literature kept secret throughout his lifetime?

As with many transgressive artists, Maële also had to pay the bills and so illustrated a variety of non-erotic books ― H.G. Wells novels and Sherlock Holmes stories to name a couple. It’s doubtful that most readers of those books would have known about his erotic work, but those familiar with the libertine scenes of Paris, London or Berlin would probably have made the connection.

Many of van Maële’s illustrations contain surreal details, such as unnaturally engorged penises. Were such fantastical depictions of human anatomy rare at the time?

They were probably intended to provoke or unsettle the viewer rather than create distance. Some other artists of the time also used the same approach ― Beardsley’s illustrations for “Lysistrata” with its crazy huge penises would be the most famous of those.

A lot of these strange, phallic depictions are descendants of the Greco-Roman Fascina. [Editor’s note: Fascina are ancient Greek gods representing masculine generative power and represented by a phallus.] The Catholic Church later went to work eradicating these items, knocking the penises off of Priapus statues and whatnot. Even today, although our culture is full of implied phallic symbols –- the explicit penis is still a taboo sight in popular culture. Rewind to the morals of 100-plus years ago, and you can imagine this was a powerful, even jarring, symbol for Decadent artists to play around with.

It wasn’t just phalluses though, van Maële also incorporated some pretty surreal vaginas into his work! As with the Fascina, one could draw a line from these to Sheela Na Gigs from Britain and other ancient female fertility figures in continental Europe. All this stuff is a little odd to our modern eyes, because explicit images of genitals these days are almost invariably sexualized to the exclusion of all else. 

What would you say is van Maële’s legacy? 

Van Maële was obscure for a couple generations after his death, until the 1970s when some of his prints began to get republished for a wider audience. In present day he’s probably better-known than at any time aside from his actual life, so it’s hard to gauge his individual legacy over the years.

He did create one etching of a phallus-wielding knight rescuing a maiden from some kind of fearsome duck-footed penis-vulva beast –- you know, the usual ― which, aside from the classic Hokusai octopus print, is one of the more overt ancestors of hentai tentacle porn I’ve seen. As far as legacies go, that one might be kind of dubious.

But you can also look at his work via the traditions that the Decadent movement influenced: Surrealism, Dadaism, symbolism, the fertile artistic period of Weimar Berlin, and then everything influenced by them in turn. He’s part of the constantly evolving aesthetics and ideas from that continuum. With a lot of historic erotic artists, this holistic view is the most instructive way to assess them ― their chosen subject matter put a cap on their individual “mainstream” recognition, but many of their aesthetics, motifs and themes percolated out subtly into the greater cultural ecosystem.

See more of the beautiful nastiness below:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

A polar bear whose bottom half is caked in oily black gunk. A whale wrapped in striped fabric: a pseudo straightjacket. These are the messes climate change leaves behind, the things we know are happening but often don’t have the opportunity to see with our own eyes.

Swiss street art duo Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni, otherwise known as NeverCrew, met in art school when they were 15 and started making work together soon after. As a team, the artists adorn the world with eye-popping and gut-wrenching images depicting the consequences of humanity’s actions on earth.

Tackling issues from privatization of natural resources to the concentration of environmental power to climate change to immigration, NeverCrew transforms dark realities into stunning works of art that urge viewers to take action as quickly as they capture our attention.

Many of their projects directly address mankind’s contemporary connection to nature, which they view as a relationship of necessity and belonging, as well as one of consumption and appropriation. In captions accompanying their artworks, they have called the privatization of natural resources “arrogant” and an “inconsiderate exploitation.”

“In our society, structured on the expansion of power and on the conquest of the final product, the origin of things and their history are often put aside,” they wrote in another caption. “The reasons are confused and mixed over time [...] making past and present less and less readable.”

NeverCrew hopes their work creates a dialogue between artist and viewer, placing the dire issues plaguing our natural world at center stage. “We’re developing our personal language, artwork after artwork, to communicate and interact in our personal way,” the artists explained to Street Art United States.

Thus far, NeverCrew has created work in locations around the globe, including Hamburg, Dublin, Cairo, Belgrade and Berlin. They hope soon to visit the United States. Check out of NeverCrew’s most inspiring works below:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

What if there were an alternate heaven for slain black boys, a place where the horrors of racism and police brutality didn’t exist?

