Pheromones are mysterious, unscented love-chemicals that send signals about your moods, your sexual orientation, and your genetic makeup. Animals use these chemicals to attract potential mates; humans have them too, but as this Washington Post story points out, "we have no idea what they are or how they work." Marketers use that ambiguity to make products that contain pheromones, promising to assist in bagging a special someone. There are a ton of pheromone products on the market. Some you'll find in $6 deodorant at Walgreens, while others are very expensive and promise the moon.

Take Athena Institute's 10X unscented aftershave additive for men, for instance. Product creator and Athena Institute President and Founder Dr. Winnifred Cutler has, according to the company's website, a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania, done postdoctoral behavioral endocrinology work at Stanford, and spent over 25 years researching reproductive biology. She's also an "author of eight books and over 35 scientific articles." Her 10X formula is a whopping $100 for one-sixth of an ounce, the idea being that you mix it into your favorite aftershave, apply a dab, and boom—you're transmogrified from an ugly simpleton into an unstoppable whirlwind of seduction.

Doubters of the products efficacy need look no further than the customer testimonials provided on the company's site. ("Names changed, of course!" it reads.) Mike* from Florida writes, "Hi Doc! This is your favorite customer down here in Florida. I would like two more vials [his 49th order] of the Athena 10X. No need to thank me. Are you kidding? I thank you for inventing the product. I am the one to do the thanking."

Don* from Texas, Larry* from Ohio, and another guy named Don* also from Texas all have similar things to say, but it's Roger* from Internet whose praise rings loudest: "Just wanted to say that I went into the camera store the other day and was astounded when two women started making eyes at me and started flirting with me. Amazing. It was so funny how they were acting...Then all the women at work have started being VERY nice to me."

On top of these obviously very real endorsements of the product the company insists their pheromones effectiveness have been proven in "three double blind, placebo-controlled studies." Despite all this, I decided to test 10X myself. I went out three times, to a host of different places, to find out if pheromones really would make me irresistible to women.

Experiment 1: The New Museum

My Wingmen

Raph: Sneakerhead Comedian

Aliyah: Raph's Daughter, World's Cutest Four-Year Old

Clark: Genius Computer Scientist

Kristina: International Businesswoman

My Look: Your Dad's Friend

Right before heading into the museum to meet with my friends/wingmen, I applied a touch of the pheromones behind my ears.

The exhibits themselves were large projections of hallucinatory Swedish video art. In practice, this meant lots of museum-goers swaying in one spot, nodding while watching washed-out footage of sea anemones and close-ups of six-inch heels walking on subway grates. In what was surely a sign from Athena herself, the soundtrack to the subway piece was an instrumental cover of the sexiest song of all time, Chris Isaacs' "Wicked Game."

It was time to the let the pheromones do their work.

For this first test, I posted up at the exhibit's entrance. I'd let my love potion radiate off my skin, sure that hundreds of bewitched mega-babes roaming the museum would soon run straight for me.

They did not.

I walked up to the museum's second floor. This time, I circulated through the exhibits to let the pheromones waft through the crowd. I knew the phalanx of Asian tourists wearing surgical face masks would prove immune to my scent-based charms, but I was disappointed that even the non-masked patrons didn't glance, or even sniff, in my direction.

My wingmen cased the place, looking out for lonely singles eager to be olfactorily transported to a world of true love. They found none.

On the museum's top floor, I wandered into what should've been a love goldmine: The entire floor was taken up by video projected onto the ceiling, while the ground was filled with beds for strangers to lay on and watch the videos. Beds! Beds everywhere! Free, publicly accessible…disease-festering…germ apartments, filled by a mix of angry art students and passed-out old men.

For some reason, the pheromones didn't turn me into the type of person who's eager to climb into strange beds with strange women/crotchety retirees. We left the museum.

SUCCESS RATE: 0%. TOTAL FAILURE.

CONCLUSION

• It wouldn't be enough to let the pheromones work on their own since they're only effective at close range. For my next test, I'd have to approach women and then let my secret sex-scent work its magic.

