Thursday 23rd June
I am woken up by a knock on my door. My housemate gently pokes her head into my bedroom. I am spread-eagled across my Destiny 1000 mattress, cascades of pillows around my head, duvets flung to the floor.

"Bertie?"

I murmur to prove I'm awake. Am I late for vinyasa flow?

"Bertie, you should get up." Her eyes roam around my room, a half-drunk bottle of tequila, a bra thrown over a stack of dusty magazines. Wait, wasn't I with someone last night? Didn't we spend the night together? I'm confused. I have that distinct discomfort in the sides of my hips but I'm definitely very much alone in this bed.

"Bertie, you need to get up."

I open my eyes into the beige gloom. She walks in. "Wake up. The referendum fucked you, Bertie, and Britain left. He took your MacBook. And my marmite."

Wednesday 9th November
I am woken up by the sound of the radio being switched on in the kitchen. As I instinctively swivel over to the darker side of the bed, my head swims like liquid in a spinning bowl. I croak and then immediately cough. I smoked too many cigarettes last night. My stomach grates. I can make out the end of an Al Green song and then the flicking on of the kettle.

"Bertie, are you awake? I'm making tea."

I enunciate my most energetic "yeah!" and wrap my arms around a pillow, pushing further down under the duvet. My housemate appears at the door. She clocks my crumpled underwear and the Slavoj Zizek books I'm pretending to read scattered across the floor.

"Are you OK?"

"Hmm? Course, why wouldn't I be."

"Uh, you came in pretty late last night and I think there was more than one person with you."

I push myself up to sitting. It's raining outside and the damp from my window is seeping into the wall, mimicking the grey clouds outside.

"Bertie, um, have you looked at your phone?"

I pick it up, it's out of battery. "No, why?"

"You might want to check your messages. I don't know how to put this... Last night you got fucked by Trump and the entirety of the alt-right. It's all over the news."

I click on to Rebel Media's YouTube page. Lauren Southern has already released a video about it.

Friday 11th November
Leonard Cohen has abandoned me and I am now ready to accept I may have some issues to work through. It is time to anticipate all further crises and mentally prepare for the worst. This way, when you wake up lacking the protection of some fundamental human right or to the presence of a lunatic in a position of absolute power, you can simply smile, pop a codeine paracetamol and go back to sleep.

And now:

ALL THE WAYS WE'RE GOING TO GET FUCKED NEXT YEAR

Nope, you don't need to wax, work-out or even wash your poshest underwear. In fact, getting fucked has never been easier, especially because we've had so much practice this year. Simply prepare for the absolute worst, and then feel satisfaction in the knowledge you had the foresight to expect it.

JK Rowling Will Replace Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party
Decided through a series of viral Twitter polls, the author will graciously accept the position after ousting a now "unforgivably Hufflepuff" Corbyn from the top spot.

Your Home Will Unfortunately Be in the Path of a Very Important Train Track
Or a Westfield, or Ed Balls' garden extension. Suzanne Moore will write an article for the Guardian about why we need to stop "attacking everyday people" for wanting to make the best of their homes and move their bodies from places to other places extremely fast.

David Attenborough Will Die
He will die sorry!

Trump Will Accept His Position as POTUS
And his combined following on Twitter will immediately qualify him for a second term. He will repeal Roe vs. Wade after accidentally placing three white nationalist Catholics at the head of the Supreme Court. This means that every woman fucked in any way by Trump will be forced to carry the child to term. America will be repopulated by Donalds, and Milo Yiannopoulos will ride around the country in an enormous pram screaming "DADDY" at the top of his lungs.

The Ice Caps Will Actually Melt
This will stop being a cute article that websites run when they need something to go viral. Like the slow and steady way 30 creeps up on you, so too will the destruction of the natural world. Leonardo DiCaprio will make a must-see, deeply woke feature-length film about the coral reef, which will require the moulding and distribution of so many 3D glasses out of toxic plastic the Pacific Trash vortex will expand, heating the water underneath it and creating a hot current which drowns the final polar bears. Soho House will install a pop-up health spa at its source.

@bertiebrandes

Thumbnail photo by MIKI Yoshihito

More from VICE:

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How 2016 Became the Year That Voters Stopped Following Politicians' Big Plans

Populism Barely Got Started in 2016 – Just Wait Until Next Year

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

US NEWS

Trump Wants Climate Change Skeptic as Interior Secretary
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly offered the role of secretary of the interior to Montana representative Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander who said he did not believe climate change was "proven science." Zinke has been a supporter of mining and logging on public lands and called Hillary Clinton the "Antichrist" in 2014.—The New York Times

US Calls on Taiwan to Boost Military Spending
An Obama administration official has warned Taiwan to ramp up its military spending to keep pace with threats from China. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Abraham Denmark said US respect for the One China policy remained in place under Team Obama, but Denmark also said Taiwan's defense budget "has not kept pace with the threat developments and should be increased."—Reuters

Tom Perez to Challenge Keith Ellison for DNC Role
The Obama administration's outgoing labor secretary Tom Perez is ready to join the race to lead the Democratic National Committee. Sources close to Perez say he will announce his campaign to become DNC chairman on Thursday. He would immediately slide in as a top rival to Representative Keith Ellison, who's backed by 2016 Democratic presidential runner-up Bernie Sanders.—The Washington Post

Ohio Governor Signs 20-Week Abortion Ban
Ohio governor John Kasich signed a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks in his state on Tuesday. The ban makes no exceptions for rape or incest cases. The Republican governor also vetoed a separate bill that would have banned abortions at the first sign of a fetal heartbeat, usually around six weeks into pregnancy.—VICE

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Rebel Fighters and Civilians Still Under Fire in East Aleppo
Residents of eastern Aleppo are still trying to leave the city, after an evacuation set to start at dawn on Wednesday morning was delayed. Under a deal struck a day earlier, both civilians and rebel fighters were to be taken on buses to rebel-held areas in northern Syria. Rebel leaders blamed Iran's Shi'ite militias for the delay, and the ceasefire with pro-regime forces seemed to fall apart.—Reuters/CNN

Gambian Soldiers Seize Electoral Commission HQ
Security forces have seized control of Gambia's Independent Electoral Commission offices. The commission had confirmed the defeat of President Yahya Jammeh by Adama Barrow following a vote earlier this month. A delegation of West African leaders arrived in Gambia Tuesday to convince Jammeh to give up power.—Al Jazeera

Protests Against Brazilian Spending Freeze Turn Violent
Activists clashed with police after the Brazilian senate on Tuesday approved a plan to cap public spending over the next two decades. In Brasilia, people protested outside the National Congress building, and riot police blocked a group trying to march on Globo TV offices. President Michel Temer's long-term austerity plan passed by 53 votes to 19.—BBC News

ISIS Claims Responsibility for Cairo Church Attack
In a statement shared online, ISIS has claimed it was responsible for the suicide bomb attack on St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo on Sunday that killed 25 people. A 22-year-old named Mahmoud Shafiq Mohammed Mustafa is said to have carried out the attack.—The Guardian

EVERYTHING ELSE

Kayne Teases White House Run with #2024 Tweet
Kayne West has explained his Trump Tower meeting in a series of tweets and teased a run for the presidency with the cryptic message: "#2024." The artist said it was "important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change."—USA Today

Snowden Warns Against Fake News Censorship
Edward Snowden thinks aggressive government intervention would be the wrong way to tackle fake news in a livestreamed interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. "The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer is more speech," said the NSA whistleblower.—VICE News

Beyoncé Has Most Googled Song of the Year
Beyoncé's "Formation" was the most googled song of 2016, according to a top ten list released by the search engine. Prince's "Purple Rain" came second, followed by Rae Sremmurd's "Black Beatles" and Desiigner's "Panda." – Billboard

Margot Robbie Set for All-Female DC Villains Movie
Margot Robbie has reportedly joined the cast of all-female DC superhero movie Gotham City Sirens, repeating her role as Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad. David Ayer, who directed the Warner Bros. movie, is set to direct the DC project.—The Hollywood Reporter

Arctic Warming in 2016 Is 'Unprecedented,' Scientists Say
A new report from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned of "unprecedented" warming in Arctic temperatures. The polar region has had its warmest year on record, according to the group's Arctic Report Card.—Motherboard

There's much more to Christmas than the relatively modern set of customs that get trotted out every year: Santa Claus, presents under the tree, stockings hung with care. What about Krampus, a centuries-old pagan character rooted in Norse mythology? Yeah, hey, what about him? According to folklore, the horned, goat-footed devil was partnered with jolly old Saint Nick in the 17th century by Christians as part of the Feast of St. Nicholas, their winter celebration. Scaring children into being nice by whipping them with chains and even hauling them off to his lair to be tortured and eaten, the original bad Santa arrives every Krampusnacht, or Krampus night, traditionally held on December 5.

The beast's name comes from the German word krampen, meaning claw, and shares characteristics with demonic creatures in Greek mythology like fauns and satyrs. Due to his devilish appearance, Krampus celebrations were banned by the Catholic Church in the 12th century. Even fascists in World War II allegedly found fault with Krampus because they considered him a creation of the Social Democrats. A more modern take on the tradition has taken hold in the US and Europe where inebriated men dress up in devilish costumes and gallivant though the streets for Krampuslauf (Krampus run), a 1,500 year-old pagan ritual to chase off the ghosts of winter. (Sorta like Santacon—which actually has some spiritual ties to Krampus in the distant past.)

The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil, a book by Al Ridenour out now from Feral House, explores the legend of the mythical bogeyman that has inspired a Hollywood movie, a comic book, and holiday greeting cards called Krampuskarten that feature images of the horned demon frightening and beating naughty children into tears. These cards often come with slogans like "Gruss vom Krampus" (greetings from krampus) or "Brav Sein" (be good). I recently spoke with the 55-year-old Ridenour, a veteran freelance writer, to find out about the legend of Krampus and how, "You better watch out, you better not cry / Better not pout, I'm telling you why" takes on a whole new meaning with this dude.

