Kurt Vonnegut once said that practicing any art ― no matter how badly ― makes the soul grow. “So do it,” he wisely advised.

Psychologists have now come to a similar conclusion. According to a recent study out of New Zealand, engaging in creative activities contributes to an “upward spiral” of positive emotions, psychological well-being and feelings of “flourishing” in life. 

This isn’t just good news for people who work in creative fields. Anyone who finds time for creative hobbies and side projects like writing in a journal, sketching, crafting or playing the ukulele is likely to experience the same effect. 

For the study, which was published Nov. 17 in the Journal of Positive Psychology, 658 volunteers were asked to keep a diary for 13 days, rating how creative they had been over the course of the day and describing their overall mood. Creativity was defined as coming up with new ideas, expressing oneself in an original way or spending time engaged in artistic pursuits. 

Each day, the participants also rated how much they felt they were “flourishing” ― which the researchers define as experiencing positive personal growth ― by assessing things like how engaged they felt in their daily activities and how rewarding their social interactions were. 

A clear pattern emerged in the diary entries. Immediately after the days participants were more creative, they said they felt more enthusiastic and energized ― in other words, they were flourishing more. 

“This finding suggests a particular kind of upward spiral for well-being and creativity,” Dr. Tamlin Conner, a psychologist at New Zealand’s University of Otago and the study’s lead author, stated in a press release. “Engaging in creative behavior leads to increases in well-being the next day, and this increased well-being is likely to facilitate creative activity on the same day.”

Creating and expressing ourselves gives us a sense of purpose, according to Tony Wagner, a senior research fellow at Harvard and author of Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

Creativity can also help lower stress and anxiety, enhance resilience and contribute to a sense of playfulness and curiosity. Engaging in creative activities and art-based therapies has also been linked to improved physical and mental health. 

But if you don’t consider yourself an “artist,” don’t worry. You don’t have to have any particular creative talents to benefit from creative activity. Anything from experimenting with a new dinner recipe to creating a mood board on Pinterest can give you that creative boost. 

As the study’s authors concluded, “Finding ways to encourage everyday creative activities, not just master works of art, could lead directly to increased well-being.”

Happy upward spiraling! 

-- 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 ladies of Twitter never fail to brighten our days with their brilliant ― but succinct ― wisdom. Each week, HuffPost Women rounds up hilarious 140-character musings. For this week’s great tweets from women, scroll through the list below. Then visit our Funniest Tweets From Women page for our past collections.       

-- 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 American public loves everything just a little bit dark and twisted these days ― superhero movies, comedies, and even children’s books. So Bad Little Children’s Books fits right into the market: Billed as “Kid-Lit Parodies, Shameless Spoofs, Offensively Tweaked Covers,” the rather hefty volume is a children’s book for adults in the form of an old-fashioned Little Golden Book. 

On closer inspection, the book is packed with racist, xenophobic, and religious bigotry ― neither a successful spoof nor acceptable.

The book compiles dozens of schmaltzy children’s book covers edited with new titles, subtitles, authors, and slightly tweaked images. Even the relatively innocuous spoofs fall fairly flat on the humor front; “My First Little Boob Job” and “The 3 Little Future Bacon Strips” are such half-hearted jokes they barely elicit sighs of acknowledgement, let alone chuckles. 

More disturbing are the many insidious and overt instances of bigotry ― perhaps intended to poke fun at racial, religious and ethnic stereotypes, but in practice only emphasizing them:

On a pure craft level, the publisher and creators of the book should be embarrassed by how lazy and hackneyed it is to use “Asians suck at driving” as the punchline.

Though the book, published by Abrams Image, an imprint of Abrams Books, actually came out in September, it was resurfaced today by a BookRiot blogger, Kelly Jensen, who was deeply troubled by what she found inside: “Dark horror and dark comedy really appeal to me. But there comes a point when ‘funny’ becomes straight up hate and when that hate is straight-up racist,” she writes. She also points out that the Islamophobic images don’t appear in previews provided by the publisher, “nor do they show up in solid searching (by a librarian, no less).”

Bad Little Children’s Books is attributed to one Arthur C. Gackley, though this is transparently a pseudonym. (His author bio notes that he “was likely washed out to sea or fell penniless into an abandoned wishing well shaft in the winter of 1978.”) However, the images, children’s book covers with vulgar alterations, bear a striking resemblance to several published in 2012 by author and illustrator Bob Staake. One bears the title “Dead Whales Can’t Wave Back” over an image of two children waving at whale backs surfacing in the sea. Darkly funny enough, right? Then the subtitle: “And The Japanese Are To Blame.” Wholly unnecessary for the adult-level humor, but definitely racialized and offensive.

