Bedugul Coffee: The role of photography in the fight for civil rights 📷

Culture Shift is a weekly newsletter curated by the HuffPost Culture writers and editors.

This week we're talking about the importance of photography in the fight for civil rights, an Oscar-nominated foreign film, Internet slang around the world, the books every "Broad City" fans will love, and what it means to be a male ballet dancer in an industry that so many people associate with femininity.

What Male Ballet Dancers Can Teach You About Being A Great Partner

As winter storm Jonas bore down on the East Coast on a Saturday in late January, cities announced transport and road closures. People retreated inside to Netflix and chill as snow filled the streets. Stores shut down. And then, Tiler Peck, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, posted to Instagram a video of the company being informed that the day's matinee and evening performances had been canceled.

The rehearsal studio exploded with cheers. Peck's fellow principal Sara Mearns did a giggly little victory dance and soon took to Instagram to post pictures of herself doing arabesques in the snow. It was a charming reminder of something that tutus and pointe shoes are designed to disguise: ballet dancers are people, too. They're people with jobs, just like you and me. Ballet is hard work, and even when you love your job, you get excited about a day off.

In this series, The Huffington Post profiles some of the best ballet dancers in the world, working in some of the rarest and most unusual work environments imaginable, to try to understand how they deal with the same workplace issues that confront the rest of us mere mortals. Most of us don't get literal standing ovations from hundreds of people when we do good work. And most of us don't have to visit the physical therapist at the beginning and end of every work day. But no matter what sector we're in, the big questions are the same: What does it mean to have your body under scrutiny on the job? How does it feel to be asked to represent your entire race in a company meeting? How do you find the right people to mentor and guide you?

In our first installment, we talk to Marcelo Gomes, principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, about what it means to be a man in an industry that so many people associate with femininity, and how to be such a good team member that people fight over who gets to work with you. (Read more here)

The Importance Of Photography In The Fight For Civil Rights

Some images are difficult to ignore. The dashboard camera footage of Sandra Bland's arrest, three days before her wrongful death in prison. The still image of Michael Brown's body covered by a sheet, just after the unarmed 18-year-old was fatally shot by a police officer. Protest photos of massive crowds bearing a single message, so simple it's absurd: "Black Lives Matter."

A camera is not in itself political. But the photographic tool carries with it the potential for widespread awareness, reform and revolution. Contemporary protest movements are propelled by the images and videos circulating across social media, broadcasting in plain sight the systemic injustices and atrocities still inextricably linked with blackness in America.

In 1912, when Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, photographers didn't document the lives of people of color or the struggles they were forced to endure. Simply being seen was a fight in itself, a fight to which Parks dedicated his life.

He grew up in poverty, the youngest of 15 children. After graduating high school, he worked a string of odd jobs -- a semi-pro basketball player, a waiter, a busboy and a brothel pianist. Over time, Parks became enamored with the photography of the Farm Security Administration -- how artists like Jack Delano and Dorothea Lange captured the plights of migrant workers and Depression-era communities.

"I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs," he told an interviewer in 1999, seven years before his death. "I knew at that point I had to have a camera." Eventually, Parks visited a pawn shop and purchased a camera of his own. (Read more here)

Oscar-Nominated Film 'Mustang' Perfectly Depicts What It Is To Be A Woman

The girls in "Mustang" -- particularly the youngest, Lale -- climb, curse, light furniture on fire, and escape the confines of their prison-like home whenever possible. But they are also unabashedly girlish. They call each other lovingly disparaging names, they giggle about crushes, they laze around in their swimsuits. Director Deniz Ergüven is at her strongest here, bringing to life the intimate moments shared between young women. She says she has her keen memory to thank, for storing away the details that make up the texture of a feminine life.

"It's so funny the things you say inside of a sisterhood," Ergüven said. "'Who has one boob that's bigger than the other? Your ass is fatter.' There's all that ping-ponging that's very prevalent. It's part of my intimate experience."

These candid, fluid conversations are juxtaposed in the film by strident opinions held by men speaking on TV and the radio -- unwritten laws that all women citizens should abide by, including a ban on public laughter. Ergüven said that, unsurprisingly, much of the debate surrounding her film in Turkey mirrored the language the male authorities use in the film itself. (Read more here)

LOL, Internet Slang Around The World Is More Similar Than You'd Think

Americans aren't the only ones embracing hyperbole, fragments and 😂. Check out the acronyms and abbreviations people in France, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Korea, Tunisia, Spain, United Kingdom, Greece, India, Australia, Japan and more are using. (Read more here)

8 Books To Help You Celebrate The Return Of 'Broad City'

No mo' (literary) FOMO:

1. Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth
2. Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell
3. Paulina & Fran by Rachel B. Glaser
4. "The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein
5. Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam
6. Jillian by Halle Butler
7. The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker
8. Friendship by Emily Gould (Read more here)

Book of The Week!