My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It - Matt Duron A lot of marriages don’t survive raising a gender-creative son who is, statistically speaking, most likely going to be gay or transgender as an adult. I wish I could to talk to those men. I wish I could be there for their kids. I've been a police officer for more than 15 years. I grew up in a sports-oriented family. But, being an athlete, a firefighter, and a cop, I have spent a lot of time in locker rooms and around guys who dish out homophobic slurs like turkey on Thanksgiving. Sometimes I’ll call people out when they use them. “Bro, I was just joking. Those are the responses I get. Here’s the thing. I don’t tell most of the guys who I work with at the police department about my son. My close friends know. I've slipped at times and told some of the other guys in my life. “Man, how do you deal with that? What does all of that mean? To me, loving a child who is different, a target and seen as vulnerable is my role as a father and decent human being. I’m a father.
Ikumi Yoshimatsu ne cède pas face aux yakuzas L'histoire rocambolesque d'Ikumi Yoshimatsu commence durant le printemps 2012 lorsqu'elle attire l’œil de Kazuyoshi Ishii qui travaillait à l'époque pour l'agence Burning Productions. Se présentant au bureau de Ikumi et son ancien manager, il les emmène dans les bureaux de son agence pour avoir l'approbation de monsieur Ikuo Shuo, PDG de Burning Productions. Selon ses dires, cette approbation est une "règle" à respecter dans le monde du divertissement japonais. Par une simple recherche internet, Ikumi découvre rapidement les liens de Burning Productions et en particulier de monsieur Shuo avec la mafia japonaise. La suite de la vie de madame Yoshimatsu augurait bien mieux, mais malheureusement c'est tout à fait le contraire qui se produisit. Le 21 octobre 2012, Ikumi est élue Miss International 2012, première miss de cru japonais depuis 52 ans. Ikumi refuse toujours, par conviction et éthique, elle ne veut pas travailler avec des gens en relation avec les yakuzas.
How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano | Film Michael Nyman, composer Jane Campion called me while I was in the middle of watching Neighbours one lunchtime. We had never met, so I asked her "Why me?" Jane had the vision to see, through that music, that I could do the emotion she wanted. My more rough-and-ready, high-energy stuff would have been totally inconceivable for The Piano, so Jane forced me to do other things. Reading this on mobile? Strangely, although the soundtrack sounds very easy and improvised, getting the right voice was difficult. When I went through the script with Jane, she indicated where Ada needed a piano piece. I had listened to recordings of Holly Hunter, who played Ada, performing Bach and Brahms and thought she'd be best suited to reflective, lyrical music – and useless at the usual Michael Nyman-type stuff. Nobody, me included, ever dreamt that the main theme tune, The Heart Asks Pleasure First, would achieve the popularity it did. After doing the piano pieces, we started on the orchestral soundtrack.
Pellerin : Le sexisme insidieux du numérique Les entreprises du high-tech seraient-elles sexistes? Il a suffi d'un tweet d'un start-upper californien pour créer la polémique fin octobre : "Je participe à un événement qui est censé être réservé aux entrepreneurs, mais quelqu'un y porte des talons? #pasdecerveau." Fleur Pellerin annonce une mission sur ce sujet. Le numérique, qui se veut d'avant-garde, serait-il un repaire de machos rétrogrades? N'y a-t-il pas là un paradoxe? Quels types de comportements? «Dans les colloques, je suis souvent devant des publics quasi exclusivement masculins. Certaines chefs d'entreprise se plaignent de difficultés à lever des fonds…Dans les banques et les fonds de capital-risque, les équipes sont très largement masculines. Marissa Mayer, PDG de Yahoo, et Sheryl Sandberg, directrice générale de Facebook, sont-elles l'arbre qui cache la forêt? Le gouvernement va-t-il engager des actions dans ce secteur? Camille Neveux - Le Journal du Dimanche samedi 07 décembre 2013
British children 'unhappiest in the world', say academics Wendy Ellyatt, the group’s development director, who is also an author and consultant in early education, said the launch reflected growing concerns over the state of modern childhood. It will campaign on a range of issues covering education, health, technology and commercial pressures that hamper children’s development, she suggested. The move follows the publication of a landmark report from Unicef last year that found British parents were trapping their children in a cycle of "compulsive consumerism" by showering them with toys and designer labels instead of spending quality time with them. This came after a 2007 study by the UN children's agency ranked Britain bottom out of 21 developed countries for child welfare and third from bottom for educational standards. Mrs Ellyatt said: “Recent research that shows that children in the UK are some of the most pressurised, unhappy and commercially vulnerable in the world. “This situation has not been helped by risk-averse policy-making.”
