Created with the help of Captain Underpants author and illustrator Dav Pilkey. Tra-la-laaaaaa!
Author and illustrator Dav Pilkey stopped by BuzzFeed New York to talk about his new book, Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot. While he was here, he helped us make this quiz that will help you find out your Captain Underpants superpower!
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The neurologist died Sunday aged 82. Here are just a few of his thoughts on topics from music and perception, to ageing and how he felt when he learned of his terminal cancer.
Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks at Columbia University June 3, 2009 in New York City. Sacks was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in 2007.
Chris Mcgrath / Getty Images
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
Via oliversacks.com
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
Via oliversacks.com
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We've lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. They don't seem to be of our creation. They don't seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception.
Via ted.com
A roundup of recent favorites we’ve reviewed in the BuzzFeed Books newsletter.
Mollie Shafer-Schweig / BuzzFeed
Harper
Graham Webster
Bless the Harry Potter fandom.
— Caitlin Michelle Beerer, Facebook
Let’s put your English Lit skills to the test.
The wisdom of Dumbledore is forever.
~Fall~ in love with a new book this fall.
Jarry Lee / BuzzFeed
“His holiness is grateful for the thoughtful gesture and for the feelings which it evoked,” the Vatican wrote to the author of several LGBT-friendly children’s books.
Tony Gentile / Reuters
After the mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, yanked a children's book showing animals in different forms of families from pre-school libraries in his city, the publisher of The Little Egg was surprised to get an enthusiastic letter on behalf of Pope Francis in response to the book and several others with LGBT themes sent to the Vatican.
"His holiness is grateful for the thoughtful gesture and for the feelings which it evoked, hoping for an always more fruitful activity in the service of young generations and the spread of genuine human and Christian values," wrote Monsignor Peter Brian Wells of the Vatican Secretary of State in a letter to The Little Egg's author, according to a report in The Guardian.
On her Facebook page, Pardi wrote that she sent copies of books published by her company, Lo Stampatello, to the pope along with a cover letter explaining that she started the company for the sake of her four children, which she is raising along with her partner, Maria Silvia Fiengo.
"The book, 'Why are there two mothers?' is simply our (their) story, and the book "Why are there two dads?" is the story of a family that we personally know," she wrote. She said conservative groups have distorted the books in a campaign against them in Italy, saying "we support the teaching of masturbation to children in schools, inciting people against us."
"In most cases, homosexuals are good people and face the task of parenting with great responsibility and competence," she wrote. "Many put their hopes in a church that is not fundamentalist and inhuman as we have known in other historical eras ... which is why I persist in trying to reach you with my voice."
Lo Stampatello
— Hey, are you a family?
— Yes we are two moms with our kitten.
— Look how many snuggles that pussycat gets!
Lo Stampatello
Are you more Spidey or Batman? Your star sign will reveal all!
Wake up, sheeple.
Leslie Kean's 2008 book is notable both for her prior experience as an esteemed investigative journalist and the breadth of strange and compelling UFO cases it explores. The book includes strange and chilling firsthand accounts from a retired Air Force major, an Air Force colonel, and a retired chief of the FAA’s Accidents and Investigations Division — in addition to several other distinguished sources. Kean's book is well-written, spooky, and completely un-put-downable.
For a little over a year, starting in 1966, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was besieged by a series of inexplicable sightings — all of a bizarre, giant, winged figure which came to be called "The Mothman." In this bestseller, journalist John A. Keel explores these and other, seemingly related strange events.
In this book, which highlights the infamous 1947 Roswell Incident — in which some believe a UFO crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico — the authors delve deeply into news reports, historical data, and witness accounts to explore what really happened. The detail presented is almost overwhelming, and many readers will be hard-pressed to deny that something beyond a mere weather balloon was found that day.
Whitley Strieber's 1987 account of his and his wife's repeated experiences with alien abduction — and their subsequent interviews with counselors and hypnotists — has drawn enduring, international interest and acclaim for its careful open-mindedness, the stirring writing style, and the vivid, convincing detail in which Strieber relays his story.
Wizarding London > Universal Studios, soz.
Rebecca Hendin / Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
flickr.com/garryknight/8551309697/ / Creative Commons
Guaranteed to make you grimace.