Poet Danez Smith imagines such a world in a poem posted by Button Poetry on Tuesday and performed at the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam in June ― and it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Smith paints a powerful portrait of an afterlife wherein “boys brown as rye play the dozens and ball,” where they “jump in the air and stay there.” 

Recalling the deaths of young black boys like Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, Smith goes on to speak of a world in which there is no fear of police brutality. 

“Here, there is no language for officer, or law. No color to call white ― if snow fell, it’d fall black,” Smith recites.

“Please, don’t call us dead. Call us alive some place better... Paradise is a world where everything is a sanctuary and nothing is a gun.”

While the poem focuses on slain black boys (Smith makes several references to the death of Emmett Till), it also, importantly, acknowledges that there are probably many alternate heavens for black people who “earned this paradise by a death we didn’t deserve.”

He ends the poem with: “I’m sure that there are other ‘heres’ somewhere for every kind of somebody. A heaven of brown girls braiding on golden stoops. But somebody prayed we’d rest in peace. And here we are, in peace. Whole. All summer.”

Watch the poem in its entirety above. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

President Barack Obama released his second and final summer playlist as POTUS in a tweet Thursday ― presumably the soundtrack to life in the White House. 

Rap artist Wale, who appears first on Obama’s daytime list with his hit “LoveHate Thing,” replied to the president’s tweet: “POTUS knows. #1.”

Other Twitter users praised Obama’s musical taste and begged him to stay in office.

Obama’s 2016 summer playlist, available on Spotify, shows his preference for upbeat jams in the day and love songs at night. Both collections feature oldies and contemporary tunes from American and international artists.

When the sun goes down, he’s listening to romantic tunes such as Denise LaSalle’s “Trapped By A Thing Called Love,” Billie Holiday’s “Lover Man,” Miles Davis’ “My Funny Valentine” and Janet Jackson’s “I Get Lonely.”

During the day, he’s getting pumped blasting “So Ambitious” by Jay Z featuring Pharrell, “The Man” by Aloe Blacc, “Me Gustas Tu” by Manu Chao and “Don’t Owe You A Thing” by Gary Clark Jr.

Obama first shared his collection of favorite summer tunes on the official White House Spotify account last year. And back in 2008, as a presidential hopeful, he shared his favorite iPod tracks.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If Hollywood nixed coming-of-age stories, it would probably go bankrupt. But the trailer for this fall’s “Moonlight” seems to signal something special. The movie chronicles three chapters in the life of Chiron, a Miami teenager grappling with his sexuality amid a complicated home life. That sounds typical enough, but the trailer for Barry Jenkins’ film has a haunting quality that might make this movie one of the year’s breakout indies. 

“Moonlight,” based on the Tarell McCraney play ”In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” will premiere at the Toronto and New York film festivals before opening in theaters on Oct. 21. It stars Naomie Harris, André Holland, Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe (in her film debut), in addition to the three actors who play Chiron at various stages of his life: Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes and Alex R. Hibbert. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The Summer Olympics has no shortage of photos. Agencies send their best photographers with the most high-tech and expensive gear to capture the split-second moments we all miss while watching the events on television.

Here’s just a sampling of the best photos so far from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We’ll keep updating it through the closing ceremonies. 

For more Olympics coverage:

• 16 Photos These Olympians Probably Wish They Could Delete From The Internet


• These Eerie Photos Show The Ghosts Of Olympics Past


• Pretend You’re In Rio In This 360-degree Video


• Here’s What Olympic Gold Medals Are Actually Made Of

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

With a powerful spoken word poem, Hollie McNish has summed up the struggles of being a breastfeeding mother.

In the poem titled “Embarrassed” posted on Monday by Independent Films based in London, McNish captured the shame moms face when they’re asked to breastfeed in the bathroom when she shared her experience of feeding her child on top of toilets.

“After six months of her life sat sitting on lids, sipping on milk, nostrils sniffing on piss, trying not to bang her head on toilet roll dispensers, I wonder whether these public loo feeds offend her,” she said. 

She then stressed the double standard surrounding breastfeeding in a “country of low-cut tops, cleavage and skin,” leading her to wonder why she should be “embarrassed in case a small flash of flesh might offend.”