VICE: Why do you think Krampus has had this resurgence in popular culture?
Al Ridenour: The pattern is different in Europe, but in America, it would be the punk aesthetic and the sort of impudent internet culture of memes. Ever since the 1960s, the counterculture's looked for some way to respond to the holidays. In those days, neo-pagans began celebrating the customs of Yule, and by the 1970s, you began seeing an even more nihilistic response with Christmas slasher films like Black Christmas or Christmas Evil. All of this was a rebellion against the parental generation, the Normal Rockwell Christmas, and the Coca-Cola Santa.

As the punk aesthetic of the 1980s moved into the 1990s, it was giving birth to things like Santacon, those mobs of drunken Santas that take over dozens of cities each year. Nowadays, that event's just a sort of amorphous pub crawl, but I was an organizer with the group that created that event, the Cacophony Society, and in its original form, Santacon was more pointedly and theatrically satiric. Its mission was to skewer the American holiday by making a degrading display of its chief icon.

When images of the Krampus began circulating on the internet in the mid 2000s, that really set fire to it all. Those of us who came up in the punk milieu recognized the Krampus as the new savior of Christmas. We'd grown up chafing against this ideal of Christmas a sentimental domestic idyll of family values and childhood wonder, and here we had this shocking figure who celebrated the holiday by beating children! He seemed to perfectly embody the rebellion we felt. Then, if you started actually looking into the figure, got beyond those images of whips and chains and frightened children, if did a little reading, you'd realize the Krampus also fit in with that 1960s countercultural desire to embrace the holiday's pagan roots.

Photo by Moorpass Maishofen/Courtesy of Feral House

How did you find out about the legend of Krampus, and what made you want to write a book about it?
My grandparents were German, and I ended up getting a BA in German studies. After college, I lived for a year in Berlin, which is far north of Krampus country, but there were still these beautiful old devil postcards that would show up around Christmas. I was attracted to them and bought one, not really knowing what it was. However, at the time, I was also doing some pretty serious reading of my own in mythology and folklore. I eventually figured it out and became obsessed with the subject.

In 2012, I finally had the opportunity to go to southern Germany and Austria to see Krampus runs for myself. I ended up doing some pretty serious study of the topic just to plan my trip. That was the beginning of research for my book. At the same time, my involvement with the Cacophony Society fed the interest. This group had also engaged in forms of unruly street theater in ways paralleling the more traditional less municipally controlled Krampus runs. People I knew from that group also become interested in the Krampus, and in 2013, we formed a troupe in LA.

Making costumes and masks for that, as well as translating a 19th-century Krampus play we now produce annually, all fed into my research for the book. Other than that, I did a lot of online interviews after returning from Europe and ended up meeting an Austrian anthropologist who happened to be working at UCLA, Matthäus Rest, who also wrote a book on the subject, sadly only available in German. He helped greatly with the research.

At one time, in Europe, Krampus was a regular holiday tradition that involved all kinds of dark characters and sequences of events related to witchcraft. Can you explain all that?
The season was once much more comparable to Halloween. And it was not just the Krampus, but many other costumed figures that visited homes in the night. Like Halloween, the season was considered a time when the veil between the worlds was lifted and was associated with a complex mythology of ghosts, witchcraft, and other supernatural beings. A good part of my book is about a whole network of traditions associated with the Krampus that I lump under the subtitle the "Old, Dark Christmas."

The only taste Americans get of this is in Dickens's ghost story, but this is only the tip of a long-submerged iceberg. Dickens himself wrote a number of ghost stories set at Christmas, and the British have revived this tradition with annual BBC showings of "A Ghost Story for Christmas." In contemporary Germany and Austria, the Krampus may appear on the days around St. Nicholas Eve, but from Christmas to Epiphany (January 6), there are hundreds of other costumed events featuring a similar creature called the Percht, as well as other events that use storytelling and costumes to celebrate the haunted Twelve Nights parents staged for everyone's entertainment and the improvement of children's behavior. As for the German question, I get this a lot and always get the feeling that behind it there's some notion of national character tainted by American's inability to think of Germans without thinking of Nazis. It wasn't a tradition of the German nation as a whole—it was a tradition of the German south, Bavaria, and Austria.

The more martial culture of northern Germany, the Prussian-dominated culture that gave Germany a reputation for hardness, and eventually paved the way for the militarism of the Third Reich, was not associated with the tradition. The fact that the bogeyman used to frighten children has been ubiquitous, and parenting in the 19th century—when the tradition as we know it was consolidated—was strict and employed threats and corporal punishment throughout Europe, not just in Germany and Austria.

Tyrolean Unterland–style Perchten from Eiber Pass, Schwoich, Austria. Photo © Martin Guggenberger Photography/courtesy of Feral House

Could you talk about Krampus's demise by World War II?
This is one of those facts that made it onto the English-language Wikipedia, which seems to be given undue importance. It's true that Krampus runs were curtailed during the war, but the same could be said for other public entertainments during times of scarcity. There was not an ideological opposition to Krampus activities, and indeed the Third Reich was very supportive of various expressions of the German folk culture. But any large gathering of people during unstable times always presents a possible outlet for expressions of political unrest and riot. That's more the reason they were suppressed. On the other hand, it was during the 1930s and 1940s, that a renaissance in the art of Krampus mask carving took place. The masks we think of as traditional today date to that period.

So how wicked was this original bad Santa?
His punishment of naughty children was described in pretty brutal terms. He was said not only to beat children but to eat them, tear them apart, throw them in frozen lakes, or drag them down to hell. However, I always like to stay away from the "bad Santa" analogy, because despite all this cruelty, you have to remember, the Krampus was understood as a servant of St. Nicholas, an enforcer of good behavior. He may take delight in his duties as a punisher, but he was not a rogue force of evil. He was traditionally depicted in chains to remind us that he was subjugated to St. Nicholas and the church's notion of a just cosmos.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project

When an execution is scheduled at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, a select group of witnesses is invited to attend. In a small room crammed with blue plastic chairs, the families of the victim and of the condemned are seated together, inches apart, watching the culmination of their common story through two layers of glass.

But this November, one week after the election of a president who has revitalized law-and-order rhetoric and is a death-penalty enthusiast, there was a very different kind of gathering inside that same witnessing room.

In one corner stood a staffer for a Republican congressman, who is interested in learning more about prisons and how they can be improved. Next to the gurney (neatly made up with clean sheets) stood a formerly homeless veteran, who said he was baffled at how much nicer this place seemed than his VA hospital. Behind him stood two college students, both considering whether to pursue a career in criminal justice, who had texted each other beforehand about whether they should wear heels. And down the hall, through the red-painted entranceway to death row, stood a woman with incarcerated family members, there to learn what life inside was like.

The execution gurney at Central Prison. Photo by Justin Cook for the Marshall Project

For at least this one day, they all had access to Central Prison and could ask honest questions of its warden and other top officials, as part of the Vera Institute of Justice's "National Prison Visiting Week." Through a series of field trips to 29 facilities in 17 states, Vera welcomed a diverse array of community members—from bankers to prosecutors to real estate agents to teachers, doctors, and clergy—into Incarceration Nation. The goal was to promote the value of transparency: to demonstrate that if corrections officials allowed people in, the sky wouldn't fall. In the process, the organizers hoped, both staff and visitors would engage in a "re-imagining" of the very purpose of a prison: Is it punishment? Incapacitation? Deterrence? Rehabilitation?

The event was conceived during the administration of the first president ever to visit a federal prison, and in anticipation of a next president who had vowed she would reform criminal justice "from end-to-end." So the election of Donald J. Trump, less than a week earlier, left many participants wondering whether this field trip would still be the new beginning that was intended, or rather a last gasp of idealism about reform.

Inmates eat at a cafeteria in Central Prison. Photo by Justin Cook for the Marshall Project

Either way, visitors came away with an education.

In California, people began crying when they saw the shackles and caging used during the treatment of mentally ill inmates at California State Prison in Los Angeles County. They went home thinking about whether incarceration could be more humane.

In Connecticut, a banker and a fire chief were among those surprised to see inmates working at a clothing factory within Osborn Correctional Institution, because the textile industry has been virtually extinct in that state for decades. They left wondering if prison jobs are truly preparing anyone for future employment in the real economy.

In Colorado, a real estate agent and the associate director of an art museum chatted with lifers about what solitary confinement feels like. "They'd definitely never been in a room with so many murderers before," said Rick Raemisch, executive director of the state's department of corrections. (Check out VICE's new solitary confinement project here.)

And in Philadelphia, several participants said that what they witnessed could directly influence their work. Marc Reason, a teacher and sports coach, plans to talk to his students (especially the boys) about the conditions he saw in lockup—as a warning. Tayana Timmons and Kateryna Hnatenko, two paralegals from the district attorney's office, even seemed ready to rethink their whole outlook on prosecution.

"All we usually see at our job is a file with a name on it; all we see is an inmate's crime," said Timmons. "We can kind of believe in the system—believe that in theory, it works. But this helps us see, hey, there are humans in jail here. You see the physical reason why maybe we should dismiss a case."

An inmate at the House of Correction in Philadelphia in November. Photo by the author

For newcomers, jails like Philadelphia's House of Correction are more visually arresting than prisons, since they are so much busier with comings-in and goings-out. (Jails are for those awaiting trial or serving short terms; prisons are for longer sentences.)

But what Timmons and others saw at the HOC, a century-old jail that has faced lawsuits since the 1970s because of its overcrowding, was distressing.

