2016 was not cursed. Nor was 2016 a year riddled with bad luck. 2016 did not turn out so fucked up because someone bound a picture of it in black ribbon in the 90s and threw a photograph of its parents into a fire. 2016 was appalling – very – but that had nothing to do with planetary alignment. It was appalling because of the people who exist in the world in 2016. People did this. Shit people like you and me. You and me did this.

But we also had help from loads of other people, too. Between the alt-right army, outraged liberals and #pizzagate fanatics, 2016 was a year of horrible bigots and man-babies. Man-babies who tweet about having eaten all the chocolates out of their advent calendar the day they bought it. Even though they actually didn't. They didn't even fucking buy one. Social media has made the world grim. Here are all the grim people you will have met on it, this year.

OLD RICH PEOPLE BEING POLITICAL!

R U more offended by Kate Bush sympathising with Theresa May, an empowered woman whose rhetoric emboldens people who want to abuse migrants, or the blathering of liberal writers denouncing the Labour party for being too radical? 2016, a year of political turmoil, saw many earwigs of mainstream culture and media scuttle out from their desks at broadsheet newspapers and demonstrate their absolute ignorance and stupidity. My thoughts? The phoney liberals are worse. Please hurry up and resign from the Labour party; you'll be identifying as Conservative in five years anyway when your brother starts dating Samantha Cameron's cousin and you realise you actually only care about politics when it gets you the retweets that keep you in column inches.

THE VLOGGER'S BOYFRIEND!

Let's move away from politics momentarily so we can breathe oxygen and not suffocate ourselves by hyper-ventilating with anxiety. One of the new characters we've been introduced to on the internet this year has spent the last five years of his life taking pictures of his girlfriend wearing a mauve maxi skirt and fake-laughing, outside a shop that sells biscuits and scones at a 500 percent mark-up. This organism who previously only existed in a sort of sub-conscious state has now evolved a kind of self-awareness that means he's ready to turn the camera around on himself and exist in the digital world he's hovered on the edges of for so long. The Olympus PEN is to him what the hand-mirror was to feminists of the 1970s. Previously used as a weapon of oppression, now finally the tool of his liberation. And what a joy it is, that his confidence as the Vlogger's Boyfriend has developed to such an extent he now feels able to create his own content. His own little corner of the internet where he teases and tempts us with sponsored posts about Zizzi and reviews of Beard Lube and Leather Scent. A gormless selfie in a train mirror. An Instagram flat lay with a delicately torn croissant and a rose-gold wristwatch. It's what we all secretly want to do, and he's fucking done it. If you liked this video, click subscribe for constant updates from his brave new world.

Brock Turner (Image in public domain via Wiki)

RAPE APOLOGISTS!

Join me, if you will, in casting your mind back to simpler times, earlier this year, when Trump was physically very far away from the White House and the western world woke up daily to fascinating developments in the Kardashian-West-Jenner-Chyna-Tyga neo-odyssey. If only this dark year could have continued on that same trajectory; before the political Big Bang, before the Middle Eastern genocide (was broadcast), when racism in America didn't exist and rapists roamed social media freely and with abandon. Yes, we met quite a few rapists online this year. And not only did we meet them, we also experienced them being met and supported by groups of people who apparently think rape is a totally justifiable thing. But only, of course, if a woman is a slut or drunk or a drunk slut, which we know that all women are once they hit 16 and start wearing bras and tampons

THE ALT-RIGHT SIS

Alt-Right sis starter pack: excessively straightened hair; Deus Vult hoodie; profile picture holding an assault rifle; faved tweets detailing that they are pro-Israeli settlements; pro-increased legislation of gay and women's rights; pro-racial profiling; general inability to comprehend structural inequality in the West. Idolises: Faith Goldy, Lauren Southern, Ann Coulter, Christina Hoff Sommers, #doesntneedfeminism, obviously.

The phenomenon of the alt-right is fascinating mainly because it's been propelled into the public eye by a man who's happy to be filmed wearing a waistcoat without a shirt underneath, which is literally the most repulsive image I've seen all year. But while alt-right broshave been trash-talking progressive politics in favour of raw dogging cavewomen on Reddit for years, the emergence of the female alt-right warrior online represents something new.

Where archaic ideas of male privilege and entitlement pushed disillusioned trilbies and bros into a regressive right-wing political group, a growing number of women are now becoming equally aggressive towards any attempt to magnify the effects of white privilege on American culture. AKA all the white women who voted for Trump. The Alt-Right sis sees everything in black and white, except race, which she'll publicly refuse to acknowledge has any social ramifications whatsoever. Privately, of course, they all engage in a spot of eugenics chat. It is 2016 after all, freedom of speech guys!

AMERICANS GOING ON ABOUT #PIZZAGATE

Possibly my favourite internet phenomenon of the year, no online roundup of shitheads would be complete without the brave Americans SPEAKING OUT about the #Podesta #pizzagate #coverup. A conspiracy theory big-hitter drawing as much bizarrely-narrated content out of the dark web as Sandy Hook and its ilk, #pizzagate was borne from leaked emails from a restaurant in DC frequented by members of the Democratic party. In light of probably one person's assertion that the leaked emails were communicating in code, thousands of people now believe some brothers who run a pizza shop are engaged in a cannibalistic satanic paedophile ring. Says q a lot about the American psyche, no? A few weeks ago a guy pointed his gun around in their restaurant, demanding answers. Now. Watch me cover my back and say hey, I've read two JG Ballard novels, I don't doubt the presence of deeply dark shit in high places. But when the actual skeleton of this movement is literally two hours of a guy scrolling through Instagram repeatedly calling images by Chris the Simpsons Artist and Gosha Rubinksy "creepy", "damning" and "horrifying" I have but two words: Try Harder.

AN INEXHAUSTIBLE BRAZILIAN FAN BASE

The current "come to Brazil" meme circulating may have more impact than we have predicted. Judging by the success of mob mentality across the world in 2016, potentially before the year is up, all D and E list celebrities will be rounded up and forced to live in cages in Brazil, performing round the clock for their glamour-starved fans before collapsing into a mass grave teeming with acoustic guitars and Armani Luminous Silk Foundation. Not necessarily a bad thing.

(Image via Twitter)

BORING IDIOTS LIKE YOU AND ME

Let's not forget that we're on here too. Boring, self-involved, lazy idiots who think talking about South Park makes us sound clever and linking to an article from Verso Books renders us immediately fuckable. If you have shared two or more of the following sentiments, you deserve a place on this list:

"Planet Earth makes everything OK."

"All the young people in America voted Democrat! Forward the revolution."

*shares beauty shot of young Hillary Clinton* with caption: do the right thing and make history, America. *Cries on insta story that she lost because America is too sexist*

"Black Mirror ep 4 was absolutely beautiful, really impressive and so progressive."

"I ate my whole advent calendar in two hours looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool"

@bertiebrandes

More on 2016:

Don't Blame '2016' For Your Shitty Year

2016 Is a Lie

All the Things MPs Tried to Ban In 2016

The post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Here at VICE, we like to make predictions. We predict trends, but we're also conscious about world events and politics and stuff, so we predict a bag of that shit as well. But we rarely reflect on the predictions we make. We just kind of make them, and then they get consumed by whatever new Vine-born dance has just cropped up. That comes to an end today.

Before we crack on with 2017, we're going to look at a few of the things we said would happen in 2016, and whether they actually did or not.

Firstly, in January of this year, Mike Pearl wrote this piece about shit we should be wary of in the coming year. A lot of it was about flooding and mudslides in Los Angeles, but one of the more relevant things mentioned was the notion that Europe would become more strained by nationalism. It would be impossible to argue against this, as far-right parties across the continent gain greater ground, such as Marine Le Pen's Nation Front, the recently banned neo-Nazi group National Action in the UK, and many more across countries like Poland, Hungary, and Austria.

It also makes mention of the Syrian conflict becoming "messier," which—as anyone who has been witnessing the extremely violent recapturing of Aleppo by President Bashar al Assad's forces could testify—would also be quite hard to discount.

In January, Amelia Abraham wrote us a guide on how to make life better for LGBTQ people in 2016. She says, "One is that we need to find a way to stop violence against trans women of color, and another is that we need everybody to stop worrying so much about what genitals everybody else has." In the three months after the Brexit vote, homophobic attacks rose by 147 percent, according to the Guardian, which is an extremely large amount. Trans people worldwide are also still feeling the sting of subjugation and bullying, especially the young. In a study conducted by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital in August of this year, 42 percent of transgender youth reported self-harming, and 30 percent said they have attempted suicide. Young trans people are still facing massive social anxiety, so that's something we should really fucking fix.

"Worst case scenario," said Gavin Haynes in his forward-thinking piece, "How to Revolutionize British Politics in 2016," "President Trump doing a Thatcher atop a US tank breaching the border into Pakistan, the people of Britain watching him on flickering TVs as the power dims under the immense forex strain created by an EU exit, while an additional three million refugees charter their own P&Os to a Europe too transfixed by its own political paralysis to bother stopping them, and paratroopers go into The Gorbals to quell 1970s-style 'troubles' amongst rebellious Scottish tribes now hell-bent on secession. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi personally and publicly beheads President Assad as ISIS raises the Black Flag in Damascus. And Oliver Letwin is dragged out of his car and Rodney King-ed by politically nerdy Brixton youth."

While this approximation hasn't quite reached its full potential in the real world, the election of Mr. Trump has given a lot of the planet's citizens cause to tussle their collars in nervousness. And with an ever-increasing amount of extreme bloodshed occurring in Syria, the flow of people desperate to escape it by any means necessary doesn't seem to be coming to an end anytime soon.