McDonald's Corporation / Via etsy.com
McDonald's Corporation
McDonald's Corporation
McDonald's Corporation
Introducing Harry Potter, The Boy Who Kills…
Warner Bros / Via youtube.com
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Warner Bros. / Via youtube.com
Let’s control-z some tears.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Tyrion definitely earned his in archery — specifically crossbow.
Requirements: Scouts must identify the parts of the bow and arrow they are using, state range safety rules, and shoot one round with a minimum accuracy requirement.
Tyrion Lannister has earned his badge by hitting a seated target at a distance of several meters. Bonus points for patricide.
HBO / meritbadge.org
Requirements: Scouts must demonstrate the ability to launch their watercraft, row for 100 yards, backwater for 25 yards, land, and tie a proper mooring knot.
Gendry has earned his badge by rowing since Season 3. Official presentation of badge is dependent upon Gendry actually showing up.
HBO / meritbadge.org
Requirements: Scouts must perform a series of athletic tasks within a time frame, including push ups, pull ups, high jumps and running.
The Mountain has earned his badge by... well, just look at him.
HBO / meritbadge.org
Requirements: Scouts must learn the basics of genealogy and complete a family tree by visiting or using a record-keeping institution or source.
Ned Stark has earned his badge by learning the difference between brown hair and blonde hair.
HBO / meritbadge.org
Graphic designer Louise Fili’s Graphique de la Rue is a celebration of Paris’s iconic aesthetic. Here’s a look inside.
Louise Fili
Spécialite de Legumes Cuit, 6 rue Pont Philippe; Royal Bar, 19 rue du Parc Royal; Café et Lait, 30 rue Vieille du Temple; Conserves du lèr Choix, 6 rue Pont Philippe
Louise Fili
Louise Fili
Louise Fili
*shrieks*
They're made by LA Splash and each one costs $14.
Warner Bros. Entertainment / Via giphy.com
Duh, all of them.
In the books. And maybe the TV show. SPOILERS, maybe.
In the TV show, he is killed by Brienne of Tarth in the forest, surrounded by the bodies of his defeated army. In the books, on the other hand, his death is described in a letter from Ramsay to Jon, prompting Jon to try to lead the Night's Watch south to Winterfell, a betrayal of his vows that results in the rebellion against him.
HBO
The question, of course, is whether this is the same case in the TV show, as the two have diverged significantly, though it appeared that by the end of Season 5, the characters had ended up in broadly similar places.
It's often accepted that when an audience isn't shown the body, it leaves a strong possibility that the character will return. Game of Thrones producer Dan Weiss told Entertainment Weekly in June that "If don’t see the body then they’re not really dead."
Additionally, some people have pointed out that based on the angle of the sword swipe, and the placement of the tree, Brienne's blow would have hit the tree before killing Stannis.
HBO / Via ew.com
So either there's some misdirection going on with the production team, or book Stannis is taking a very different journey to TV Stannis.
Flickr: gageskidmore / Via Gage Skidmore / Creative Commons
Listen, things had to get interesting once those kids started going through wifi withdrawal.
Warner Bros.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
Claudia Rankine has had a hell of a year. Her most recent book, Citizen: An American Lyric, has been a barnstorming critical success – winning, among others, the National Book Critics Circle award for both poetry (in a first, it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism) – and hoovering up praise from readers across the US, the UK, and beyond. Readers have found themselves in Citizen as both perpetrators and victims of the racial micro (and macro) aggressions the book documents. It is a mixture of prose, poetry and images, ruminating on the state of blackness over time and in different spaces.
"You take in things you don't want all the time," she writes in part III of the book. "Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that?"
Rankine, who has also won the PEN award and the NAACP award for outstanding literary work and was a National Book Award finalist, spoke to BuzzFeed while in London for a brief book tour at the end of June. We talked about calling out racism, the reframing of the hoodie as a cultural icon of doom, and the strong, protective love many black women feel for Serena Williams.
You collect so many microaggressions in the book. I was once at a members' club and this man sat down pretty much on top of my friend. She protested and he said, "I'm so sorry I didn't see you!" and when I read that in the book...
Claudia Rankine: [laughs] ...there it is!
What was it like for you to hear these stories of hypervisibility or invisibility being told over and over? Is it a quiet trauma?