A Brief Discourse on Method

To be totally truthful, I didn't follow the pheromone's instructions to the letter. For one, they recommend that you put them on every single day. I didn't even consider doing this because I'd mixed them into a bottle of Aqua Velva, which made me smell like a 14-year old gearing up to finger blast his first girlfriend on a paintball course.

Secondly, the pheromone's creators admit that some users need to wear their wonder tonic for up to six months before seeing any improvement in their sex lives. No thanks.

So I'm sorry if this taints your view of my experiments. But this isn't the British medical journal The Lancet. It's not even The New England Journal of Tricking Women Into Boinking You. I'm just a single lonesome man and I'm doing the best I can.

Experiment #2: A Classy Manhattan Hotel Bar

My Wingmen

David: TV Writer

Rachel: Author, Relationship Expert

My Look: Vagrant Who Found an H&M Gift Card Then Immediately Spilled Mayonnaise on His Pants

I knew it would take an extreme level of sophistication for a woman to truly appreciate the passionate stench I was giving off, so my friends Rachel and David suggested meeting up at a hotel bar. The sleek watering hole was positively bursting with gold fixtures, luxurious leather seats, and literally two women.

Maybe it was because it was a Tuesday night, but there've been Men's Rights conventions that had more women at them than this hotel bar. And the women at the bar were swarmed by sweaty, divorced businessmen forming inescapable conversation circles around them. (The only upside was that everyone, not just me, smelled like desperation.) One such circle I could overhear scattered when it was revealed that the blonde in the center was waiting for her boyfriend, "the heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune."

My wingmen and I moved to the lobby's back bar, only to find a similar situation. Rachel offered to strike up a conversation with one of the few ladies present, but I got scared and insisted we grab drinks and sit next to a fireplace to bide our time. Perhaps sensing the futility/pitiableness of our quest, Rachel left.

At this point, I knew I had to actually talk to a woman. I had to. I approached a brunette in a blue dress at the bar. Our entire conversation went as follows:

Me: "What are you drinking?"

Her: "A vodka and cranberry juice."

Me: "I got too drunk on those once and now I can't drink cranberry juice at all."

Her: "That's too bad about cranberry juice." [TO BARTENDER] "Am I allowed to drink this in my room?" [SHE EXITS]

David and I left the bar soon after.

SUCCESS RATE: -0%. TECHNICALLY, A ZERO CAN'T BE POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE, BUT THIS FELT LIKE A REAL DEFEAT.

CONCLUSION

• If I wanted to truly test these pheromones, I needed to use them the way their makers intended: By getting wasted and hitting on as many girls as I could.

Experiment #3: Brooklyn Bar Crawl

My Wingmen

Barry: Dapper Actor

Rick: Roguish Adventurer

My Look: Balding Tablecloth

This was going to be a long night. I prepared by eating a corned beef sandwich.

Bar #1 - The Casual Date Spot, 9 PM

I picked a laid-back Williamsburg joint to start and planned to hit up several nearby bars as the night progressed. With two dependable, fun-loving wingmen by my side, I had a feeling that everything was about to get very, very sexy.

Immediately, Barry got sick and had to go home. We were not off to a great start.

Rick and I grabbed a table near the front. And for the first time since I'd started taking the pheromones…a woman approached us! They worked! The damn pheromones worked! But then it turned out that the girl had actually recognized Rick from a one-off Tinder date that had been painfully boring. The pheromones had not worked—in fact, instead of attracting eager women, they'd started to attract women who actively hated us.

Rick and I spent the next hour drinking in silence.

But, then another woman approached us! She was one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. In a gorgeous French accent, she said, "Do either of you have a cigarette?" Now, did she really want a cigarette? Or was she subconsciously beguiled by my sex-musk? Judging by the cigarette she eventually found and then smoked, she probably was just looking for a cigarette. But maybe she was, at least in some way, also looking for true love. Judging by the way she started making out with a bearded guy in a beanie right after coming in from her cigarette, she might have found it.

Rick and I continued to drink.

Eventually, as the bar filled up, we did start having normal, non-pathetic conversations with the women there. We talked to a very sweet fashion designer and a pair of cool TV producers. No love connections, but at least I was feeling like a human being and not a smelly lump of aftershave and sadness.