VICE's drug correspondent Max Daly was told by UK Drug Watch boss Michael Linnell that "if you can get one message across to people who take drugs in 2016, to make drugs better and safer, it would be to take smaller doses. They need to remember the old drug user saying: 'You can always take more, but you can never take less.'"

Unfortunately, this message doesn't seem to have made it to the kids as much as we'd have liked. News stories about deaths from overdoses on extremely strong ecstasy have peppered various outlets over the course of the year, and two cases happening in the vicinity of London nightclub Fabric caused its temporary closure and loss of license. The availability of Naloxone, a drug that has the potential to bring opioid abusers "back to life" after overdoses, is still made scarce by its high price—something pharmaceutical companies have been criticized for.

So there you go. We've made very little progress in these pressing social issues, and in a time when certain parts of modern life—like technology and medicine, for instance—are getting better at an exponential rate, year after year, it's more than a little troubling that we still struggle not to kill one another and let one another die for no reason. Looks like we're bad at predicting stuff. Here's our prediction for 2017, anyway: It's going to be fucking shit.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

We live in a "post-truth" world now, don't we? You know it, Donald Trump knows it, even the lexicographers charged with keeping dictionaries hip know it. But while we might know it, many of us still don't fully understand it. How can such a large chunk of the voting population just not give a fuck about the facts?

One lucky set of people who've at least had a little more time to comprehend this concept are those who follow British law. Drug legislators were "post-truth" before it was cool, very much leading the way when it came to ignoring experts and just reacting to whatever the red tops were making a fuss about. And this year was a big win for the tabloids: when the Psychoactive Substances Act came into force on the 26th of May, making it illegal to sell hitherto "legal highs" or nitrous oxide, it was a direct result of the moral panic they'd started themselves.

Nitrous oxide – which you probably call "NOS" or laughing gas, or just "balloons" – is an interesting case for investigators of "post-truthiness". Papers like The Sun and The Daily Mail delighted in vilifying the drug they termed "hippy crack", one of those names – like "meow meow" and "roflcopter" – that only ever seemed to appear in print if it was written by someone who had no idea what they were on about.

As a VICE investigation found, these apparently anti-drug stories tended to only drive up interest in whatever high was mentioned. In one such story, which made The Sun's front page in June of 2015, England footballer Raheem Sterling was pictured apparently inhaling a balloon beside the splash headline: "50m? You're having a laughing gas," a very clever reference to the amount Manchester City were about to pay to buy him from Liverpool – a transfer the NOS revelations did nothing to stop.

The hysteria peaked the following month. Eighteen-year-old Ally Calvert, from Bexley in south-east London, died after attending a party. In line with initial police statements, The Sun reported: "Teen dies after 'taking hippy crack' at party," and The Daily Mail followed with: "Pictured: The teenage electrician, 18, who suffered a cardiac arrest and died in the street after inhaling hippy crack."

Illustration: Sam Taylor

Except this wasn't true. By September, the police had been forced to apologise when it became clear that Calvert had died from an unrelated heart condition, and that any link to consumption of alcohol or nitrous oxide was, in the police's words, "completely false". Yet both The Sun and the Mail stories, and their headlines, remain online. The Mail's story has added a short correction explaining the police's mistake, but you'll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the story – which still blames nitrous oxide – before you can read it.

Even the tabloid-fuelled belief that using nitrous was a new and dangerous pastime is an ahistorical lie. People have been inhaling it for fun since 1799, when it was a hit with the British upper classes. Many of the romantic poets were fans, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge even recorded his experiences with laughing gas, writing that it caused him to remain "for a few seconds motionless, in great ecstasy". As an added bonus, he didn't even have to put up with people calling it "hippy crack".

Although the Psychoactive Substances Act has now outlawed the selling of nitrous oxide for direct inhalation, its sale remains very much legal if the buyer intends to use it to make whipped cream. The confused state of this law was beautifully illustrated just last month by Devon and Cornwall police, which, having seized a box of nitrous canisters, proceeded to list it for sale on its eBay page for a tenner (with free shipping). The force later issued a statement, saying: "We would like to make clear that the sale of NOS chargers is not prohibited in the UK, and that such items are widely and legally available both online and in retail outlets. On reflection, we regret placing these items for sale."

Since the ban, The Sun has continued to run "hippy crack" scare stories. Two recent articles involved serious accidents that occurred while drivers allegedly inhaled nitrous before or while behind the wheel. Unquestionably stupid, although surely only drug-related in the same sense that you could say smoking is bad for your health if you do it while filling your car with petrol.

The ban on experimental "legal highs" appears to have been relatively more successful. Many of the mystery powders available before have been removed from the high street and, as we recently discovered, any "legal highs" still being sold openly online are invariably caffeine-based.

WATCH: 'The Hard Lives of Britain's Synthetic Cannabis Addicts'

However, use of "synthetic cannabis" Spice – a substance banned under the act – has increased, notably among Britain's prisoners. The drug is worth ten times its price inside, so former inmates are plugging their arses with the drug and deliberately reoffending as a way to smuggle it in. And when it reaches cells, it causes havoc, with users fitting, vomiting and blacking out. The amount of ambulances responding to prison Spice casualties has shot up, to the point that Nick Hardwick, HM chief inspector of prisons, recently said of HMP Wealstun in Yorkshire: "They were having so many health emergencies caused by the use of [Spice] that basically all of the available ambulances in the community on one occasion were at the prison."

This problem is stark, and experts say the government's prison reform plans aren't going to make the slightest bit of difference. What's more difficult to assess, though, is how much impact the blanket implementation of the ban, where all new drugs are now considered illegal until proved otherwise, has had on people working to create new medicine. The government's former drug advisor Professor David Nutt warned when the ban was first suggested that the new law would make it harder for those working in the medical field to develop and test new drugs.

Nutt is one of those who has been speaking out about "post-truth" drug policies since well before "post-truth" went mainstream. When he was sacked as a government advisor in 2009 it was because he was calling for exactly the sort of legislation based on evidence, science and risk that seems such a distant dream now. Last year, I asked him why he thought the government was bowing to the tabloid demand to ban nitrous oxide, and he put it succinctly: "I think this is just about young people enjoying themselves, and they hate that because they're miserable sods."

Drug legislation in the UK has never been about truth or scientific evidence. It's always been a culture war, and just as has happened with immigration and EU integration, it's a culture war in which the tabloids have declared victory. Britain now finds itself way behind the curve when it comes to drug liberalisation. In America, weed has now been legalised for recreational use in eight states and is legal for medical purposes in a further 20. Ireland, too, is mooting legalisation for medical use. Yet in Britain, any relaxing of our own drug laws couldn't be further from Theresa May's mind.

2016 wasn't all bad for rationality. A last minute change to the Psychoactive Substances Act meant that poppers were made exempt from the new law, a decision that was at least in part due to a former Conservative justice minister, Crispin Blunt, telling the Commons he'd used poppers, and calling the idea of a ban "fantastically stupid".

It's also worth noting that the new law specifically outlawed the sale of new psychoactive substances, but not possession, a distinction that many drug campaigners had called for. Initiatives such as drug testing at festivals were examples of harm reduction winning out over moral panic, but they were exceptions to the general rule. In the brave new post-truth world, drug science was an early casualty.

@KevinEGPerry

It's the last podcast of the year, so we're heading to the pub to talk about the pains and pleasures of Christmas in your twenties: relentless drinking, shagging in your childhood bed and drunk parents. Also, Oobah asks people when they found out Santa wasn't real, and we enjoy a problematic Christmas quiz.

The VICE UK podcast comes out every Tuesday, covering drugs, politics, music, mental health and everything else we can think of. Listen and subscribe on iTunes.

It isn't a solely human behaviour to attach emotional weight to inanimate objects, but we do it well. A good 50 to 65 percent of my clothes are ones I've ended up with as the result of hand-me-downs, ex-relationships or those after-parties where you get home in a jumper that wasn't yours to start with. This is probably for the best, as my dress sense is terrible, but it means that a large chunk of my wardrobe comes with its own story.

To explore the idea of clothing taking on more meaning than "it prevents me from being naked in public", I asked a few people about the things in their wardrobe they're most sentimental about.

MOLLY, 21

It's my Grandpa's cricket jumper, and I got it in January of 2010, when he passed away.

It was the last thing I ever saw him in. When he was sick I found it way too upsetting to visit him because he'd become so frail and this huge cricket jumper swamped his tiny frame. That was super shitty of me. But the jumper reminds me of him as this frail man he ended up as, but also as the fit, healthy sports-mad man who I was so desperate to hold on to.

Now I insist on basically wearing it all winter, or at any event remotely related to my grandad. He'd been an Olympic gold medalist and the BBC made a film about him, so I wore the jumper to all the press evenings and meeting the cast.

I'd like to be remembered like this too, one day. I think there's something really special in physically wrapping yourself in the memory of somebody you love. I'd love to go around giving hugs from beyond.

GABRIEL, 23

I'm wearing a scarf that my grandmother in Brazil knitted for me. And I don't want to make out that I'm sort of always thinking about its spiritual weight or anything, but she passed away a few years ago and it's the only thing I have from her. So I'd be much more upset about losing it than if it were just an M&S scarf.

I probably wouldn't wear it out, just because scarves are easy to lose, but otherwise I'd put it on whenever.

I think we attach meaning to clothes because they're something tangible from the past that you can keep using today. I've worn this since I was in primary school, so I can kind of see that link, as well as the one to my grandmother.

NASSIA, 27

I got this jacket when I was 16. For a weird reason I didn't like wearing jackets when I was young, so this is the first and the only one that I had from that time.

I started wearing it when I was leaving school, to go to protests when I was living in Athens. I kept it "naked" – without the patches – because in protests you need to wear no identifiable clothes. But a friend bought me a Hello Kitty patch and I put it on as a joke. Then it became a thing and my friends started buying me patches from their travels, and every time I fell in love with a band's music I had to add a patch. So you can see my progress in life in this jacket.