CR: Right, right. The thing is in collecting and hearing the stories, because, you know, I'm in my middle ages: I've lived all of the stories. It was very rare that someone told me something and I didn't have my own version. It wasn't a sense of feeling educated by the stories – I was existing as the writer in those moments, where you're actually just listening to the language. You're asking the language to communicate as much as it can about the whole historical run-up to the moment. I was listening more for how to tell the life that we all are living, and what's the sort of exact right language to do that with? And when you hear it, you hear it. Like, "oh, OK."
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
How selfish can we be when we’re talking about a type of everyday pain that "belongs" to all of us? Lots of people say, "That's not real racism – focus on something else!" How do you answer that and say, "this is part of the bigger picture"?
CR: Structurally, what I try to do in the book is show the accumulation of single events. How do you really, really know that person was motivated by racism? Can you really know? At a certain level, I don't give a shit. I don't care if you can or can't know. Black bodies are being subjugated to these things day in and day out, so at a certain point, whether or not it's readable or not does not matter. You're still, as a body, asked to negotiate this, and the fact that you have to ask yourself, "Is this a moment of racism or isn't it?" is part of the problem. And so the structure of the book was meant to take that question out of play by saying if you have to confront it again and again and again... Maybe something that happened only once, you could dismiss it, but after a while, it's all going to start adding up and it will lock down your ability to be objective. So it was more an attempt to replicate how for black bodies it's just so ordinary, you don't even begin to question what happens. In the essay on Serena Williams, one of the things I loved about her is that she wasn't always right. Sometimes she was wrong but it didn't matter. What was controlling her behaviour was a history of transgressions against her. So that when somebody made a call and the call actually was correct, she then had lost her ability to even read that. You know, it's like, are you that one from before, who did that other thing? So that's where I think it gets very murky.
Speaking of Serena Williams, that seems to be the chapter people glom on to. After her win at the French Open, there was an outpouring of black female love on my Twitter timeline, a real feeling of "nobody else loves us like we do". I'm interested in the solidarity that exists.
CR: Well, I think what's different about Serena than, say, Beyoncé, is that you have seen her subjected to racist moment after racist moment. [There was] the head of the Russian Tennis Federation [Shamil Tarpischev] referring to [her and her sister] as "the Williams brothers". These things come at you every day. So I think that's part of it. It's the sense of the assault of racism. We are living it in our own special ways and we have our own arsenal of insults, but to have it on the screen, watching it all the time... We've also seen it with Michelle Obama, but Serena has been around a lot longer in the public eye and she's not protected by the White House and we've had to negotiate it with her. And so I think that's why she has a special place in all out hearts. She's just out there working her way.
What are your first thoughts in the aftermath of something like the Charleston shootings? And what does it add to you, or take from you?
CR: Grief for the families, obviously. Once you hear about this and the horror of it, it very immediately begins to line up, historically. As a writer, I began to think about this, like, how is this similar or different? For me, one of the distinctions being made is that this was not police, this was an individual, homegrown terrorist. I think I was curious about how it would be portrayed in the media, and how he would be framed and interacted with, both within the media and the justice system. The ways in which whiteness privileges whiteness and the double standards. That even in the face of identified white supremacist mass murder, [Dylann Roof] is being given concessions. That even in this extreme positioning, white privilege is still at work, in service of his white body. And so those are the kinds of things that I'm at this point watching and still marvelling at, in a sense.
Kiese Laymon wrote in The Guardian about the historical call for black people to forgive, and that seemed to be all over Charleston, in the humanising of Roof over the...
CR: ...the grief of black families?
Right. I wonder what your thoughts were with people saying forgiveness is often a case of pandering to white privilege. Is there a line, do you think? How communal can grief be?
CR: For me, this whole engagement with the forgiveness from the family really doesn't concern me. Because I feel... You know, these people are traumatised. I don't know what they even mean when they say they've forgiven him. If they felt it was cathartic to say that, then fine. You know? Because it's not about him. He wasn't asking for forgiveness. If, as individuals who have just lost people in their family that are close to them, they felt like saying that, then say that. More interesting to me is the media's enthusiasm around this act of forgiveness. I mean, why does Dylann Roof need to be forgiven when he's not asking for forgiveness? I have not heard him say, "Please forgive me." And yet the media seems so enthusiastic and so pleased about this. So is it because they feel implicated inside the cultural condemnation of black people and the cultural murder of black people? That's really my question. I mean, why does the culture need to highlight the fact that these family members, at the very beginning of their journey through this traumatic loss, "forgive"?