At the end of the video, which has been viewed more than 1.7 million times as of Thursday, McNish decided she’d had enough. Despite the comments and the looks, no one will stop her for simply feeding her child in public.  

“No more will I sit on these cold toilet lids, no matter how embarrassed I feel as she sips.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

It’s not hard to see how much of a threat racism is to black men in America.

Author Mychal Denzel Smith touched upon this in his appearance Wednesday on “The Daily Show” to discuss his book, Invisible Man, Got The Whole World Watching.

In his book, Smith tackles how black men process witnessing the deaths of other black men and boys while simultaneously celebrating their identity and power. Smith was 25 when George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. He told host Trever Noah that though Martin’s death wasn’t the start of a new phenomenon, it was a turning point for black millennials. 

“That moment galvanized a lot of people and I think it was because you had a generation that turned out to vote for Barack Obama,” the author said. “[Black people] turned their political energy toward the electoral system, the ideas of hope and change. And here’s the thing, here’s the history that we were told was over happening to us.”

Smith admitted that, like many black men, he didn’t think he would even live to see 25.

“I also came of age post 9/11 and the Iraq war. I thought maybe I could get sent off to war and die there,” he told Noah. “And then George Zimmerman kills Trayvon Martin and now you have to worry about people who think they’re police officers. So there’s all of these different elements at play contributing to that anxiety that your life is devalued in a way that could end at any moment.” 

After Martin’s death, Smith said he predicted the national focus would be shifted to how black men can prevent themselves from getting killed ― a notion that denies them humanity in the first place, he says. He also stressed how important it is to look at the root cause of not only black people being killed by non-black people but also the root cause of violence within the black community.

“We’re not examining poverty, we’re not examining the lack of educational resources, we’re not examining the lack of mental health resources in our communities,” he said.  

In an extended clip of Smith’s interview, he said that many of the issues black people face today are “products of an oppressive system meant to devalue black lives.” He urged black millennials to f**k s**t up and stand up against the racial violence that often goes unnoticed.

“We don’t talk about the sort of violence of the erasure of slavery from the textbooks in Texas. We don’t talk about the violence of closing schools in Chicago and Philly. We’re still not even talking about the violence of poisoning people’s water... That’s happening every single day and it’s all a part of the same system.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

We have reached the dog days of summer, and if you’re like us, you’re probably mentally drained from all of the election news. To take a break from the real world, here are 10 of the best movies, from all-time classics to underrated gems, that capture various aspects of the political process.

Most of the listed films are available to rent and/or purchase on iTunes, Google Play or Amazon. We have also noted if they are available to stream on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime.

For even more viewing options, check out our list of 12 political documentaries.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie certainly has a way with words.

On Sunday, the Nigerian feminist writer sat down with London’s Southbank Centre Senior Programmer Ted Hodgkinson to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her novel Half Of A Yellow Sun. According to BuzzFeed, the two discussed the now-iconic book and her thoughts on feminism, motherhood and female sexuality. 

Adichie, who is well-known for her feminist ideas and writing, described to Hodgkinson that feminism influences every part of her life: “I’m a daughter, I’m a sister, mother now, wife. All of those things, and being a good feminist, are not mutually exclusive at all,” she said. “A feminist is who and what I am. It’s not a cloak I put on on certain days and take off on certain days.”

The 38-year-old said that her writing is one part of her life that she really feels reflects her “belief about gender.” Her writing, Adichie says, is where she’s able to create an honest depiction of female sexuality. 

“I think it’s so important that female sexuality be seen as a thing that is real, and complex, and is not at all connected with shame,” Adichie said. “It manifests differently but it’s true everywhere: There is always an element of shame when it comes to female sexuality. And for me, in my writing, I want to find ways to make female sexuality the human, flawed, beautiful, sensual thing that it is.”

I want to find ways to make female sexuality the human, flawed, beautiful, sensual thing that it is.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie said one of her main goals in her work is to get people talking about feminism. Her words were launched into the public consciousness when Beyoncé quoted the author in the hit song “***Flawless.” That exposure definitely helped move the feminist conversation forward, Adichie said.  

