15 famous redheads in movies and on TV recently

Over the past few decades, the world has become fascinated with red hair, and characters with the distinctive shade have been popping up all over pop culture recently. Here are some of the newest from the movie and small screens.

Disney/Pixar/AP

1. 'Brave'

Disney/Pixar/AP

Redhead Princess Merida is the star of the 2012 Pixar animated film "Brave." Voiced by Kelly Macdonald, Merida would much rather practice her bow and arrow or ride her horse than sit in a dress waiting for a husband, but when she tries to change her life, a spell cast by a witch has unexpected consequences.

Merida is best-known for her dislike of tight-fitting dresses (she struggles with a fancy garment in the film as she tries to fire a bow and arrow) and her wild, curly red hair, so there was an outcry when Disney briefly debuted a new image of the Scottish princess with bigger eyes and a fancier gown. A petition on Change.org titled "Disney: Say No to the Merida Makeover, Keep Our Heroine Brave!" garnered 251,000 signatures, and Disney responded by saying the new Merida was a limited-edition image (designed specially for Merida's induction into the Disney princess group) and that the old Merida would be appearing on merchandise as well.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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