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gingerhaze

did i ever show y’all my Benedict Cumberbatch impression

neoninthedark

Uncanny

nprfreshair

The man behind the most popular female comic book hero of all time, Wonder Woman, had a secret past. Creator William Moulton Marston, had a wife — and a mistress. He fathered children with each of them and they all secretly lived together in Rye, N.Y. And the best part? Marston was also the creator of the lie detector.

Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore reveals this and other surprising details about Marston in the new book The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

"I got fascinated by this story because I’m a political historian and it seemed to me there was a really important political story that had been missed that’s basically as invisible as Wonder Woman’s jet," Lepore tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

Marston, who was a famous psychologist, made up Woman Woman in 1941. He was interested in the women’s suffrage movement and in Margaret Sanger, the birth control and women’s rights activist — who was also his mistress’ aunt.

A feminist icon, Wonder Woman was an Amazon woman who forces people to tell the truth with her magic lasso. She was a controversial figure in the 1940s because of her overt sexuality and her link to bondage. Her costume was inspired by Marston’s interest in erotic pin-up art.

"There’s no simple story here," Lepore says. "There are a lot of people who get very upset at what Marston was doing … ‘Is this a feminist project that’s supposed to help girls decide to go to college and have careers or is this just like soft porn?’"

The full interview:

The Man Behind Wonder Woman Was Inspired By Both Suffragists And Centerfolds

Photo via Retronaut

smartgirlsattheparty

One of my pumpkins this year :)

nbcparksandrec

inessentialhouses

Happy Birthday, Katharine Hepburn → MAY 12, 1907 - JUNE 29, 2003

Katharine Hepburn is timeless.

I mean that in the most literal sense of the word: she doesn’t belong to every era, she belongs to no era. She’s as alien to us as she was to the Hollywood that first met her in 1932, to the audiences who had no idea what to make of this strange, swift-moving girl with a voice like a pocketful of jangling coins, lean and powerful, her face assembled neatly from a collection of angles so sharp they could cut glass. She wasn’t the type of girl you met on the street, or even the type you emulated; you were either born Katharine Hepburn or you weren’t, and there could be only one. She was a mystery, an enigma with an upturned nose and her late brother’s birthday, whose backstory was told in the gossip columns one day and denied the next. She was a bundle of kinetic energy and raw athletic prowess, as potent as the ice-cold baths she took every morning — but she was Alice Adams, too, crying against a rain-slicked windowpane and smelling of dead violets.

"You were born at the right time," she wrote in her autobiography, speaking sternly from the all-knowing vantage point of old age to what she called "that creature whom I created": Katharine Hepburn, the Actress. "You looked right. You sounded right. You were lucky. You caught on and got rich. Good. I’m glad that you’ve had a good time. Now I’m going to take over." It’s almost surprisingly self-deprecating stuff from a woman widely perceived as proud, headstrong, and wholly self-assured. It’s not luck but tenacity, personality, and talent that we can thank for the gift that is Kate, who lived ninety-six years and spent over sixty of them working — becoming known to the public first as an ingenue, then as box-office poison, then as a four-time Academy Award winner and twelve-time nominee — ultimately securing a legacy as one of the greatest screen stars of all time.

"I’ve made forty-three pictures," she wrote later, lest you overestimate her modesty. "Naturally I’m adorable in all of them."

floccinaucinihilipilificationa

teesandtanks

imnolongeronaplane

Give me this

lascasartoris

Mrs Paul Xiniwe (née Ndwanya) of the African Choir, 1891. Photographed by London Stereoscopic Company studios.

Between 1891-1893 a group of young Africans singers toured Britain and North American as the ’ African Choir’. Inspired by Orpheus M. McAdoo’s Virginia Jubliee Singers, they were a Christian choir on a mission to raise funds for a technical school in Kimberley in the Cape Colony (South Africa).

The Choir’s members included Paul Xiniwe and his wife (pictured above), Sannie Koopman, Charlotte Makhomo Manye, Johanna Jonkers, Josiah Semouse and a Miss Gwashu.

Above: African Choir, London 1891. Photograph by The London Stereoscopic Company.

