We the Peeps.
How Well Do You Know Basic U.S. Politics?
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Watch The Rapid Progression Of The #BringBackOurGirls Twitter Hashtag
Geotagged tweets from the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign from April 23 to May 6. The Boko Haram terrorist network claimed responsibility Wednesday for the April 15 kidnapping of 276 teenage girls from their boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria.
A sample of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign:
vine.co / Via srogers.cartodb.com
This video shows the progression of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign as of May 6 from CartoDB:
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105 People That You Probably Haven't Thought About In Over 10 Years
Alternate list title: “105 People Who Were Relevant 10 Years Ago But Not So Much Today.”
1. The guy Britney Spears married in Vegas for 48 hours
2. Bam Margera
3. April Margera
4. Phil Margera
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
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Julianne Moore Was Once In A Time-Life Books Commercial In The Late '80s
And apparently she had an out-of-body experience.
Do you remember Time-Life's Mysteries of the Unknown book series?
Via goodwillhunting4geeks.blogspot.com
The creepy series explored unexplained supernatural phenomenons.
Like the woman who foresaw a schoolhouse buried in an avalanche...
Time Life
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This Vine Of A Teen Catching His Own 40 Yard Pass Is Amazing
Whoa.
The below is kind of mind-boggling and has quickly been spread around the interwebs. "I didn't think it was going to blow up to be this big," Gary Haynes, the star of the video, said.
If you think it's fake, definintely check out this interview with Gary on KHOU! This kid is going places.
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Separatist Pets Are Taking Over The Russian Internet
When the U.S. first announced sanctions against Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s pets spoke up . As pro-Russian rebel groups occupy government buildings in eastern Ukraine, cats, dogs, bunnies and even geese are taking sides.
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Signs You're The Mom Of Your Friend Group
No one messes with your babies.
Wildlife better know not to mess with your friends.
Seriously.
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Watch This Rescued Baby Squirrel Get A Full Tummy
LOOK AT ITS MESSY LIL FACE.
OH
alxbngala.tumblr.com / vimeo.com
MY
alxbngala.tumblr.com / vimeo.com
GOD
alxbngala.tumblr.com / vimeo.com
WATCH THE WHOLE ADORABLE MEAL RIGHT NOW:
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If Old School Hobbies Had Internet Fandoms
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You Have To Listen To This Awesome Feminist Version Of The Beastie Boys'"Girls"
“They don’t wanna see a girl cakin’ like a millionaire, they just wanna see her eat the cake cuz they don’t really care.”
Sizzy Rocket, a 22-year-old songwriter, rewrote the lyrics to the Beastie Boys' song "Girls" and made her own original video.
She's currently signed to Universal and co-wrote the Timeflies single, "All the Way" and a song on their album, Yeah.
Sizzy Rocket / Via youtube.com
The artist was inspired by early '90s imagery and neon colors.
"I love producing music videos and when I recorded the cover I immediately saw it in my head," Rocket told BuzzFeed. "I also took inspiration from the limo scene from Brooke Candy's 'Das Me' video, and Paris is Burning (the feather boas and the sequins). I just wanted it to feel very fun and upbeat. I think the director, Eve Del Prado, nailed it perfectly."
Sizzy Rocket / Via youtube.com
Rocket said she was inspired to rewrite the Beastie Boys song in the shower.
"I've always wanted to do a statement piece on female empowerment and I saw the opportunity in this record."
Sizzy Rocket / Via youtube.com
Her favorite line in the rewrite is: "They don't wanna see a girl cakin' like a millionaire, they just wanna see her eat the cake cuz they don't really care".
"Cake here is being used as both a sex symbol (icing can be licked off fingers) and a power object (representative of money) and I think it's important to realize that a woman can be both sexy and powerful at the same time," Rocket explained to BuzzFeed. "Just because you enjoy sex doesn't make you a sex object. That's what the lyric means to me."
Sizzy Rocket / Via youtube.com
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12 Food Facts That Sound Like Total Lies But Are Actually True
Wait, what’s that about frogs and milk?
This 98-second video will change the way you look at cheese, honey, milk, cookies, and lots of other food...
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Russian Diplomat's Sexist Attack On Pussy Riot
Emails obtained by BuzzFeed show a Russian diplomat disparaging Russian dissidents, praising Stalin, and talking about America’s “homosexual authoritarianism.”