With an emergency response team guarding them and announcements blaring over the loudspeakers, visitors strolled through a facility crawling with rodents and mold and so overcrowded that inmates were packed three to a cell, dangling their hands over the rusted bars as the tour group passed by. In the summer, because there is no air-conditioning, this place gets up to 120 degrees.

"Try to get pictures," said Cara Tratner, a community organizer, to a reporter. "There are human rights violations going on back here."

Captain Xavier Beaufort, the burly and affable officer leading visitors around the jail, mentioned that when he was a trainee, he had been expected to handle as many as 200 inmates. At one point, he witnessed a murder and has been dealing with the memory ever since.

Another officer, Lieutenant Darnice Harris, said it was refreshing to be honest about that kind of thing, because, normally, policy forbids staff from even describing the conditions to their friends.

And Bruce Herdman, chief of medical operations for the jail, agreed that "we should be held accountable publicly, and be honest about what we can't do. It's time-consuming for staff to get visitors in and out to see this stuff, but it's worth it."

A view of Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photo by Justin Cook for the Marshall Project

W. David Guice, the North Carolina commissioner of corrections, is a conservative Republican who carries a cane and speaks with a deep Blue Ridge mountain drawl. He said the Vera field trips came at an all-time-high for public interest in prison issues. "For someone who has been in this business for decades, believe me, these continue to be exciting times," he says. "What I hear when I speak on this issue nationally is a clear desire to embrace the moment."

Edward Thomas, warden of Central Prison in Raleigh, agrees that an uncomfortably productive conversation is only now beginning to blossom. "From a warden's perspective, it's usually a) security, b) security, c) security," he says, adding that allowing community members to have complete access to a prison would not be his natural inclination. "This is the first reimagining I've ever done."

Whatever its loftier aims, Vera's week of field trips left visitors with any number of seemingly perverse bits of protocol and odd facts. At the Philly jail, according to rules posted at the entrance, family members coming into the building are not allowed to wear plain white T-shirts. Bermuda shorts, though, are specifically allowed. Or this: During the intake process, inmates can put only five phone numbers on their "call list." But since their cellphones have already been confiscated, most cannot remember any numbers to write down.

Edward Thomas, the warden at Central Prison, talks to a group during a tour. Photo by Justin Cook for the Marshall Project

And did you know that women gain an average of 44 pounds while incarcerated, but men only four?

For others on the visits, it was at best a kind of safari: an opportunity for strangers to nod their heads at the hassles and minutiae of daily existence in jail and then go home to their comfortable lives.

"Learning is good, and the sheer physical reaction of being inside a jail—you leave feeling the weight of that. But it was like we were touring people's suffering," said Tratner, the community organizer. "It was surreal to see how normalized that suffering and the overcrowding were for the people who live and work there."

Allie Tiger, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, agreed. "Hardly acknowledging other than perhaps a glance and a smile or a nod, while our tour guide was talking to us about all the amazing and wonderful and life-changing opportunities" the jail offers, she said, "felt wrong."

Some of the facilities did use the occasion as an opportunity for marketing and public relations.

In Philadelphia, staff passed out catalogs of products made on-site by inmates, who are paid as little as 90 cents a day. Among the items listed was a Freedom Chair, "the ultimate in sitting and reclining comfort" and winner of nine international awards for its "revolutionary features and unparalleled ease of use." Many of these seats can be found in waiting areas at the airport, Captain Beaufort explained.

A death row cell at Central Prison. Photo by Justin Cook for the Marshall Project

At Central Prison in North Carolina, as visitors perused the one-person outdoor cages where inmates in solitary confinement get one hour of recreation per day, Warden Thomas focused mainly on how the bolts are painted orange so that officers will notice if they are tampered with.

Commissioner Guice, for his part, acknowledged that the tours are "about the education of the visitors, it's not allowing them to write our policies."

Nicholas Turner, president and director of the Vera Institute, said he had anticipated that corrections officials would try to show things in the best light. Before the week began, he debated whether these visits would be a kind of superficial glimpse of life inside, a dog-and-pony show.

"Is three hours sufficient to understand what goes on in a prison, to understand the human beings there? Of course not," he says. "But it can still be catalytic, the same way these videos of police shootings are catalytic."

Despite the organizers' deep pessimism about the prospect of federal reform under President Trump, the field trips were also a reminder that the overwhelming majority of criminal justice transactions happen at the state (and local) level, and that reforms are taking place there, too.

In North Carolina, as Central Prison visitors learned, the number of inmates in solitary confinement has plummeted from under 5,500 to about 2,500 in just the past year, and 16- and 17-year-olds have been removed from isolation entirely. As recently as a year ago, mentally ill inmates were being placed in solitary so frequently that the ACLU said the state's prison system was "in crisis." Now, most of them are housed in therapeutic units.

Watch VICE's James Burns explain why he's voluntarily entering solitary confinement for 30 days at an Arizona jail.

In the new Trump era, Commissioner Guice says, corrections officials like him will continue to pursue the solitary confinement reform and rehabilitative and reentry programming they believe will help keep their inmates from resuming a life of crime when they are released.

In Philadelphia, thanks to a $3.5 million grant the city recently won from the MacArthur Foundation, the jail population has been reduced by 13 percent since July. By developing more accurate risk-assessment tools to gauge whether offenders truly need to be in jail (and putting them on house-arrest and GPS monitoring when they don't); by initiating reviews of nonviolent cases to determine if bail could be set lower; and by opening a triage center and other treatment and housing options for mentally ill people who get arrested, the city aims to have the population cut by 34 percent in three years.

Laurie R. Garduque, director of justice reform for MacArthur, which has given similar grants to 19 other jurisdictions across the country, says she recently surveyed all of them about whether the election will affect their efforts. "No," was the unanimous response.

"Counties recognize the importance of this," she says. "City officials recognize it. The bench recognizes it. Increasingly, even DAs and sheriffs know there are smarter ways to use their money than to lock people up."

It was still a sad place: Guards with rifles looked down from a tower at the condemned men, many of them very old, some in wheelchairs.

And that progress is durable, Garduque says, in large part because the public is paying more attention. North Carolina may have gone for Trump, but surveys indicate that 69 percent of voters in the state believe too many nonviolent people are in prison, and 77 percent say the goal of incarceration should be rehabilitation.

Meanwhile, North Carolina now has one of the most "progressive" death rows in the nation. No one has been executed here since 2006, and inmates are allowed to mingle with one another and spend hours outside. They are the most well-behaved population in the prison, officials say, largely because they have become a community.

So the two college students, Anna Landis and Allison Pearman—who came along on Vera's field trip to figure out whether they wanted to devote their future careers to the criminal justice system—were surprised to see the red-uniformed residents of death row playing volleyball in the yard.

It was still a sad place: Guards with rifles looked down from a tower at the condemned men, many of them very old, some in wheelchairs.

But when they had signed up for this unusual field trip, they said they expected to feel only disgust. Instead, they saw something human. So they clasped their fingers onto the chain-link fence and watched.

Just when you thought 2016 couldn't get any weirder, we get another plot twist. On Tuesday, apparent BFFs Kanye West and President-elect Donald Trump hung out at Trump Tower in the most mind-boggling meeting of the year. Last night on VICELAND's Desus & Mero, the hosts discussed this bizarre get-together that ended with an Illuminati bro hug.

While we don't know exactly what the duo talked about—multicultural issues? Postponing Kanye's presidential run? If blondes really do have more fun?—it's clear that the meeting was important to Trump. Who needs intel briefings when you can talk about being a pop-culture idol all morning?

And if you are in the need for more dystopian political fun, watch Desus and Mero discuss new energy secretary Rick Perry, a guy who once forgot the department exists.

Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump's pick for secretary of state, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a gathering of politicians, experts, and business leaders, earlier this year. Photo by Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Early Tuesday morning, President-Elect Donald Trump officially announced—via Twitter, of course—his pick for secretary of state: Rex Tillerson, a Texan who has spent his entire career working for ExxonMobil and ran the company since 2004. The 64-year-old oilman's total lack of government experience is a common trait among Trump's cabinet-level picks, but what has alarmed most critics is Tillerson's ties to Russia—as CEO and chairman of Exxon, he's made many deals with Russian government–owned oil company Rosneft, and was given an award by Russian president Vladimir Putin; some of Exxon's deals in the country have also been held up by US sanctions.

Tillerson's relationship with Russia makes sense in context. There's a lot of oil there, and as Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of a book on Exxon, explained in the New Yorker, oil projects do better in countries where the political situation is unchanging, which often means they flourish under authoritarian leaders. But his Russian connections are striking given Trump's occasional praise of Putin, his advisers' links to Russia, and his dismissal of intelligence reports that Russia was behind hacks into the emails of his Democratic opponents.

To learn more about what all this means for US-Russia relations, I called Harlow Robinson, a history professor at Northeastern University, who told me among other things that Tillerson's conflicts of interests were unprecedented and that Russian hackers will never relent. Here's what we talked about.

VICE: What have US-Russia relations been like under Obama?
Harlow Robinson: Well, it has not been very good. I would say it's deteriorated to a certain degree. Certainly the rhetoric has become much more negative on both sides, particularly compared to the 1990s when we had sort of a love-fest going on between hacking are also true––why they were promoting his election. I think maybe they feel they can play him rather easily somehow and this is going to give him a lot more maneuvering room in the economic and international arena.

Do you think that, after all of this, Russian intelligence might stop targeting US or European institutions,?
I don't think this will mean they will stop at all. If anything, I think it will be empowering for them to see that they've had an impact. There are all kinds of other ways that the Russians are using the internet and hacking. In Germany, they're also starting to do the same kinds of things around Angela Merkel, and also they're using these kinds of tactics against their domestic foes.

