Bedugul Coffee: Why diversity is the future of ballet ☜

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

This week we're talking about the feminist utopia of dog sledding, the pianist behind a Martin Scorsese biopic, diversity in the ballet world, the NRA's version of fairy tales, America's crowdsourced poetry, and the podcasts that want to improve your love life.

Photographer Captures The Secret Feminist Utopia Of Dog Sledding

The first time Katie Orlinsky set off for Alaska, the forecast predicted temperatures of negative 30 degrees. She had packed her camera, lenses and the warmest clothing she could find. But when she finally stepped off the plane, she found the airline had lost her baggage. Surrounded by subzero temperatures — and an assignment weighing overhead to document the Yukon Quest, the dog-sled race that wound 1,000 miles through wild Alaskan and Canadian terrain — Orlinsky was in a bit of a tight spot. And a cold one, too. But, apparently, there's a truth to the old adage about hands and hearts.

"They all lent me their clothing," she said of the airline employees, "and then the next day the bag arrived out where I needed to be. People are really kind out there. Nobody wants to watch anybody freeze," Orlinsky told The Huffington Post.

The 29-year-old photographer and native New Yorker has been flying out to Alaska since 2014 to document competitive mushers — people who steer dog sleds — and their animals. She's debuted several collections of images capturing the dogs, their human friends, and the bond between them that makes all the difference out on the trail of the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod — another, and perhaps the better known, race across 1,000 miles of mountains, forests, tundra and frozen rivers.

And — surprising to some, obvious to others — she's found a lot of women on the trails. (Read more here)

What A Black Ballerina's Path To Success Can Teach You About Workplace Diversity

Stephanie Rae Williams, who is biracial, started ballet when she was 8, and says she was the only black student in class at her Houston ballet school. "There were two of us in the studio, maybe three but the other girls were older. There were no black men or black boys either, so it was just the three of us, and in my class I was the only one," she said. She was one of the only ones in her elementary school class, too, so ballet class felt familiar, even if it didn't feel great. Because she's biracial, "I was always a little bit not-white or not-black, I'm in the middle, and I didn't really fit in anywhere," Williams said. "So I understood that I was the only black girl in the class, but I never felt like, 'Oh, I want to be with more black people,' I just thought it was normal."

But being the odd one out started feeling abnormal, and like something that could really hamper her chances of being a successful ballerina, as she grew older and started training more seriously. "The older I got, the more I realized that I really like to dance, and my teachers would always tell me, 'You should look at a more modern company,' the typical, 'You have a more muscular body type, so maybe you should look at [contemporary] companies like Hubbard Street [Dance Chicago] or Alvin Ailey [American Dance Theater],'" she explained. She persisted on the classical path, though, and it was when she got her first job, as an apprentice at the Texas Ballet Theater, that she came to see just how narrow that path was going to be for her.

She was the only black dancer in the company — in fact, she was the only non-white dancer, period, in a 30-person company. "I really felt it. You don't feel like you can relate to people and it was hard because I was young, it was my first job, so of course I was really shy." Teachers and choreographers would critique her dancing in ways that drove home that sense of difference. "I got corrections like, 'You stick out and I don't know what it is, but you need to try to fit in more,' which is a terrible correction to give someone," she said. "I just really think it broke me down a bit."

Still, she was cast as Clara in "The Nutcracker," a starring role in the production that, for most companies, is the most popular event on the performance calendar. It was a big deal, especially in Dallas, she said, "in a city that's so white." But, she said, "I think it was too progressive"; when the new season started, she wasn't cast in anything, "and in February the ballet mistress came up to me and said, '[Artistic Director] Ben Stevenson doesn't like you anymore.'"

Her contract wasn't renewed, and, having missed out on audition season, she had to scramble to find a new job. She concedes that there are multiple explanations for her negative experience in Dallas. "Maybe it was a little bit of my dancing, maybe it was also because I wasn't a good fit, but a lot of that had to do with my skin color," she said, sounding matter-of-fact but understandably hurt almost a decade later. "And that's when I really started to realize that, oh, it's going to be a bit different for me than for other girls I grew up with." (Read more here)

The NRA Finally Makes Fairy Tales Child-Friendly By Adding Guns

Have you ever noticed how exceedingly rare it is for a witch, these days, to cook and eat a couple of small children she's kidnapped? Or for a wolf to devour a little girl and her grandmother without even chewing?

If you're wondering why these misadventures, so common in centuries past as evidenced by fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Hansel and Gretel,"seem to have been largely eliminated, the answer is clear: The wide availability of modern firearms, and the solid Second Amendment rights that ensure every American can carry a high-powered weapon in order to protect him- or herself from whatsoever threat might present itself at home, at work, at the library, at school, at the public park, at the local Chili's, near the gingerbread cottage in the woods, and so on.