As Jensen notes, edgy children’s books for grown-ups aren’t inherently bad; in fact, they’re pretty popular. (Carrie Bradshaw even, accidentally, pitched one about a little girl named Cathy and her magic cigarettes on “Sex and the City.”) The sweet innocence of a children’s book ― a mainstay of all our childhoods ― gives an extra kick of subversiveness to any dark humor layered over it. That’s why the so-called kids’ book for adults Go the Fuck to Sleep, in itself not a particularly funny statement, became a smash hit. It parodied bedtime stories for young kids while capturing, in profane language, what many parents might really be thinking while reading yet another saccharine tale to their squirmy tots.

But it’s not enough to just label a work “spoof” or “satire,” as I wrote earlier this year, to skirt criticism. In response to Calvin Trillin’s unfortunate doggerel about Chinese regional cuisines, I wrote:

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

The same holds abundantly true for dark parodies and vulgar spoofs for adult eyes only. It’s not particularly fresh or funny to reiterate widely held prejudices against certain groups, nor is it clear, at least in Bad Little Children’s Books, whom the target of mockery is meant to be. 

Take this tableau: A white, unvaccinated child afflicted with smallpox due to a “Navajo blanket,” and a satisfied-looking “Navajo family” in the background. (It’s long been claimed that European settlers used blankets infected with smallpox to decimate Native tribes, and though historical records exist of this tactic being proposed, historians disagree on whether it was put into action.) 

So, what on earth are readers meant to take away from this? It’s frankly irresponsible to twist the likely fragile associations many have with smallpox, blankets, and Native Americans in this way. Perhaps the intent is to give the underdog Natives the upper hand at last, but the result appears to be further vilification of a severely marginalized group, complete with stereotypes and muddled history.

In one of several unpleasant parodies aimed at Islam and the Middle East, this cover portrays bloodied hands raining from the sky. It’s written by “A. Yatollah.” (Laughing yet?)

Because the stumpy hands are pouring into what looks like a rather conventional American setting ― lawn, cookie-cutter white house with a chimney and yellow shutters ― the queasy threat that Islamic fundamentalists are coming to get us with Sharia law is baked in to this joke. And, again, what is the joke? That Islamic law is purportedly violent? That it’s coming to get you in your quiet suburban home? That children don’t know about Sharia law? It’s so embarrassingly unclear what the actual punchline is that the only purpose the image serves is the same as any racist meme on Reddit: To get cheap laughs from bigots by perpetuating bigoted ideas. 

When reached for comment by The Huffington Post, the publisher replied, “Unfortunately, we are not releasing a statement at this time.”

It doesn’t have to be like this. Even within Bad Little Children’s Books, a few delightfully nihilistic parodies made me giggle, juxtaposing the goofy, uncomplicated cheer of children’s entertainment with the grim realities we adults have since learned about: 

Parody, like all forms of comedy, can be executed ineptly. A clear target and fresh humor play indispensable roles in getting it to work. So does landing the joke straightforwardly, without muddled messages.

UPDATE: Abrams Books provided the following statement to HuffPost responding to the controversy over their publication: 

-- 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 Lego Donald Trump will permanently be on the naughty list.

The plastic version of the president-elect seizes control of the North Pole just two days after his inauguration, in Alisha Brophy and Scott Miles’ latest stop-motion animated video.

And as Santa Claus, he immediately sets to work in reshaping the holidays to be exactly how he wants them ― after a little help from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

What follows is a perfect parody referencing some of Trump’s most controversial moments of the past year.

There are references to Trump’s spat with the cast of the “Hamilton” musical and his ejection of a baby from a campaign rally.

The clever clip also mentions Trump’s disgusting comments about women.

“When you’re Santa, you can do whatever. Grab ’em by the antlers,” says “Santa” Trump.

He even calls “for a total ban on Gingerbread men,” in reference to his campaign vow to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.

Check out the full video 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.

A new book documents the colorful history of Europe’s largest live street art festival.

Upfest II chronicles the last four years of the “Upfest” event, which started as a small gathering in the Bedminster neighborhood of Bristol in southwest England in 2008.

It’s since mushroomed into a focal point for graffiti artists around the world, with this year’s edition over three days in July attracting 300 painters from 40+ countries who each painted on shutters, boards and buildings across the area.

Festival organizers estimate that 1,600 artists have taken part since the event’s inception in Banksy’s home city. Upfest will return again in 2017 from July 29 to 31.  

The book (cover above) showcases 200 of those works of art, with the majority of the photographs taken by visitors and selected via a competition. A selection of them are below:

Upfest II is available to buy via the Upfest website here.

And see how 2016’s event went down here:

-- 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 fire that ripped through an Oakland, California, warehouse during a dance party has left at least nine people dead, though officials said Saturday they are still searching the structure and the death toll could be as high as 40.

The fire started around 11:30 p.m. Friday in a warehouse three miles outside downtown Oakland with about 50 people inside the venue, according to The Washington Post. The artist space was hosting an electronic dance party by musicians Golden Donna when the blaze began.

