Thrillist: The Best Things To Do and See Near The High Line in NYC

Thrillist: Everywhere We Plan to Eat, Drink, and Stay in Healdsburg This Summer

Thrillist: Best Places to Visit for Vacation in 2017 – Thrillist

Thrillist: 9 Surprisingly Great U.S. Food Cities You Have to Visit

Thrillist: The Coolest End-of-Summer Things to Do Across America

WeWork: Made in Detroit: Homegrown Chefs Create a Sizzling Food Movement

Millions of fans in the Middle East have been glued to the regional television singing contest, especially Palestinians who have gathered in cafes and homes to watch Assaf compete.

The contest was held in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut.

The 23-year-old singer who grew up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip has given Palestinians a renewed sense of pride and they have been his loyal supporters throughout the competition.

So it should come as no surprise that celebrations erupted in the Palestinian territories when they heard the good news.

Fireworks in Gaza City and East Jerusalem ignited as people took to the streets, some dancing the traditional “dabka” dance.

More from GlobalPost: In-Depth Series: Israel faces a changed Gaza

Assaf was pronounced the winner Saturday night, following Friday’s final round of competition where he went up against Ahmed Jamal from Egypt and Farah Youssef from Syria.

Assaf, said he almost didn’t get to compete and that he had to plead with Hamas to let him leave Gaza to travel to Lebanon. Another Palestinian reportedly gave Assaf his audition slot, believing Assaf had a better shot at winning.

Following the win, Assaf was named Youth Ambassador for UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/hollyworld/arab-idol-gaza-singer-mohammed-assaf-wins-contest-palestinian

Hannah (Lena Dunham), now back with Adam (Adam Driver), is getting her life back on track, while her best friend Marnie (Allison Williams) is single again after being ceremonially dumped by Charlie (Christopher Abbott). Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is enjoying her newfound sexual freedom and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) reappears in rehab. If you didn’t watch it, here is a recap.

Below, I chat with an anonymous woman friend about the new season.

Jennifer: I was actually pretty happy to see all the ways Girls touched on feminism in the first two episodes. I did feel, though, that they kinda hit us over the head with this definition of female friendship as one where you stick it out no matter what: the good, the bad and the ugly. As Hannah explains to Adam “I don’t care what my friends have to say! That’s like the whole point of friendship!”

In contrast, I think the show definitely nails both Adam and Charlie for pulling a disappearing act when they break-up with their ex-girlfriends. The show is critiquing a type of overly sensitive but basically irresponsible 20- and 30-something New York man captured in Adelle Waldman’s new novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which I think Dunham mentions in your Salon interview, right?

Lena Dunham (left) with Christina Aguillera

 Anonymous Friend: Yes, she said,

I loved it. It was the first novel I’ve read that was taking place in the same world as Girls. It was cool to see how fiction could deal with that differently. You get an internal monologue, and that was cool.

If I had to dilute the first two episodes down to one moment, it would be the scene in the coffee shop when Adam’s ex-girlfriend tells Hannah “You know that you have an off-the-wagon Neanderthal sex addict sociopath who’s gonna fuck you like he’s never met you and like he’s never loved his own mother. And then you’re gonna cry, because that’s what you do. Does he like to eat you out from behind? Does he bite your neck? Does he sound like a dying dog when he’s fucking you and he shoots his cum all over the place like it’s goddamn confetti? F*cking in my hair I had to get a goddamn blowout after I left your place.” I envy Dunham for getting to write lines for and about Adam, the feminist nightmare in rehab. He is often the worst thing ever, but his moments of truth keep us rooting for him and for their growth as a couple.

Jennifer: It was so dirty, and I think I laughed partly because it was so excruciating to hear.