Also, we drank more.

Before moving on to the next bar, we stopped to chat with a girl celebrating her birthday. We approached her group—the bday gal, a female friend, and two gay companions. This was a mistake. You see, her friend was married and the birthday girl was so drunk, Rick and I absolutely looked like exactly what we were: Two gross bros trying to hit on uninterested women. I have never experienced such withering looks in my life. Seriously. This was Nuremberg-jurors-staring-down-Eichmann-level scorn. And we deserved it.

Nevertheless, the birthday girl gifted me a paper party crown. We finished our drinks and as we left. I put the crown around my neck.

Bar #2 - The Rock Club, 12 AM

As soon as we entered, I overheard a girl make fun of my crown. I threw it in the trash. Rick and I then grabbed giant beers.

I'm not sure why the bar has such a rep as a rock hotspot. Sure, some of the girls were dressed in leather jackets but most of the guys looked like French henchmen from an unmade Taken sequel. One girl at the bar had obviously just gone to her hairdresser and said, "Give me the Angelina Jolie from Gone in 60 Seconds."

What I'm trying to say is, we didn't fit in.

We tried! We really did. We chatted a pair of very nice gals, but overall this wasn't the place for us and no amount of pheromones could fix that.

Bar #3 - The Hook-Up Dance Club, 2 AM

IndieBK.com called this bar, "the hottest meat market in Williamsburg." Now, I just made up that quote and that website, but if that site did exist, that's how they would describe it. Knowing that, I decided to splash on a little bit more of my Aqua Velva-enhanced attractant. Considering that any amount of Aqua Velva is too much, I put on way, way too much.

We were surprised to find almost no one on the dance floor, but being in the mood for fun, hoping to meet women, and extremely inebriated, we danced our asses off. At this point, instead of giving off unscented pheromones, I must've smelled like sweated-out corned beef and the rotten hull of an old wooden ship.

We spotted two girls on the dance floor. They were very pretty and kind European roommates. But they had zero interest in talking to us. I was fading fast.

Bar #4 - The Bar With Only One Pool Table But Everyone at the Entire Bar Is Taking the Pool Game Terrifyingly Seriously, 3 AM

Rick got a text to meet up with some friends at a fourth bar. I lasted for about 15 minutes, but by the time the third pool player had been ejected for fighting, I decided to call it a night.

When the evening started, I'd felt like Lance Armstrong: An American hero, climbing the mountain of greatness through sheer force of will. But by this point, I was feeling more like Lance Armstrong: A lying, chemical-abusing cheater that everyone in the world hates.

SUCCESS RATE: 100%, FOR I LEARNED THAT TRUE HAPPINESS COMES FROM WITHIN. JUST KIDDING, THIS ALSO GETS A 0% BECAUSE NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE ME.

CONCLUSION

• Look, pheromones don't work. Everyone knows it. I knew it, you knew it, the people who make the pheromones know it.

• Drinking all the time is awful for your skin.

• Finally, there's simply no substitute for the world's most powerful aphrodisiac: Confidence. After this experiment, I sorely lack it.

Follow Sam Weiner on Twitter.

Nothing in the human world is apolitical. The very insistence that games "apolitical" attitude is in itself political, favoring the status quo, or avoiding the necessary conflicts and conversations that lead to growth and progress.

For a long, long time, many folks on my side of the political spectrum bemoaned the AAA game space's failure to really connect with larger social movements. In the last few years, we've had crucial, painful conversations about race and police brutality (and the rising militarization of American police), all while so many "big" games still set players in the roles of hyper-powered soldiers, vigilantes, or even, occasionally, cops.

It was an uncomfortable situation, to say the least.

While most AAA games still aren't focussed on the lives of the underrepresented, the disenfranchised, and those who are fight tooth and nail for better in our society, an encouraging trend ran through several titles this year. A desire, on some level, to talk about things that really, really matter: race, class, and organizing power. (And it's worth saying that independent and alternative games have been tackling these issues for years now.)