Charlotte Manye (first woman on the right) was 17 years old when the African Choir arrived in London. While on tour with the Choir in the US she was offered at scholarship at Wilberforce University, the African Methodist Episcopal Church university in Xenia, Ohio. She became the first South African woman to earn a Doctorate in Arts and Humanities and she was betrothed to a fellow graduate, Dr. Marshall Maxeke.

Organisations that Dr Charlotte Manye Maxeke founded, including the the Bantu Women’s League and AME Church’s Widow’s Mite Society, were responsible for educating literally thousands of young Africans and campaigned for women’s rights in South Africa. She was an early and very active member of the African National Congress, writing much of their early literature, and a passionate advocate for African liberty.

She died in 1939 at the age of 65.

Above: Charlotte Makhomo Manye, aged 17 years old, The Illustrated London News, August 1891.

thebluths

rhettxparker

I’ve never smiled so hard in my entire life.

mymodernmet

Remarkably realistic tattoo portraits by St. Petersburg-based tattoo artist Valentina Ryabova.

lovefortv

dammit-desmond-deactivated20180

*Unarmed Black person gets killed by police* “It’s not about race they had to have done something to deserve it.”

*Black person gets a job or goes to a college* “This is obviously about race there is nothing they could have done to deserve it.”

ladernierefois-deactivated20160

HELLO.

dynamicafrica

Viola Davis for New York Magazine photographed by Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud of JUCO Photo.

“I was so desperate for people to think that I was beautiful,” she says, but now she exposes her natural hair. Her perspective fully shifted, she says, after watching her father die in 2006 from pancreatic cancer. “When you see a parent pass, it defines life for what it is,” she says, her voice trembling.

“Being concerned about my age, being concerned that I’m going to fail in a TV show—all of those things are very superficial. I don’t want my legacy being, ‘Oh, you never could see what she could fully do. She always had more in her.’ ”

danielle-writes

The Elephant Technique or How Not To Break Your Momentum During NaNoWriMo And Beyond

So there’s this thing, National Novel Writing Month, where a person writes a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. These people are referred to as crazy. I am one of them.

And there’s this guy, Chris Baty. Baty helped make NaNoWriMo a thing. He even wrote a book about it. A book about writing a book. It’s meta. In this book he gave advice on just how to write a book in 30 days. Lots and lots of advice. Because writing is hard.

Really hard.

Really, REALLY hard.

But this guy, Baty? He’s pretty smart about it. One of the things he talks about is to know your weakness as a writer. I have a bunch, but the main one is getting distracted by internetz.

See, the thing is, I try. I really do. I try to research all the things and stuff I need to research before I write, but sometimes I’ll be going on my merry way and BOOM I forgot what I named that hospital. Or BOOM I don’t know what the parts to a horse’s saddle is. So I go to Google and Google tells me. But it never stops there. I always go, “While I’m here, I might as well check [insert your time-wasting social media site of choice].” And then, BOOM - an hour has passed and I haven’t touched what I was writing.

This is no good. I need to focus and not break my momentum while I’m writing. Stopping to open a browser and searching on Google breaks my momentum. So what do I do? Research even more? As much as I’d like to think I can predict everything that happens in my plot, some things I just can’t foresee. And that’s a good thing! No, it’s great! That’s one of the best things about writing, when I’m surprised when X, Y, or Z happens.

Instead of extensive, mind-numbing research, I do this. Whenever I find myself stalling to think of a name or an adjective or literally anything else, I write elephant instead. Elephant. And then go on my merry way.

It felt really stupid when I started. The worse is when I read what I’ve written and forgot that I slapped on an elephant in the middle of an intense scene.

But it works!

I promise, I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t.

And when I edit, all I do is find each “elephant” with the search option of whatever word-processor I’m using and insert it’s rightful word - the well-researched-after-I’ve-written-the-book word. I’ve told a few people about my Elephant Technique, and I knew a few people who use different words: cantaloupe, poodle, febreze. It all works.

BOOM, distraction gone. Please enjoy BMO dancing as you go forth and write all the things.