Bedugul Coffee: All the dystopian books you should read 📚

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

This week we're talking about the romance app turning fantasy into reality, the artists inspired by the late David Bowie, why talking about reading preferences matters, and the double life of an outsider artist.

A New App Turns Your Romance Novel Fantasy Into Reality

Reading a novel isn't what it used to be.

There you sit, nose stuck in a book, á la Belle the Disney princess, when your phone buzzes with a text from your mom. After a long back-and-forth with her about when you'll be able to make it back for a visit, you finally turn back to the book. Oops, another buzz -- a text from your bestie containing just a string of random emojis. While you laugh, you swipe over to Instagram. I mean, as long as you're checking your phone. Maybe you should just toggle over to Twitter too -- surely you have some new faves on that last tweet; it was so clever. No? Well, it's only been a couple minutes. OK, back to the book; you can check Twitter again after a page.

Bookworm Belle might have been able to remain engrossed in a book even as she wandered through a plaza packed with singing villagers, but she probably wouldn't be any match for a smartphone's endless stream of alerts.

So, what if all these distractions were part of the story?

(Read more here)

Artists Around The World Reflect On The Magic Of David Bowie

David Bowie was not just a musician.

The man -- known at various points in time as Davy Jones, Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Thomas Jerome Newton, the Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane and Jareth the Goblin King -- turned his entire life into an ongoing work of performance. He changed personas as quickly as he changed hairstyles, adapting new ways of talking, moving, looking and feeling that impacted far more than his music.

An artist in almost every capacity, Bowie once proclaimed that "squishing paint on a senseless canvas" was his favorite occupation.

Here are just a few of the artists who paid tribute to him with amazing words and images, including Yoko Ono, Gary Baseman, Jean Jullien, Helen Green, and Zhang Liang.

(Read more here)

I Decided Not To Read Books By White Authors For A Year. Conservatives Lost Their Damn Minds.

"I decided not to read books by white authors in 2016. And then I tweeted about it. And all hell broke loose.

There's a worthy debate to be had about whether talking publicly about these kinds of reading plans defeats their purpose. Last week at Jezebel, Jia Tolentino argued that the "Year of Only Reading Kill All Men" takes us further from the very goal of the exercise.

I might have agreed with Tolentino, who also argues that, as writers, we want to be read for the quality of our ideas, not for the color of our skin or arrangement of our chromosomes. I certainly want that. But then I witnessed what happens when we do discuss our reading habits -- when, on the way to the better future, we are assailed by the bitter present.

It quickly became clear that, though we wish it weren't, talking publicly about a reading list designed to correct inequities and make you a better citizen of the world is -- or, at least, is interpreted as -- subversive."

(Read more here)

How A New Jersey-Born Cop Learned To Embrace His Artistic Side

Charles Sabba worked nights at a federal corrections facility and often wound up passing the time drawing the inmates faces through the cell bars. "They didn't come out looking too criminal," Sabba said. "There is a humanizing effect when you're drawing a face." He also talked to the inmates, a lot. Big gangsters and mafia informants and some art thieves as well. "I got a real fascination for art theft and art thieves."

Following his stint in corrections, Sabba became a police officer. He studied forensic drawing, hoping to incorporate artistry into his daily regimen, but rarely had the opportunity to flex his creative muscles. For a while he worked closely with an art theft investigator for the NYPD, documenting the characters in the twisted plots that so engrossed him.

This is his story of living a double life.

(Read more here)

The Dystopian Books That Put A Fresh Spin On The Old Genre