The bodies of nine people had been recovered by Saturday night, and more than two dozen were unaccounted for, Sgt. Ray Kelly, spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, said. Responders were able to observe additional bodies, but were not yet able to recover them yet, Kelly said. 

Authorities said on Saturday they will need a minimum of 48 hours to start clearing the building. Shifting walls and debris have made the process slow going.

“We had to stop operations because the building is so unsafe. It’s very, very hard,” Kelly said.

Authorities are “prepared to deal with up to 30 to 40 deceased people,” he said.

More than 70 firefighters rushed to the scene, Oakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach-Reed told the Post.

“This is pretty tragic for us,” Deloach-Reed told the publication. “It is hitting this community pretty hard. I don’t even want to talk about how the families and friends are feeling. We have a community that’s hurting.”

Bob Mule told KTVU-TV that he tried saving a friend who had an injured ankle but wasn’t able to.

“It was too hot, too much smoke,” Mule told the station. “I had to get out of there. I literally felt my skin peeling and my lungs being suffocated by smoke. I couldn’t get the fire extinguisher to work.”

Spokesman Kelly said many of those inside the building were young.

Officials on social media have shared their condolences, including California Gov. Jerry Brown. 

Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf thanked first responders at a press conference Saturday afternoon.

“I spent my morning...focusing on the families of the loved ones that are waiting to hear info and waiting for us to address this very complicated and devastating scene,” she said.

The warehouse was not equipped with sprinklers and the fire caused the building’s roof to collapse. Multiple artist studios in the space were also cluttered with furniture, statues and other large objects, according to The Associated Press. The second floor had only one exit ― a makeshift stairwell, officials said. 

Last month, city officials cited the owner of the warehouse after a neighbor filed a complaint about trash piling up around the building, the East Bay Times reported. 

“Also, a lot of items are left on the sidewalk near the property,” the complaint said. “Some of trash was hazardous. This property is a storage but the owner turned it to become trash recycle site.” 

The following day, officials launched an investigation into an illegal interior structure, documents obtained by the East Bay Times shows. 

The cause of the fire is still unknown. An event page on Facebook showed 176 people planned to attend the party. That page is now being used for family members and friends trying to contact loved ones.

The Oakland A’s and Raiders said they would match donations for those affected by the tragedy up to $30,000. The Golden State Warriors announced a donation of $50,000 and held a moment of silence before their Saturday night game. Donations can also be made to YouCaring, which was nearing a goal of $150,000 by Sunday morning.

Officials have released a document in progress intended to identify missing people.

-- 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.

Just change the channel already.

President-elect Donald Trump has once again tweeted how angry he is about Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him on “Saturday Night Live.”

Following this weekend’s episode, Trump didn’t waste any time in blasting the show as “unwatchable,” “totally biased” and “not funny” ― while saying Baldwin’s impersonation “just can’t get any worse.”

Here’s how the clearly thicker-skinned Baldwin replied:

This week’s cold-open skit centered around the Trump character retweeting random people, including a high school student, during what should have been an important security briefing.

“There is a reason actually that Donald tweets so much,” said Kate McKinnon, who was playing Trump campaign manager and top aide Kellyanne Conway. “He does it to distract the media from his business conflicts and all the very scary people in his Cabinet.”

To which Baldwin-as-Trump replied: “Actually, that’s not why I do it. I do it because my brain is bad.” Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon even made an appearance, as the Grim Reaper.

In November, Trump petulantly dubbed the show “totally one-sided” and “biased.” The previous month, while he was still on the campaign trail, he said it was “boring and unfunny” and called for it to be scrapped ― conveniently forgetting he actually hosted the show in November 2015.

Check out the clip 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.

A new book is taking a compelling look at the history of faux-lesbian fantasy photography and the practice’s relationship to the male gaze.

Lesbians For Men is a first of its kind coffee table book that brings together photography from over the decades that explores female sexuality created in relationship with the straight male sexual desire.

The book is authored and edited by Dian Hanson who began her publishing career as an American pornographic magazine editor, historian, and occasional model. Her background informs much of Lesbians For Men, with Hanson most famous for serving as the editor of Juggs and Leg Show sexual fetish magazines.

Many of the woman depicted in these images are actually straight ― but history and the way the images are framed and marketed would communicate otherwise.

“I like my books to educate as well as entertain,” author and editor Dian Hanson told The Huffington Post. “I was researching what’s out there, what others were publishing, and saw several books with photos of women together ― what we called girl/girl back in the porn business ― all maintaining the time-worn fantasy of ‘young girls exploring their bi-curiosity.’ I thought, ‘Why not shake this up? Why not make an honest book about the history of faux lesbian photography aimed, as it all is, at the straight male gaze?’ I’m a big fan of sexual truth, and believe we can know the truth without sacrificing the fantasy.”

