lesprit-de-escalier:

waitingonthesilentshelf:

dynamicafrica:

A Senegalese woman crosses the street in her brightly coloured gown, looking incredibly flawless and fabulous.

this is beyond beautiful

In the dictionary, next to “swag”…

(Source: , via mobiusloops)

discoverynews:

Nobel Laureate Rita Montalcini Turns 103

Has Dr. Rita Levi Montalcini unlocked the secret of eternal life? The oldest living and the longest-lived Nobel laureate in history, Montalcini celebrates today her 103th birthday.

“I can say my mental capacity is greater today than when I was 20, since it has been enriched by so many experiences,” she says.

keep reading

(via fluorescentbird)

chris-ledford:

Even during the Blitz, Londoners still needed their milk, and this guy delivered. Cheers!

(via lostsplendor)

lostsplendor:

Lyudmila Pavlichenko [1916-1974]: Successful Sniper during the second World War at age 24, History Student, Wartime Diplomat

An excerpt from her bibliographical profile within the Military Channel reads:

When Russian sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko was interviewed by Time magazine in 1942, she derided the American media. 

“One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat, ” she said. 

The length of skirt probably didn’t matter to the 309 Nazi soldiers Pavlichenko is credited with killing, or to the many Russians she inspired with her bravery and skill. 

suicideblonde:

Alice Vanderbilt Shepard (1888) by John Singer Sargent

Alice Vanderbilt Shepard was the daughter of Elliot Fitch Shepard and Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt, a daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt. In 1895 Alice married Dave Hennen Morris, who later became the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium.

Alice was known to her family as “Angela” because of the sweetness of her disposition and the beauty of her face, well-demonstrated by her attached portrait. She was no true angel, however, and climbed a tree against her father’s specific interdiction and fell out fracturing her thoracic spine. Her father, a hard man, refused to call the doctor to punish her disobedience. She grew up deformed in a mansion on the Hudson now occupied as the clubhouse of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.

She was courted for sometime by “Dave” Hennen Morris who saw her face around the funnel of the steamer to France and knew at once that he must marry her. When he pursued her more closely, he saw that she had a deforming scoliosis which did not change his ardor one bit. When he presented himself to ask for her hand in marriage, her father (the hard man), told him he would never amount to anything good and asked him to leave and and have no further contact with the family. When he was allowed to say good-bye to her in the hall, he asked her to elope with him. She climbed out the window that night for an extraordinary life. Her sister later packed up her clothes in a trunk and sent them on by Railway Express. Mr. Shepard was infuriated at the insubordination of yet another daughter and refused to speak to her for a year, as the family story goes.

(Source: Wikipedia, via cavetocanvas)

biichama:

barbeauxbot:

jawdust:

Why you should be in passionate horny love with Elizabeth ‘Nellie Bly’ Cochrane

• Born in 1864/65, Elizabeth, one of 15 children, was always ‘the rebellious one’. Fierce as fuck from an early age, she testified against her abusive stepfather in her mother’s divorce trial.
• In 1880 she enrolled in a teacher-training college but had to leave after her first semester due to lack of funding - then moved to Pittsburgh to help run a goddamn boarding school. 
• This is where we get to the good shit. Age 18, she wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch bitchslapping the everloving fuck out of a sexist ballsack of an article entitled ‘What Girls Are Good For’. 
• The editor was so goddamn wooed by her razor-sharp tongue that he RAN AN AD asking her to identify herself. Elizabeth owned up, and was hired instantaneously, her badassery radiating from her pores and intoxicating all within a twenty mile radius.
• Working under the pen-name Nellie Bly, Elizabeth kicked the butts of morons everywhere, writing articles aimed at social justice, particularly labour laws to protect working ‘girls’ and reform of Pennsylvania’s divorce law, which greatly favoured men.
• Not content with changing the world from behind her desk, Elizabeth became a founding mother of investigative journalism. She was expelled from Mexico for exposing political corruption, and henceforth wrapped in cotton wool by her editors. Infuriated by their mollycoddling, Lizzie left them a note essentially telling them to fuck themselves and hot footed it to NYC. She was still only 23.
• Within six months she was hired by Joseph fucking Pulitzer himself, and continued her batshit crazy investigations uninhibited. Her very first assingment had her feigning mental illness to expose repulsive conditions in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. Her cutting report was so fucking horrifying, compelling and persuasive that it triggered public and political action, leading to reform of the institution.
• In the next couple of years she had herself thrown in jail and hired by a sweatshop, all for shits and giggles. Oh, and to uncover incomprehensible injustice, cruelty, poverty, and the concealed, heinous treatment of the vulnerable and voiceless. 
• But was pioneering journalism, social revolution and batshit badassery enough for our Liz? Like fuck it was. On a whim Nellie did what any self-respecting 25 year old woman in the 1800s would do - she emulated Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and did it in 72.
• Millions followed her journey, and its appeal to a semi-literate populace resulted in greatly increased newspaper readership. So while travelling the entire globe (IN THE 1800s, AS A WOMAN) by ship, train, burro and balloon, she helped the world to read.
• Having essentially conquered the entire goddamn universe before hitting 30, Nellie retired, and wed 72 year old industrialist Robert Seaman. Their marriage was a happy one, and after his death she took over Iron Clad Manufacturing Co.
• But Lizzie was a writer, what would she know about the metal industry? Well, she INVENTED the steel barrel that became the model for the widely used 55-gallon drum and turned her inherited businesses into multimillion-dollar companies, so apparently a fuck ton.
• Furthermore, she set a precedent for working conditions, ensuring her workers had good pay, gymnasiums, staffed libraries, and health care, all completely unheard of at the time, while still writing to further the plight of the Suffragette movement.
• Nellie may have died age 58 of pneumonia, but HBICs live on forever.

When I worked for the Girl Scouts, one of my favorite things was teaching them about Nellie.

AMAZING.

FIERCE

(via janeturenne)

(Source: janeturenne)

oneironautical:

Is it love or toxic radiation? Baby, it’s both, but who cares? Happy birthday to Marie Curie!

I’m honored to share a birthday with such a remarkable person. Even her cookbooks are still too highly radioactive to handle safely! 

(via tardiscrash)

thelifeguardlibrarian:

Ursula K. Le Guin

(via fuckyeahsciencefiction)