There were many calls to take down the Confederate flag after the killings. Is there any power in taking down the flag, or is it an empty symbolism? [South Carolina governor Nikki Haley ordered its removal from the state capitol on 10 July.]
CR: No, I don't think the symbolism is empty. I think that the way you create an environment where certain beliefs are held is that you continue to confirm them. So for somebody like Dylann Roof, that flag meant something, and for him to be able to walk the streets and see the flag flying means that what he believes is believed commonly, out in public, supported by the state. The taking down of the flag doesn't signify an interior change in South Carolina, but it at least says that the state doesn't condone what the flag stands for as a political statement. So, no, I think it's important.
So it's a trickle-down effect? What was acceptable is no longer?
CR: I hope so. We hope so.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
In Citizen, you write: "because white men can't / police their imagination / black men are dying". Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown, said he looked like...
CR: ...a demon. Mmm hmm.
The projection, the fear that appears to change physical characteristics, like a superhuman thing. And the flip of "superhuman" is "subhuman".
CR: Right, exactly.
How do we encourage white people not to have these overactive imaginations?
CR: I think it's not that we can encourage anything. Becuase we're not in control of the white body. But I think we need to stop not calling it out. I think that's what we can do. We can stop housing it. So that it stays where it belongs, in the person who's creating it. By not calling it out, it actually arrives somewhere. By calling it out, you're like, you might wanna deal with this, whatever it is for you, y'know?
That can be difficult.
CR: Yeah, people will act defensively, but that's not your concern. I say: You can be defensive if you want. I'm just telling you what I heard and how I feel. If you care about me, then you care about how I feel. If you don't care about me, that's fine. But I'm telling you it's racist.
So many realisations about conversations from years past.
CR: [laughs] Tomorrow's another day!
You mentioned liberal subjectivity in an interview last year. There's a distancing that takes place in many liberal circles, a lot of "we're not like that". I'm interested in the space between how many white liberals see themselves, separate to "the bad people".
CR: Well, this is why I wanted the book to exist in the space of the white liberal. Because people like to say "oh, it's the South", "it's ignorance", "it's white supremacist Fox News". And I'm like, no, no, no. It's white alliance with all of those things. So that these moments are happening in our offices, with our so-called friends, in the Congress, among highly educated people who apparently know better. So it was a very conscious thing to move the book away from scandal and towards white alliance. The use of the second person – that "you" – was meant to say, "Step in here with me, because there is no me without you inside this dynamic.”
People believe things are different in Europe, which is, of course, not entirely true.
CR: I know, because we're coming from the same post-colonial history!
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
There's an idea of Europe as a utopia, and you write about Mark Duggan in Citizen. I am interested in the Americanisation of blackness, and I wonder if that's something that you think about.
CR: Right. Well, that's why I wanted to bring in Duggan. And Zidane. Because this is a dynamic that comes out of post-colonial orientation. All these countries owned slaves. They privilege whiteness in a certain way. They have difficulties within their own cultures based on whatever language they're using, but it's all coming down to the same frame. And what is different in the United States is the militarised police system that perhaps is not replicated here. I haven't seen images of tanks rolling down streets. I saw it in Ireland back in the '80s when I was there. But I haven't seen it used against the black population here. In the US, obviously in Ferguson, we saw that. The white police force thinks it's in a war with unarmed black Americans and apparently, in some warehouse somewhere, had the tanks ready to go. And that's across the country. So that's where it's a little bit different, I think. I think when people say it's a utopia, it's not a utopia in terms of racist attitudes towards blacks. It's a utopia against the tolerance of blatant, daily killings and the warehousing of black bodies inside prison industrial institutes that rely on black bodies to fill them. So the new Jim Crow in the US is this kind of extended rounding up of black people and warehousing them inside of prisons, and that I think is happening less in Europe than in the United States.
There have been a lot of people talking about self-care and pulling back from the bombardment of bad news. Gene Demby wrote about remembering that being black is not "just a parade of calamities and disadvantage".
CR: I think in the book, there are moments where even in the midst of... For instance, I was very conscious about including the dinner with my white friend where the waiter took my credit card and returned it to her. And that sense that it's always happening, but you're still in part amused by it, in part frustrated – all of the emotions are still in play. One's still going out to dinner, one's still playing tennis, one's still engaged in one's life. So you're not shut down. You're just not allowed all the way in. That's the thing. In a piece I wrote for the New York Times, I quoted the critic Fred Moten, who says, "I believe in the world and I want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it so I can be in the next one." I wanted the book to also communicate that this is a life and we're in it. It's a book about intimacy. We're showing up in it. You are constantly trying to push me out – that's your business.