They're planting compromising material on the websites of Russians who live abroad and have been critical of the regime. I don't know if you saw the big piece in the New York Times recently about Vladimir Bukovsky, a very well known dissident who lives in London and has been accused of trafficking in child pornography. It seems like it's entirely been invented, like stuff has been planted on his computer, but he's been charged with these crimes. So, no, I think this is only the beginning.

What would be an effective way to get Russia to stop interfering in elections or occupying their neighbors? Apparently economic sanctions haven't been effective.
What I think we need to see is people in Congress actually taking some action. Obama is a lame duck; he's not gonna be able to do a lot. It's really up to influential people in Congress to do the shaming thing, which has been effective in other cases, like that of North Korea. And this hacking isn't new. Remember the North Koreans hacking Sony's website? This is happening globally now, and if there's not a moral pushback on the part of people in power in Congress... Yes some of the Republicans are saying that they don't agree, but it's really mild, and it's not that forceful.

How will Trump's denial of Russians being behind the hacking affect relations?
We don't totally know yet. He's not president yet, and as we have seen with Trump, he will often say one thing and then not carry through on it. Like, "Oh, I'm gonna prosecute Hillary," and then, "Oh, no, I'm not." But certainly I myself find very troubling these accusations that the CIA is incompetent, which is basically what he's saying. This is just a really dangerous road to go down in my opinion. Because if we start undermining these objective agencies that are part of strategic defense, then we're really heading for something that's totally new territory.

How is the entirety of this going to affect our place within the rest of the world? What pieces will shift?
I think it's going to be very difficult, especially with certain countries. Germany, for example, is not a great fan of Putin, and Russians have done a lot of meddling in Germany, too. And certainly in the UK. It's going to call in question all of our assumptions about what side we're on, which is really kind of scary. One doesn't want to demonize Russia as a country, but the fact is that it's now ruled by a very small number of people. There is the alleged democracy, but in fact, it's Putin and a small circle of people around him who are allowed to do whatever they want.

So we have to distinguish between the Russians and their government, because, just like many Americans, they are just kind of pawns in this. And I do have some hope that in Russia things will change with time, because younger Russians are so much more sophisticated, they've traveled. This is a totally new thing that would have been impossible under the Soviet Union, and it will have to have an effect eventually.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The trailer for Christopher Nolan's follow-up to the 2014 sci-fi slog Interstellar is here, and it looks like a WWII epic to rival Saving Private Ryan. The movie, Dunkirk, takes its name from the French city where the Allies staged a massive evacuation in 1940 to save roughly 400,000 troops cornered by the Nazis.

The Dunkirk trailer hits all the standard WWII war-movie tropes—from beaches filled with bodies to aerial dogfights—and has appearances from Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hardy. Kenneth Branagh even pops up for a few moments.

It'll be interesting to see how Nolan tackles a straightforward war story, since there probably won't be any cerebral, high-concept mind-fucks like Inception or Prestige's twists.

The movie was shot on location in Dunkirk, France, and is set to hit theaters next summer. Give the trailer a watch above.

Image by Kitron Neuschatz

Like most psychotherapists, Desiree Robinson spends the majority of her time in an office talking with clients. But occasionally she'll start the day in her office and end it on a Thai mat piled with cushions and pillows, cuddling with a different kind of client.

"I make it a point to not hold sessions in spaces designed for sleep or sex," she told me of her cuddling practice, which she adopted as a side gig earlier this year.

In addition to being a licensed therapist, Robinson is a professional cuddler for Cuddlist, a service that connects people who feel lonely or deprived of nonsexual touch with paid cuddlers. And she's not alone: Robinson is one of the roughly 20 percent of Cuddlists who are also licensed therapists, according to Adam Lippin, the CEO of Cuddlist.

"Both modalities affirm clients and create an atmosphere of acceptance," Lippin told me. " are skilled in compassionate listening and judgment-free space holding that promotes feelings of confidence and connectedness."

Even before she joined Cuddlist, Robinson noticed a connection between therapy and physical touch. Sometimes, during a particularly grueling therapy session, she felt the urge to hug a client; other times, clients explicitly asked for physical comfort.

But as a therapist, she had to keep her distance. Physical contact is considered a gray area in the field—it's not illegal, but many therapists worry that something like a hug could be taken the wrong way and could result in a lawsuit.

So Robinson turned to cuddle therapy, fronting the $79 fee to get certified with Cuddlist, both as a way to expand her therapy practice and to make a little cash on the side.

"Crying into a tissue on a therapist's couch is different than crying in someone's arms."
—Adam Lippin

These days, Robinson spends roughly four to eight hours meeting with Cuddlist clients each month, plus an additional three hours per week working on her marketing strategy to acquire new clients. She pays Cuddlist $30 a month to have her profile included in their database, similar to the fee she pays Psychology Today to list her profile as a psychotherapist. And so far, it's paid off: She charges her cuddling clients the standard $80 an hour, which works out to roughly the same rate she charges her therapy clients ($120 for the initial consultation and $55 to $85 an hour for subsequent sessions).

Despite these similarities, Robinson is careful to keep her therapy and cuddling work separate. To avoid the ethical and legal ramifications, she does not cuddle with her therapy clients and vice versa.

Her Cuddlist profile does, however, mention she is a licensed therapist—something she thinks is a selling point in attracting new clients. She also sometimes lets her therapy clients know about the other parts of her career.

"I don't advertise cuddling to them, but I'm also not hiding," she told me.

Watch: VICE visits Tokyo's cuddle cafes, where gazing into someone's eyes or getting your ears cleaned are all on the menu.

Cuddle therapy was born of the belief that everyone could benefit from a little more nonsexual physical touch. Since the first recorded "cuddle party" in New York more than a decade ago, the industry has ballooned to include companies like Cuddlist, Cuddle Time, and Cuddle Therapy, where anyone can pay to spend time with a professional cuddler.

"Most of us don't get enough touch in our lives," Lippin told me. Cuddling, as he sees it, can be an extension of the things people work out in talk therapy. "Where talk-therapy ends, touch-therapy continues. Crying into a tissue on a therapist's couch is different than crying in someone's arms."

Karissa Brennan is another therapist turned professional cuddler. In addition to working with clients in person, Brennan also connects with people via an online-therapy platform. She sees both online therapy and cuddling work as ways to supplement her skills as a therapist.

"When someone holds you, you find that you can hold you," she told me. "You feel cared for, so you then give yourself permission to care for yourself."

Online therapy and Cuddlist are only two of several avenues and companies therapists use to supplement the income they earn from working with clients in person. Some of them blog about mental health and host ads on their site, others publish self-help and psychology books, and a few of them take part-time administrative positions at mental health companies.

It can be hard to imagine therapists would need to spend so much time supplementing their income. Therapy isn't cheap, costing an average of $75 to $150 per session. But many therapists earn less than $30,000 a year through their primary work, either because they subsidize sessions for low-income clients or because they can't book enough clients. Therapy fees also go toward the cost of operating the office, continuing professional training, or maintaining a license. As a result, side hustles have become increasingly common

For Brennan, having alternate sources of income was a bonus—but professional cuddling also helps her sharpen her skills in the traditional therapy setting.

"As a business owner, I agree that having multiple sources of income is wise, yet I also believe in a holistic approach to healing," Brennan told me. "I believe it is part of my duty to understand other practices and how they can benefit my clients in ways I cannot help them ."

Follow Joseph Rauch on Twitter.

Rob Zombie directing during the filming of '31.' Photos courtesy of '31'

The father, who has not yet been identified, has been charged alongside the teens with assault.

Both the teens and the dad involved in a viral video posted online last week—where the latter appeared to have been brutally beat up by the former—have been charged by York Regional police.

Syrian refugees take notes during an ESL class at the International Rescue Committee center in San Diego. Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Every year as the holidays roll around, Refugee Services of Texas, one of the state's main resettlement agencies, hosts parties for its recent arrivals, welcoming them to their new home. This year, those parties are bigger than ever, and serve a more critical function: to assure refugees they can remain in the United States.

"After the election, we've heard a lot of concerns both from our clients and staff, many of whom are former refugees. We've had people asking if they'd be sent back to refugee camps overseas," Aaron Rippenkroeger, the president and CEO of Refugee Services of Texas, told me. "So we've expanded our holiday activities to include more people, and we're doubling down on the message that getting sent back is not on the table."

Resettlement agencies in Texas—and other states with governors who have fought to block refugees—are working harder than ever to soothe their clients in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, who pledged during his campaign to severely restrict refugees from settling in the US. Now, as resettlement agencies try to keep a calm face, they also brace for a possible halt on the country's refugee program, which advocates warn could cause a humanitarian disaster.

The president-elect has kept quiet about his resettlement plans since his election, and his press office did not return requests for comment. But during his campaign, Trump vowed to suspend the acceptance of all Syrians and to stop sending refugees to any community that opposed them.

"A Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local community where they are being placed," Trump said just three days before the election in a Minnesota campaign speech. He added that the state had "suffered enough" since Somali refugees began arriving. Later, after a Somali refugee attacked students at Ohio State, Trump tweeted that the 18-year-old "should not have been in our country."

If a Trump administration does decide to block refugee resettlement in certain communities, the move would be unprecedented. Currently, the Office of Refugee Resettlement places refugees throughout the country with the help of national NGOs under the federal refugee resettlement program. States cannot turn away refugees, even if their communities don't want them.

But recently, dozens of governors have fought resettlement—perhaps most notably Texas governor Greg Abbott, who announced this fall that his state would pull out of the federal refugee resettlement program. Abbott's withdrawal, largely seen as a political move, can't actually prevent new refugees from coming to Texas. But some warn that the Trump administration could cut services and funds, effectively gutting these programs.

"If the services we provide now were to stop, it would be a humanitarian disaster," Rippenkroeger told me. "There would be people homeless, without medical coverage and food. It would be a very direct human catastrophe so we can't afford for the program not to be fully functional."