I don't wear it much any more. I've had it for 11 years and it serves more the purpose of a visual diary for me. I am a minimalist, so I don't like owning many things and being attached to them, but then the oxymoron is that if you don't own much, you get attached to what little you do have.

ALLISON, 24

It's a pretty plain and boring shirt, but it belonged to my dad so I've kept it. I've had it ever since my mum was having a clear out a few years ago.

It means so much to me because dad wore it to my brother's wedding in 2007, then passed away in 2008. It's particularly special to me because my dad wasn't there for my other brother's wedding, or my sister's. The last time we saw him happy and relaxed was at that wedding, in that shirt, so I'll always treasure it.

Occasionally when my anxiety is horrendous I wear it as a reminder that he always supported me. I wore it a few times when I was finishing up my last uni assignments, actually, hoping it would give me luck, which it did.

I'd say it's more of a comfort than a good luck charm – a reminder to persevere. He was the kindest person in the world and it encourages me to be like him through all the bad stuff that may happen.

MARC, 22

My grandad died of cancer after being diagnosed in 1996, and since I'm his only grandson this ring was given to me in October of 2005. I used to go up and visit him most weekends, and I have pretty fond memories of him and my gran coming to watch me at local football tournaments.

When I was given the ring I used to wear it and convinced myself it fit, but my mum would say, "You don't want to lose it," so I found a box for it and stored it away.

If I ever lost it I'd be gutted. Hopefully one day I'll have a family and I can pass it on. Sometimes I'll bring the ring out to show my gran, and she talks about that time in her life – it's refreshing to hear, and nice when you see the way she looks at it.

@williamwasteman

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"Man has," Sigmund Freud tells us in Civilization and Its Discontents, "become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but… We must not forget that present-day man is not happy in his Godlike character."

The good doctor might have been wrong about the value of the vaginal orgasm, but he was right about the crippling, self-destructive anxiety undergirding modern life and how poorly our species seems equipped to handle it. This was prescient when Freud first published it in 1930, and like too many other things out of that decade, it feels fresh again at the end of 2016.

It's common to lament 2016 as a kind of spectacularly miserable year, a singularly awful global catastrophe where all the good celebrities died and all the bad ones became President. But 2016 is not sentient and it's not deliberately tormenting you (no matter how much it sometimes feels that way). It's really just the year a number of cultural, technological, political, and ecological trends all collided into one another in the worst possible way.

In hindsight, it's easy to see how everything that boiled over this year was bubbling away for the better part of the decade. It feels like we live in a markedly—even unthinkably—different world than we did in 2015 or 2011. But we're really just catching a boomerang. 2016 is the year our chickens came home to roost.

Can't Get Enough of That Kulturkampf

2016 has infamously racked up an impressive celebrity bodycount, including David Bowie and Prince and Leonard Cohen and Muhammad Ali and John Glenn and George Michael and Carrie Fisher and, and, and....

Many of these people were cultural giants of the 20th century—in a way that might be impossible in the 21st century. Thanks to the proliferation of media technology (and changes in its consumption), it's difficult for anyone to cultivate the same kind of universal cultural appeal or influence of someone like Bowie or Fisher. As Sam Kriss has noted elsewhere, we're not only mourning the loss of beloved idols but the last links to a fading world: "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."

This metamorphosis in media has been underway for more than a decade, but 2016 is the year we finally began to understand its true ramifications. There is no question that the spread of smartphones over the last decade is changing the way people interact with each other and the world. It's trendy in technophile circles to call this a revolution, but counter-revolution works just as well. Social media in its present form - that is, a disparate network of privately-owned websites functioning as a public space, the content of which is subject to manipulation by advertising algorithms powered by personal information extracted from users—is as profoundly, maddeningly disempowering as it is a vehicle for personal enlightenment, community engagement and social organization.

Take this year's absolute meltdowns about "fake news" and "post-truth." Fake News morphed from a descriptive term for deliberately false stories circulated on social media for advertising revenue to "deliberate misinformation from agents of [the Russian state/international Jewish financiers]" to "anything dissenting from the [liberal political establishment/Alt-Right hivemind]" to "anything I don't like." These are not the conditions of 'post-truth'—because political discourse has always exceeded (and often contradicted) empirical reality—but rather what Alex Tesar has dubbed 'meta-truth.'

Changing media technology, dovetailing with the precarious economic conditions prevailing since the Great Recession in 2008 and the bankruptcy of traditional economic, intellectual, and political authorities have landed us in a condition of epistemic anarchy. The political earthquakes of 2016 have demonstrated, that in conditions of meta-truth—the intellectual state of nature—the only rule is brutal, naked, awesome force.

The Circus Comes to Town

Shock and awe was how the far right won most of 2016's major political battles.

Consider, first, the Brexit blitz. When David Cameron called the referendum on Britain's membership in the EU, it was on the assumption that it would be a resounding success for Remain and that the Euroskeptic fringe that had been floating the Tory coalition would finally shut up and go away. Business leaders, tenured academics and every other member of the liberal political establishment was trotted out to stress how terribly complex leaving Europe would be and how they had all these statistics about how neoliberal globalization might be a touch uncomfortable for the poor but that everything otherwise was tickety-boo. The Leave camp, by contrast, focused on stoking racist fantasies about murderous immigrants, completely disingenuous claims about how much money they would could funnel into the NHS if they weren't paying Brussels, and the fabulous lie that moving political power from the technocracy in Brussels to the plutocrats in London would make life better for the average (white, aging, anxiously working-class) Briton.

The ghost of an entirely imaginary British Empire—the wrong answer to the right questions—cut the country off from the continent in a political upset that the Leave campaign did not anticipate. The pro-Remain coalition spent approximately zero time wondering how they misunderstood the mood of the electorate or why they were so out of touch, and instead immediately moved to asking why voters were so stupid. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and nobody learned anything and the exact same experience was repeated four months later across the pond.

Constitutional wranglings in the United Kingdom have nothing on this year's American election, when what was a punchline for 20-odd years slowly metastasized into President Donald Trump. Trump is one of the greatest conmen in American history, channeling the anxiety, alienation, and resentment of white, rural America into a victory over one of the worst political campaigns ever run in the history of the republic. Faced with overwhelming evidence of widespread popular dissatisfaction with the status quo, Hillary Clinton campaigned on the absurd slogan that "America is great because America is good" and was so convinced of her own inevitable coronation as the khaleesi of corporate feminism that she didn't even bother campaigning in Michigan. Half the electorate stayed home and a few million useful idiots for a bargain-bin American Bonaparte handed control of the world's preeminent nuclear arsenal to a 70-year-old toddler and his merry band of vampire billionaires.

Like Brexit, the Trump campaign was running a scam of Biblical proportions and improbably won the day—thanks to a perfect storm of antisocial radicalism bubbling at the fringes of American life for the better part of the last decade. What observers had once assumed was the Republican party eating itself in the face of Barack Obama's triumphant liberalism was actually the total colonization of the GOP by Andrew Breitbart's parasitic ghost. Meanwhile, disaffected white virgins who had been radicalized on pick-up artist websites in 2012 and spent 2014 laying the groundwork for a violently reactionary white identity politics by getting mad about video games online became, in 2016, a vanguard of computer literate neo-Nazis described in the press as the 'alt-right.'

Fascism has been a hot topic in 2016, specifically because of the ongoing argument over whether or not Donald Trump and the alt-right can be called a properly fascist movement. They are definitely not classically fascist—there are no partisan paramilitaries storming through the streets (yet)—but they belong in the same family tree of extreme reactionary politics. You can call it neo-fascism, or post-fascism, or even proto-fascism, and there is a valuable debate to hold about splitting these semantic hairs. But I think the f-word works just fine, because the genius of fascism is that it is always morphing its shape. It is the ultimate pastiche ideology; an ideological chameleon, rearranging its spots to suit the historical moment, pressing stoner cartoon frogs into the service of white supremacy.

Fascism flourishes in conditions of meta-truth precisely because it is so malleable, so forcefully beguiling, so deliberately free of even pretending to care about the liberal establishment's idea of "truth." It recognizes, consciously or otherwise, that truth is a function of power. Donald Trump's regular, pathological lying underscores that the real goal of fascist rhetoric is not to convince, but to awe and impress. This is why fact-checking the alt-right's absurd claims are useless and arguably counterproductive—everything they do and say is intentionally performed in bad faith.

Keith Olbermann can scream and sob into a flag all he wants. It only makes Trump stronger. He may or may not ever build that border wall, but the central promise of his campaign remains true: he will do whatever he wants, and the rest of us will pay for it.

This Planet Is Burning Up

Not that there's ever a good time for the political triumph of reactionary nationalism, but this is an especially bad one. Major countries are turning inward and the international community is fracturing at the exact moment when coordinated global action on climate change is most necessary.

The real sense in which the future arrived in 2016 are all the ecological barriers the planet broke this year. Not only was this the hottest year ever recorded (RIP 2015), but the planet also permanently passed the threshold of 400 parts-per-million of atmospheric carbon dioxide for the first time in millions of years, which by all accounts is not so great a time. Second, and more alarmingly, the Arctic has been anywhere from 20-30 degrees Celsius warmer than usual all autumn, losing 19,000 square miles of ice over five days in November.

These are significant developments. Higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere along with abnormally warm temperatures in the Arctic bring us perilously close to triggering a number of unstoppable climactic feedback loops. A markedly warmer Arctic means more dark, sunlight-absorbing ocean surface, which in turn warms the arctic further, and on and on. (Pay no attention to the melting permafrost behind the curtain.)