“I want to live in a world where men and women are truly equal. I want to live in a world where gender doesn’t hold women back, as it does today, everywhere in the world. I think we should do everything we possibly can,” she said. “And having young people talk about feminism, even having people say that word, ‘feminist’, who would never have said it, I think it’s a good thing. Is it ideal and perfect? No. But it’s part of the journey, I think.” 

Head over to BuzzFeed to read more of Adichie’s conversation. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Ledet Muleta is well-acquainted with the damaging stigmas around mental illness in Africa. 

Muleta, a 37-year-old Ethiopian-born nurse who now lives in Washington, D.C., has travelled across the African diaspora to tackle the disparities in mental health care and worked to combat the stigmas that surround it. Her work eventually inspired her to launch the non-profit organization Medixaa Health Services, which aims to fight against the stigmatization of mental illness across the continent.

Through her organization, Muleta created “Chula,” a film project that chronicles one young Ethiopian woman’s battle with bipolar disorder and her experience living in Africa among a family that seemingly fails to understand the serious impact of her mental illness. Muleta believes the young woman’s story in the film reflects the life of millions of others on the continent who don’t receive adequate attention or aid in regards to the mental heath issues they face. Because of this, she has launched a Kickstarter campaign that aims to raise money to fund the full making of the film which is almost done and ready to be marketed. When complete, Muleta said “Chula” will help to generate more awareness around what African families can, and should, do to better address the needs of mental health patients. So far, the film has raised more than $20,000.

In a interview with The Huffington Post, Muleta opened up about “Chula” and how she hopes the film will be used as a tool to educate those across the African diaspora, and beyond, about the affects of mental illness.

HuffPost: What inspired you to create “Chula” and what is the main message behind the film?

Muleta: “CHULA” arose from my experience working as a psychiatric nurse in the Washington metropolitan area in addition to my travels across the continent. I witnessed wide disparities in the utilization of mental health services particularly among the African diaspora and other minority/immigrant communities. When I visited countries in Africa ― Liberia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Uganda and Egypt ― the use of services or rather shall I say the recognition of mental illness was minimal. That, in combination with the rising substance abuse on the continent ― Africa is becoming an emerging and major market for narcotics typically found in the West (i.e. cocaine )― and the stigmatization of mental illness persuaded me to write the script for “CHULA.”

With the film, “CHULA,” I want to reduce the stigma of mental illness so people realize it is treatable just like any other chronic illness. The film presents mental illness as non-discriminatory since it affects people from all backgrounds. The film reverses that notion through the main character Chula, a rising and talented pianist, who comes from a wealthy family of Ethiopian origin in suburban Washington, D.C.

Why did you decide to explore this narrative around mental health through film? 

I chose film as I felt it would allow “CHULA” to have a wide impact, particularly across the global African community both on the continent and abroad. I wanted to ensure that the message could reach as many people as possible in a relatively quick way, which film allows you to do.

How has your African heritage and experiences on traveling across the continent as a nurse taught you about the way people in Africa treat and perceive mental illness?

My African heritage has always taught me to show sympathy to those who are elderly, sick, and those who need assistance. Unfortunately, my culture has also taught me to discriminate against those affected by mental illness ― luckily that is a notion I have unlearned. The illness is treated quite differently from other medical conditions. More often it is associated with spiritual or religious issues.  Sometimes those affected are blamed for bringing these issues onto themselves. Another misconception is that all mental illnesses have the same set of symptoms which is untrue. Additionally, those living with mental illness are perceived to have lost their ability to be integrated within their communities and contribute to society. That is why the film “CHULA” will be used to dispel some of the myths of mental illness.

What are some of the stigmas African families have around mental health, and why do you think they are so harmful?

One of the major stigmas surrounding mental illness is simply that it doesn’t exist. Mental illness is often depicted as a punishment for an individual’s personal faults. Another stigma found across Africa is the belief that mental illness arises due to supernatural forces such as possession by spirits (i.e. zar). Other times, the lack of spirituality ― this is more common among religious Christian and Muslim communities ― is used to explain the onset of mental illness among individuals. So as you can see, stigma held by Africans vary across social, cultural and religious factors; yet education or the lack thereof is also a major underlying factor in many cases. 