Under the current resettlement program, new arrivals receive housing and minimal financial aid for their first several months in the US ($1,000 for a family of five to last their first four months, and then $400 a month for four more months). Twenty thousand refugees are scheduled to receive such support in Texas over the course of fiscal year 2017, which started in September, Rippenkroeger told me. Texas is slated to receive about $100 million in federal funds for refugee resettlement in 2017, he said.

"These are the most vulnerable people, who just arrived in the country and are trying to learn English and find jobs," Rippenkroeger said of the individuals receiving support. "There's no amount of fundraising we could do to replace federal support."

Amid the uncertainty, Rippenkroeger said the Office of Refugee Resettlement was working with a "nose to the grindstone approach" in setting up a system to distribute federal funds through the Texas NGOs.

"The federal authorities we're working with now are pretty calm," Rippenkroeger said. "They recognize changes will be coming to personnel and leadership, but like us, they recognize the program needs to be functional by February 1."

A spokesman for the US State Department told me in an email that President Obama set global refugee resettlement targets and regional allocations for 2017 in September, but that the State Department could not speculate on the plans of President-elect Trump.

Texas is not the only state in transition: Maine governor Paul LePage withdrew from the federal refugee resettlement program last month, claiming in a letter that he had "lost confidence in the federal government's ability to safely and responsibly run the refugee program." But a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities of Maine—the only NGO running the state's resettlement—told me she refused to ponder changes that could come with the Trump administration.

"We're in a transition period to have the funds come to us, and we're in contact with the Office of Refugee Resettlement every day," Judy Katzel, Catholic Charities Maine's chief communications officer, told me of the federal refugee aid. "For us in Maine, our program is business as usual. There's an awful lot of rhetoric in any campaign, and at this point, there's no way to speculate what will actually happen."

Refugee advocates in other parts of the country where anti-refugee sentiment is common displayed similar reserve when I asked them about Trump's resettlement plans. Cole Varga, executive director of Exodus Refugee Immigration Inc.—the organization that sued Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and vice president-elect, for trying to block Syrian refugees from the state—told me he was hopeful.

"Currently, we have not received any word from our national partners or the State Department on how the incoming Trump administration will run the federal government's refugee resettlement program," Varga told me in an email, declining to comment on the lawsuit. "We are hopeful that the program continues unaltered as it is a critical program that truly shows the world the generosity and humanitarianism of our country, no matter the race, religion, or group one belongs to."

Even if Trump allows certain communities to pull out of resettlement, he can't stop refugees from moving states after arriving in the US—which means the most significant difference may be the money states receive, noted Erol Kekic, executive director of the national resettlement agency Church World Service.

"Immigration is a federal matter, and if the nation continues to admit refugees, they're free to go wherever they want the moment they arrive," Kekic told me. "They may not receive services, but they're free to move—so even if Governor Abbott says he wants none in Texas, how will he know a refugee won't move to Texas?"

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

It's early morning on BC's 'Namgis First Nation and the morning fog has yet to burn off. Setting off towards the ocean from the Big House and the world's tallest totem pole, a wide road leads you down a hill, towards the water, on this remote reserve on Cormorant Island in the Broughton Strait. A sign stapled to a roadside telephone pole reads, "Emergency Fish Farm Meeting." Before you turn onto Front Street you pass a vast empty lawn, the former site of a residential school. The institution Indigenous children from coastal communities attended for more than four decades stood in this place until demolished just last year.

The central ferry terminal is the demarcation between the reserve and the Village of Alert Bay, two distinct but connected communities that some refer to together as Alert Bay.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Alert Bay was the center of north coast fishing. Close to 1,000 fishing boats were registered in the area and thousands of fishermen and their families would come to the island each week. The money that flowed into the community gave rise to bustling shops, government offices, ten taxis, four churches, two theaters, and a Chinatown.

Sockeye dries inside a smokehouse. There are a range of ways the 'Namgis will preserve the extremely important resource, including canning with salt, barbequing and canning, and smoking.

Living in the shadow of this once booming fishing industry, members of the 'Namgis First Nation are voicing their growing concerns over the threat of farmed salmon to the wild salmon stocks—an integral part of their culture— while navigating an uncertain economic future.

This morning a group of men gather on a dock. These 'Namgis elders and leadership are going to demonstrate at a salmon farm along with members of the Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw and other Kwakwaka'wakw nations. The Kwakwaka'wakw are Indigenous groups who speak Kwak'wala but live in different places and have different names. The farm is in Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw traditional territory, and the 'Namgis on board this morning are showing solidarity with them.

The 'Namgis climb onto the boat and it cuts through the thick fog for several hours heading east to Gilford Island. There, more elders and a group of around nine youth from Kingcome Inlet dressed in their regalia get onboard and collect on the bow as the boat continues its journey.

A 'Namgis elder and youth approach a salmon farm to demonstrate the impact of farmed salmon on wild stocks.

One elder looks into the ocean ahead and says his worry is that the general public have little idea what the fish farms are doing and how it affects the people who live here. He is here today because he wants to share his concerns over the possibility of farmed Atlantic salmon spreading disease to the wild salmon, but also because he feels his people have never been given proper consultation on the issue. While not representative of the views of every Kwakwaka'wakw person, the people here today want the fish farms out of their waters. The 'Namgis in fact, own and operate a land-based salmon farm—the first in Canada and what many see as an example of a sustainable method for farming fish.

Anticipation builds as the boat approaches the salmon farm, a massive grid of ocean pens enclosed by metal walkways. Smaller boats begin to bring people onto the farm, and there is a tense conversation with farm employees who let the demonstrators know they are not authorized to be there. One worker dressed in blue and green overalls and rubber boots records the scene with a tablet. As more people reach the farm, they peer into the pens, the water pulsing with salmon.

Vera Newman arranges pieces of sockeye in a can with salt. Once sealed, the cans are boiled for four hours.

Around fifty demonstrators begin to walk slowly around the perimeter of the farm, singing and drumming. They make a striking sight; a determined and snaking stream of people, the detailing on their regalia glittering in the midday sun on this farm in the middle of nowhere. After more than an hour, the Kwakwaka'wakw board boats and begin the trip back to their respective communities.

Back on the reserve three days later, John Macko sits on a stump outside a smokehouse full of his drying salmon. The bush behind him hangs heavy with fat August blackberries. He refers to himself as a traditional food harvester, and his life centers around ocean resources, whether he's making valuable grease from a fish called eulachon, catching salmon and halibut from his gillnetter The Pacific Endeavor or clam digging. In the fishing industry for 50 years, Macko says long gone are the days when fishing was a steady and common job. "Nowadays it's just not reliable anymore," he says, adding it's more common for people to have a regular job but also go out on fishing boats occasionally.

Donna Cranmer, left, filets sockeye salmon while her mother, Vera Newman, cans the fish with salt. The canned salmon will be used to feed guests at a potlatch next year.

On the beach in front of his house Macko uses a washed up cedar trunk as a workstation to secure large pieces of sockeye salmon between cedar stakes. He plants the stakes in the sand around a small fire and the fish barbecues, turning a more muted pink before the surface of the flesh gently darkens. Some will be given away and some canned. Inside his home he enjoys a favorite dinner with a friend; barbecued sockeye salmon, potatoes and apples, all dipped in rich eulachon grease. For Macko, the 'Namgis aren't the 'Namgis without salmon. "Salmon is the life blood of this village," he says.

The importance of salmon in 'Namgis culture can be illustrated by its presence at everything from casual family dinners to potlatches. Potlatches are ceremonies that mark important events for Kwakwaka'wakw, like naming children, the transfer of rights and privileges, marriage and death. Guests at potlatches are given gifts, and the more given away, the higher the status of the host. The federal government made potlatches illegal from 1884-1951, and in 1921 a raid during Dan Cranmer's potlatch on Village Island resulted in arrests and the confiscation of priceless ceremonial regalia. These coppers, masks, rattles and other items were divided among museums and private collections.

Close to 100 years after the raid at Dan Cranmer's potlatch, relatives gather at the house of one of his granddaughters, Donna Cranmer. The family is spending the day filleting, cleaning and canning sockeye salmon to be used for feeding guests at a potlatch in 2017. A blue freezer bin containing approximately 100 sockeye sits beside the work tables. The fish were frozen from last year's catch—the sockeye run was poor this year, with each household receiving less fish than usual.

After the cannery, the net loft was the second most important building in the community when fishing was booming. Fishermen would repair and work on their nets in this building. It is now owned by the 'Namgis First Nation and still used.

Donna expertly fillets the salmon. Her mother Vera Newman cuts the filets into small sections and arranges them snugly into jars with a single teaspoon of salt. Once sealed, the cans are cooked for four hours.

At the end of the day, the Cranmer family has 168 cans of sockeye, and they gather upstairs at a long dining room table around a steaming pot filled with cooked salmon heads. The chewy cheeks are a favorite part. Donna's father, Roy Cranmer, lives in this home too. He spent much of his life in the fishing industry. He worries their community will end up like many former fishing towns in Atlantic Canada, and sees the future for the 'Namgis economy in tourism.

His daughter Barbara Cranmer agrees. She sits inside Culture Shock Interactive Gallery, the business she started with sisters Donna and Andrea. Situated on the boardwalk, it's a popular stop for tourists getting off the ferry. Also an award-winning filmmaker, Barbara started working on her dad's fishing boat as a teenager. While the days of fishing prosperity are over, she says she is tired of hearing about doom and gloom in the community. She sees the rich resources all around and views cultural tourism as the get-behind industry, envisioning 'Namgis owning and operating businesses ranging from whale watching to kayaking. "I think it's a vibrant community trying to find its way," she says.