Nadya Tolokonnikova (center) and Maria Alyokhina (center left) of Pussy Riot.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
WASHINGTON — A senior diplomat at the Russian embassy in Washington made sexist statements about Pussy Riot in 2012 emails, suggesting that the all-female protest group "just need a good fuck."
In emails to a U.S. government official working on Russian human rights issues obtained by BuzzFeed on the stipulation of anonymity for both parties, the Russian official mused about Pussy Riot, who were at the time about to go on trial for an anti-Putin protest inside Moscow's main Orthodox church. BuzzFeed has viewed the emails and agreed not to publish the names to protect the anonymity of the correspondents.
"Life is strange — kill 12 people in a movie theater, and you are a psyco boy, maniac; show your ass in a nation biggest cathedral — and they will call you a prisoner of conscience," the official wrote, referring to the mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater that summer.
The U.S. official responded: "It's hard to be a prisoner of conscience without being in prison, not saying their performance wasn't offensive or even illegal, but fines for trespassing would be a little more 'European' than the SIZO… and I don't understand your point on the Aurora shootings." "SIZO" is a Russian pre-trial detention center.
The Russian diplomat responded that the women of Pussy Riot "are simply not happy in their sexual lives."
"How can you know it wasn't offensive?" the Russian diplomat wrote. "Novaya gazeta is saying that, or you guys held hearing on it?," he asked, referring to Novaya Gazeta, Russia's only investigative newspaper. "Imagine someone did that somewhere in Saudi Arabia, one of the greatest democracies on Earth and the US ally. By the way, Russia is a orthodox (predominantly) country, so they had rather think twice before doing it. Now they have to be held accountable, as you put it.
Generally, I am of the opinion that those pussies are simply not happy in their sexual life. And that makes them riot. They simply need a good f..k, not SIZO. Unfortunately, we don't have such a capital punishment in our criminal law."
Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina of Pussy Riot are in the United States this week, where they attended several White House Correspondents Dinner events and lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill to push for more additions to the Magnitsky List of Russians banned from traveling to or keeping money in the U.S. Both were found guilty of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" after the group's church protest and sentenced to two years in prison. They were pardoned by Vladimir Putin in December and released three months early.
The diplomat in question has sent other offensive emails, including one from this year warning of "homosexual authoritarianism" threatening the U.S. and one from last year describing his nostalgia for Stalin, who "fucked" a "feminine" Russia.
"One thing about Stalin is that with him Russian state was at its highest," the diplomat wrote in 2013. "I am convinced without this guy we would never launch Gagarin in outer space, though it happened a bit later," he wrote, referring to Yury Gagarin, the first man in space and a Soviet hero. "Yes he kinda fucked Russia, but Russian soul is feminine by it's nature. So I believe we need to step back and look at him in a longer perspective, like the French did with Napoleon. It's complicated like so many things in Russian history."
In an email titled "gay SOS," the diplomat writes: "In Russia when someone does studies of a foreign country, he or she is most probably trUly in love with it. I am myself was deeply in love with France. Now it doesn't work here in the States. Why most of Russia watchers in Washington DC are indeed Russia haters? Probably because this is a Cold War legacy. You studied USSR to know your enemy. Now the only way to make Russia a living is to help hating it - be it Vladimir Putin or human rights. Actually I was thinking about homosexual authoritarism [sic] threatening America. Here is a good piece on Arizona buzz. Why don't anyone write something similar about Russian anti-propaganda law? The answer my friend is blowing with the wind....
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/jan-brewers-foolish-veto-104014.html?hp=l1s"
In another email from this year about a PSA produced by a group called the Fair Games Project protesting Russia's anti-gay law in light of the Sochi Olympics, the diplomat questioned why Russia is being criticized when other countries can "legally kill fags."
"Of note, not a single face there I could recognize as Russian. But anyway we are clearly losers by their own standards: they claim only a minor penalty for being gay in Russia (which is not true), while others can legally kill fags or send them in prison. Rossija vpered!" ("Russia Forward!").
"We do not comment on private correspondence of unknown and unnamed persons," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, press officer at the Russian Embassy. "Such alleged correspondence has nothing to do with the Embassy."
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This Is What Google Thinks Of Your Favorite Celebrities
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How Many Years Has Commuting Taken Off Your Life?
Science and statistics were involved in the making of this quiz.