The NRA, outlets including NPR and The Washington Post pointed out this week, has published two updated versions of popular fairy tales on their website: "Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)" and "Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)." According to The Washington Post, author Amelia Hamilton called her rewrites "much kinder" than the originals. In both stories, you'll doubtless be unsurprised to hear, the young heroes' access to, and experience with, guns allow them to escape not only death, but hunger, imprisonment, proximity to bubbling cauldrons, and other temporary discomforts.

Actually, if we're being sticklers, it only allows them to escape the latter things, as neither Red Riding Hood and her granny, nor Hansel and Gretel, wind up deceased in the original, grim fairy tales. But apparently the guns do save their jaunts through the woods from turning into anything more than slightly eventful hunting excursions.(Read more here)

Our Poet Laureate Is Trying To Find America's Voice In A Crowdsourced Poem

How do you capture the mood of America?

In the age of #OscarsSoWhite and #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, the answer is: head to Twitter. In all its forms, social media is an omnipresent and ever-accessible gauge of human emotions. Juan Felipe Herrera, however, would like to suggest a barometer cozier in the 18th century than the 21st. And that is a very long, crowdsourced poem. (Read more here)

8 Podcasts To Improve Your Love Life

Audio that will help you feel more deeply, whether single, attached or anywhere in between.

1.The Heart
2. Modern Love
3. Dear Sugar Radio
4. Savage Lovecast
5. Plz Advise
6. The Lonely Hour
7. Guys We F****d
8. This Is Why You're Single

(Read more here)

Meet The Brilliant Pianist Behind Martin Scorsese's Upcoming Biopic

Over his long and celebrated career, pianist Byron Janis has experienced triumphs and challenges unknowable to most of us. He's overcome injury and illness to maintain a storied career, performed in Soviet Russia in the midst of frenzied anti-American sentiment. He's even spoken out about brushes with the paranormal.

In January, Variety reported that Paramount was developing a biopic on Janis' life with Martin Scorsese, based on the pianist's autobiography, Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Paranormal. But who is this piano maestro? In a phone conversation on March 24, Janis' 88th birthday, he reflected on a life likely unfamiliar in its particulars to many Americans today, but one that powerfully captures the resilience that springs from an open mind and a willingness to embrace imperfection and impossibility.

When it comes to the movie itself, Janis doesn't have much to say, but his optimism about the project shines through. Details remain scant, as he expressed reticence about discussing the film before getting the go-ahead from Paramount. "We don't have details yet, and they don't want me to speak about it until they do," he told me. "I'm very happy ... I'll be involved."

Though Scorsese is now reportedly developing biopics of megastars Frank Sinatra and Mike Tyson, the film based on Janis recalls past Scorsese projects like "The Aviator," the Howard Hughes biopic that brought the reclusive mogul to the forefront of the movie-going public's consciousness. Janis may be a less familiar name than Sinatra to the casual music fan, but his life is primed for the Scorsese treatment. (Read more here)

Speaking Out About Rape Is Scary. For Some Writers, Fiction Can Help.

"The first person to tell me I was gang-raped was a therapist, seven years after the fact," novelist Jessica Knoll wrote in an essay for Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's newsletter, Lenny Letter.

It's a heartrending statement, one that makes our culture's tendency to ignore or undermine rape victims clear. As a consequence, repressed emotions, shame and denial are common responses to the crime. Understanding what happened to oneself as rape can be harrowing or impossible when similar acts aren't publicly discussed as such; it's no wonder Knoll was unsure. But, the recent groundswell of women publicly announcing that they were sexually assaulted gave her confidence. What happened to her was rape, even if her peers at the time refused to label it as such.

Knoll's essay detailing her rape and her attempts to process it is especially powerful in light of her debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, which deals with similar themes. The book's protagonist, Ani, is gang-raped and publicly humiliated at a young, impressionable age. She seeks an indirect sort of revenge by living an outwardly impressive life, but learns that glamour can't stand in for intrinsic peace. In the book's dedication, Knoll wrote, "To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world, I know," prompting fans to ask whether the author had endured the same hardships as her heroine. Until recently, she claimed she hadn't, or was evasive.

"I've been running and I've been ducking and I've been dodging because I'm scared," Knoll wrote on Lenny Letter. "I'm scared people won't call what happened to me rape because for a long time, no one did."

In the essay, she rehashes her attempt to confront one of the boys who raped her. The next day, "trash slut" was scrawled across her locker. Terrified, she apologized to him, and never referred to the crime as rape again, until writing the piece for Lenny. Instead, she created a character who had endured similar traumas. Perhaps because she felt unsafe or unsure discussing her own rape, Knoll — like many other authors who have been victims — turned to fiction first. (Read more here)

God Is A Woman In Previously Forgotten Feminist Exhibit 'The Sister Chapel'