The original 'Namgis First Nation burial ground on Cormorant Island is full of towering totem poles as well as some that have fallen. Once a pole has fallen, it is seen to have served its purpose and is left to naturally erode.

One challenge the community faces is retaining young families, according to Randy Bell, the human resource capacity coordinator for the 'Namgis First Nation. "We haven't diversified quickly enough to maintain livelihood," he says. "We need to stop losing families." Like Cranmer, he is optimistic that tourism could be the way forward. The beauty, wildlife and friendliness of the area offers massive opportunity, and he sees the current generation of young people as critical to the community's future.

"I see a lot of resources being shipped away," says Tina Jones. Tina and husband Marvin have recently started Alert Bay Seafoods. The couple own a 32-foot gillnetter and lease a commercial salmon license through the 'Namgis First Nation. They don't support open net fish farms and are proud of selling all wild salmon products.

The Jones' hope to eventually open a processing plant on the island to help create jobs and celebrate their natural resources. Ideally down the line they hope to combine the business with tourism, offering tours to show all the work and steps that go into fish production. Their path hasn't been without challenges; they had mechanical failure this summer on the boat and had to purchase salmon from other fisherman. Yet the pair is dedicated to pursuing their goal. "We don't want to fail," says Tina.

Inside the 'Namgis First Nation Big House on a hot and dry Thursday afternoon, the T'sasala Cultural Group is in the middle of a performance for tourists. The group is made up of children, teenagers and adults who dance through the summer, showing glimpses into their culture and ceremonies to visitors. Andrea Cranmer introduces the salmon dance and tells the audience about the threat of the fish farms in the area's waters to the sacred salmon, a resource they have always had. She pauses. "We don't have a dance that represents farmed fish."

Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine

It started at an early age.

My mom and I would go out into the yard, and she'd grab me by my wrists and spin me around in a big circle. Sometimes she'd spin me in an office chair. Other times, just on my feet—twirling me around and around until I was disoriented. She'd use any way to get me dizzy and off balance, really. It was something we did quite often, and for seemingly no reason. When I'd stop spinning, my mom would make me concentrate. "Do you feel that funny feeling, the butterflies in your stomach?" she'd ask. "That's a fun feeling! That feels good!" she'd assure me.

At that age—around 4 or 5—you really listen to your parents, and trust that what they're telling you is the truth. My mom was my rock, so I had no reason to believe what she was telling me was false.

A few years later, once I was tall enough, she and I started going on rides at carnivals and amusement parks—she just couldn't wait to have someone to finally share these rides with. It occurred to me then that she had sort of raised me to be her riding partner. That's what all the spinning had been about. She had been getting me acclimated to this woozy sensation all along, trying to get me to appreciate the typical associations I'd eventually feel when going on a scary or unnerving amusement park ride. Seeing my mom next to me on a roller coaster smiling and laughing so hard she was crying really helped drive home that this was genuinely fun, and that those feelings actually were positive. I've been a roller coaster enthusiast ever since!

My dad thought we were crazy. He didn't like rides. He thought getting on a roller coaster was almost the same thing as intentionally getting into a car accident. He couldn't wrap his mind around why we'd want to willingly strap ourselves into what seemed to him like a medieval torture device. Many of my mom's friends felt the same way. Many of mine did, too.

It dawned on me: Maybe they had never been taught, as I had, that the feeling of being turned upside down and round and round was a thrill, something fun. They'd not been as fortunate as I had been to have someone help calibrate them in this way. I had just been lucky enough to be taught that these inner sensations I thought were very intense and even uncomfortably strange could actually be experienced as something joyous and delightful. It just took the proper orientation toward how I interpreted them. It made me think about what other intense, overwhelming, and uncomfortable sensations I could learn to reinterpret.

Into adulthood and throughout my life, I've attempted to reorient myself toward the spectrum of emotional sensations inside. Feelings otherwise thought of as bad, I've tried to embrace as part of a giant, super long-lasting roller coaster. Because life, as comedian and philosopher Bill Hicks once famously said, is just a ride. It may sound trite or obvious, but the analogy is worn out because it's so perfect. Just as a roller coaster is a series of up and down, and is filled with many twists and turns, so too is life. And what we consider the scary parts of a ride—the loops, the downs, the turns, the dizziness—can actually thrill us and make life more dynamic and interesting. We can learn to appreciate these challenging emotional sensations, or at least not waste so much energy on resenting them or desperately avoiding them.

Every part of life's rich experience counts, and we are robbing ourselves when we don't seek to extract something valuable from the full spectrum of our experiences, even those that don't register as feeling great. We are often told that many natural shades of emotion—sadness, anxiety, melancholy—are "not good" by the abstract pressures of society, that we're meant to be happy-go-lucky 24 hours a day. We are often encouraged to overcome our darker feelings, or conquer them, or escape them, or vanquish them like we would a horrible monster.

But more and more, it occurs to me that maybe these emotional sensations are not there to be overcome, eliminated, or numbed out, but appreciated. (I should note here that I'm not talking about pure suffering, deep depression, terrible atrocities, or debilitating trauma, but the everyday doubts that holds us back.) I've tried to harness them or use them as fuel. We can reinterpret these "bad" feelings and use our imagination to find some value in them, let them teach us about ourselves and the world.

I'm more or less convinced my dad actually feels the same waves in his stomach I do when on a roller coaster, he was just never taught that this intestines-in-your-throat experience was fun. Just like spicy food is spicy to everyone, but some learn to enjoy and revel in the burn. It's never too late to go through a rigorous process of reinterpreting challenging feelings or sensations.

Because the truth is, no matter how much we try to contain or eliminate adversity in life, we will always be faced with challenges. Our quest is to master how we go through these moments of difficulty and discomfort. The more we can practice the art of appreciating a wide range of inner experiences and shades of emotion in low-intensity circumstances, the better we will fair when life flings us head first into uncharted territory, when an unanticipated drop comes and we feel like we may lose it.

It's the day-to-day moments of life that allow us to test ourselves in small and manageable ways, so that when we face the biggest tests of all, we will have some sense that it is just part of the roller coaster of life. Being alive is going to be intense. No matter how much we try to smooth it out, the more we can take on the ups and downs with courage and even joy, the more worthy we are of a meaningful and fulfilling ride.

Follow Andrew W.K. on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Global Panorama

On Monday, ten members of the Electoral College wrote a letter to national intelligence director James Clapper asking for an intelligence briefing regarding any ongoing investigations into foreign election interference. Now 54 of the 232 Democrat electors—and one Republican—have reportedly joined in on that request, according to Politico.

The list now holds signatures from 13 states, the majority of which come from electors in California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. But despite the request gaining ground—and support from the Clinton campaign—it still lacks the names of key electors like Bill Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, and Bill de Blasio from New York.

In the letter, the electors argue that they need information regarding various election hacks—believed by the CIA to have come from Russia—before they meet and cast the official presidential vote on December 19. The letter cites concerns about Donald Trump's current handling of intelligence findings and his ongoing defense of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

"The Electors require to know from the intelligence community whether there are ongoing investigations into ties between Donald Trump, his campaign, or associates, and Russian government interference in the election, the scope of those investigations, how far those investigations may have reached, and who was involved in those investigations," the letter reads.

"We further require a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States."

Photo via Flickr user Jonathan Silverberg.

What did you do to piss off your parents when you were a kid? Did you sneak off to the park and smoke a J? Maybe you had sex somewhere or with someone you weren't supposed to?

I never expected to find existential enlightenment from the pages of a porn magazine. But when I was 18, that's exactly what happened, after I wandered into one of Portland's many adult bookstores on a lark.

I was browsing the racks when I came across a bare-chested, lumberjack-built man on the cover of a magazine called BEAR. He wasn't waxed or tanned, and instead of the chiseled bodies on the covers that surrounded him, he was bearded, beefy and hairy all over. To my eyes, he was perfect—and seeing him on the cover of a gay magazine was, in that pre-internet era of the late 80s, a revelation.

For homos like myself, BEAR Magazine was much more than a porn rag. It was my first exposure to a subculture that would come to dominate the next decade of my social life. Seeing that cover made me realize that there were other men out there who were attracted to heavyset, hirsute guys like I was. And the magazine itself heralded a new era for a broad demographic of gay men that until then existed mostly in bars and local clubs.

I had come to terms with my homosexuality two years earlier; coming out was potentially catastrophic for me, since I was raised Mormon by a devout family, and my father was a church bishop. Being a "sexually deviant" homosexual was bad enough—worse, I thought, was that I was attracted to big, hairy men.

That was something I realized in one of the most uncomfortable ways imaginable: from an illustrated book my parents owned that depicted the Gospel of Luke. One of the pages showed Jesus on the cross, flanked by two common thieves, and it will be hard to forget one of them, who was perched on the cross with his bare, hairy chest exposed. The weight of guilt I experienced from it is still hard for me to fathom.

Our religious household meant that I had slim pickings for any kind of exposure to gay culture or media, and I didn't identity with what little I saw of the mainstream gay community, based mostly on TV shows like Queer as Folk. The gay community, as far as I could tell, was made up more or less of fit men in gay dance clubs. Anyone who was overweight or balding, I thought, was socially dead on arrival. And while I knew there was nothing wrong with being into dancing or drag, it didn't help that the community I could have turned to as an escape from my upbringing was one I couldn't picture myself within.

I was caught between two worlds: my parents' church, and my alienating (and naive) idea of the gay community. That's why seeing that cover of BEAR was monumental; it meant that I wasn't as alone as I thought.

It was a beautiful coincidence that the bear community rose to prominence in America as I entered adulthood. The Advocate may claim they coined the term bear as early as 1979, but it took until 1987 for Richard Bulger and his boyfriend Chris Nelson to deploy the phrase as a marketing scheme when they founded BEAR. Knowing there were untold others out there that shared their taste in men, they released the first issue as 45 xeroxed copies rife with portraits of masculine, rugged guys, and the publication took off from there. During the 90s, bear culture would ascend from a little-known subculture to a full-fledged national movement; thanks to publications like BEAR, a bear pride movement arose and the community began to wear the label with gusto. Little did I know all that would await me as I entered my twenties—I'm just glad I found BEAR when I did.