All of these trends existed well before 2016, but we can point to 2016 as the year we blew past those major milestones and definitely entered the Anthropocene. Ironically, the surest sign that humanity has entered a geological era defined by our impact on the planet's ecological metabolism may turn out to be that we are no longer able to control or mitigate what we have unleashed. There is no question now that after 2016, we live on a different planet than the one any previous generations in human history inhabited.

And as 2017 looms, epistemic anarchy reigns. The incoming president of the United States believes climate change is a hoax and has appointed a former Exxon executive as Secretary of State. If the long arc of history does indeed bend toward justice, the devil and his angels are making sure they grab everything that isn't nailed down before the final trumpets sound.

The situation is dire. Angry Boomers are taking their countries back at the same time as the world spins catastrophically out of their control. Everyone is connected to each other and the entire compendium of human knowledge by the supercomputers we carry around in our pockets and we have never felt more anxious or alone. We are prosthetic Gods hell-bent on our own crucifixion.

But it would be irresponsible to wrap all this up on such a bleak note. There are reasons for hope. If 2016 was the year that the old order of the world finally started cracking to pieces, that means it's also the moment when space opened up for something new. Right now, the forces moving to occupy those spaces are monstrous. But their victory is fragile, and they can be pushed around. There is a clear hunger for a different future; something better, something not constrained by the beige, dead-eyed dogmas of technocratic liberalism.

Millennials take a lot of shit for being apathetic, flighty narcissists. But the other major Western political upheaval of 2016—the one spearheaded by a geriatric Jewish socialist named Bernie Sanders—shows that we'll come out in droves for anyone who will listen to us, for anyone willing and able to give voice to the demand that our lives don't have to get worse forever just so some monsters with suits and stock options can get rich off our labour while cities sink into the sea.

The clock is ticking, but it shouldn't be paralyzing. Nihilism is a disease and irony is a vector. It is possible to dream differently and it is possible to organize and it is possible to win. Let 2016 be a kick in your ass, not a boot on your throat.

So slam as many drinks or joints or pills or lines or quiet moments of sobriety as you need to get through New Year's Eve 2016, and then get the fuck up. The future is here and it's ours if we take it.

If we don't, somebody else will.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

After partial vote recounts in certain states, US election officials found no evidence that votes had been manipulated by a cyberattack on voting machines, security researchers told an audience at the Chaos Communication Congress hacking festival on Wednesday. But, the researchers called for a vast overhaul in voting machine security and related legislation, warning that an attack is still possible in a future election.

"We need this because even if the 2016 election wasn't hacked, the 2020 election might well be," said J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, during a presentation with Matt Bernhard, a computer science PhD student.

Halderman's and other security experts' concerns made headlines in November when he participated in a call with the Clinton campaign about a potential recount in some states. Green Party candidate Jill Stein subsequently held a crowdfunding campaign to finance the recounts.

"Developing an attack for one of these machines is not terribly difficult; I and others have done it again and again in the laboratory. All you need to do is buy one government surplus on eBay to test it out," Halderman, who has extensively researched voting machine security, said during the talk.

Read the rest on Motherboard

To most gay men, Grindr is known as the world's premiere dick pic delivery service. But lately, the company's executives, programmers, and PR soldiers have been hard at work to shift the app's image from "hookup helper" to "lifestyle brand." When I visited the startup's new Los Angeles headquarters, an 18,000-square-foot workspace located on the 14th floor of the Pacific Design Center Red Building, change was all anyone could talk about. The panoramic view of Los Angeles provided by floor-to-ceiling windows was inescapable. A diverse and attractive staff buzzed throughout the workplace, coding at large computers or lounging on modernist furniture. Morale was high, and conversations hummed with possibility. One thing was certain: This is far more than just the dick pic Death Star. This is the nerve center of a global tech company, and thanks to a recent majority investment by a Chinese gaming company, Beijing Kunlun Tech, it's one that's poised for major expansion.

The investment, which was announced in January, put Grindr's valuation at $155 million. But though Beijing Kunlun has acquired 60 percent of the company, the investor allowed Grindr to keep its current operating team and structure. In short, Grindr has an influx of cash and a significant degree of autonomy to guide plans for global proliferation.

A motivating factor behind Beijing Kunlun's investment was likely Grindr's rapidly growing user base. A little over a year after CEO Joel Simkhai launched the app in 2009, Grindr had racked up more than one million users. The app now boasts more than seven million, with the highest concentration of members in the US. Users are also highly engaged: More than two million people use Grindr daily, and spend an average of 54 minutes on the app. Simply put: Grindr has the gay community by the balls. It wants to take this massive, highly attentive audience and, per press materials, "become the preeminent global gay lifestyle brand."

Read the rest on Broadly.

News from the world of medical science in 2017 is going to be insane. If all goes according to plan, this could be a year in which medical progress—which normally creeps forward ever so slowly—experiences a few quantum leaps.

That's not to say it'll be a great year for health. Millions of Americans might lose their insurance if Obamacare gets repealed and replaced—for the time being—with nothing. And it's also worth noting that some of the medical breakthroughs scheduled for 2017 are so outlandish, they might not pan out. But in theory, the rising tide of medical science lifts all boats (fingers crossed on that one).

So this may not be the best time to be a human being, but thanks to some of the breakthroughs outlined below, we can all hope that 2017 will be remembered as a year when having a human body got a little easier.

Ketamine for Depression

Since 2013, we've been hearing that psychiatrists might soon start prescribing ketamine for the huge proportion of depression sufferers who don't respond to antidepressants like Prozac. Ketamine is, of course, a staple drug in the rave scene, but it's also on the World Health Organization's model list of essential medicines. In 2015, a recipient of therapeutic ketamine for depression told us the whole experience was just lovely.

The psychiatric applications have looked so promising that the FDA fast tracked ketamine tests last year, "making it more likely that they will become available to patients in 2017," according to the Cleveland Clinic.

The drug that will likely debut first is called "esketamine"—but according to emergency room doctor Darragh O'Carroll, who frequently prescribes ketamine at the University of Southern California Medical Center, the difference is negligible, and comes down to chirality—meaning the two drugs' molecules are mirror images and are technically only slightly different. "They are doing so to push for a new patent, because technically esketamine is a different drug then ketamine," he said. "From my perspective, it's big pharma trying to push that their drug is better than the other guys."

In short, esketamine is basically ketamine, and it might help your treatment-resistant depression.

An Actual Fucking Head Transplant

If the human head transplant supposedly scheduled for 2017 actually works, it's going to be one of the most important achievements in the history of medical science, and the history of technology just in general. Problem is, whether or not it will work is still seriously in doubt.

In 2015, Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from a terminal muscle atrophying disease, publicized that he would be the first person ever to experience a complete head-switcheroo, with surgery slated to happen in China in December of 2017. But Sergio Canavero, the grandstanding Italian spinal surgeon who claims he'll be attempting the operation told the Times of India in May of 2016 that an unnamed Chinese recipient has jumped in line ahead of Spiridonov for unknown reasons.

In January of 2016 Canavero claimed to have performed a head transplant on a monkey, but he was suspiciously cagey about letting journalists see the monkey. Monkeys have been the victims of failed—but promising—head transplantation attempts in the past.

Still, a successful head transplant—which might more accurately be dubbed a "full body transplant"—could be the cure to most diseases, in addition to its applications in the treatment of spinal injuries. So—long shot or not—file this one under "huge if true."

Self-Testing for HPV

A new doodad called the Cobas4800 will allow women all over the world to test themselves for human papilloma virus from home. HPV is a relatively harmless STD in its own right, but it can lead to cervical cancer, the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide, according to report from a Spanish NGO called the Information Centre on HPV and Cancer.

That means with the early warning and quick treatment, the number of women worldwide who die from cervical cancer every year could drop dramatically and quickly from its current 265,672.

The CRISPR Innerspace Race Between the US and China

It's reasonable to not know what the hell gene editing is, or why a sort of medical arms race would be a good thing, so stay with me:

In 2012, a group of mostly American researchers at the University of California Berkeley discovered that a cluster of bacterial genes known as CRISPR were capable of selectively targeting unwanted human DNA, and replacing it with different DNA. It didn't exactly send shockwaves through the media, but it should have. In the ensuing four years, science journalists have obsessed over the astounding possibilities—and potential horrors—of gene editing with CRISPR: it might be a new way to screen for and treat cancers, it might let us genetically modify our vegetables, livestock, and maybe even children, to our hearts' content, and it might eradicate vast categories of viral diseases. We just have to find a way to step up the research, so we can find out which of these things that might happen, can happen.

Well, the world may have just stumbled into a way to step up research.

In November of 2016, Chinese medical researchers at Sichuan University in Chengdu used CRISPR to alter the DNA of human cells under attack from an aggressive form of cancer—meaning the age of human gene editing officially kicked off outside the US. Carl June, an immunotherapy specialist at the University of Pennsylvania told Nature Magazine that the Chinese breakthrough was akin to "sputnik 2.0." June called it "a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States, which is important since competition usually improves the end product."

So with any luck, the Innerspace Race will kick off officially in 2017 at the third meeting of the CRISPR & Precision Genome Editing Congress in Boston, and before long, we'll all be just like the people in Bioshock, injecting ourselves with genetic improvements, and turning ourselves into a race of superbeings.

VR Headsets in Actual Operating Rooms

Several hospitals have previously launched virtual reality pilot programs, but now, according to The Cleveland Clinic, several are about to start using VR as an actual surgical tool starting in 2017.

Granted, no one wants to picture their neurosurgeon with an Oculus Rift over their face while they scoop tumors out of their brain, and fortunately that's not what's happening here (although, let's be honest: that can't be far away). Instead, what's been happening in tests at hospitals like UCLA Medical Center is that the surgeon has been operating goggle-free, then they'll put down the knife for a second and put on the goggles, so they can temporarily step inside a simulation of your unique brain. In VR-land, they'll double check that they're making the right cuts, and then take the googles back off and resume your surgery.