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17 Life Lessons Oprah Learned From Doing "Master Class"
The queen of all media reveals the Master Class words of wisdom — from Jay Z, Justin Timberlake, Stevie Nicks, and others — that have struck a chord deep within her.
Over the more than three decades of her career, Oprah Winfrey has shared more than a few inspirational quotes with her rapt audience, transforming lives and people's outlook on the world. But what words of wisdom have resonated with Winfrey herself?
To answer that question, BuzzFeed asked the OWN chairman and CEO to mine past seasons of Oprah's Master Class, which returns for a fourth season on Sunday, May 11, at 10 p.m. on OWN, to come up with her favorite life lessons.
"What we've learned from 'The Masters,' as I call them, is that everybody has a story and there's something to be learned from every experience," Winfrey said. "When we were dreaming up the idea of OWN, I wanted to create a series where we would be able to offer some of the most iconic artists of our time a chance to share what they know for sure about being human. And I'm proud to say we have been very fortunate to have gotten some of the biggies to share their life lessons."
She added, "It was difficult to choose, but here are some of my favs ... maybe they are exactly what you need to hear right now to inspire you to follow your dream, whatever they may be, and stay on your path."
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In Case You Were Wondering What Harry Potter's Up To Currently
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Why Ellen Willis Is An Essential Icon
Her work as a writer, critic, activist, thinker, and radical feminist spans decades, and now her best pieces are available in one must-read collection.
Via upress.umn.edu
There is a kind of woman writer who, with her long cigarettes and cars and sleek, untouchable prose, makes all the girls want to be her; and there is a kind of woman writer who, by letting herself be the screaming, crying fan as well as the cool-eyed critic, or the marching protestor as well as the reporter at the march, makes it so we can be her. Ellen Willis leads the latter camp. A critic, activist, thinker, and radical feminist whose work is newly collected in The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press), she is an icon to my demographic. Her gut-wrung genius for popular music (she was the New Yorker's first-ever pop critic) presaged the widespread taking-seriously of Taylor Swift. Her reportings and/or polemics and/or personal essays, usually written for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, or The Nation, are touchstones of the genres. A founder, with Shulamith Firestone, of the far-out feminist group Redstockings, she remains one of the top defenders of both abortion and pornography as inalienable — and entirely human — rights. Always challenging, but first self-challenging, Willis' writings are never simultaneously difficult. Her thinking is all transparent — and prescient. In a 1996 essay on daytime talk shows and "trash television," Willis writes that we need more noise, not less: "Our problem is not the excesses of talk shows but the brutality and emptiness of our political culture. Pop bashing is the humanism of fools: in the name of defending people's dignity it attacks their pleasures and their meager store of power." In other words, she is one of the first defenders of so-called "toxic Twitter." A rare and truly anti-snobbish intellect, Ellen Willis is one of the great definers of our time; in 2006, she died.
Three years ago, Nona Willis Aronowitz, the only daughter of Willis and her husband, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, put out a collection of her mother's (mostly) rock 'n' roll criticism called Out of the Vinyl Deeps. Its success led to the republishing of two other collections, No More Nice Girls and Beginning to See the Light. These weren't enough. Obsessives like me wanted more, while others, believing Willis had left pop criticism for mere academia, needed to see the evolution of her principled, pleasure-taking aims. To that end, The Essential Ellen Willis organizes Willis' work by decade, from the '60s through the '00s, and features introductions to each decade by Willis-Aronowitz's peers and friends, including Cord Jefferson and Sara Marcus. Here to talk about the project, its relevance, and growing up Willis is Nona, herself an accomplished journalist and feminist thinker.
A younger Nona Willis Aronowitz, with her mother, Ellen Willis.
Nona Willis Aronowitz
Let's start at the end of this new collection, with the beginnings of Willis' book-in-progress on Freudian radicalism and the cultural unconscious. She was working on this book for almost a decade, right?
Nona Willis Aronowitz: Yes, she was working on it for around eight years, with large chunks of inactivity in between. I think it was partly that the ideas and topic were so trenchant, and also not immediate, but also that she felt nervous and spooked about writing an actual book, rather than a loosely connected group of essays. It was an arduous editing process. She shifted very quickly from extremely polished paragraphs to indecipherable notes. I agonized over it because I knew she wouldn't have wanted unfinished thoughts to see the light of day. Eventually, I thought it was worth it to uncover ideas she'd been stewing over since the '70s, even if they weren't fashionable— like how she thought there was a psychoanalytic explanation, rather than just economic or social ones, for why conservatives had succeeded in reversing some of the '60s countercultural gains. This argument blossoms into this whole theory about how hard it is for people, even leftist people, to truly accept freedom of expression.