BEAR ceased publication in 2002, as the internet turned America into a digital society; bear-focused dating websites like Bear411 (and, later, dating apps like GROWLr) came to replace print publications focused on the community. But magazines like BEAR, including competitors like Bear World and Inside Bear, became instrumental in planting the seeds for bear culture to evolve from a fetish into a full-fledged identity. BEAR began as porn, but as its reach expanded, it began to include articles, lifestyle coverage, and discussion of topics important to the community that formed around it, as did its competitors.

Today the bear community, like the larger gay community it sprang from, has declined as an identity at the hands of cultural assimilation from its peak in the 90s and 2000s. In some ways, it's still robust: Just ask the owners of innumerable gay bars saved from economic ruin by bear nights, or the more than 10,000 people who attend Provincetown Bear Week each summer. But it's hard to imagine the need for a publication like BEAR, which still soldiers on, published semi-annually by editor-in-chief Steven Wolfe.

Kids today looking for atypical depictions of homosexuality are practically inundated with them—bears, especially, have become something of a cliché of gay stereotypes, figuring into the punchlines of Family Guy and movies like Inside Out; even a main character on Modern Family, one of the country's most popular sitcoms, is a bear. They've been anatomized in documentaries and become part of our shared cultural imagination. And that's a beautiful thing, especially for confused kids growing up under devoutly Mormon roofs. After all, nobody should have to wander into a sex shop to realize they're normal.

Follow Benjamin Adams on Twitter.

Us Canadians tend to be an inquisitive folk.

When you're trapped inside for six months a year because the outdoors actively want you dead, you can't help but try to learn about the world. And, because we live in the future, there's no better place than the internet to turn to for answers to critical questions like "Who is Damn Daniel?" and "What is shadow flipping?"

Google just released its Canadian trending list for 2016 and among the statistics that showed we Googled the hell out of Drake, the Ford Bros, Gord Downie and Trump, you can find the questions most asked by Canadians. I thought I would do my patriotic duty and try to answer the most difficult of these questions for you, the Canadian Googler.

Q: Who is Harambe? (Not joking, this was the number one 'who is' question Googled by Canadians)
A: Oh boy! Starting off strong aren't we? OK... are you sitting down? If not, maybe find a place to sit down, this isn't going to be a fun one. You sitting? OK, good.

Harambe was a beautiful gorrilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. A three-year-old climbed into his enclosure and Harambe grabbed and dragged the boy. At this time, zoo staff shot and killed our fair Harambe. The gorrilla quickly transcended his physical self and became the muse for meme creators worldwide. Very quickly people started getting their dicks out for him and he became co-opted by some pretty terrible people and, because it's 2016, it got racist really fast.

In short, he died so we could live and we promptly ruined it.

Q: What is shadow flipping?
A: A really shady way of making money off real estate. Essentially a real estate agent will arrange a sale but secretly find more than one buyer willing to pay more before the deal is closed. The multiple sales will happen, typically without the original seller knowing, but land transfer taxes will only happen once. BC's premier cracked down on the practice, and ended self-regulation of real estate this summer.

Q: Who is Ken Bone?
A: An inquisitive person who asked a question during one of the American presidential debates. Bone, a unique looking gentleman, was immediately adored by the internet who, by sheer force of will, made him into a meme.

Bone tried to capitalize on his newfound popularity and it... uh, didn't go well. His rise was swift as was the conquerent downfall. Ride hard, die hard right?

I've always had a bit of a crush on Louis Theroux. So when I saw my friend wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his face – emblazoned twice, in fact: young Louis and older, sterner, arms-crossed Louis – I knew I had to have one. Lucky, then, that she knew exactly where it had come from: Homage Tees, a clothing company specialising in putting iconic faces on T-shirts, from Sinead O'Connor and Björk to David Hasselhoff and Princess Diana.

I sent the Louis shirt to him on Twitter and replied: "I don't think I'd get away with wearing one," adding that it had "given me an idea for a Christmas present for my wife" – simultaneously crushing my dreams of a potential union and reminding me how lovely he is.

Anyway, I got in touch with Homage Tees, and after some back and forth – and a 10-hour flight on his part – I managed to have a chat with the secretive, Hackney-based founder.

The Louis Theroux T-shirt

VICE: So who are you?
Homage Tees: Here's the thing: I don't want anyone to know that it's me that does it. I'd love to keep it anonymous. I don't want there to be any focus on me. It's about paying homage, and it's about the people. It's an anti-brand. There's no logo. I'd just rather the focus was on the products.

When did you start doing this?
It started about six months ago. I've worked for quite a few brands, and basically I didn't want to have to wear them any more. You know when you wear a brand you're repping what that brand stands for? There wasn't really brands out there that I wanted to do that for. But there was people. So I made a couple for me and my friends. Then Skepta took one and he wore it on stage at Glastonbury, and then Reading Festival, I think, and people just wanted them, so I started selling them online. It just snowballed from there, really.

So you're mates with Skepta?
Nah, I'm not. I don't even really know how he got it, to be honest. I left the T-shirt in my crib, and obviously some of my friends know him and it just ended up with him. But that was a Wiley tee. There's a few different umbrellas under Homage Tees. There's Grime Tees, Homage Tees and then Homage Tees US, and the EU website as well. After Skepta wore one I did the Crazy Titch tee, because I've got a link to him, and I gave him a percentage of money. After that I just wanted to do other people that I wanted to wear, innit.

Anyone else in particular you've been chuffed to see in a T-shirt?
There's a little list. I saw Lily Allen post a picture of her wearing one recently, and I hadn't given it to her.

How do you design them?
All the designs are done by me, and it's just for the people. It's straight up for the people. I think in time more people are going to be making their own shit. You see people flipping logos all the time as well. There's a bootleg culture, which is cool, because it's anti, innit. It's going against the mainstream. I think Homage fits into that a little bit.

Do you love the 90s?
I'm a late 80s baby; I grew up in the 90s and 2000s. The style of the tee is more like a late-90s thing, I think, rather than an old school, hip-hop feel. Maybe the Mark Morrison one is a bit more like that 'cause it's a rapper, innit. But the Louis Theroux one is a lot more simple and clean. It's not as inspired by 90s rap tees. The concept of putting a person on a T-shirt comes from that, but the style of the T-shirt and the design doesn't.

Why is Diana your cover photo on the webpage?
She's in the background because she was the first tee we did. She was the first Homage Tee. She's like a people's hero. Out of all of the people we've done a Homage Tee for, she's the one, I think, who deserves the most props. Or maybe not deserves the most props, but is seen in the highest regard. She's Princess Di, innit! When I was thinking who should be the first person and who I wanted to wear, she had to be first because it was almost like, if you're gonna start by doing only British subculture heroes, you would have to pay homage to her before you pay homage to the other people.

Would you say most of the people you feature have already got a bit of a cult following?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. As I said, it's more of like a subculture following. Even though we know Louis Theroux is mainstream. David Attenborough is very mainstream, it's ironic and it's fun. It's niché to have them on a tee. Whenever you wear one of the tees people are like, "Oh shit, where did you get that from?" and that's 'cause it's such an unexpected thing to have on the T-shirt.

Do you wear your own stuff a lot then?
Yeah, I wear everything. I've got my particular ones. Catherine Zeta Jones is my favourite one personally. Even though it's basic design-wise, it's the one I like the most because it's so simple. Maybe because it's the one I've seen the least people wearing. I like the Tom Jones one as well.

Are there any other icons that you're gonna add to the roster?
Yeah, I got a list that I'm working through. But it's a secret list, I can't disclose it.

Just one?
Just one on the list? Okay. Stephen Hawking. There's going to be Stephen Hawking one coming soon, still.

What's been the most popular ones?
The David Attenborough and the Louis Theroux. People love them. They're the people's heroes.

How does it feel to know that Louis has given it his stamp of approval?
Did he give it his stamp of approval?

Yeah, I tweeted him about it earlier and he said he was into it, that it gave him an idea for his wife's Christmas present.
No way, that's crazy – I didn't know that. That's beautiful news. Big up, Louis. The OG. That's dope. Respect for the man.

I'm just imagining, on Christmas Day, at Louis Theroux's house, his wife opening a present with his face on it.
Yo, that would be wild.

@CharlieBCuff

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This past year, an average of 640 trains have been cancelled every day in the UK. That's 233,606 cancelations a year or – depending on which way you want to anger yourself – 7,221,879 planned journeys affected. And it's not even like we're offered a discount for this shitty service – Britain's rail system is the most expensive in Europe, and keeps getting pricier.

So what do we do? Do we lie back and take it? Sentenced to an eternity of forking out handfuls of cash in exchange for tardiness and discomfort? No, we stand up and fight. After over a decade of catching public transport and struggling to afford it, I've arrived with an arsenal of hacks, tricks and grifts that can level the playing field. Simple ruses that make the system work for you.

Let's start at Kings Cross. I need to be in Stevenage in less than an hour and am desperate for the toilet. I get on the Stevenage train but it's a shit heap: filled to the brim with people resting bags on seats, frowning into their Kindles and huffing you away like irritated horses. I've paid good money for a ticket but there isn't a seat in sight. So what options do I have? Stand up? Not with these knees. Sit on the floor? That won't do – I'm no Future of the Left.

But then I remember: of course! The great emancipators, stuffed in my jacket pocket: the trusty Post-it notepad and Sharpie!

Crude, unadulterated comfort.