The fact that this is coming to an operating room near you is good, even though it will make your doctor look like a dweeb.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Tattoos have become more popular than ever, and they experienced an increased presence in 2016 when it came to celebrities. There was Rihanna and Drake's matching camouflage shark, the tiny cross that Justin Bieber got near his left eye, the Fat Jew's portrait of Barack Obama on a $5,000 bill, and Lady Gaga's David Bowie tribute tattoo, among many others. Celebrity ink is helping to change the way tattoos are thought about, and normalizing a practice that has surprisingly continued to carry a social stigma.

According to a 2015 Harris Poll which surveyed 2,225 Americans, roughly three in 10 Americans— about 29%—have at least one tattoo. Almost half of all millennials are inked, and about seven in 10 people have two or more tattoos. The Harris Poll's findings reflect the reality of the growing number of Americans getting tattoos, celebrities included.

When it comes to the influence of celebrity tattoos on other people getting inked, there does seem to be a larger connection. Jannah Miller, the shop manager at Electric Anvil Tattoo in Crown Heights told me over email, "Celebrities getting tattooed definitely influences the style of tattoos that people want for sure. A while back, there was a huge trend of people getting 'under boob' Rihanna-style tattoos that look like lace. There has been a trend of people getting small trinket style tattoos, geometric patterns and mehndi/henna style designs."

Stephanie Tamez, tattooer and co-owner of Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn, added, "I would say the biggest trend I have seen in the last couple of years would be what people are calling "naive" tattoos. Which is mostly black line, simple design illustration with quotes or statements. I also have noticed a lot of hand poke work—some by real tattooers exploring this style and others by non-tattooers. There have been a lot of fine line micro tattoos as well."

Jen Carmen, who has been tattooing for 20 years and owns New Foundland, NJ's Monarch Tattoo, noted, "As far as trends go, we have been tattooing lots of birds, owls and ravens being the most popular. As far as celebrity tattoo culture goes, Scarlett Johansson did no one any favors by getting a 'homemade' tattoo. Every time someone with high visibility does something like that, it undermines what so many serious dedicated artists and craftspeople dedicated their lives too."

While these larger fads in tattoo culture are important to note, Carmen also seems to be suggesting there is a broader history that the average person has to be alerted to. The larger history of tattoos, particularly in the United States and abroad, is complicated and spans centuries and cultures. However, the wider exposure to the practice, and the celebrities who are participating, is continuing to help normalize the practice of tattoos.

There's also a larger gendered element to tattoo culture that Dr. Beverly Thompson, a professor of sociology at Siena College, researched within her book 2015 book, Covered in Ink: Tattoos and the Politics of the Body.

Dr. Thompson said via email, "Women have been an important part of popularizing tattoo culture, as the practice grew from masculine subcultures and new demographic groups began collecting in earnest. In 2012, the Harris Poll reported that women surpassed men as tattoo collectors for the first time. With the changing demographics of tattoo collectors, the meaning of being inked has changed. For women, they still struggle with gendered public reactions, which reminds them that for women, gender appropriate tattoos remain small, cute, and hidden. Yet this hasn't slowed down the increase of heavily tattooed women that are represented in the media and in public, who are redefining their own concept of beauty and self-expression."

Dr. Thompson's astute observation surrounding the way women in particular have helped to popularize tattoo culture is vital. It also speaks to the influence that women celebrities such as Kat Von D and Rihanna play in the public eye. Tattoo culture has become the subject of several reality television shows—including TLC's ink series Miami Ink, LA Ink, and New York Ink—and Spike TV's Ink Master, recently crowned their first woman winner. Reality television, as well as many famous tattooers Instagram accounts such as Dr. Woo, Kat Von D, and others, have all helped lift the veil behind tattoo culture and give the general public a peek into this otherwise private world. Tattoos continue to gain momentum in celebrity and culture, and if 2016 has taught us anything, it's that tattoos really are for the masses.

Follow Anni Irish on Twitter.

Bless the mysticism surrounding New Year's Eve that makes us think that the stroke of midnight resets our lives. Next year is probably going to be shit too; the regression, the death, the flaming political trashfires—there is little reason to think all this could just halt with the change of a number on a calendar. Anyway, for all of you who can't stop bitching about how 2016 is the worst year ever, here's some more bad news: The year that just won't end is going to last extra second. 

There will be something called a "leap second" at 6:59:59 PM EST on New Year's Eve, the Huffington Post reports. The U.S. Naval Observatory announced the extra second back in July of this year, surely before knowing just how much of a disaster the rest of 2016 was going to be.

"Historically, time was based on the mean rotation of the Earth relative to celestial bodies and the second was defined in this reference frame," Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory stated in the announcement. "However, the invention of atomic clocks defined a much more precise 'atomic' timescale and a second that is independent of Earth's rotation."

We're not exactly sure what that means, but at this point we wouldn't be surprised if the rapture happens this weekend, and tbh, thank christ. Farewell, dear readers.

Follow Allison Tierney on Twitter .

This October, President Obama announced to much fanfare that America's high school graduation rate has reached an all-time high—83.2 percent for the 2014-2015 school year, the most recent year for which data is available.

This was the cherry on top of five years of consecutive growth that also includes a big leap forward for minority groups, such a African American students (a 7.6 percent increase) and Native Americans (a 6.6 percent increase). The president took that chance to tout some of his education initiatives such as investing in preschool education and a push to connect classrooms to broadband internet.

While these initiatives may have helped, education experts are still pondering why the graduation rate has increased. Could it be teaching the real-world skill of coding in classrooms? Or engaging group learning that solves world problems? How much did social and emotional learning where students are taught about self-awareness, relationships, and human decency have an impact? However you slice it, it seems like teachers are making school less boring, potentially keeping kids in classrooms long enough to graduate.

"Students are using Snapchat and Instagram, so there is the ability to create something that relates much more to life after school than anything else." —Hadi Partovi

"There is a whole bunch of things going on simultaneously," said Laura Hamilton, a senior behavioral scientist from RAND Education, part of the policy think tank RAND Corporation. "It is hard to say which of these might be responsible for the rise in graduation rates, but together this stuff does seem to be working to some degree."

Hamilton pointed to classrooms with project-based learning, where, for example, math and literacy instruction is packaged in a real-world problem for students to solve as a group. Students might spend an afternoon using Pythagoras's theorem to find the distance between their avatar and an enemy in a computer game, rather than memorizing an equation on a blackboard.

"Students are using Snapchat and Instagram, so there is the ability to create something that relates much more to life after school than anything else," said Hadi Partovi, the CEO of Code.org, a nonprofit that brings computer science and coding into schools.

Code.org provides computer science course curriculum for students from elementary to high school age. In the one-year course for high schoolers, students use HTML to build their own web pages from scratch, and develop basic games and animation through a repeat cycle of design, testing, and debugging. So far, about 2,000 schools have incorporated this course and more than 2 million students have been reached across all Code.org courses, according to Hadi.

The Code.org programs have been around for three years, which isn't long enough to say how it might impact graduation rates. But a survey from Change the Equation, an education nonprofit with founding members from the executive ranks of Intel, Xerox, and ExxonMobil, put computer science as the third most enjoyed subject, behind graphic arts and performing arts. "This class [computer science] is not only more fun and engaging," said Partovi. "Students can immediately see how it can help them develop a high-paying career."

Technology has also enabled some schools to flip classroom learning on its head. "Flipped learning" or "flipped classrooms" are where students view a lecture at home, often a video from their teacher, and then go into class to workshop what has historically been considered homework. This allows them to learn at their own pace at home; then, when they apply what they've learned in an engaging classroom setting, there is a teacher on hand to help.

One Michigan school that experimented with flipped classrooms in 2010 saw student fail rate drop from 30 percent to 10 percent, according to a New York Times article.

"Whenever I had a problem on the homework, I couldn't do anything about it at home," one senior student, Luwayne Harris, told the New York Times. "Now if I have a problem with a video, I can just rewind and watch it over and over again."

It's hard to say how much flipped classrooms affect learning or graduation rates. One 2013 survey of research on flipping found that anecdotal evidence showed student learning did improve, but recommended further studies. Limitations like uneven access to technology in the home also complicate the bigger picture.

Of course, all this—technology's integration into school learning—would not be possible without the internet in classrooms. One of President Obama's initiatives, ConnectED, sought to bridge 99 percent of students to high-speed internet by 2018. So far, 20 million students have broadband internet in their classrooms.

Another initiative, Next Generation High Schools, tied together private and public innovation and funding. One of the partners, computer giant IBM, helped develop a New York City high school that went from grade nine to 14. At the school, called P-Tech, students graduate with an associate's degree in either computer systems technology or electromechanical engineering technology with a prime position to enter IBM's workforce.

It isn't just new technology that's keeping kids engaged, but an added focus on what humans have valued since the dawn of time—problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, persistence, and how to maintain relationships. Teaching these skills and traits comes under the banner of social and emotional learning.

"These skills have always been important in the development of children, but we've gained a lot of knowledge in the last ten years or so that indicates that these skills matter in school," said Emma Garcia, an education economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that evaluates the economic impact of policy ideas.

The contribution that social and emotional learning has made to high school graduation isn't completely known, but Garcia says evidence does suggest a connection. She pointed to a study that compared those who completed high school and those who dropped out and later received a GED. Both groups had similar cognitive skills—what you use to think, read and write—but the group that completed high school displayed greater non-cognitive skills, such as perseverance. ("Non-cognitive skills" is another term for social and emotional learning.)