Read more on Waypoint

It's nothing new to proclaim that we had some pretty great television in 2016—FX Networks Research counted 455 scripted series this year, so some of them have to be good. But what stood out the most this year are the trends and storylines that make me optimistic for the discussions that will potentially take place in 2017.

Like all good art, television functions within the larger world of culture and politics. Rather than existing in a vacuum, it often responds to the outside world, even sometimes dictating its outlook—even on issues that first rose to prominence 22 years ago. The most culturally relevant show in 2016 was about a 1994 murder case: American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, which revisited and recreated the murder (and subsequent trial) of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

What was notable about the series wasn't its sensationalism—just compare it (and ESPN's 30 for 30's unofficial counterpart O.J. Made in America) to the endless parade of cruel and gross JonBenét Ramsey programming that aired this year—but how it took this specific, significant cultural moment and successfully framed it within the context of 2016. It did so without sacrificing the narrative, instead letting us know that the applicable themes are still prevalent.

The entire series is fantastic—possibly my favorite of the year, even—but there are two episodes in particular that stand out. The fifth episode lays it out in the title: "The Race Card." The series deftly weaves in racism throughout, but "The Race Card" really narrows in on how race helped to shape the trial, for better or worse. It's a knockout from the cold open on, as Johnnie Cochran follows the rules (remain polite, narrate actions, don't make sudden moves) when pulled over by a white police officer. but still getting handcuffed in front of his daughters. Knowing that Cochran obviously survives the encounter doesn't stop viewers from holding their breath, since we're all too familiar with how these "routine" police stops go in real life. From there, the episode dives into the politics of the N-word, the insecurities of affirmative action, and so much more that remains and will continue to remain relevant.

The next episode, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia," went all-in on gender politics, steering away from the trial and focusing on Marcia Clark. The episode cast her in a lose-lose position—a position she was very much in for the duration of the trial as her gender was repeatedly harped on. Her love life and motherhood was brought up in court, nude photos were leaked to tabloids, and a cashier joked about her tampon purchases ("Guess the defense is in for one hell of a week"). The People v. O.J. Simpson took a murder case and flipped it into a rumination on the various shitty ways women are treated—especially if they're in the spotlight, and whether they want to be a celebrity or not. (That cashier only said what he said to Marcia because he felt that he knew her due to watching her and seeing her photos on the newsstand). It's about Marcia Clark, yes, but it's also about the invasiveness and scrutiny that women continue to face every day—and the show made sure that we keep talking about those topics throughout its run and after it ended.

That's what made The People v. O.J. Simpson so powerful to me: I couldn't stop thinking about the show, writing about it, and talking about it to my closest friends and bar strangers. I didn't want to just talk about what was on screen—I wanted to talk about the book behind it, the devastating themes, and the smart, entertaining ways in which it discussed race and gender while often remaining fun as hell to watch. I want to keep talking about it.

And The People v. O.J. Simpson wasn't the only series this year that made me feel like that. There were a ton of shows—new and old—that similarly approached mental illness, including BoJack Horseman, Lady Dynamite, You're The Worst, and The Magicians. One of the ways to survive mental illness is to normalize it, understand that it's a common thing, and to make others understand that, too—and what's more commonly loved than television? This year, we saw an animated horse and a child star tackle clinical depression and the perils of addiction; a beloved comedian use her bipolar disorder as a driving force for a fantastic Netflix sitcom; a military veteran—a group that television often forgets— deal with and seek out help for his PTSD; and a twentysomething budding magician learn that even literal magic isn't a cure.

The Carmichael Show dedicated a fantastic half-hour to exploring depression with its strong family matriarch Cynthia, breaking down the stigma of going to therapy (You're The Worst addressed this as well). Better Things and American Housewife featured child characters who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Broad City had Ilana packing her anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds next to her vibrator. Even The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's endlessly optimistic Kimmy had post-traumatic stress disorder—which Empire also touched on after Jamal was shot. Every step that TV takes to destigmatize and just talk about mental illness is another step closer to the rest of the world following suit.