Check out a more extensive interview with Hanson below, as well as some images from Lesbians For Men.

The book stretches from 1890 to the present. Tell us some of the biggest changes that have occurred over the last century regarding these kind of images.


The most obvious change is the rise and fall of explicit imagery. At the dawn of photography all nude images were produced outside the law, with no attempt to conform to law, and were therefore uncensored. Most images were made in France, where prostitution was legal, so it was easy to find models willing to take on any subject, as they were performing these acts in their professional lives already. This continued on up until WWII, when European photographers were, in many cases, imprisoned and killed. After the war production moved to the U.S. and was constrained by American morality and laws that condemned all gay imagery as perversion. All of this loosened as obscenity statutes were struck down in the 1970s, but even into the 1990s American prisons disallowed images of the most tepid and unrealistic “lesbian” sex as perversion dangerous to prison order.

Many queer people find these kinds of images ― “lesbian” content for straight men ― to be degrading and even dangerous to the lives and experiences of queer women. What, if anything, useful can come from viewing / talking about them?


Unlike other books with similar photos there is NO pretext that these women are lesbians. Just the opposite, the text is a well-researched, accurate exploration of why men respond to such imagery, and informs the male audience that such photos are staged, overwhelmingly, by straight women solely for the purpose of male titillation. When I see fantasy repeated so often it becomes truth, I have to step in. I am here to educate, as real sexual education is shockingly rare.    

For some queer women, this kind of content might have been the first (and only) woman-4-woman content they could find for themselves. Can you address the radical nature of repurposing and/or reappropriating this content by and for queer audiences?


I produced magazines targeted to heterosexual men for 25 years before coming to TASCHEN, and from the very beginning I received letters from women who repurposed these images for their own pleasure, including one from my best friend in adolescence. Thus, this doesn’t seem very radical ― rather, entirely natural. On Our Backs, under Susie Bright, was a great contribution to female sexuality in the 80s, but since fantasy refuses to draw inside the lines, many women still preferred, and prefer, those straight girls in the men’s magazines. Just as readers of my old foot fetish magazine masturbated to shoe photos in Vogue. Repurposing is ecologically, and sexually, sound.   

What do you hope readers / viewers take away from the book?


Truth and beauty. 

Lesbians For Men will be available for order later this month.

-- 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.

At least 24 people died in the fire that erupted Friday night during an Oakland, California, warehouse dance party, fire officials said Sunday morning.

Authorities said the death toll could be as high as 40, and that they still have 80 percent of the building left to search. About 50 people were inside the artist space venue when the fire started around 11:30 p.m. on Friday. 

While the search for bodies continues, the fire is already the deadliest to hit Oakland since 1991, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The warehouse, which was hosting an electronic dance party by musicians Golden Donna when the blaze started, had several fire safety issues. It was not equipped with sprinklers; multiple artist studios were cluttered with furniture, statues and large objects; and the second floor’s only exit was a makeshift stairwell, officials said. 

The search will continue for a few more days, Oakland Fire Department battalion chief Melinda Drayton said Sunday.

“This will be a long and arduous process, but we want to make sure we’re respecting the victims and their families and our firefighters’ safety to work slowly and carefully through the building,” she said. 

They’re removing debris “literally bucket by bucket,” Drayton added. 

“I can tell you when I was in there throughout the evening, the somber approach that our firefighters and Alameda County Sheriff’s department members took to this search,” she said. “It was quiet, it was heartbreaking.”

The cause of the fire remains unknown. 

“We don’t believe we’ve even gotten close to the point of origin of the fire,” Drayton said. 

Alameda County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ray Kelly said authorities will begin releasing victims’ names later on Sunday after his department has finished notifying and consoling their families.  

This article has been updated with comment from Melinda Drayton.

-- 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.

UPDATE: 2:10 p.m. ― Later on Monday, Bana Alabed’s Twitter account was back up online. It’s still not clear why it disappeared.

PREVIOUSLY: A seven-year-old Syrian girl’s Twitter account has mysteriously shut down.

Bana Alabed’s Twitter account had gained more than 100,000 followers since she and her mother Fatemah began tweeting about their experiences in the war-torn city of Aleppo in September.

Their documentation of the shocking daily ordeals they faced in the rebel-held eastern part of the city even caught the attention of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who sent the youngster the full set of her fantasy novels after learning she was a fan.

But on Sunday, multiple media outlets reported that the mother and daughter’s account had suddenly vanished from the micro-blogging service. Clicking on the handle now brings up a page that states, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

According to CNN, the duo’s last tweet read: “We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day dear world. Bye. - Fatemah #Aleppo.”

As of early Monday, there was no indication of what had happened to the pair, nor what exactly had caused the Twitter account to vanish.

Concerned fellow tweeters expressed their fears via the #WhereIsBana hashtag.

