Culture Shift is a weekly newsletter curated by the HuffPost Culture writers and editors.
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This week we're talking about feminist back-to-school reading, what the art world can learn from a studio for developmental disabilities, the lack of flesh-toned pointe shoes in ballet, author Belle Boggs on childless women, a dead cat wedding, a daughter who documented her mother's bipolar disorder, and our latest book club suggestion.
Your Ultimate Feminist Back-To-School Reading List
Do your homework. Read these women writers. (Read more here.)
What The Art World Can Learn From A Studio For Artists With Developmental Disabilities
If there was a way to harness the negativity that those outside the art world often feel in its presence, and then reverse it completely, that is the generous spirit embodied by Brooklyn’s LAND Gallery. The space, a nonprofit program for artists with developmental disabilities, works with 16 adult artists every day, helping them to cultivate and promote their work. (Read more here.)
This Photo Says Everything About Being A Ballerina Of Color Today
IEvery ballerina is beholden to the rituals of keeping pointe shoes. But only dancers of color are required to go the extra step.(Read more here.)
Make These Absurdist Stories About Modern Dating Your Next Book Club Pick
Alexandra Kleeman’s new book, Intimations, is full of spare, funny stories. (Read more here.)
FYI: Childless Women Aren’t Villains
When Belle Boggs, a writer and educator living and working in North Carolina, wrote her first short story collection, she included a character undergoing fertility treatment. This was before Boggs and her husband explored in vitro fertilization treatments themselves, so the character, to her, was a symbol of yearning and unfulfilled desires.
“Not only did I get some of the details of treatment wrong, but I also just ― I feel critical when I look back at the portrayal of that character,” Boggs said in an interview with The Huffington Post. “It bothered me when I looked back, the way I included IVF as this example of grasping at something. I was just interested in how I myself ― before I experienced any of these problems on my own ― had just integrated that narrative into my thinking.”
Now, with her book, The Art of Waiting, consisting of connected essays that are both personal and rigorously researched, Boggs hopes to undo some of the myths we uphold about childlessness, fertility treatments, and the desire ― fulfilled or unfulfilled ― to have a family. (Read more here.)
For 7 Years, A Daughter Documented Her Mother’s Bipolar Disorder In Photos
“I hope that I show an honest record of my personal situation with a mentally ill, substance-abusing parent,” photographer Melissa Spitz explains. (Read more here.)
A Dead Cat’s Wedding Reveals How Humans Dealt With Death A Century Ago
Some things are cute. (Like kittens.) Some things are macabre. (Like dead kittens.) And some things are so equally perverse and adorable they skirt the apparently very thin line that separates cute and macabre.
Such is the case with Walter Potter’s “The Kittens’ Wedding,” a taxidermic spectacle from the 1890s that consists of more than a dozen dead kittens arranged at a wedding ceremony, fit with a bride, a groom and a whole lot of tiny tuxedoes. The memento mori is currently on view at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York, as part of its “Taxidermy: Art, Science & Immortality” exhibition. (Read more here.)
New Pottermore Story Reveals The Original Slytherin Antihero
Before Snape, there was another Potions master. (Read more here.)
Netflix recommendation of the week!
Need help figuring out what to watch on Netflix? Here's what our editors have to say about "Bob's Burgers": "The odd yet lovable Belchers run a burger joint in a seaside tourist town. This animated delight will make you laugh out loud while hugging your heart all at the same time."
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