One of the major stigmas surrounding mental illness [in Africa] is simply that it doesn’t exist.
Ledet Muleta

The stigmatization of mental illness is harmful particularly in that it renders mental illness and those living with mental illness invisible. And, as I mentioned before, the view that mental illness is a Western invention is damaging, as well. Perceptions of mental illness are improving on the political front as more African nations continue to recognize the impact of mental illness and create more robust mental health policies.

However, the work of reducing the stigma of mental illness must start with the individual. Once this is achieved, we would be [able] to see a shift in the overall perceptions around mental illness which could then lead to improved access, use, and acceptability of mental health services. 

How do you think the stigmas around mental health among African families differ from the black community at large? 

The biggest difference between the stigma in the African community and the stigma in the black community, comes down to a difference in culture. In the African diaspora, there is cultural illiteracy when it comes to issues of mental health. It’s shocking when people come from the continent, where mental illness is not acknowledged, and enter a society where mental illness (although stigmatized) is discussed. As I mentioned earlier, language also plays a large role in stigma because diasporic Africans may not possess the language to discuss their experiences with mental illness. Mental illness is hard enough to discuss in English but it’s even more difficult to translate these concepts into one’s native tongue, especially when one comes from a culture where mental illness is not discussed at all. Issues and stories out of Africa are, sadly, not as visible in mainstream media.

How do you hope your film, and experience in nursing, helps to make sure that all black lives matter?

Yes, you are right, stories from Africa have been largely pushed out from mainstream media in the United States.

The Black Lives Matter movement originated as a response to police brutality in the United States and the deaths of black men and women at the hands of police. However, we can say that the movement has also been used as a call to action for those of us who are still alive. Black Lives Matter intersects with our project because of the disparities in access to healthcare for black people both here in the U.S. and in Africa. By addressing these disparities, I am hoping the film “CHULA” will be proactive in showcasing that black lives do matter by allowing individuals to take preventative steps in safeguarding their mental health and overall well-being.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If there were a gold medal for BFF-ship, the U.S. Women’s Olympic Gymnastics team would certainly win.

Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas, Simone Biles, Laurie Hernandez and Madison Kocian (a.k.a. the Final Five) are not only five of the best gymnasts in the entire world ― maybe the best ― but they are also the best of friends. In addition to watching them complete logic-defying tumbling passes and rack up gold medals at the Rio Olympics, we’ve loved watching them love each other.

(Like, seriously, we could look at photos of them hugging each other all day, every day.)

Here are 14 times the Final Five simply could not hold back their affection for one another:

For more Olympics coverage:

• The Media Is Saying And Doing A Bunch Of Sexist Stuff During The Olympics


• 50 Photos That Show The Raw Power Of This Year’s Olympic Women


• Here’s The Real Reason We Love Watching Olympic Gymnastics


• Katie Ledecky Just Destroyed Her Own World Record In The Women’s 400-Meter Freestyle


• Watch 41-Year-Old Gymnast Oksana Chusovitina Slay Her Olympic Vault

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

When Bri Dow learned she was pregnant with her first child, she wanted to surprise her husband Brandon with the news in an unconventional way. 

The Wisconsin mama-to-be enlisted her wedding photographer Samantha Boos to help orchestrate the surprise. Bri told Brandon they had won a free couples photo shoot. During the session, Boos gave each of them a chalkboard and told them to write three words that describe each other while standing back to back.

While Brandon affectionately wrote, “Love Cute Sweet,” Bri wrote “You’re going to be a daddy.” As they flipped around, Boos captured Brandon’s reaction to reading his wife’s chalkboard.

On August 5, the photographer posted the photos on her Facebook page, where they quickly went viral. “Brandon’s reaction was priceless,” Boos told The Huffington Post. “He had the same reaction when Bri walked down the aisle as well. After he read the board it went from thoughtful, to excited, then lastly to tearful. He was overjoyed with the news and couldn’t wait to hug his wife.”

Boos said she’s happy to see so many joy-filled responses to the photos online. “I hope people see love and how much love two people can have for each other and the future,” she said. “So much in the media right now is negative. It’s always nice to see something positive.”

Baby Dow is due February 11. See the full sequence of photos below.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Amid the vaults of sexual artifacts housed at the Kinsey Institute of Sex and Research in Bloomington, Indiana, there is a rather unorthodox diagram. Even the Institute doesn’t know who made it, where or why ― it was donated to their collection anonymously and is loosely dated as “20th century.” It depicts, in prudent detail, the precise way to administer a cane.