Rowling herself also retweeted several posts from the Free Syria Media Hub’s account:

While some had questioned whether the Twitter account was real, Fatemah, who is a teacher, gave a video interview with the BBC in October. She called the accusations “disappointing.”

“All the words come from the heart,” she said. “All are the truth.”

-- 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.

While Theodore Geisel ― better known as Dr. Seuss ― is frequently celebrated for rhyming “cat” with “hat” and “one fish, two fish” with “red fish, blue fish,” the iconic children’s book author and illustrator could deliver a razor-sharp political cartoon, too.

Between 1941 and 1943, a decade before he published The Cat in the Hat, Seuss drew over 400 comics for the left-wing political magazine PM. 

Seuss, of Jewish German descent and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, was devastated by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and similarly outraged by America’s initial ambivalence to it. “I think he just got mad,” Judith Morgan, coauthor of the book Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, said in an interview with The Atlantic. “He saw the growing threat in Europe and thought the Americans were not paying attention.”

Drawing in his signature style of swooping trees with cloud-like leaves, Seuss lambasted Hitler and everything he stood for. In his cartoons he rendered the fascist dictator as a mad scientist, a trophy hunter, and a bureaucrat giving orders to the devil. Although somewhat childlike in their aesthetic, Seuss’ drawings tackled the most terrifying 20th-century issues plaguing Germany and beyond. 

Some of Seuss’ most insightful cartoons, posted online by Imgur user moriartytheking, have been making the rounds on the internet recently, for obvious reasons. While a significant portion of the U.S. struggles to determine whether the appropriate reaction to President-elect Donald Trump’s win should be one of disappointment or utter terror, Seuss’ drawings present an example of what it looks like to witness and resist through art. 

Today’s authors have not shied away from drawing certain parallels between 1940s Germany and contemporary America. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in an essay for The New Yorker: “Now is not the time to tiptoe around historical references. Recalling Nazism is not extreme; it is the astute response of those who know that history gives both context and warning.”

Seuss’ drawings are another reminder of the subversive role artists and writers can play in the coming years. And if they do it with rhyming couplets and adorable turtles, all the better. 

-- 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.

In 1963, a protestor scrawled the words “End White Supremacy” onto a sign and carried it during a civil rights march in New York. Over 50 years have passed and, disgracefully, the message pleading for the most essential of human rights remains just as relevant. 

In 2008, digging through archival photographs, artist Sam Durant found an image of the ‘60s sign. Durant creates large-scale lightboxes featuring language culled from various protests and demonstrations throughout history, often focusing on the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panther protests. He gravitates towards words whose relevance is not bound up with any one time or event, whose message resounds regardless.

The artist scanned and cropped the sign’s language to create one such text-based artwork, which was mounted on the exterior of New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery just around the time America elected its first black president until 2009.

On Nov. 29, however, the piece was restored to the Paula Cooper Gallery facade. The sign’s return is a response to the recent election of Donald Trump, who, as a candidate, was widely accused of feeding off the racism, misogyny and xenophobia lingering on the fringes of the American psyche, giving bigotry a platform and ushering it into the mainstream. 

Gallery owner Paula Cooper explained the importance of using skills and resources to fight against the normalization of hate and fear in an interview with Hyperallergic.

“We should, as spaces available and open to the public, do whatever we can to resist and overcome whatever abominations are about to confront us,” Cooper said. “How we best do that is the question.”

An identical version of the lightbox was also on view ― somewhat surreally ― at Art Basel Miami Beach, courtesy of Blum & Poe Gallery. The uncomfortable juxtaposition of locales highlights the strange space the art world occupies in the election aftermath, with so many artists working to magnify injustice and empower action within a system catering primarily to the wealthy elite. The piece is on sale for $75,000. 

If that’s not quite in your budget, stop by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York to see the powerful sign in the flesh. Cooper told Hyperallergic she does not know how long the piece will be on public view, but here’s hoping it will never feel quite so painfully relevant again.

-- 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.

After lightly scandalizing the highbrow literary world by RSVPing “no” to the awards ceremony and banquet where his Nobel Prize in Literature would be awarded, iconic singer-songwriter Bob Dylan told the Nobel Foundation that he wrote a “speech of thanks” that will be read at the event. 

The first musician to be awarded the Nobel in Literature, Dylan was a long-standing figure in speculation about possible honorees but also a shocking choice for the prize. His selection was divisive, garnering both strong pushback from literary purists and exultation from fans and proponents of genre expansion.

In mid-November, he informed the Nobel Foundation that he would be unable to attend the ceremony and banquet due to “pre-existing commitments.” 

The artist remained silent regarding his award for nearly two weeks after it was announced on Oct. 13, finally accepting the prize in a call to Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless,” he said, according to a Nobel Foundation press release.