Anon: Dunham exploits every stereotype possible, especially with the closeted black lesbian (Danielle Brooks, who plays Taystee on Orange Is the New Black) who gets outed by Jessa for supposedly wearing clearly identifiable lesbian clothing. During a rehab meeting, Jessa tells her, “I feel like you are using being molested as an excuse. I’m really sorry that your uncle fucked you, but at the end of the day we’ve all been fucked a lot.” Later, Jessa offers her an oral sex apology. Although Dunham has been criticized for the show’s lack of diversity, I’m not sure that this scene will appease any of her critics.

Jennifer: Well, I think what’s more interesting than the “is she racist?” conversation is the way Dunham and executive producer Jenni Konner threw in a pretty graphic multi-racial lesbian oral-sex scene complete with Jessa’s face being buried in the other girls’ lap.

Anon: Boom, that was amazing. How often has lesbian oral sex been shown on television?

Jennifer: Exactly. So, I guess it’s impossible to talk about Girls without some mention of Dunham being full-on naked … again. I would say she is quite literally on top in this Season 3 premiere. Of course, it begs the question reporter Tim Molloy recently asked Dunham, “I don’t get the purpose of all of the nudity on the show … your character is often naked just at random times for no reason.” Is this scene gratuitous?

Anon: Imperfection and nudity: two things we all live with and try to hide. Dunham challenges the idea that a woman’s body has to achieve male standards of beauty to be worthy of nudity and to enjoy sex. Her body is useful, and she loves it and sex and life.

Girls logo from Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Dunham from Flickr user YayA Lee under license from Creative Commons 2.0.

Hurricane Sandy had effectively divided the city in two, the haves and the have nots.

Uptown New Yorkers had power and access to stocked grocery stories while downtown many people remained in the dark, their streets flooded without access to shops or restaurants with food or even working traffic lights.

Walk around the Financial District today and you’ll hear the hum of generators and water being pumped out of the lobbies of office buildings and restaurant entrances. Dirty streets are piling up with black garbage bags while relatively few people walk the normally crowded sidewalks.

ConEd trucks, industrial dumpsters and yellow crime scene tape are now the norm.

On streets once filled with cars, you can find the occasional taxi or bus. On Saturday, broken traffic lights blinked yellow or red.

In lower Manhattan, the areas most devastated by the storm were Battery Park City, South Street Seaport and Wall Street.

Matthew Conaty, 31, a lawyer who lives and works on Wall Street, was among the last few people to evacuate the area before the storm hit Monday evening.

“My building manager sent me an email that ConEd could cut the power at anytime within the next hour and I knew I’d lose light, heat but also water,” Conaty said. “The city was starting to close the bridges and tunnels to leave Manhattan. I realized the elevator power was out and it was in my best interest to walk down the 21 flights of stairs to the lobby and leave as quickly as possible.”

Conaty tried to hail a cab in the battering wind and rain for 20 minutes but the streets were largely deserted except for some police officers and utility workers, most of whom were erecting sandbags around Wall Street’s banks, bars and local shops.

“I finally flagged down a cab and told them to take me to Brooklyn, and quickly, as only 20 minutes remained till all the bridges closed,” effectively sealing off Manhattan that evening from the rest of the boroughs.

Conaty returned Wednesday, only to find his apartment still uninhabitable, like so many New Yorkers.

“There were a lot of police and an incredible amount of utility trucks – trucks pumping water, workers jack hammering the roads… I was surprised by the scope of the operation so soon after the hurricane disappeared.”

So how does it feel to be back?

“A storm like this certainly changes the way you look at home,” he said. “You don’t take a well lit, warm apartment for granted anymore.”

“I lost power, water, electricity but I was prepared,” explained Michelle Soffen, 24, a film producer who weathered out the storm at her high-rise apartment building a block from the New York Stock Exchange. “It’s like urban camping. If you filled your bathtub with water and stocked up on food, you were alright. I think the city has done an amazing job working overtime to get things back to normal. I’m really grateful to the ConEd workers and the doormen, who are the heroes of this storm.”