Atop the sketch of a woman’s backside (seen below), the artist specifies which regions of her rear are “areas of maximum effectiveness,” identifying them with shaded boxes. He or she also shrewdly points out that if the caner is left-handed, the directives should be reversed. “It reads like an instruction manual for how to cane someone properly,” curator Rebecca Fasman explained in a conversation with The Huffington Post. “It looks so perfect, so professional, like something this person labored over for a while. They wanted to create a very clean guide ― to caning.”

An exhibition titled “Private Eyes: Selected Artwork from the Kinsey Institute Collection” is made up entirely of such odd treasures ― handmade artworks by anonymous artist that grapple in some way with the eternally stimulating question of human sexuality.

The Kinsey Institute was founded in 1947 by controversial biologist and researcher Alfred Kinsey, widely considered to be the first major player in American sexology. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Kinsey collected thousands of individual testimonies on sexual experiences and fantasies, thereby deepening the collective scope of knowledge regarding sexual identities, proclivities and conventions. He also rather infamously engaged in research through observation and participation in performed sexual encounters.

One of Kinsey’s lesser known exploits is creating an archive of objects loosely related to sexuality ― including sculptures, drawings, ephemera, toys and antiques. When word got out that Kinsey was looking to collect articles of a sexual nature, donations flew in. Today, the Kinsey Institute houses over 100,000 items dealing with human sexuality. 

Fasman was brought aboard the Kinsey Institute team in 2015 as a consultant, organizing traveling exhibitions for this vast reserve of carnal knowledge. With her background in museum studies and curation, Fasman was immediately fixated by the range of artworks housed in the Kinsey archives. “We have really well-known artists, including Rembrandt and Matisse and Mapplethorpe and Cartier-Bresson,” she said. “But in that same collection there are works from unknown artists. Regardless, they all relate to the same experience of being human and expressing your sexuality through artwork.”

The exhibition, “Private Eyes,” which opens Aug. 12 at Intuit in Chicago, focuses on 16 handmade objects, most of which are made by unknown individuals who likely created the works with no clue whatsoever they would end up in a museum. Intuit is a nonprofit institution dedicated to exhibiting outsider art, which is loosely and contentiously defined as work made outside of, and with little influence from, the mainstream artistic institution. The term feels disenfranchising when used to categorize living, working artists, who, for one reason or another, are only acknowledged outside of the boundaries of the art world establishment. But the phrase feels more suited to the makers featured in “Private Eyes,” artists who may never have viewed themselves as artists at all.

As Fasman explained, “These pieces were made by people either just for themselves or for a very small group of people.” They weren’t intended to be enshrined on museum walls. 

Most of the works in “Private Eyes” reveal the erotic urges and sexual perspectives of everyday strangers. Gazing upon them feels as merrily wrong as opening a dusty drawer, the confines of which you were never meant to see. For example, one anonymous individual weaved a darling penis warmer from fabric and yarn. The misshapen mitten feels ahead of its time with its twee irreverence, like something you’d find on a feminist Etsy store.

The sexual landscape has changed a lot since Kinsey’s time. What was considered erotic, forbidden, abnormal and grotesque before the feminist revolution, the fight for LGBTQ rights, the birth of the internet? “In contemporary culture, pornography is very accessible,” Fasman continued. “At the time many of these pieces were made, it was not. Not to mention there were legal ramifications; if people were found with obscene images, there could be criminal charges brought against them. It’s interesting to be able to see work that was considered obscene then and think about how our idea of what obscenity is has changed.”

“Private Eyes” is its own type of peep show. Featuring handmade art objects from people we’ll never know and never truly understand, the exhibition illuminates the universal aspects of sexuality that persist from the 20th century to today. Although the works vary intensely in media, style and origin, they’re united by an urge to create and a dirty sense of humor. 

The work illuminates the longstanding relationship between creativity and sensuality, between making things and making love. That sometimes the purest form of eroticism is in the mind, not the body, and is best expressed in the realm of fantasy, not reality. 

