upworthy

Joseph Lamour

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10 photographs that boldly show how very different life is in the 2 Koreas

These images of insular North Korea are jarring next to images from South Korea (whose democracy is pretty similar to the U.S.'s). The image parings show how radically different life is in each half of a divided Korea.



Street scene in Insa-dong (Seoul, South Korea)



Street scene in Pyongyang (North Korea)





Bus stop for Boseong Girls' Middle & High School (South Korea)





Bus stop in Pyongyang (North Korea)



Hat seller on Insa-dong Street (South Korea)



Policewoman on Janggwang Street (North Korea)





Seoul Metropolitan Subway (South Korea)



Pyongyang Metro (North Korea)





Suburb of Seoul (South Korea)





Fields in the Gangdong district (North Korea)

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Heroes

Some instruments are made with 'blood wood,' and it doesn't even make them sound better.

Take a look at some musicians trying to change things.

True
Unilever and the United Nations

Some songs you listen to can actually be helpful to the environment.

You might be wondering what the heck that means.

Well, press play on this fun playlist, and let me explain it to you.

What do these sweet guitar tunes have in common?

The guitars you hear are played by musicians who have formed a pact against unsustainable wood. They are a part of Reverb, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping musicians "green" their tours.

These artists are "greening" their guitars.

The rare wood popular with fancy guitars — mahogany from Brazil, ironwood from Indonesia, and rosewood from India — sometimes comes from illegal or unsustainable logging areas.

It's sometimes said that these kinds of rare woods provide a "richer" quality of sound or somehow "enhance" the performance. But many guitar-makers and players agree: Rare wood doesn't make the music sound any better.

If rare wood doesn't make guitars sounds better, what does it do?


Bad stuff.

Reverb talks about the many ways illegal logging affects the communities and environments surrounding it. Climate change, human rights violations, destruction of rare habitats — the effect of this "blood wood" is far reaching.

What can we do? Seriously, just ask.

If you're wondering what you can do to make sure you're not buying an instrument made from resources that have been irresponsibly harvested, just ask.

If they don't know where it came from, buy the instrument somewhere else. If enough of us start to ask where our wood came from, music stores the world over will start caring. And that is how you keep responsible wood harvesters in business and make illegal logging a thing of the past.

Check out exactly how bands like Maroon 5 and Guster are helping so that these rare trees don't get any rarer.

I know this playlist is amazing ("When Doves Cry" by sustainable artist Prince is playing for me, and I am LIVING for the fact that he is helping the environment with his music), but press pause for a few moments and learn more about this important issue.

But more than just instruments are made of wood.

And while this might be about guitars, just think: Almost everything, from doors to floors to desks to almost everything in your home, has wood in it. Do you know where it comes from?

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Here is more proof that Hollywood is in major need of a gender-fairness overhaul.

Something's gotta give.

People are paying more attention to how unfairly women are treated in Hollywood.

With the recent revelation that 37-year-old actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was deemed too old to play a yet-unnamed 55-year-old actor's love interest in a movie and news that Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were paid the same as their male co-stars even though Fonda and Tomlin are the main characters whose names are the title of the show, it has come to a fever pitch of unfairness.

This clip from AJ+ can clue you in a bit more:

Here are a few jarring facts from the video, in case you can't play it at the moment.

  • In 2014, women had speaking roles only 30% of the time.
    • That's only 5% more than in the 1940s and '50s.
  • In 2014, women made up a total of 13% of lead roles.
    • Considering women are half of the population, that is an absurdly small number.
  • The top 10 earning actresses made about half of what their male counterparts made in 2014.

Yeah, I know.

One woman, Maria Giese, is doing something about it.

The film director has filed a complaint with the ACLU, saying that Directors Guild of America is overwhelmingly male, and that limited perspective affects almost every part of the movie industry.

Giese's complaint shines an important light on the old boys' club of Hollywood, and that it's gone on long enough.

If the industry has only one type of voice at the top of the heap...

...they're missing out on the value of a different perspective, which makes movies much more interesting.

I, for one, don't want to watch the same movie over and over. Do you?

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Two survivors of a brutal war meet again years later under astonishing circumstances.

Totally unbelievable yet absolutely true.

The Iraq-Iran war claimed so many lives. But this is a story about how it brought two lives together.

Also known as the Gulf War before the Persian Gulf War of the 1990s, it lasted 8 years, from 1980 to 1988. It tore almost a million people from their families and their futures. And in that chaos, two men — one Iraqi and one Iranian — met for the first time ... and then again 20 years later, under amazing circumstances:

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These men's lifelines became inextricably linked on the battlefield.

Unbelievable, right? These two men were enemies on the battlefield. But when Iranian Zahed Haftlang (who was only 13 at the time) came across an injured Iraqi soldier Najah Aboud, he could have just shot him and gone on his way. Instead, he decided to go through his pockets. It was there he found Najah's Quran.

When he picked up the book, he saw Najah's girlfriend and her child's picture in the injured soldier's pocket. It was then that he became another human to him. And that he realized that human had a family.

Compassion isn't usually the first thing on someone's mind in a situation like they were. Even in a time where Zahed's orders were to kill every enemy, he found it in his heart to spare Najah.

In war, too often we think of death and death only, but there are many stories about life in war, just like this.

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