There are other aspects of this year's best television that make me optimistic for what the medium can and should continue to do next year. Behind the scenes, television took small but major steps to actively promote diversity instead of just talking about it: Atlanta has an all-black writers room and Queen Sugar hired all women directors (the next season of Jessica Jones will follow suit). Onscreen, Fresh Off the Boat and Superstore were sitcoms that found both humor and importance in the conversation surrounding immigration—Superstore, in particular, featured TV's first undocumented Filipino immigrant character—with jokes that added to storylines and avoided offensive territory. Jane the Virgin had a casual abortion storyline this year, and BoJack Horseman had a whole abortion-themed song/music video that I can't get out of my head.

Black-ish aired "Hope," which centered on police brutality but also actually articulated how, for black people watching the inauguration, joy turned to fear for Obama's life. A later episode, "Being Bow-Racial," not only featured a biracial character acknowledging being biracial but also talking about it, trying to understand what it means and how it's affected her life, and sorting out the complexities that make her who she is.

The list goes on: Sweet/Vicious centered on a rape survivor, depicting the daily devastation of living with trauma and giving us some hope in the form of beating down campus rapists. Fleabag depicted a woman who was completely unapologetic and with full agency over her own life—a real person, instead of just a "cool girl." Seeso's must-watch gem Take My Wife featured real-life married couple/comedians Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, following their lives and careers together and proving that you can make a hilarious queer show without awkwardly writing around sexuality, fetishizing two women in bed or, you know, killing off all the lesbians.

These shows—and more!—all handed us notable and admirable examples of how television should continue to grow, build, and change in 2017. That's the mark of what made these series so great—they all pushed forward the conversations that we're going to need to carry on into the next.

Follow Pilot Viruet on Twitter.

In the season finale of PAYDAY, we meet a party promoter, an ex-drug dealing window washer, a billionaire DJ, and a woman who is paid to party as they try to readjust their lives in the competitive city of Toronto.

PAYDAY airs Fridays at 9 PM on VICELAND.

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

Welcome to "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun, and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

A lot of stuff happened in 2016 to make people feel shocked, frustrated, and generally sad: The early deaths of celebrities like David Bowie and Prince, the horror show of American politics in action, the much more horrific horror show of global politics in action, a Star Wars that was just OK, an intractable humanitarian disaster in Syria that just won't seem to end, and more. So we at VICE, as well as a lot of other publications, coped by personifying the year as a nasty villain we could hate. It's handy when your villain is a year, because years have short lifespans—rarely more than 365 days. But right as a year dies, a new year tags in, and we all have to hope it will be friendlier.

So here comes 2017, a fresh year waiting to announce its alignment. Will it be a plucky underdog hero like Jyn Erso, a Walter White-style antihero, or another all-out Voldermort?

I'll start with some very bad news: in 2017 the number of celebrity deaths might be just as high as—if not higher than—it was in 2016.

No, there's not some kind of antibiotic-resistant form of bacteria affecting only celebrities. But according to the organizations that most closely study celebrities—British broadsheets and tabloids—there are only a handful of ways to explain the spike in celebrity mortality. It could have been a statistically inevitable clumping of individual random events, or it may be that there are just more aging celebrities than there used to be, and more celebrities in general for the Grim Reaper to cull from.

For now this is just a hypothesis, (How the hell do you measure it?) but it makes sense when you consider how many new ways there are to be famous. Christina Grimmie, a singer who died in 2016 largely rose to fame as a YouTuber. So when you consider that the movie, TV and music stars of yore are all still vulnerable alongside an ever-expanding crop of celebrities from podcasting, YouTube, and Twitch, it's safe to say celebrity obituaries will continue to be a booming industry in 2017.

But while celebrity deaths are a bummer, they're not consequential in the same way as politics. I turned to historians to figure out how we should feel about a year in which Donald Trump—a temperamental and chronically dishonest billionaire who preaches authoritarianism, and has nationalistic fans—will assume the most powerful office in the world, while his political party controls all three branches of the federal government.

"We should be absolutely terrified in 2017—perhaps more than at any other point in the 20th century," said Robin Kelley, historian of social movements in the US at the University of California Los Angeles. Conservative agendas in the past, he explained, have been kept in check by "countervailing forces pushing, for example, to extend the welfare state and implement some elements of social democracy." He pointed to expansions of welfare that happened under Eisenhower even though he was a Republican as an example. Today, Kelley pointed out, movements toward social justice "have all been vilified by a white majority and even some so-called liberals as the problem."