To wit: "A political movement that aspires to have an impact on our deepening economic and cultural crises cannot succeed simply by appealing to moral principle or rational self-interest; it must speak to the cultural unconscious, address the hidden conflict. The story of contemporary American politics is that the right intuitively understands this, while the left, by and large, has no clue."
Or: "Few people imagine it's possible or desirable to restore the old order, yet even fewer raise the obvious question: if the family as we've known it isn't working, don't we need to invent forms of domestic life and child rearing more suited to a free, postpatriarchal society? No, it has long since been agreed that such talk is silly leftover hippiespeak. Instead we feel guilty, scapegoat single mothers on welfare, oppose no-fault divorce. Or else we declare that the crisis of the family is a myth — it's just that there are different kinds of families. Aren't gays clamoring to join the marriage club? My compliments to the Emperor's tailor: we are all pro-family now."
I was thinking about how her career in political writing fell after one golden age of leftist independent publishing, in the '60s, and before another, which is happening now with The New Inquiry and n+1 and Jacobin and the revitalized Dissent (although she did serve on the editorial board of a previous, perhaps less vital Dissent).
NWA: Yes, totally. She didn't want to compromise, ideas-wise or length-wise, so she wrote in smaller journals rather than cut thousands of words. And it's funny, she also wrote in Slate and Salon pretty frequently, but none of those essays made the cut. They were just nowhere near as complicated or nuanced as her print pieces, probably by the editors' design; they were topical, around 900 words each, and didn't feel relevant, even though they were the most recent of her pieces.
How did you decide what was Essential? Did you ask friends of yours and/or hers for help?
NWA: I did write a mass email in the beginning of the process asking people for their suggestions, though I'd mostly thought of them. My main criteria was: Did this transcend its era? Even if it was about Clinton or Anita Hill or Tom Wolfe or whatever, were there useful, universal ideas? My original table of contents ended up being 50,000 words longer than the final version, so my editor made some brutal cuts. I mostly agree with them, actually. I also cut some essays that felt more academic or theoretical in favor of more intimate and/or unpublished pieces — just to give the reader a feel for who Ellen Willis was.
I can't wait for the Inessential Ellen Willis!
NWA: Ha, there's some great stuff in there. I'm already regretting a few cuts. This sounds terrible, but anything she'd written for a women's magazine was automatically out of the final cut. You could just tell it'd be edited for "tone" and that made me feel uncomfy, and there was always a better version of the piece that'd been published elsewhere.
As someone who came up in women's magazines, or fashion magazines — and I still write for them — I think it doesn't sound terrible, just complicated.
NWA: I mean, one of the pieces I edited out was sort of a primer on the women's movement for Mademoiselle, which was interesting as an artifact, but eventually I was like, "OK, this is basic."
Which brings us to something I didn't know until I read her "Three Elegies for Sontag" in this collection: She won the same Mademoiselle "guest editor" contest that Sylvia Plath had in 1953?
NWA: Oh, yes! There are some adorable pictures in that Mademoiselle issue. You know, [my mom and Sylvia Plath] were probably pretty similar when they were that age.
How so?
NWA: Repressed, depressed, confused, prim, introverted. Overachieving.
And angry.
NWA: Yep.
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27 Reasons Kath Day-Knight Is The Greatest Mother In TV History
She’s such a foxy moron.
She always looks on the bright side.
ABC / Via fuckyeahkathandkim.tumblr.com
ABC
ABC
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FYI, This Is What Bubba Sparxxx Looks Like Today
Mr. “Ms. New Booty” is nearly unrecognizable.
Yup, THAT BUBBA SPARXXX. Now, let's dial our memories back to 2005 when we were all aggressively chanting "Ms. New Booty" at a high school homecoming dance.
Interscope / Via youtube.com
This was the Georgia native we remembered:
(with mid-00s Luda.)
Frank Micelotta / Getty Images
Yup.
Interscope
"Mr. Collipark, Bubba Sparxxx!"
Interscope / Via barimavox.blogspot.com
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How Many Words That Mean Vagina Do You Know?
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