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) is one of the nonprofits helping students develop these skills. CASEL works with schools and districts to integrate social and emotional learning into a student's day. This can include explicit lessons on a range of skills like the importance of listening and communicating in relationships. In one lesson filmed on video, students from the Oakland Unified School District, which works with CASEL, practice conversations with prepared questions on an everyday subject.

"What did you do on the weekend?" one of the students asks the other. The two then proceed to talk about shopping and a track meet. While mastering a good conversation might seem too basic for a sixth-grade class, Hamilton argued "a lot of students are not in the kind of environments in the home or in the community that foster the development of those skills."

Lessons can also be less obvious and folded into every moment of school life. Melissa Schlinger, a vice president at CASEL, stressed the importance of school climate. For example, students soak up a lesson in managing relationships just by observing how a teacher interacts with say, the custodian or the bus driver.

"You can imagine that you are in a school where there is a deliberate focus on building relationships, that is obviously going to go a long way just getting kids to attend," Schlinger said.

Looking forward to 2017, researchers like Hamilton are looking for the data to back their suspicions of what is causing the increase in high school graduation rates. She called social and emotional learning a "hot issue" among researchers and funders. But under the new administration, it's unclear whether the trend toward more wired, engaged classrooms will persist.

"Of course the specific policy changes that might be enacted are unknown," said Hamilton, "so I think we'll have to wait to see what happens."

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This year has been a weird, wild, and kind of horrible one. Between the election, refugee crisis, global economy, David Bowie, Prince, Ebola, Brexit, Carrie Fischer, and mass shootings, it's been hard to find the light. Thankfully, it didn't affect any of the films that were released online because they are still pretty outstanding (and, technically, weren't actually made in 2016). At any rate, it was hard to narrow down the list from the more than 2,000 short films I've seen this year—some of which I've written about for this site—but I was able to do so by placing them into categories and setting a few ground rules, which go as follows:

1. 1–40 minutes in length, per Academy standards (not that 40 minutes is particularly short)
2. Released online in 2016 (the production year can be earlier, but it must have still been traveling on the festival circuit)

So, without giving too much thought to the inherent ridiculousness of year-end "best of" awards, here I go:

The "I'm So Glad This Isn't Happening to Me" Award

Winner: The Procedure. Probably one of the strangest and most horrifying "what if" torture scenarios ever put on tape, The Procedure is equal parts shock and stomach-busting laughter. It also garnered the 2016 jury prize for fiction filmmaking at Sundance.

Runner-up: Her Friend Adam. I've never been able to decide if one should or shouldn't watch this film if you're in a relationship. It is pure jealousy and anxiety put on-screen. Grace Glowicki's performance as the titular "her" puts When Harry Met Sally's Meg Ryan to shame.

The Your Dead Mom Award

Winner: I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked. Winner of the 2014 Sundance jury prize for non-fiction, this short documentary by Yuval Hameiri is unlike anything you'll have seen this year—or other years. Using a number of household items, he attempts to recreate the last moments of his mother's life. It's raw, handmade, and unbelievably moving.

Runner-up: Thunder Road. You know that moment when your mom dies and you're supposed to eulogize her in front of all of her friends and family and then everything goes horribly awry? Well, Jim Cummings, who writes, directs, and stars in Thunder Road, knows it—or else is able to imagine it convincingly—and the evidence is in this impressive and wonderfully cringe-inducing single-shot film. Winner of the 2016 grand jury prize at Sundance and a host of other international prizes, Thunder Road will make you laugh, squirm, and shake your head.

The Extremist Documentary Award

Winner: Speaking Is Difficult. Five years of American mass shooting 911 calls and footage from those places in the present make up this haunting and devastating short. Director A.J. Schnack calls his short "open-started," referring to how he has continued to add more calls to the beginning as they continue to happen. It's super heavy, but very powerful and sobering.

Runner-up: Born to be Mild. On the entirely opposite end of the spectrum of "extremist" is this short about the most dull men on earth. These old farts just lay back and literally watch grass grow, and yet Andy Oxley's 15-minute doc reveals the famously tedious activity to be as interesting as it is entertaining. I've already joined the Dull Men's Club, and it feels great.

The Dealing with the Refugee Crisis Award

Winner: 4.1 Miles. One of the most eye-opening and heart-wrenching documentaries about the refugee crisis was made by Daphne Matziaraki, a recent graduate of UC-Berkeley's School of Journalism. It's about a 4.1 mile stretch of water between the Turkish coast and a small Greek island and the Coast Guard who patrols it, saving hundreds of lives in the process. It's currently shortlisted for an Academy Award.

Runner-up: Over. Blending fact and fiction, Jorn Threlfall's wildly acclaimed short Over is a decidedly different take on refugees. Told in reverse and running just under 14 minutes, the film makes the audience jump to many conclusions and has a more shocking ending than Memento.

The Animated Fever Dream Award

Winner: Manoman. Whenever I'm feeling down and I want a good old fashioned pick-me-up film, where I can see puppets scream, fuck, fight, and piss all over one another, this is my go-to. By the end, you'll be a primal scream therapy convert and a chanter of their mantra: "MANOMAN, MANOMAN."

Runner-up: Symphony No. 42. Réka Bucsi is one of the most talented and imaginative young animators working today. Her ideas and characters come together in such strange and surprising ways that it's less than a delight to watch what unfolds. She has a new short on the circuit this year called Love, and it's been taking festivals by storm. After screening around the world, it will be at next month's Sundance.

The WTF Award

Winner: Short Stories About Love. Boys do cry, and this video is proof. Here is my monkey brain at work, and this is the best one to end on.

See you in 2017!

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte made another shocking claim this week when he said that he once threw a "corrupt" person from a helicopter in flight as punishment. He then threatened to do it again.

"If you are corrupt, I will fetch you using a helicopter to Manila and I will throw you out," Duterte said in Filipino during a speech about typhoon-relief efforts. "I've done it before; why can't I do it again?"

Duterte's helicopter threat was aimed at officials who misuse relief-effort funds. The person thrown from the helicopter was a kidnapper and murderer, Duterte said.

Later, however, Duterte denied that he had thrown someone from a helicopter, implying the comment was a joke.

"We had no helicopter. We don't use that," he told CNN Philippines.

Duterte then went on to poke fun at media coverage of his comments. A spokesman has said Duterte's comments should be taken "seriously but not literally," echoing statements made during the US election, that the press takes Donald Trump literally but his supporters take him "seriously but not literally."

Read the rest on VICE News.

All photos by author.

For anyone going through an identity crisis (literally every human for all of time, except for maybe the Dalai Lama), New Year's Eve (NYE, as the kids call it) is always going to be one of three things: an unforgettable time, a learning experience, or a depressive episode of Nietzsche proportions. There is no in between, and regardless of the outcome, the only chance to make up for a bad night out won't come for another 365 days.

With stakes that high, what party (or weird social gathering that you tell your friends is a party to trick them into coming with you) you end up at on NYE will likely determine what tale you tell the next morning (or three months later, when you brain recovers from how badly you mistreated it). Either way, we here at VICE have compiled a list of every possible NYE party you will be invited to, hear of, or perhaps even go to this year.

"A chill thing" going on at your friend's friend's friend's place.

Your friend says it's going to be "super relaxed." Everyone there is  gonna be "cool" and there will be free drinks (really just the worst whiskey the guy who owns the home could find mixed with Dr. Pepper). If you thought, "Hmm, maybe this could be fun," you're either really lonely or a 16-year-old boy.

After your friend picks you up at 11:20 PM—because "midnight is just the beginning"—you find yourself in the basement of a random suburban duplex. The only people at this place are four hockey bros in Bass Pro hats, a dude hitting poppers in the corner, and two guys playing video games with the sound off. At some point, girls will come through, but they'll be gone as soon as the Uber comes to whisk them to an actual party.

The party you go to after cancelling all your plans because your crush invited you.

You've been drooling over this person for a whole year, and you finally feel the chemistry has reached its peak. You guys head to the party together, share some liquor out of a kitschy flask, and end up running into a group of mutual friends inside. Despite how much fun everyone's having, all you can really think about is sucking the soul out of your partner's face at midnight.

30 minutes before the ball drop, you head to the bathroom, only to see that your crush is MIA. You check your phone—you were only in there for 10 minutes. Where could they have gone? You look everywhere, but no luck. It's now two minutes before ball drop. You text them. They don't respond. Soon enough, people begin counting down ten. You meekly let out "ONE" from your lips, but everyone has already mushed their face into the stranger across from them.

A few minutes later, your phone pings. Your crush went home with the passive-aggressive friend of the group. They "hope you had fun tonight."

Public Intoxication

Morons getting fucked up in public is kind of an NYE tradition. Piss on cars, broken beer bottles, and condoms littering the streets is a staple of January 1. With that said, you should always be an outsider to these events. If your idea of fun is wandering around in public with your buds while absolutely shit-faced, you probably weren't invited to a cool party. Don't ruin it for the rest of us, just go home and take the L.

Massive event by a bank or news network in the middle of your city's busiest intersection

I honestly have never understood people who stand in sub-zero temperatures for hours on end. Not for concerts, not for sports games, and especially not to watch hella-rich celebrities talk aimlessly about the army of regular citizens beneath, all while sipping on expensive champagne inside heated tents. Pro life tip: If you're a parent, don't bring your kids here. If you're an adult, don't have kids. If Anderson Cooper is worth standing in the freezing cold for, you probably need to find another reason to live.

"NYE GOLD NIGHT BIG BOTTLES, GIRLS FREE BEFORE 11, GUYS MUST BUY HALF THE CLUB"

Only two people could have invited you to this: a) your clubrat friend, or b) a promoter who was supposed to graduate from your university with a business degree, but instead gave up halfway to sell weed and push bottles of Grey Goose into sorority girls' mouths.