North a few blocks, the iconic South Street Seaport, which was slammed by Hurricane Sandy still looks like a ghost town. The cobblestone streets are empty, shops like Brookstone, The Body Shop and Ann Taylor abandoned. The complex’s historic buildings suffered extensive flood damage.

David Tews, 43, an audio engineer for NBC, who lives nearby, finally returned home Saturday after living at a hotel uptown on 53rd street for most of the week.

“It feels good to be home, power or no power,” said Tews who walked two hours from Midtown back home. ”I am lucky to have a place to come back to. The thing that seemed the most disturbing was that on the Upper West Side, it was strange to walk by people with groceries… knowing people below 34th street and on the Lower East Side were dumpster diving for food.“

“I’m not attacking… but be mindful, if you help, help out,” he said.

It’s a sentiment many New Yorkers feel in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Down at the end of Pier 17, where South Street Seaport edges into the East River, a lone security guard stood watch Saturday night, trying to keep warm in the evening cold.

“I was here when the floods came. Me and a few other guards were here from Sunday afternoon through Tuesday,” explained the officer who spoke to GlobalPost on the condition of anonymity. “We made the best of what we had.. It’s been very, very dark down here.”

Through the storm, the group of six were “literally trapped” in the Seaport’s mall area with TV dinner and a few supplies as 7-8 feet of water surged up from the river.

Janette Barbosa and Jorge Santana live nearby in an apartment on the 15th floor of the Alfred E. Smith public housing development.

“It’s been hard; four days, no light, no water, still no elevators,” Santana explained. “I had to stay home and lost two days work.”

Looking around at the now deserted cobblestone streets of South Street Seaport, Santana said wistfully ”This is our spot. It’s where we go for the holidays. I don’t think it’s ever going to be the same.”

BROOKLYN, NY — On election night, about 200 enthusiastic Obama supporters gathered at the Galapagos Art Space to watch election results come in, but reminders of Hurricane Sandy were not far away.

The space, just a block from the East River, suffered $200,000 worth of damage from a massive 14-foot surge that dumped five feet of water on the venue during last week’s storm.

A neighborhood gathering spot for locals and artists, Galapagos sits below the Brooklyn Bridge in the DUMBO neighborhood, on a block now lined with dumpsters and generators providing electricity to the area’s flooded buildings and warehouses.

On Tuesday night, the space was packed with Brooklyn natives who gleefully watched President Barack Obama win a second term. But just one week ago, Galapagos was underwater.

“We were totally devastated, this entire venue was up to our neck in water,” said Galapagos’ director Robert Elmes. “We set a deadline and a finish line and we had to cross it … We knew we had to, or we wouldn’t stay alive.”

Over 80 volunteers came to help — they siphoned water, mopped, and shoveled mud.

After a long week, many Obama supporters were finally able to enjoy some good news.

“The entire room burst into applause!” exclaimed Shree Dhond, a communications consultant, who was stranded in Connecticut during the storm. “It’s good to be in a space when you hear good news like that. It’s great to feel that energy.”

“I’m proud to live in a country where people can love each other and get married, and no man in Washington can tell me what to do with my body,” said Cheryl Fielding, 37, a British wedding planner. “This is the first year I was able to vote because I recently became a US citizen. I think the election process is a lot more flashy here, there’s a lot more money [than Europe.]”

For Lola Dyer, 39, a registered nurse, the decisive issue of this election was abortion rights.

“For me, that was the huge difference between Romney and Obama,” said Dyer. “I grew up in Nashville. Twenty-five percent of my family now wants to leave the country, they voted for Romney.”

The evening was not only a victory for the president, but for a number of women who won contentious Senate races including Claire McCaskill, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Kirsten Gillibrand.

“I’m very excited,” said Katelyn Dominque, 23, an employment specialist. “I’m actually from Massachusetts. I did an absentee ballot. It’s a big deal for me that Elizabeth Warren won. I’m almost proud of my state.”

