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upworthy

Amanda Pell

You’re getting ready for a date. It’s time to pick the place. Where do you go?

You want to consider price — not too cheap, not too expensive — and ambiance; you want it to be conveniently located, with a good menu and perhaps some alcohol offerings. And if you’re gay in Indiana, you also need to pick somewhere you know you won’t get harassed or downright thrown out.

“Any service provider in Indiana can turn anyone down,” says Amy Shaw, who identifies as a lesbian and has lived in Indiana for the past 14 years. “People get assaulted for being queer. So it’s important to know where those safe places are, where you’ll get served, where people are going to treat you like anyone else.”

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When  Josh Kaplan was a kid, he had a pretty hard time fitting in.

“I had a terrible stutter,” he says. “I really struggled to make friends.”

Finally, Kaplan opened up to his parents about the difficulty he was having with classmates at school.

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L'Oreal Dermablend

"I’m definitely really comfortable in my skin," Kody says. But a few years ago, that wasn't the case.

When Kody was in high school, he hadn't yet come out as gay. He was young and still figuring out who he was.

"I wanted to fit in," he says. "I wanted to be just like everyone else."

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One of today's most innovative forms of sustainable farming is old. Like, really, really old. Aztec Empire old: chinampas.

With all the focus we put on technology, it's easy to believe that sustainability is a new-age idea. Scientists are frantically trying to develop something to save the world from our recent mistakes — the pollution of the Industrial Revolution, spills from any number of oil companies, and the human-made climate change that scientists only began to notice in the late 1900s.

In reality, one of the most innovative farming solutions has been here all along. Sustainable farming isn't a 20th century invention. It's something the Aztecs started doing centuries ago called chinampas.

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