After he declined to attend the awards ceremony, the Swedish Academy released a statement noting that his absence would be “unusual, to be sure, but not exceptional,” and adding that they “look forward to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture, which he must give ― it is the only requirement ― within six months counting from December 10, 2016.” 

It is unclear whether Dylan’s “speech of thanks” is intended to fill this requirement or whether a more full address will be delivered in person at some point over the next six months. 

-- 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’ve ever listened to the classic Christmas song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” then you know it’s a really screwed up tune.

A couple from Minneapolis, Minnesota, found the ditty so unnerving that they decided to revamp it for a modern audience, reworking the lyrics to “emphasize the importance of consent,” according to CNN.

The original 1944 lyrics by Frank Loesser include problematic lines like, “What’s in this drink?” crooned by a woman and “What’s the sense in hurtin’ my pride?” by the man.

The duo, singer-songwriters Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski, told CNN that they felt that the original song was “aggressive and inappropriate,” arguing that the listener never finds out what happens to the woman in the song.

“You never figure out if she gets to go home. You never figure out if there was something in her drink. It just leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth,” said Liza.

The couple’s revised lyrics are adorably consensual, opening with “I really can’t stay” sung by Liza and “Baby, I’m fine with that” sung by Lemanski.

Most notably, when Liza sings, “I ought to say no, no, no,” Lemanksi responds with “You reserve the right to say no.”

The rest of the lyrics include a reference to Pomegranate La Croix (we’re unclear as to whether or not this flavor exists, but we’d totally drink it if it were real), as well as plans for a date at The Cheesecake Factory. Listen to the whole thing here:

The couple hopes that the song raises awareness for the need for consent and that “people will donate to charity or do some volunteer work at shelters or sexual assault centers.” 

We can’t wait to see if they rewrite any other classic tunes. We’ll be sipping some La Croix while we wait.

-- 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.

Though Francisco Franco’s totalitarian Spanish regime was toppled nearly 40 years ago, its legacy is still present in the country. Walk through the cities of Spain, and you’re likely to find streets named after regime members like general José Millán Astray, attorney Adolfo Muñoz Alonso, minister José Enrique Varela, and many more (link in Spanish).

But not for long.

In February, the government—applying a 2007 law that promised to get rid of the marks of autocratic heritage in public spaces—announced it would retire these street names. Now, cities around the country are renaming them after women, answering the complaint that about 90% of streets in Spain’s cities are named after men—and those honoring women usually reference saints (link in Spanish).

Janette Sadik-Khan, former New York City transportation commissioner, once famously said, “if you can change the street, you can change the world.” If she’s right, Spain is on its way to a metaphorical revolution. Since 2005, the city of Cordoba has enforced a mandate that half of new streets be named after women. In Barcelona, the total number of streets named after women went from 7% in 1996 to 27.7% in 2010 (link in Spanish).

To further correct the imbalance, Valencia will now name 80% of its new streets after women, and Bilbao, Oviedo and Cádiz plan to follow that example.

Many of the streets have or will be named after Spanish women targeted during Franco’s regime, including activists, revolutionaries, and civil rights fighters, such as Soledad Cazorla, the first public prosecutor to specialize in gender violence. Others will carry the names of women of remarkable talent, from Spain and the rest of the world, who distinguished themselves in fields such as physics, or equal rights movements. In the city of Léon, where the selection of name is made by popular vote, a recent group of possible street names included American civil rights activist Rosa Parks, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, English novelist Jane Austen, and Spanish inventor Ángela Ruiz Robles.

Other countries should take note: the lack of streets named after women is far from just a Spanish problem. In Rome, for instance, only 3.5 percent of streets carry a woman’s name. In 2015, a study of seven world metropolis (London, Paris, San Francisco, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore) found that only 27.5% streets were named after women.

This article originally appeared on Quartz.

-- 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 man regarded as the leader of a ragtag artist collective in Oakland, California, is facing criticism over a Facebook post he wrote in response to a deadly fire at the group’s homebase. 

Derick Ion is the head of the Oakland Ghost Ship artists’ warehouse, where the fire broke out just before midnight Friday during a rave. At least 36 people are confirmed dead, and many more are still missing.

Shortly after the fire, Ion posted a Facebook message saying: “Confirmed. Everything I worked so hard for is gone. Blessed that my children and [wife] Micah were at a hotel safe and sound ... it’s as if I have awoken from a dream filled with opulence and hope ... to be standing now in poverty of self worth.”

The post has since been deleted. 

People slammed Ion in hundreds of replies, astounded that he hadn’t mentioned the people who had died. Many also implied that he should bear some responsibility for the tragedy because of his role in the collective.

“I’m devastated,” Michael Allison, who identified himself as Ion’s father-in-law, told The Huffington Post over the phone. “Those poor people. They had no idea how unsafe that building was.”

He said Ion ran rave parties to “get as much money as he could” and called the warehouse space “a fire trap.”