The 50 Most Perfectly Timed Photos Ever By Internet standards, a perfectly timed photo occurs when two of the following three conditions are met: 1. Perfect Place 2. Sometimes the holy trinity of perfectness is achieved and you get an Internet classic like so many of the photographs below. Enjoy! Photograph by MARTIN BERNETTI (via rusrep.ru) If you enjoyed this post, the Sifter highly recommends: Joshua Bell Plays in a Subway Station Forwarded email describes what happened when acclaimed classical violinist Joshua Bell appeared incognito on a subway platform in Washington, D.C. one cold winter morning and played his heart out for tips. Description: Forwarded email Circulating since: Dec. 2008 Status: True (see details below) Example:Email text contributed by Bill B., Dec. 17, 2008: A Violinist in the Metro A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. Analysis: True. "No one knew it," explained Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten several months after the event, "but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made." And how did they react? Which is fair to ask. Sources and further reading:
NASA or MOMA? Play the Game! - Megan Garber Here are some pictures. Were they taken in space, or painted here on Earth? One of the most enduring and inspiring side effects of space exploration is the pictures -- pictures of Earth taken from new heights; pictures of Earth's neighbors, taken from new angles; pictures that resemble, and in fact are, art. They are magical. They are mysterious. And they often resemble art of a more earthly variety. Scroll down for the key. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Key: 1.
What the world eats -- a week's worth of groceries The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people | Society The first clue that things are done very differently on Bastoy prison island, which lies a couple of miles off the coast in the Oslo fjord, 46 miles south-east of Norway's capital, comes shortly after I board the prison ferry. I'm taken aback slightly when the ferry operative who welcomed me aboard just minutes earlier, and with whom I'm exchanging small talk about the weather, suddenly reveals he is a serving prisoner – doing 14 years for drug smuggling. He notes my surprise, smiles, and takes off a thick glove before offering me his hand. Before he transferred to Bastoy, Petter was in a high-security prison for nearly eight years. There are big differences between the two countries, of course. Despite the seriousness of their crimes, however, I found that the loss of liberty was all the punishment they suffered. As the ferry powers through the freezing early-morning fog, Petter tells me he is appealing against his conviction. I wasn't sure what to expect on Bastoy.
Toy Stories | gabriele galimberti If Riverboom’s photographer Gabriele Galimberti had happened to shoot me, aged 6 and surrounded by my favorite toys, he would have seen the following: plastic medieval weaponry; assorted Lego (Space, Castle and Pirate); an inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex (punctured slowly into extinction); a Superman action figure (I lost it and hyperventilated with grief); a pair of cuddly rabbits (Sally and Billy); toy cars; a tiny guitar; a plane you launched with an elastic catapult; a replica pistol I thought my mum didn’t know about. Everyone remembers their childhood toys. The fact that I can recall how most of mine tasted better than I can remember the names of my primary school teachers says everything you need to know about the universe kids inhabit. But how they play can reveal a lot. “The richest children were more possessive. Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Ben Machell – The Times Magazine
Students' rooms: 1890s v 2010s 15 February 2013Last updated at 06:22 ET By Vanessa Barford BBC News Magazine Continue reading the main story A trove of 19th Century photographs (recreated above) of students at Royal Holloway University gives a rare insight into Victorian accommodation. Students have always used their rooms to express their personality, but how has it changed over the past 100 years? A horseshoe, crocodile skin, and the skeleton of a medieval nun. It's not the typical stuff you'd expect to find in a student room. And yet a collection of 56 photographs from Royal Holloway's archive shows that is exactly what some of the women that went to the university between 1896 and 1898 put on their floor or pinned to their walls. Some things look familiar in the 1890s shots. There are books and plants. But other items of dorm decor are from a different era. Victorian students had the luxury of a study and a bedroom The young women arriving at Royal Holloway in the 1890s were pioneers. Some racy items were on show.