After a clean hour of toilet dwelling, only disturbed by one or two disgruntled knocks from passengers who quickly move on to one of the train's other five toilets, we arrive at my destination. An hour enjoying my own space. I could get used to this way of life.

Next I want to go to York – my sister lives up there and is pregnant with her first child, and I haven't seen her in months. I've bought a ticket for the train, but did I have to? I've heard an old urban myth that you can hide in a suitcase on a train without ever being bothered by a ticket inspector, and I want to see if it's true, or even feasible.

First, I need a friend, and a strong one at that. It just so happens that my pal and trusty photographer Chris Bethell is really fucking strong, has never been to York and feels a three-hour train journey is a meagre undertaking in exchange for one of Greggs' Meat and Potato pasties unique to the north.

Next, I need a suitcase. I figure I want one that's either blue and red (you'll see why) and that's the right size for a 5'9, 10-and-a-half stone human – so a 34" works for me. I cut out a small hole in the suitcase. Then, when I arrive at the station, I just need to pop around the corner...

And get inside.

This is the hard bit. I'm caught between freaking out and searching for air holes while holding my nose, hushing that game-giving-away-laughter.

Once I'm through the gates and onto the train my friend finds an inconspicuous little corner to nestle me in. This will be my home for the next two hours, so it's important to get comfortable.

The next 20 minutes are difficult. A constant shuffle from arsecheek to arsecheek, trying to ration out the numbness, I start thinking I should have done Patsy Kensit's workout video and stretches before I left the shed I live in this morning. But it doesn't matter, as the novelty of being inside a suitcase will keep me going.

I send texts and photos to my friends from inside the suitcase about being in the suitcase. However, it seems the cramped, claustrophobic world I inhabit is interesting to me and me alone: my messages are delivered, but no one replies. So I scroll through my newsfeed, noticing that my parents are discussing their pride in me with my godmother on Facebook: "Oobah's in the Guardian today!" they write. I squint around the pitch black. "This suitcase is your ceiling," my brain whispers.

I hear footsteps reverberating through the carriage, which come to a halt right beside me. "Is anybody in there?" My heart goes. Just a metre from my head a door opens and shuts. Of course he wasn't talking to me – he was talking to the toilet door. 'Thank goodness,' I think, before realising I'm thankful for a man shitting within arm's reach of me.

Eventually I feel two kicks in the case from my friend: this is the signal that the ticket inspector is on their way, so I give up on comfort and stop shuffling around. I hold my breath as I hear it: "Tickets and passes, please!" she says, her voice muffled by several layers of suitcase. My chest contracts and expands, unwillingly. The silence lingers. "Thank you." She moves on.

Thirty minutes left, and it feels as if somebody is sat with a lighter, giving the cartilage behind my kneecaps a smiley. Somebody has left the toilet door open and it smells like piss. I've snapchatted pitch black into a void enough times, and the only thing left to enjoy is on-and-off bouts of pins and needles. I wish that the suitcase had been laid on its back so that I was packed more foetal, less child in an air raid. Daylight seems like a distant thing. I yearn for it. So I rock the suitcase, back and forth, away from the wall.

I apply some Poundland Avengers make-up to my face using the light and front-facing camera on my phone, and open the porthole I'd cut into my bag earlier in the day.

Sip at the air, keep a straight face; I'm a chameleon. Just 20 minutes to go.

I feel the train stop and people starting to gather around me. I'm unsure whether or not this is reality or in fact a fever dream, until my friend starts to re-zip the small parts of the case he's loosened for comfort. The train doors part, I feel the cold air and subsequent thud of the ground. I've never been closer to the sandstone of York. After a few minutes, light permeates through the small slits in the suitcase. This is the unmistakable shine of the King's city.

The majesty of Britain's most beautiful Cathedral.

Take it in, friend.

I see my sister and head to a local school Christmas fair. I purchase some arts and crafts; enjoy some pupils' portraits of Nelson Mandela; get myself a drink and play the tombola.

I also win an Angry Birds belt.

Then, after enjoying myself for a few hours and drinking enough for the novelty of spending multiple hours in a suitcase to return, I get back in the suitcase. I'm wheeled onto the train and to London. This time, I ask to be positioned on my back, under the luggage rack, so that things aren't so difficult. I put in my headphones, listen to the soothing voice of Scott Carrier on Home of the Brave, and surprisingly manage to nod off.

I eventually awake to dark, the knowledge I probably have tendonitis and the soothing lights of the capital. I've won: I'm home.

And there you have it. I can tell you now: that luggage rack is going to be busy this December.

DISCLAIMER: VICE does not actually encourage anyone to hide in a suitcase for three hours on a train. Partly because it's illegal if you're doing it to take a train without a ticket, but also because you'll probably break all your bones when someone shoves you over to make room for a buggy. If you're wondering how to actually behave on public transport, we made a guide for that.

@oobahs

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2016 (Actually "Saturn Devouring His Son" by Fransico Goya)

You are being stalked by a monster. You hardly even notice the thing: it's so vast, it's all around you, it has the ability to blend in to the world of ordinary objects – and then dart out to strike. It's killed countless people, people you loved. There's no telling who might be next. The thing is in your house right now, while you sit reading articles on the internet with your back exposed to the world as if your life isn't in danger. You've seen its name on the front pages of newspapers, you've heard it on TV, you've moaned to your friends about the monster and how terrible it's been, but all the while you keep on living your life – as if the creature were very far away, not waiting right behind you, its tongue slithering over your neck. As if you didn't realise that there's still time, that 2016 might still kill us all.

2016 killed Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Leonard Cohen, Harper Lee, Harambe and tens of thousands of Syrians. There was no other cause of death; all these people were living happily until 2016 pounced on them, claws of densely folded time reaching out through the walls of reality to rip their souls right out through their ribs. 2016 caused the Zika virus – after all, mosquitoes don't live very long; they're always creatures of the present year. 2016 gave us Brexit and Trump – not you – you didn't do anything; 2016 swooped down low overhead on tattered wings and shat out a sickly-orange Donald Trump greasy and mewling into your hands.

2016 has been the worst year ever, a garbage fire, a no good very bad year. Why did nobody try switching 2016 off and back on again? How could we let something so weightless as a year cause so much damage to our lives? Why didn't we do what was necessary back in January and strangle this hideous year before it even drew its first breath, all 7 billion of us gathering around in a big circle to kick and punch 2016 into bloodied shreds, and then living out the next 11-and-a-bit months in a state of pure timeless ataraxy, floating free to somewhere the calendar and all its evils will never reach us? It's too late now. All that's left is to wait, until 2016 sloughs off, creaking on its wizened legs into the warm dark hole of the past, to die. 2017 will be better. In 2017 everything will be just fine.

Nearly everyone seems to agree that 2016 was the worst year ever. It was the worst year for human rights in Malaysia, for the construction sector in Rangoon, prison suicides in the UK, ersatz Mexican food, the Great Barrier Reef and pedestrians minding their own business in Toronto. John Oliver, the babbling kookaburra of your Facebook feed, went so far as to blow up a giant "2016" prop as a kind of substitute for destroying the year itself and everything in it.

A few writers have tried to put all this in proportion – at Slate, Rebecca Onion points out that people were also having a fairly tough time in 1348, when the Black Death killed nearly a third of Europe; or 72,000 BCE, when a volcanic eruption reduced the entire human population to around 3,000 individuals. I'm not entirely convinced; after all, 2016 happened to a lot more people. I'm not saying that 2016 wasn't the worst year humanity has ever faced. But then 2015 was also the worst year ever – Donald Trump! Man buns! Cecil the lion! And 2014 – planes falling out the sky all over the world, Isis spreading like a slime mould across the Middle East, a new cold war stabbing Europe's east with sharpened icicles – was the worst year ever, too. 2013 – something's happening here – was also the worst year on record. And 2012. And 2011.

A pattern seems to be developing. It's not that we've had a succession of particularly bad years, 12-month periods of arbitrary and abstract time colluding among themselves to ruin things for everyone else. It's that things are getting worse; everything is terrible and it's all disintegrating; a weary planet is spinning itself into extinction, and we're all on the long slow lurch into the abyss.

In so many respects 2016 really was the worst year ever. Take the dying idols: all those universally beloved film and music icons tend to belong to the post-1945 generation, the one that invented pop music and turned the culture-commodity into a universal world-system, and that generation is slowly thinning out. There really were more celebrity deaths in 2016 than in previous years, and there'll be even more next year, until everyone who unified the culture is gone, and the only people left are ageing YouTube stars and problematic faves, heirs to a more atomised world, whose disappearance will be wailed at by their isolated fanbases and utterly ignored by everyone else. But 2016 was also the warmest year in recorded history: a momentous, record-breaking year in which climate change really started to seem irreversible. And until 2016 came along, 2015 was the warmest year in recorded history. As was 2014. 2016 keeps breaking records, but these records keep getting broken. In 2016 there were fewer trees on Earth than in any other year, fewer surviving animal species, fewer natural resources for each living person. And in 2017, all those records will be broken again.

Blaming 2016 is weird, a mass-cultural means of making pathetically optimistic new year's resolutions – we all had a bad year, we did some things we weren't proud of, we died in our millions for no good reason, but the moment the first drunken whines of Auld Lang Syne rise in dismal chorus above the moving line of midnight tracking across the Earth, we'll put that behind us and start living right. But it never works out; in the bleak cold depths of January, when the days come and go in half an hour as an anaemic sun barely bothers to roll out of the horizon, while the nights are long and biting ever closer to your skin, we'll forget. We'll have another war, we'll elect another fascist, we'll exterminate another species of harmless woodland creature without even knowing what we're doing or why. 2017 will roll down to crush us with all the weight and inevitability of the dead, and we'll say the exact same thing. Ugh, what a garbage fire. Happy new year.

@sam_kriss

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