Neither Ion nor his wife replied to Facebook messages or phone calls requesting comment.  

The Ghost Ship group is also known as the Satya Yuga Collective. Affiliated artists and musicians describe themselves on Facebook as “an unprecedented fusion of earth home bomb bunker helter skelter spelunker shelters.” 

The cause of the fire isn’t yet known. However, officials say artists were living illegally in the building in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, and that no one affiliated with the building had the proper safety permits to inhabit rooms or to use the warehouse as a party venue. One resident told CNN that at least 20 people were living there.

City inspectors had visited the building on Nov. 17 to launch an investigation after people complained that trash had been piling up at the warehouse, CNN reports. Officials have identified several fire safety issues with the building, including evidence that it didn’t have sprinklers and only had two exits available.

Chor N. Ng owns the building through a trust, according to property records reviewed by the East Bay Express.

Ng’s daughter told the Los Angeles Times that the building was leased as studio space to an artist collective. She also told the Times that no one lived in the warehouse, but that the lease holder had told her people sometimes worked there overnight. 

-- 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.

Learning the history of pop music in America is inherently a fun exercise. 

These are songs, after all, that were made for easy recall, with hooks and rhythms that speak of universal feelings: love, loss, and good times. Marc Myers’ Anatomy of a Song — a spinoff of his Wall Street Journal column where he interviewed major musicians (think Debbie Harry, Stevie Wonder, Keith Richards and Smokey Robinson) to learn the origin stories of some of the most-well known songs over five decades — reads like a dream karaoke playlist. Not a dud in sight. 

Of the 45 songs featured in Myers’ book, I was alive for the release of just two: Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time” and R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” Reading his book, this fact is irrelevant. The tunes and lyrics of “My Girl,” “London Calling,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and countless other timeless tunes swirled in my head as I read. Where did this knowledge come from, if not direct lived experience? How do these songs earn their spot in our collective knowledge, while others fade into obscurity for only the most devoted fans of a genre to hear and scrutinize?

“By calling these hits iconic, I owed a certain amount of responsibility, and that is to define the word iconic,” Myers explained to me over the phone. “My definition of an iconic song is something that lasts the test of time. But then the question is: What is time?” He settled on a quarter century, enough years for a new generation to take the place of an older one. 

While Myers’ WSJ column didn’t have as cohesive a feel, he found that collecting his interviews and arranging them in chronological order allowed a new narrative to emerge. 

“I wanted to create a horizontal pull, so that if all you did was read the introductions, you’d get a great story on the rise of R&B and rock ‘n’ roll and soul and reggae and female folk singer-songwriters ... there’s a story unfolding that goes beyond, that transcends just these interviews,” said Myers. It’s a good overview of major staples from the 20th century in American pop music as opposed to being a comprehensive list.

With each song history comes a brief overview of the time period from which it came forth: “Please Mr. Postman” arose from record companies’ decision to steer away from suggestive rock ‘n’ roll toward massively appealing, softer songs in the 1950s. The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was released as both a seven-minute and a two-minute version, the former more closely resembling the band’s live performances, which were lengthy and meandering to appeal to an LSD-loving crowd.

Differences between artistic inspiration and record company interests are a common theme. While reading the chapter on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” Myers said, “you start to realize that [guitarist] Jimmy Page abhorred singles ... He wanted to create a bigger, longer, larger canvas.” Attitudes like Page’s, Myers explained — along with the rise of FM radio stations that had airtime to fill — led to the trend of rock albums being treated as a whole musical product, instead of a mere catalog of singles. Of course, the record company did cut down “Whole Lotta Love” into a single format.

“You start to see that there’re reasons why these things happen and reasons why they sound the way they do at these specific periods of time,” said Myers.

The other benefit to Myers’ book is, naturally, hearing about the creation of pop music’s best-known songs straight from the creators themselves — and being able to see them in a whole new light.

“I’m a fan of the music, because I grew up with the music, so I live and breathe it,” Myers explained. “But I don’t view them the way a fan would. I view them as if I’m in Rome going to churches to look at art.” He continued, “I wasn’t coming to talk about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I was coming to talk about the art of what they did. Only the art.”

Myers cited his interview with Stevie Wonder as a standout moment. Myers was talking with the musician about the technical details of “Love’s in Need of Love Today” — a song that, in the book, Wonder reveals was first recorded using a cassette recorder, allowing him to preserve his initial inspiration “like a sketch.”

When Myers asked Wonder a question about the song, “the line went quiet,” he explained.

“I was starting to think to myself, ‘Oh, boy, maybe that was not a great question, This interview is going to be over,’” he said. “The next thing I hear, maybe 30 seconds later ... I hear, ‘Marc, can you hear me?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.’ And he starts to sing the entire song while he’s playing this instrument that he has at home called the harpejji — and it’s sort of a combination between piano and guitar. He was trying to explain what he was trying to do with the vocals, and he just felt [he had to] take the phone into his studio at home and sing it. In every single song, something like this happened.”

