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Beautiful or average? Ad campaign asks women to choose beauty
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Dove set up signs with the words beautiful and average above doors in San Francisco, Shanghai, Delhi, London and Sao Paulo, and captured the results as women had to choose which door to walk through. - photo by Tracie Knabe Snowder
Doves created another powerful video about beauty perception, and this time theyre asking women to literally choose to be beautiful.

An astonishing 96 percent of women dont believe theyre beautiful, according to several studies done by Dove. The company launched its #ChooseBeautiful campaign this week to help women see that feeling beautiful is a choice they can make every day.

Dove set up signs with the words beautiful and average above doors in San Francisco, Shanghai, Delhi, London and Sao Paulo, and captured the results as women had to choose which door to walk through.

While one mother proudly dragged her daughter over to the beautiful door, most women in the video chose to walk through the average door.

It was my choice, one woman says of why she walked through the average door. And now I will question myself for the next few weeks, maybe month.

Those who did choose the beautiful door described it as a triumphant feeling.

Women make thousands of choices each day related to their careers, their families, and, lets not forget, themselves, Dove said in a statement, according to mashable.com. Feeling beautiful is one of those choices that women should feel empowered to make for themselves, every day.

Dove encourages women who don't feel beautiful to practice mindfulness, a therapeutic technique used to help a person focus on the present moment and accept their thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.

"Theres growing literature on the impact of mindfulness on body image, body confidence, body awareness and lessening body criticism," Dr. Nancy Etcoff says in a video on the #ChooseBeautiful Tumblr page. "People have a tendency to look in the mirror and always zero in on their faults. Mindfulness really helps people to look at their body in a positive way, be aware of and appreciate their body and to view it with compassion and kindness.

This isnt Doves first time creating a campaign around beauty perception. It also created the Real Beauty Sketches campaign in 2013 that asked women to describe themselves to a sketch artist.
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Book review: Author digs into mining's complicated past and present in 'River of Lost Souls'
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Jonathan Thompson will speak about his book "River of Lost Souls" at the King's English Bookshop on Tuesday, April 3 at 7 p.m. - photo by Amanda Olson
"RIVER OF LOST SOULS: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Spill," by Jonathan Thompson, Torrey House Press, 275 pages (nf)

Plenty has been written about the very small world of a mining town and the very broad reach of a beleaguered industry. From Loretta Lynns iconic song "Coal Miners Daughter," to the 2010 nail-biting coverage of 33 trapped Chilean miners, to the hit Broadway musicals "Paint Your Wagon" and "Billy Elliot," mining is a global story, and its one of heartbreak, hard work and hard times.

Jonathan Thompsons "River of Lost Souls" examines the many facets of risk involved in taking resources from below the earths surface. An environmental journalist, Thompson has reported on southwest Colorado for over 20 years. This book is special, however, because the Four Corners area of Colorado is his current and ancestral home. Thompson is writing about minings ecological, social, financial and political impact on his land, his landscape, his water, his people. That makes "River of Lost Souls" more than a regular reporting job.

Thompson begins with the Gold King Mine wastewater disaster of 2015, which the EPA caused while attempting to drain water near the mines entrance. The spill sent 3 million gallons of waste and tailings into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River and part of the San Juan River watershed which drains into the Colorado, affecting the Utah, Colorado and New Mexico parts of that watershed as well as the Navajo Nation.

From there, Thompson jumps into far stretches of time to 1765, when a Spanish explorer named the Animas River; to 10,000 years earlier, when Paleo-Indians roamed the rivers valley; to the meridian of time, when the ancestors of the Zuni, Hopi and Rio Grande Pueblo people inhabited the land for 500 years; to the mid-1800s and the Swedes who came to Silverton, Colorado, to mine.

Its a grand scope, but telling any story of landscape is telling a very grand story.

It also makes a complex story difficult to follow. Thompsons time warps are important, but they are jarring. His time jumps need clear dates, and Thompson doesnt always make them available. A map would also be useful. Thompsons writing is good, but his sentences can be dense and require readers to do their own mining for the riches the writing embeds. The work is worthwhile, however, as there are many moving parts in any story about mines land, culture, policy, history, money, inevitable disaster and Thompson works to examine all of them.

"River of Lost Souls" is a thoughtful read, but not a quick one. Because Thompsons writings come from 20 years of his newspaper reports, the overall feeling can be disjointed and sparse, which is distracting if one is expecting to follow a tenable thread. This is not a typical narrative with a cast of characters and a traditional story arc. Readers should approach this text as the investigation it is: puzzle pieces of a larger-than-life story that is eons old. If you are the kind of reader who wants it laid out cleanly, this is not that book. But, to Thompsons point, nothing is clean about mining that has never been the case.

Thompsons best writing is in his descriptions of people and places. His telling of how he came to Silverton is familiar and engaging. If readers approach the book with care and attention, they will be rewarded with savoring these descriptive passages when they happen.
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