Unless you're the "host" of the party (really just an Instagram personality yelling "turn up!" into a mic all night), an attractive female model, or a local celebrity, you will probably hate your time here. You'll also wake up the day after with a massive chunk missing from your bank account and a tinge of remorse in your heart for how you treated the bathroom attendant.

Ironic meme Facebook event from friend holding boring NYE party at their house

This is really just an attempt to diversify one's party form the endless condo and loft parties that happen on NYE with a relatable sense of internet humor. Of course, if the party was actually going to be good, the person throwing it probably wouldn't need to say much aside from "party at my place." (Face it: if you need a Tea Lizard joke to sell a good time, it's probably not a very good time.)

*BOLD WORD* (Art party)

This party is always a good bet—it's where all the too-hip-to-be-caught-at-a-club people will be—which means you're going to be exposed to the most eclectic group of groupies, drug dealers, artists, and musicians that you can possibly be brought face-to-face with in a single night. It's impossible to leave without a memorable story, and getting in is non-discriminatory—no crazy lines, bottle service, or coat check. Just a good ol' rager thrown by some "creatives" in a loft.

Of course, the major plus side of this option is that every person you meet will have a dozen ideas for after parties and alternatives to the main party, which makes dipping to a new location super easy and non-stressful. Also, beer is generally $5, and so is your dignity. Have at it.

Netflix party that is really just a front for an orgy

I've never been invited to one of these outside of Christmas, but I imagine they exist. Let me know if you find one.

Your own party

You know you're an idiot, right? Just know that you brought this all on yourself.

Your parents for the holidays.

Have you ever watched your parents watch a live NYE broadcast while getting drunk off 'bo wine? If you haven't, it's worth doing at least once. This is a great way to learn if your parents are bearable while drunk, and a passable way of justifying staying inside for the night. Family comes first, amirite?

Note: if you have even the slightest degree of FOMO, avoid this at all costs. You will feel like driving off a bridge the next morning.

Your hometown for the holidays.

Buddy, get your plans in line quickly, because hometown turn-ups oscillate between the best and absolute worst times of your life. There's no in between. If you haven't figured out what you're doing, where you're going, and who you're going with by noon on December 31, you might as well just call it a fucking night, because you're going to spend the rest of the day trying to track down something fun, and will probably hate yourself for eventually settling on going to a bar with your friend who now recruits people in his school to pyramid schemes.

The Afterparty

Whatever party you end up at afterward, just know that it's all pretty irrelevant at this point. If it turns out you get to your friend's place and it's just you with a few other people, enjoy it and accept the idea that you're prepared to end your night at reasonable time. After all, if you go to a real AP, you need to commit. Getting home at 10AM on the first day of 2017 is a horrible feeling, but you made this bed, and now it's time to sweat a bucket in it as you come down for the next five hours.

The Frat Party

If you're the type of person who doesn't want to spend any money and enjoys stale beer while being groped by strangers or having someone that is either way too old or way too young try to drunkenly kiss you at midnight, this is your place.

The Girl's Night Party

Pretty much the same as every other girl's night featuring junk food and some cheesy romantic comedy except that the Merlot tastes unusually bitter this time, maybe from the disappointment of being single on New Year's eve and having to spend it with other, miserable singles.

The Pet Party

Better call up a friend. If you have no friends your cat and your tears will do.

The I'll Eventually Go Out But Until Then I'll Watch How I Met Your Mother Reruns on Netflix Party While Drinking a $7 Bottle of Red Wine Party

So many Facebook invites from people you only talk to through Facebook. So many real friends with husbands and wives and long-term partners and even one of them has a kid and they are all just "staying in and relaxing." Sara is back from school but you know she's going to find a great party but then you'll have to hear all about exams and tests and you are nearly 30 and that shit is boring. Something will happen though, so let's open this $7 bottle (Chile is an underrated region, imo) and turn on the ole Netflix, it's only 8PM, we'll figure it out. Don't have time to watch a movie, let's just find some TV. Friends, done that. Bojack, too depressing. Man Seeking Woman (love that Eric Andre), too unavailable on Canadian Netflix. How I Met Your Mother? Shit, why not. That series finale was an all time fail, but you have 22 minutes to spare, let's see if a young Ted was as douchey as old Ted. You start with decidedly not classic "Ted Mosby: Architect" of season 2 and sip your wine, letting it it roll into "World's Greatest Couple" as you browse your limited options on your phone. You could get dressed, you could shower, you could do your hair but wine in bed with Ted is fine right now. Two episodes later you have decided your fate, you are a 28-year-old who likes drinking wine in bed with old television. You are comfortable with yourself. You will tell no one about this.   

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

The strike that was supposed to raise the consciousness of working people in the games industry has been strangely quiet since it was announced. The SAG-AFTRA voice actors strike began in late October of 2016, a full two months ago now. There's been scant footage of picket lines, no canceled or delayed games. For all the world, it looks like it's barely happened at all. But behind the scenes, there's a palpable anger.

"They led off undervaluing what we provide to the video game industry," says JB Blanc, a voice actor and observer on the preliminary negotiations. "I was at the second negotiation which occurred. Scott Witlin (the lawyer representing the studios) sat down and said—and I will quote him almost verbatim—'it's so great to see so many of you coming here to support your contract, we're very proud to see you all here. Really no one cares about voiceover in video games, and we could get anyone to do what you do for 50 bucks an hour. So we're showing extraordinary good faith by even turning up.' I think he still believes that, and he's patently wrong." Scott Witlin did not respond to our request for comment.

It was this notion that voice actors are so easily replaceable that got their backs up, in Blanc's words. It's also an idea that seems resoundingly disrespectful, not only to the voice actors, but also to people who play video games. It casts them as ignorant consumers, unable to discern good performances from bad. Sean Vanaman, co-owner of Campo Santo and co-director of the studio's debut game Firewatch, finds the quote shocking.

"Yeah, maybe it doesn't matter so much for the next AAA shooter. Fine. Continue to make that game," he says in irritation. "But when that game is no longer viable, you're not going to have many places to turn. That person should be fired. That's malpractice. He's saying that industry tastes aren't going to change, that market trends will not fluctuate, and that something popular in 2016 will be popular in 2019. I would be very, very afraid as a shareholder if that's the attitude."

Read the rest on Waypoint.

The Toronto sisters with Kardashian-like Instagrams accused of bullying and blackmailing a Nigerian billionaire, Jyoti and Kiran Matharoo, have put out an apology video. Reading from a cell phone and standing beside her silent sister, a woman who appears to be Jyoti apologized and admitted to creating NaijaGistLive, a website allegedly used to enable the crimes the sisters are accused of.

"We created a platform called NaijaGistLive.com and .co where people can send in stories," she said in the video. "Most stories were sent by close friends or associates of people being written about. The intention was not to hurt anyone or be malicious; the intention was not to extort anyone."

NaijaGistLive is a Nigerian celebrity gossip site the Matharoos allegedly owned and ran. NaijaGist.com, which the sisters' alleged site was a knock-off of, reported that the Matharoos operated a "gossip mill where they manufacture stories" and "went as far as sleeping with big Nigerian politicians and recording their sex tape secretly to extort millions."

The sisters each have tens of thousands of followers on social media, often posting photos on Instagram of lavish tropical vacations, money in various forms of currency, and in true faux-Kardashian style, a load of butt shots.

The man the Matharoo sisters were accused of attempting to blackmail with alleged evidence of him cheating on his wife, Femi Otedola, is a Nigerian man whose estimated net worth is $1.2 billion. Court documents also show that the sisters are accused of using their site "for the humiliation and cyber bullying of some 274 persons."

"We apologize to Femi Otedola and his family, especially his wife and children and all the other petitioners… We haven't received any money from this website," Matharoo said in the video, both her and her sister dressed in all black clothing.

Matharoo ended the video by saying: "We promise not to say anything of the contrary to what we are saying now. We freely volunteered to make this video, and not under duress, 'cause we are aware of the damages done to people."

The Matharoo sisters' case is set for January 26.

Follow Allison Tierney on Twitter .

If you've been on Instagram any time during the past month you have probably seen hundreds, nay, thousands, of couple photos at either the Toronto Christmas Market or the Canadian Las Vegas, Niagara Falls.

What makes Niagara Falls so appealing to couples? Is it the romance? Is it the new sexual experiences? The haunted houses? Is it because Jim and Pam from The Office got married there? From a 70 year old couple that gets more action than the average millennial and not-quite-swingers, I found that Niagara Falls has couples convinced they can recharge their relationship (as long as they don't go to Marine Land).

Mark, 26 and Angela, 25

VICE: Where are you guys coming from?

Mark: We're from Toronto actually.

Angela: Niagara Falls seemed like a good place to chill plus it's a good break from the city.

Oh, so it wasn't for the romance?

Mark: It wasn't at all. It was either going to be this or Blue Mountain.

Angela: We hate romance. I mean, we'll see after dinner if I'll say that.

Okay, I can appreciate that, get it girl. How long have you been together?

Mark: Since high school actually.

Angela: Yeah, so it's not like this was a special occasion. It's been one crazy year plus we've just graduated so we're poor #StudentProblems.

Were you guys those type of kids that would come to Niagara Falls on their first "vacation" together?

Angela: Hell no. All of the high school kids that I've seen today have made me extremely uncomfortable, to be honest.

Mark: Yeah, like where are their parents?

Wendy, 26 and Kurt, 25

VICE: Why have you come to Niagara Falls? Is this your first getaway together?

Wendy: We've been dating for 7 years, so definitely not our first.

Kurt: We just moved here from China a little over a year ago so isn't coming to Niagara a rite of passage or something?

Yeah, I guess it is a Canadian tradition. Any romantic plans lined up?