It often feels tiring to explain why something is racist, like explaining your own humanity. How do you say to people, "this thing you're doing is hurting me"?
CR: One of the things that writing this book has helped me do is call out those moments immediately. In the past I was clocking them and then later on thinking about them. Since writing Citizen, I don't do that any more. Now you say something to me, I say, "You know, that's racist." And the person's like, "No, no, that's not what I meant," and I'm like, "I don't know what you meant – I'm telling you it's racist." In fact, I don't even care what you meant. And whereas before I felt like I didn't want to be the person that makes you feel uncomfortable, now I don't give a shit about your comfort. What about my comfort? [laughs] You need not to carry that around in you. Because by not calling it out, that means you receive it, and that person gets to move along like nothing happened. So they hold their space and comfort and you suddenly are the one that's made uncomfortable. But the minute you give it back... I'm not saying engage beyond that, I'm just like, I don't care what you do with that. But you need to know that that is racist. You know, I don't dwell on it. It's just like, I'm done. And oddly enough, I am done. I move on. Now I can be like, oh! [spears a pineapple cube], this pineapple is so good! [laughs] You know? If you want to know what the effect that book has had on me, that's the effect. I don't care if you think I'm an angry black woman. I don't care if you think I'm making you feel uncomfortable. I feel better. And that is important to me.
Lynzy Billing / Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed
Citizen's British cover is slightly different, but still has the image of a shorn hood on the cover [a 1993 work by performance artist David Hammons after the beating of Rodney King]. The hoodie is so much more than an item of clothing: It's a symbol of menace. It's a persistent cultural artefact of fear. Why did you choose it?
CR: A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else. Trayvon Martin was portrayed in all the media in his hoodie; they obviously grabbed on to that image. And so, for me, rather than any individual face, the hoodie became the thing that attested to blackness as bound up in criminality in the white imagniation. But as a projection of white imagination and not of a thing in itself. It seemed to me to be the best and most open space. Also, anybody can fit in there. So it becomes also kind of the hood of the executioner. Who actually belongs inside its construction? It becomes an open question.
Lynzy Billing / Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed
All men must die. But in what order?
Disclaimer: Some characters might not actually be fully dead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Watch out for ze Grindylows.
Warner Bros. / BuzzFeed
“There once was a boy who lived under the stairs”… is not one of them.
Warner Bros.
The best week of the year.
It’s like a magical game of Pictionary!
From Jenny Block, author of O Wow: Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm.
Jenny Block is a lifestyle writer and the author of O Wow: Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm, so we decided to hit her up for some tips.
"Sex should be fun and silly and exciting and experimental and messy and loud and always an adventure. It should go where it goes for as long as you like in whatever way you like," she told BuzzFeed.
"Sex is not putting a penis in a vagina. That is one sex act of many. It’s not the main one or the primary one or the most important one. It’s just one. We have to stop having procreative sex for recreation if we can ever going to maximize our orgasm potential."
Jenny Block
"First of all, know that masturbating is an excellent idea. Seriously. It is excellent. It's safe and fun and insanely good for you. Orgasm is known to relieve pain and stress and insomnia and to make you feel generally all warm and fuzzy.
If this is your first time at bat, not to worry. The best part of masturbation is that you don't have to impress anyone and it's basically impossible to do it wrong. All you have to do is what feels good. So get comfy somewhere where you're unlikely to get caught (unless that turns you on, of course!) Get yourself some inspirational materials if you like – porn to watch or erotica to read."
HBO / Via hbosgirls.tumblr.com
"Take your time. Let your hands wander where they may until you feel relaxed and ready to focus on the main event. Then just do what feels good. Rubbing, stroking, patting, tugging, tickling, petting, penetrating, slapping, or a combination perhaps. You might want to try a vibrator (for women) or a masturbation sleeve (for men).
Whatever you do, don't focus too much on orgasm, especially if this is the first time. Masturbation, just like sex, should be pleasure oriented, not goal oriented. The only goal should be to enjoy and to learn what works for you. Then you can share with a partner what you've learned and really get to discovering your ultimate orgasm."
CBS Films / Via pastalife.tumblr.com
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What Would Your "Captain Underpants" Superpower Be?