Bedugul Coffee: The way we talk about gender is all wrong

The Huffington Post

This week we're talking about the women of sitcoms, that "period photo" that broke the Internet, sci-fi writers' predicitons for the future, Maggie Nelson's new memoir and the mistake that led to some of Andy Warhol's best work.

Women In Sitcoms Are Getting A Lot More Three-Dimensional. And That's A Good Thing

"Audiences have flocked to female-led sitcoms like '30 Rock,' 'New Girl,' 'Parks and Recreation' and 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,' leading to an apparent boom in complex, flawed comedy heroines on TV -- but also an unsettling degree of pushback from fans and critics. The bountiful variety of women leading sitcoms today seems like cause for unmitigated celebration, but not everyone is convinced." (Read more here)

About That Period Photo That Broke The Internet

"Every artist dreams of a defining moment, but [Rupi]Kaur did not intend to incite the wrath of the Instagram gods by tackling the taboo of menstruation. She is Indian-Canadian, and sensitive to the Hindu concept that a menstruating woman is ritually unclean. An undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, she was executing a school project by testing out a theory inspired by a Susan Sontag essay on how context influences art consumption. She hoped to compare reactions on different social media platforms to a single work. Kaur's 'period photo' subsequently went viral, and not for the reasons she expected." (Read more here)

The Big Problem With How We Talk About Sex And Gender

"As a poet, Maggie Nelson is concerned with the sufficiency of words -- their ability to accurately convey how we feel, and who we are. As a visual artist, her partner Harry Dodge is less convinced. So when the two met and fell in love, a life event that her new memoir, The Argonauts, centers on, Nelson began to question her allegiance to language. 'Words,' she notes, 'change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.'" (Read more here)

10 Science Fiction Writers Predict How Our World Will Change In The Next 10 Years

"As a whimsical thought experiment, The Huffington Post asked 10 science-fiction, speculative fiction, urban fantasy and dystopian authors to answer a single question: What will the next 10 years bring? Will drones become omnipresent? Will the already dissipating line between our gadgets and ourselves fade further? Or, will things remain, more or less, the same? Read what Edan Lepucki, Jo Walton and others had to say." (Read more here)

Andy Warhol Made A Mistake That Resulted In Some Of His Best Paintings

"In the early 1980s, notorious pop artist Andy Warhol created a series called 'Rorschach.' In liquid monochromes, Warhol crafted his own 'ink blots' on massive canvases (so that they'd cost more, probably). But he got one crucial thing wrong about his subject matter. He thought that patients were actually supposed to create ink blots for psychologists to decode -- not the other way around." (Read more here)

A Love Letter To My Mother, An Artist

"Back then, I thought... that every kid grew up with a reserve of acrylic paints, an extensive knowledge of the merits of various glues, and, most importantly, a mom who could do anything. I thought everyone made their own birdhouses, hammering and painting until a tiny home just appeared, right there on the table. Like my belief in No Television Week, I was obviously ill informed. I became an adult and realized this wasn't everyone's reality, that my sisters and I, we were some of the lucky ones. (Read more here)

Cleary Wolters, The Real Alex Vause, Shares Her Story For The First Time

"Reading a new book doesn't have to mean taking a huge step away from your favorite classic authors... many authors write works that are in conversation with, influenced by, or in the same tradition as many of your favorite classics. Of the many incredible books published this year, there's bound to be at least one that you'll love as much as your favorite dog-eared Victorian romance. We've taken five beloved classics and recommended an outstanding new book from 2014 based on each. Enjoy!" (Read more here)

'Unseen Cuba' Shows Us The Island's Breathtaking Beauty Through Aerial Photographs

"Lithuanian photographer Marius Jovaiša seems to be in love with the Caribbean Sea and its surroundings. Jovaiša, the founder of Unseen Pictures, a publishing and marketing company, has previously published books that show aerial photographs and showcase the beauty of places like Belize, Cancun and the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. But his latest work is generating particular interest because it focuses on a location that most Americans don't have access to: Cuba." (Read more here)