Next time you doodle a picture of you and your lover surrounded by a million hearts, feel connected to the outsider artists past and present who’ve engaged in a similar feat. Donate it to the Kinsey Institute. You might just find your work in the 22nd-century “Private Eyes” reboot. 

“Private Eyes: Selected Artwork from the Kinsey Institute Collection” is on view until Oct. 2, 2016, at Intuit in Chicago.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

If you walk into the Italian village of Capalbio in Tuscany, you may have the strange sensation that you’ve suddenly shrunk. Massive, globular forms of divine goddesses and strange beasts tower overhead, made from ceramic tiles, mirror and glass. Sprawling women with glittering blue hair and heart-shaped nipples gossip with a tree with coiling serpents for branches. 

There are 22 works in artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s ambitious sculpture garden, each representing a Major Arcana card in the tarot deck. Out of the 78 total cards in the Tarot, the Major cards represent the formative experiences of life ― those that rip the individual out of their banal, daily existence and thrust them into incidents of transformation, growth, and understanding.

There’s the Empress, the embodiment of fertility and sensuality, who wears the universe as her jewelry. There’s the Hermit, who symbolizes one who escapes the social world to gain inner knowledge and wisdom. And there’s Death, the symbol for transformation, leaving an old self behind. 

The artist underwent a major transformation herself before embarking on the Tarot Garden. She was born to an aristocratic family in Paris, who relocated to the Upper East Side when she was a toddler. At 11, Saint Phalle was molested by her father. At 17, she was recruited to become a fashion model. At 18, she was married. Soon after, she was in a mental asylum, wanting a fresh start. 

Saint Phalle embarked on the Tarot project in the late 1970s, 20 years after her stay in a psychiatric hospital. Her husband committed her after she’d attacked his mistress and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Art healed her, and Saint Phalle wanted to spread the gift of creative healing to others. Determined to change the course of her life, Saint Phalle left her husband and children to make a career for herself as an artist. 

A member of an aristocratic family with her fair share of wealthy friends, Saint Phalle dreamed big. Really big. “I’m following a course that was chosen for me, following a pressing need to show that a woman can work on a monumental scale,” she wrote in a letter describing her vision. 

The artist’s signature artistic tropes were what she dubbed Nanas ― gigantic, bulbous, colorful women with small heads and big curves, towering divas, dancing and posing joyfully with psychedelic rainbow garb. “I think that I made them so large so that men would look very small next to them,” Saint Phalle once told an interviewer. The Nanas appear in the Tarot Garden, along with a variety of other monstrous forms that defy easy categorization. 

The garden was finally completed in 1998, after almost 30 years of work and $5 million. Saint Phalle enlisted various volunteers to assist her throughout her process, though the vision remained inexorably hers. The hallucinatory vision wasn’t initially popular in the idyllic countryside village in which it popped up, rather strangely. But now people travel the world to cohort with the chromatic Nanas and whispering snakes, to feel the overwhelming power and healing presence of art.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The Chinatown Fair is one of New York’s many great relics. The video arcade defined a slice of the city’s downtown teen culture until economic and technological change forced its closure in 2011. The venue has since been modernized and reopened, but the nostalgia for its less-digitized heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s remains. 

The Huffington Post has an exclusive collection of photos from the Chinatown Fair, which is now the subject of a documentary called “The Lost Arcade,” opening in New York this weekend and premiering on VOD platforms next month. Henry Cen, who grew up nearby and worked his way from 11-year-old floor-sweeper to game curator, captured these scenes in 2001. They showcase the diverse clientele who made the Manhattan hangout such a fertile ground for friendship and amusement.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

With great controversy often comes great art, and this election season is no exception.

Dozens of pieces featuring Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and the major issues up for debate are being produced by artists across the globe. Trump as a clown? Check. Clinton as Saint Hillary of Ark(ansas)? Yes!

The Huffington Post is bringing together the most illustrious images for our “If This Art Could Vote” project, and we invite artists to put forward their own works here.

See some of the newest submissions below, and click here for the complete list.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

These wedding photographers are at the top of their game and the pictures below are proof. 

On August 5, Fearless Photographers, a site devoted to showcasing the very best wedding photogs, released their latest collection of 114 award-winning images.

See 25 of the most remarkable shots below. 

To see the collection in full, visit the Fearless Photographers website. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.