“I’m pleased,” said Marcus Bance, the Galapagos security guard. At the same time, like so many New Yorkers, Bance is feeling the economic effects of the storm after missing work last week.

Bance said he felt Obama deserved four more years, despite the economy: “This guy is doing everything he possibly can. Give the guy a chance.”

During an appearance last week onEntertainment Tonight, Winfrey said a shop assistant refused to show her a $38,000 handbag at the upscale Trois Pommes in Zurich.

More from GlobalPost: Just how racist is Switzerland?

Boutique manager Trudie Goetz denied any racism, telling CNN the entire incident was a “200 percent misunderstanding.”

Winfrey said at the Los Angeles premiere of “The Butler” on Monday that “I think that incident in Switzerland was just an incident in Switzerland.” She stars in that movie along with Forest Whitaker.

 “I’m really sorry that it got blown up. I purposely did not mention the name of the store. I’m sorry that I said it was Switzerland.”

She added, “I was just referencing it as an example of being in a place where people don’t expect that you would be able to be there.”

The incident comes as Switzerland has placed greater restrictions on foreigners and those seeking asylum.

In June, the nation voted in favor of greater restrictions on asylum seekers with some Swiss towns seeking to prevent the non-Swiss  from entering public spaces, such as pools, libraries and retirement homes.

“‘Emotional Creature’ is about discovering the girl in each of us,” Ensler said. “It is about traveling and dancing and refusing. It is about telling secrets and breaking taboos and building a posse.”

The play tackles some uncomfortable topics, from rape and genital mutilation, to such seemingly more innocent matters as Barbies and peer pressure. Part drama, part musical, the performance incorporates video, original songs, monologues and stories from across the globe.

“The reason I wrote ‘Emotional Creature’ was to honor people like Malala Yousufzai—a fearless young activist who is an inspiration to teen girls the world over,” Ensler explained in October.

Yousufzai, a 15-year-old Pakistani girl, recently made headlines when she was shot by the Taliban in her home country for promoting girls’ education. She survived, and is being treated in London for the attack. Her ordeal has drawn international attention to the struggle for gender rights in Pakistan.

The appealing and energetic cast features six young actresses. Early in the play, two of the characters, one from Bulgaria and another from Congo, talk about their experience being raped and forced into prostitution and sexual slavery.

Marta, played by Joaquina Kalukango, recounts being accosted by a group of Congolese soldiers while she is shopping. They kidnap her, and one of the men abuses her for years afterward. The monologue sheds light on the rampant problem of mass rape in Congo from the perspective of a young girl, who voices her anger, confusion and mixed emotions.

“When I see enormous injustice, when I see people messing with women’s rights, there are certain things I can’t be quiet about,” Ensler told Chicago’s Daily Herald. “I cannot sit there and let those people do that. That just makes me insane.”

Unlike the coverage available in news reports, which Ensler said prompted her to write about Pakistan and Congo, “Emotional Creature” focuses on the emotional and psychological impact such crimes have on their victims by giving them a voice. If anything, the performance makes the case that being emotional is a female strength, not weakness.

“I am an emotional creative,” sing the cast. “Don’t tell me not to cry, to shut it down. This is not extreme, it is a girl thing.”

Perhaps the wittiest sketch is the story of a 15-year-old Chinese girl who works in a Chinese factory where she makes the heads for Barbie dolls. The character, played by Olivia Oguma, tells us how sorry she feels for “poor Barbie” who must be perfect, can never talk, and doesn’t have the freedom to be herself. She jokes how she is “Prison Barbie,” trying to send out secret messages to the world while, stuck in a factory, she manufactures dolls for young girls across the globe.

Many of the scenes set in America deal with the inherent angst girls feel to conform to societal pressure to look thin, be pretty and fit in.

Adapted from the “Vagina Monologues,” in the song “my short skirt,” the girls reclaim their right to dress however they like, sexy or not, stating it is not “an invitation, a provocation, that I want it or give it or that I hook.”