Wendy: Is going to the wax museum romantic?

Kurt: I think coming to the actual falls is pretty romantic. Something about that rushing water...

What's your favorite thing about one another?

Kurt: Beautiful… I think?  

Wendy: [Walked away.]

Phil, 27 and Chris, 27

What brought you guys to Niagara Falls? The romantic atmosphere?

Phil: Oh, we're not together. Just two bros at the Falls.

Chris: It's kind of a tradition between the two of us.

Okay cool, a bro trip to Niagara, I like it. What's the tradition?

Phil: We come here every Christmas break in search for true love at the casinos. Not joking.

Chris: This has to be maybe our fifth Christmas break here. We both work in Toronto now, but this is a pretty important tradition for us so we make it work.

Dear god. Has this plan ever worked?

Chris: I thought I found love a couple Christmases ago. But she dumped me before Valentine's Day.

Phil: We're hoping for a miracle this week.

Wishing you luck, fellows. What technique will be used this time?

Chris: We decided to come to the actual falls in case some cute tourists needed help getting around. Plus, I have to say it's pretty romantic down here. We've gotten some great selfies, which is a plus.

Ed, 69 and Marilyn, 70

VICE: How long have you guys been coming to Niagara Falls?

Ed: We're just from Cambridge (Ontario) so we try to come out twice a year. But Christmas time is the best. Just time to get away from the hustle and bustle.

Marilyn: And hustle and bustle in a different kind of way. We've been married for almost 50 years so we've had a lot of adventures in our time, but Niagara Falls is always our favourite place.

50 years?! Adorable. How do you keep the excitement alive?

Marilyn: Come to Niagara Falls! Ed really enjoys the jacuzzi in the suite we always stay in.

Ed: I think it reminds us of our more… active years. The falls is one of the most romantic places in Canada during the Winter in my opinion. Plus, there's no loud kids running around.

Very true. What's one tip you would give all of the young couples here?

Ed: Never go to bed angry.

Marilyn: Patience. 100 percent patience. Every decade is different.

Steve, 42 and Melissa, 39

VICE: Why are you guys in Niagara Falls today? Vacation? For the romantic atmosphere?

Melissa: Yeah, I swear there's something in the water here that makes people five times hornier.

Steve: Yeah, maybe that's why we come here so much. We've been coming here since we started dating. Just to keep the fire going.

Oh wow, so you have a few years under your belts. What's the craziest thing that's happened while you've been here?

Melissa: I don't know what it is but we attract so many swingers. Like I said, people just feel more sexually-daring here.

Steve: Honestly. We've only been here for one night and we've already had two offers. And that's a slow night.

Wow, good for you. Have you accepted any offers?

Steve: Not yet, but who knows what'll happen.

Follow Madi  on Twitter.

Cops are usually the ones enforcing the arguably useless and destructive war on drugs. But realistically, cops are people too and obviously some of them get high. And because they're cops, one would assume it's pretty hard to get arrested for it.

Detective Constable Kirk Blake, of Toronto police's gangs and guns unit, has now defied that logic.

Blake was charged with possession of cocaine after he lost his wallet and it was found by another officer with blow inside.

According to police, Blake had gone to the Scarborough courthouse on Sept. 19 as part of his duties. Afterwards, he went to the police office. When he left, he forgot his wallet behind.

The wallet was found by another police officer who opened it to check for identification and discovered a "small quantity" of coke inside.

"The cocaine was unrelated to Detective Constable Blake's official duties," police say.

Blake is scheduled to appear in court in February. Hopefully he'll remember his wallet this time. 

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Currently, there are about 1.4 million people service in the United States Armed Forces. This includes the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. Each year, approximately 180,000 more people enlist. However, once their active duty's ended, it's difficult for some veterans to reenter society, find employment and housing, and get the medical care they may need to treat mental or physical ailments resulting from their service.

The US Department of Veteran Affairs estimates that 11 percent of the current adult homeless population in the United States are veterans; 45 percent of that number are African American, predominantly male, live in major urban areas; and 41 percent are between the ages of 31 and 50. As well, 50 percent of these veterans suffer from a serious mental illness and/or disability, and 70 percent have substance abuse problems. Additionally, around 1.4 million other veterans could be at risk of homelessness resulting from various factors such as poverty, a lack of support networks, and poor living conditions in substandard housing.

Caring for our former service members is a $182.3 billion a year project, but even with this significant sum dedicated to the effort, there are still veterans who lack access to the funding, support, and housing they need.

Joining Forces is a nationwide program founded in 2011 by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden that, according to their website, aims to work "hand in hand with the public and private sectors to ensure that service members, veterans, and their families have the tools they need to succeed throughout their lives." They focus on employment resources, education programs, and access to wellness services—which includes resources, as well as drawing attention to the urgent issues that veterans and their families confront every day.

The challenges facing veterans in the United States today is the focus of the latest episode of VICELAND's BALLS DEEP with host Thomas Morton, airing tonight at 10 PM EST. The episode follows veteran Wendell Banks as he moves into a new home in a public housing complex being opened as part of the Joining Forces initiative and meets with Michelle Obama to discuss his military service and what it was like transitioning back into civilian life. In anticipation of tonight's episode, we spoke with the first lady over email to discuss why she decided to focus her efforts on this specific issue and some of the greatest challenges she's faced in the process.

Dory Carr-Harris: Obviously America is a nation with a myriad of pressing social issues. Why did you and Dr. Biden decide to rally around eradicating the issue of homelessness in the veteran population of the US?
First Lady Michelle Obama: It is utterly unconscionable that people who fought for our country would ever have to sleep on the streets when they return home. That's why we launched the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness—and I want to emphasize the word "end," because that's really our ultimate goal. We know how to solve this problem—there are tried and true approaches that are working all across this country. And when we issued this challenge, we were thrilled that local, state, and federal government officials, along with businesses, nonprofits, and philanthropists rose to meet it. And today, 35 communities, including four of the largest cities in America, and three states—Virginia, Connecticut, and Delaware—have ended veteran homelessness. So we know this is possible. And the beauty of these successes is that we're showing that if we can end veteran homelessness, then we can end homelessness for other populations, too—families, LGBT youth, senior citizens.

America has a long tradition of supporting our troops, especially on the level of national discourse. But there seems to be a bit of a disconnect when they return from service, often falling off society's radar and ending up without homes, jobs, or care? Why does this happen?
I want to be clear that, generally, our service members make smooth transitions back to civilian society—finding jobs, raising families, and establishing themselves as leaders in their workplaces and communities. But there are folks who, understandably, struggle when they return home, and they deserve our unwavering support. That's why Jill and I felt it was so important not just to shine a light on issues that our veterans and their families are facing, but to actually address these challenges—not just with parades, ceremonies, or kind words, but with real action that makes a difference they can see and feel in their daily lives. I'm talking about things like mental health counseling, job training, help finding a home. These men and women and their families have sacrificed so much for our country, and this is the absolute least we can do for them.

Wendell Banks (who you met during the filming of the BALLS DEEP episode) was obviously so thankful for the support. Is that the normal reaction you receive from veterans in this country? Have people who you've worked with expressed resentment or anger at having served their country and then been unable to find employment or housing? How are veterans feeling about the efforts to provide more support and social infrastructure?
When we first started Joining Forces in 2011, there was a fair amount of skepticism about whether this would be a real effort or just another PR campaign. We heard from young veterans and military spouses who couldn't find work, or were struggling to get the mental health support they needed, and I think some of them were wondering how two women with almost no budget were really going to make a difference. But over the past five years, we've rallied folks across this country to step up and serve our veterans, service members, and their families—and we've been overwhelmed by the response. When it comes to employment alone, companies have hired or trained 1.5 million veterans and military spouses. So while we are nowhere near finished—we have a lot of work ahead of us—I think this is a strong start.

Michelle Obama gives veteran Wendell Banks a housewarming gift basket. Photo by Dior Rodriguez

The problems of PTSD and suicide play a central role in veteran homelessness. What progress have you seen in treatment and policy, and what do you hope to see in the coming years?
Through Joining Forces, we've worked with a number of efforts designed to change the conversation about mental health in this country and to prepare community healthcare providers to understand the unique challenges military families face. Through the Campaign to Change Direction, for example, we've encouraged everyone—not just members of the veteran or military community, but all Americans—to learn the five signs that someone might be dealing with a mental health challenge. The goal is to help people see mental health conditions as no different from physical health conditions. Getting treatment for depression should have just as little stigma as getting treatment for a broken leg. One in five Americans is living with a diagnosable mental health condition, and no one should ever feel reluctant or ashamed to get the treatment they need.

What is one of the most rewarding experiences you've had since starting the Joining Forces program? And conversely, one of the most difficult?
Some of the most powerful moments I've had over the past eight years have happened not during big rallies or speeches, but in small, quiet settings—living rooms, hospital rooms, around a table in a dining facility on a base. And I can tell you that it's heart-wrenching to hear the spouse of a wounded warrior telling you about how she had to leave her job the day her husband was injured, and she's been working around the clock as a caregiver and still can't go back to work. But in that moment, you also see the extraordinary courage, resilience, love, and love of country that our veterans and military families display every single day—and that is truly awe-inspiring.

Another moment that stands out in my mind was when I met a man named Mr. Black, a Vietnam War–era veteran. He told me that when he came home from the war, people actually looked down on him for having served, and he never talked about his experiences in Vietnam. But today, he said, because of what we've been doing through Joining Forces, he never leaves the house without his veteran cap or a pin representing his service. And in the end, that's really what we want for our servicemembers, veterans, and their families—we want them to feel like we all have their backs, and we all value, admire, and are profoundly grateful for their service to our country.

Follow Dory Carr-Harris on Twitter.