Top Shot: Shadow Falls
Top Shot features the photo with the most votes from the previous day’s Daily Dozen. The Daily Dozen is 12 photos chosen by the Your Shot editors each day from thousands of recent uploads. Our community has the chance to vote for their favorite from the selection.
A small Southern Beech tree silhouetted against the Devil’s Punchbowl waterfall in Arthur’s Pass National Park. Photograph by Wynston Cooper
Beautiful
This gallery contains 2 photos.
fallontonight: Jordan Spieth witnessed Bill Murray’s greatness while playing a round of golf! Bill Murray is all we got left. Source: youtube.com
Curators have collected more than thirty-five thousand objects from across the country. Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey have provided funds. Ahead of its September opening, Vinson Cunningham goes inside the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Read the full story on what it took to build the first ever museum dedicated to black history.
First ever museum dedicated to black history.
MOSCOW—In living rooms and kitchens across Russia and Ukraine, the U.S. presidential election is as riveting to TV viewers as “Game of Thrones” is to their American counterparts. Every time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Crimea, Russian hackers or the Donbas (the disputed region of eastern Ukraine)—and it’s rebroadcast here, which it usually is—people in both countries sit up as if some crazy American reality show has just come on. Almost every day, television channels in both countries highlight America’s new scandals and intrigues involving Trump’s connections with post-Soviet oligarchs, or leaked DNC emails, or the endless hurling of insults and the constant debate over America’s supposedly disappearing greatness.
But the main reason the U.S. election has become must-see TV is not because it’s a great reality show, or because Putin and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine come up as issues in the campaign as often as Mexican immigrants, ISIS and Benghazi. It’s because the political rhetoric across the Atlantic is actually starting to change facts on the ground in Russia and Ukraine. In both countries, coverage of the political chaos in the United States—the north star of politics for both anti-American and pro-American figures in this part of the world—is stirring public discontent and doubt about the future in Ukraine, and a sense of confidence, even arrogance, in Russia.
In short, the rhetoric in the U.S. election campaign—especially Trump’s—is already altering policy in the region, hardening Moscow’s attitude toward Ukraine and at the same time frustrating and confusing the Ukrainians who want to stand up to Putin.
Read more here
Trump Is Already Helping Putin Consolidate Control of Ukraine
“You yourself may not be a addict But try and love one, and then see if you can look me square in the eyes and tell me that you didn’t get addicted to trying to fix them. If you’re lucky, they recover. If you’re really lucky, you recover, too.
Loving a drug addict can and will consume your every thought. Watching their physical deterioration and emotional detachment to everything will make you the most tired insomniac alive.
You will stand in the doorway of their bedroom and plead with them that you "just want them back.” If you watch the person you love disappear right in front of your eyes long enough, you will start to dissolve too. Those not directly affected won’t be able to understand why you are so focused on your loved one’s well-being, especially since, during the times of your family member’s active addiction, they won’t seem so concerned with their own.
Don’t become angry with these people. They do not understand. They are lucky to not understand. You’ll catch yourself wishing that you didn’t understand, either.
“What if you had to wake up every day and wonder if today was the day your family member was going to die?” will become a popular, not-so-rhetorical question.
Drug addiction has the largest ripple effect that I have ever witnessed.
It causes parents to outlive their children. It causes jail time and homelessness. It causes sisters to mourn their siblings. It causes nieces to never meet their aunts. It causes an absence before the exit.
You will see your loved one walking and talking, but the truth is, you will lose them far before they actually succumb to their demons; which, if they don’t find recovery, is inevitable.
Drug addiction causes families to come to fear a ringing phone or a knock on the door. It causes vague obituaries. I read the papers and I follow the news; and it is scary. “Died suddenly” has officially become obituary-speak for “another young person found dead from a drug overdose.”
Drug addiction causes bedrooms and social media sites to become memorials. It causes the “yesterdays” to outnumber the “tomorrows.” It causes things to break; like the law, trust and homes.
Drug addiction causes statistics to rise and knees to fall, as praying seems like the only thing left to do sometimes.
People have a way of pigeonholing those who suffer from addiction. They call them “trash,” “junkies” or “criminals,” which is hardly ever the truth. Addiction is an illness. Addicts have families and aspirations.
You will learn that drug addiction doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care if the addict comes from a loving family or a broken home.
Drug addiction doesn’t care if you are religious. Drug addiction doesn’t care if you are a straight-A student or a drop-out. Drug addiction doesn’t care what ethnicity you are. Drug addiction will show you that one decision and one lapse in judgment can alter the course of an entire life.
Drug addiction doesn’t care. Period. But you care.
You will learn to hate the drug but love the addict. You will begin to accept that you need to separate who the person once was with who they are now.
It is not the person who uses, but the addict. It is not the person who steals to support their habit, but the addict. It is not the person who spews obscenities at their family, but the addict. It is not the person who lies, but the addict.
And yet, sadly… it is not the addict who dies, but the person.“
Posted on Facebook by one of the strongest women and ex-bosses I know.
Author unknown
The sky’s the limit! #cloudporn #construction #skyscraper #boston #newengland (at Fenway Neighborhood, Boston)
Up up and away. Wait wasn’t that Dangelos? Gasp!
Some days I truly believe this, some days not so much.
You either love “Suicide Squad” or really hate it. While that’s true for most movies, this most recent DC film stratified viewers and critics unlike most comic book movies have in the past.
Read Andrew McGill’s data-based take in
The Reason Suicide Squad Is Crushing? People Love It
(graphic by Andrew McGill / The Atlantic)
Suicide squad was pretty good, and not nearly as bad as critics said.
#quotesfromthedoor (at Cambridge, Massachusetts)
The Bensleygram 