“My short skirt… is a liberation flag in the women’s revolution,” they sing in unison.

The play is currently at Pershing Square Signature Center in New York through January 13. Meanwhile, Ensler is finishing up her memoir, In the Body of the World, which comes out next spring.

The ongoing firestorm over United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice’s possible nomination for secretary of state, to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton, is turning into the perfect storm of politics, gender and race. The furor is the latest example of the “Republican war on women,” which, in part, helped cost Mitt Romney the presidential election and led to a record number of women winning Congressional seats in November.

The campaign against Rice, led by GOP Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, has painted the UN ambassador as simultaneously too “aggressive” and not qualified enough. This age-old criticism of women in the workplace has no place in the Rice conversation. It is also, incidentally, an insult hurled at Clinton during her own nomination for State.

Opponents say Rice purposely “misled” the public in the days after the September 11 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, when she reported the assault resulted from spontaneous protests over an anti-Muhammad video. That early information turned out to be incorrect, and the Obama administration later confirmed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack. Certainly the deaths were a tragedy, but as ambassador to the UN, Rice was not responsible for decisions made in Libya.

Subsequently, Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Susan Collins of Maine have joined the GOP effort, perhaps to bolster what appears to be a group of old white men “ganging up” on an African-American woman, as Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker noted.

Republicans have yet to learn the lessons of their 2012 election defeat – that they need both women and minorities. Going after Rice, in such a public way, will only further alienate those voters.

Clinton, who has for the most part stayed out of the battle, praised Rice at a news conference last week in Dublin for her work at the UN. She echoed the administration’s explanation that the CIA intelligence coming out from Benghazi “evolved over time.”

“What Susan said had been based on the information that had been given to every senior official in our administration,” Clinton said. “She made it clear it was subject to change.”

That argument seems reasonable enough. So why have the Republicans continued their witch-hunt?

“Upon closer examination, however, the real reason may be less complicated,” writes columnist Parker. “She’s not a member of the most elite club in America, the U.S. Senate. Also, she appears to be President Obama’s first choice.”

President Barack Obama has not yet decided whether he will nominate Rice but he has vigorously defended her from the GOP attacks and warned them against blocking her confirmation. “When they go after the UN ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me,” Obama said.

Meanwhile, McCain has maintained “we will do whatever is necessary to block the nomination that’s within our power.” Graham simply added “I don’t trust her.”

Their threat to filibuster Rice could be embarrassing for Obama and creates further complications for the administration beyond the latest budget battle.

Ironically, McCain and Graham have thrown their backing behind liberal Democrat Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Considered another front-runner for Secretary of State, some Democrats believe the attempt to block Rice and promote Kerry is the Republicans’ strategy to regain the Massachusetts Senate seat they lost in the last election, according to The Huffington Post.

“I don’t doubt that at all in terms of their motives,” Democratic strategist Tad Devine told The Huffington Post. “I think they are trying to come down from 55 [Democrats] to get to 50 as fast as they can in the Senate.”

Kerry has not yet said whether he wants the job.

If Rice is confirmed, she would be the latest in a recent string of Madam Secretaries that can be traced back to Madeleine Albright.

Albright made history in 1997 when she became the first female secretary of state. She served under Bill Clinton after being unanimously confirmed by the Senate in a 99 to 0 vote, something Rice could only dream of in the contentious atmosphere today. Albright’s appointment opened the floodgates for women to a branch of government that was previously reserved for men. In the George W. Bush administration, another glass ceiling in government was shattered when Condoleezza Rice became the first African American secretary of state.

Looking back at the door she opened, Albright remarked, “My little saying is that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other. So I think there has to be the sense that once you have climbed the ladder of success, that you don’t push it away from the building.”

By continuing to support Susan Rice, women can send a clear message to the GOP that they will not be intimidated by the threat of a tough confirmation battle nor will they allow the Republicans to set the agenda over the next four years.