Anatomy of a Song is out now from Grove Press.

-- 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’re tired of the same old vanilla sex positions, the latte art in the video above is sure to be a treat. 

In a genius move, the folks over at Glamour magazine asked barista Michael Breach to illustrate the seven best sex positions for women to achieve orgasm. For instance, one is the “the lotus position,” where the woman is on top and fully in control: 

Is there anything latte artists can’t do?! Watch the full clip above to see all the positions. 

-- 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 television series based on Tejano singer Selena’s life may never air thanks to a lawsuit filed by her father, Abraham Quintanilla, against his daughter’s widower, Chris Perez.

Perez and the production company, Endemol Shine North America, announced plans to adapt the widower’s 2012 memoir, To Selena, With Love, into a series about the pair's love story on Nov. 15.

But on Friday, Quintanilla filed a lawsuit in Nueces County, Texas against Perez, his production company Blue Mariachi and Endemol, alleging that his former son-in-law could not “exploit” the name and likeness of Selena due to a prior contractual agreement. 

The lawsuit accuses Perez of violating a contract signed two months after Selena’s death in May 1995, which prevents him from telling her story without authorization. In the contract, Quintanilla argues, the widower agreed that all rights to Selena’s name, image and likeness “throughout the world in perpetuity, without restriction” belonged to her estate. In return, the widower agreed to receive 25 percent of the net profits from “the exploitation of the [estate’s] Entertainment Properties.” 

That means both Perez’s “unauthorized book” and his plans to adapt it into a TV series breach the contract he signed more than two decades ago, according to the complaint. 

The lawsuit comes after Endemol refused to halt production on the series despite having been issued a cease and desist letter last month, the Quintanilla estate’s attorney Simran Singh told The Huffington Post.

“The only alternative we had at that point was to file the petition,” Singh told The Huffington Post. “At this time, [Quintanilla wants] Endemol and Chris, as well as Chris’ production company Blue Mariachi to agree to halt any and all production of series, television, movie, anything of the like, regarding Selena.”

While the lawsuit alleges that Perez’ memoir also breached his 1995 contract, Singh said they don’t currently plan to include the book’s publisher in the case. When asked about why Quintanilla didn’t file anything against Perez when he first released the book in 2012, the attorney said: “I can’t comment to that.” 

Endemol did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

-- 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.

Now here’s a gift that’ll heat up your holiday season.  

Asian-American actors, writers, and celebrities struck their most ~fire~ poses for the second annual “Haikus On Hotties 2017” calendar. The sizzlin’ book, which was released on Monday, features the models along with poems “about their hotness,” Ada Tseng, the project’s creator, told The Huffington Post. 

Because hey, why not? 

Through the project, Tseng aims to show that Asian dudes are just as deserving of those dreamy lead roles in mainstream movies and television as anyone else. 

“It’s always fun to try and shatter stereotypes, especially when you can combine hot men with poetry,” she said. “I hope our silly calendar makes people realize how silly it is that Asian men aren’t often cast as desirable romantic leads in the mainstream media ― and how easy it is to change.”

While the guys in the calendar are easy on the eyes, unfortunately not everyone sees Asian men as attractive. In fact, the group experiences the most difficulty finding a date, according to data from OKCupid.

And Hollywood definitely hasn’t helped in changing peoples’ perceptions of Asian men. Asians only landed 3.9% of speaking roles in film, TV or digital media ― compare that to 73.7% that Whites occupy. While diversity was a huge theme host Chris Rock addressed during the last Academy Awards ceremony, Asians were not only excluded from the conversation, but at one point were even made the butt of Rock’s jokes.

Luckily this calendar illustrates exactly what Hollywood’s lacking. Its pages are filled with big names in the Asian-American community including Gerrard Lobo, who plays Anush in “Master Of None,” and Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. It retails for $19.99 and the proceeds will go towards Angry Asian Man, a blog focused on Asian-American issues. 

Tseng told HuffPost that though the project was a Kickstarter campaign that began as a joke, it’s popularity shows that people “want more hot Asian American men in their lives.”

And ya know what? We couldn’t agree more. 

Check out some more steamy “Haikus On Hotties” below. 

It’s About To Get Steamy In Here, Thanks To Justin Kim.

Joseph Vincent, You Can Serenade Us Anytime. 

Lookin’ Juicy, Michael Bow And Dan Matthews.

Vishavjit Singh, Help - Please Save Us!

OK Fine, Ronnie Woo, We’ll Get A Couples Tattoo With You.

Gerrard Lobo, Timber! We’ve Fallen For You.

To learn more or to purchase the calendar, visit the “Haikus On Hotties” website here. 

-- 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.