Kelley wasn't the only historian who seemed seriously rattled by the rise of Trump. In fact, every historian I contacted was deeply concerned about Trump's potential to make 2017 suck for Americans. The uniform intensity of their fear surprised me.

"The short answer is we should be very scared," according to historian and Barnard College history professor Premilla Nadasen.

Nadasen, whose focus is on issues affecting domestic workers, particularly women and minorities, pointed to the rise of the alt-right as a potential source of horror in the coming year. She acknowledged that individual alt-rightsters are often just internet trolls—something alt-right founder Richard Spencer has acknowledged—but Nadasen worries that "they still preach hatred and, in some cases, genocide."

Miguel Abram La Serna, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill said something similar. 2017 could be the year America turns to "a culture of bigotry, and I think once that Pandoras Box is open, it's really difficult to close," he told me. "As historians who have seen and studied these things before," he explained, "we can see the cycles of history swinging back toward hyper-nationalism and anxiety about the other."

Graphs courtesy of Steven Pinker

But media commentator and author Dan Gardner pushed back against this a bit. Gardner is the author of Future Babble: Why Pundits Are Hedgehogs and Foxes Know Best a book about why we should be skeptical of people who predict stuff. "At every moment people feel like this is bigger and scarier than ever before," he told me, but he added that such a perception is nothing but "an optical illusion," caused by a phenomenon known as hindsight bias—a tendency to see the problems of the present in contrast to a perfect past that was never real. Most people forget on any given day that they "should be very very thankful for their good fortune," according to Gardner.

When I ran my question past cognitive scientist and psychologist Steven Pinker, he expressed a sentiment similar to Gardner's, telling me by email "I'll send you some graphs that might calm you down." To a large extent, his graphs (above) worked as advertised. One showed an astonishing turn toward relative global peace within my lifetime, with a small recent surge in war deaths caused by the Syrian Civil War. Another showed that democracy is kicking autocracy's ass.

But another of Pinker's graphs (above) made me feel less calm. Yes, terrorism outside of the Middle East seems to be trending downward generally, and as I've written before, dying in a terror attack is vanishingly rare despite a small recent spike in US terror deaths (and a big spike in Western Europe). But the graph also confirms that rates of terrorism are erratic, and can shoot up seemingly overnight, and when terrorism shoots up overnight, that means more than injury and death for those unlucky enough to be involved. It also means panic in the streets, and politicians on TV demanding bloody revenge.

In short, if the trend toward more terrorism continues, even if you're one of the lucky majority who aren't injured or killed, the consequences could—to say the very least—make 2017 really suck.

That may be one reason why Gardner told me that even though his job is usually to tell people everything is almost completely OK, the coming year is looking uniquely scary. "It is an unusually uncertain and scary time," he told me. But he immediately added, "That does not change the fundamental fact that we are the healthiest and longest-lived people who have ever existed, even though Donald Trump is about to become president."

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of 2017?

3/5: Sweating it

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The shooters looked like drifting shadows as they charged through pools of yellow streetlights toward the Wallace house, brandishing 9mm handguns as they went. There were at least two of them, dressed in black hoodies, and when they made it halfway down Stephens Drive, a working-class street in Bakersfield, California, lined with palm trees, they fired seemingly at random into the crowd of at least 160 high school-aged partygoers, spreading blood and chaos onto the street.

After the violence erupted, at least one shooter from the crowd fired back.

Jocelyn Wallace, the guest of honor that night, had never been treated to a birthday party, but her parents decided to make her 15th special. Jesse Wallace, her father, a thin man living off of disability payments, told me that he and his wife, Alicea, wanted to do something quiet for their daughter with only a handful of her closest friends. Cops challenge that notion, alleging that the Wallaces patted down their guests for weapons, which police believe to be evidence the family was anticipating possible gang violence.

The day leading up to the party, Friday, July 15, was scorching—even by Bakersfield standards—with a high of 105 degrees. The few guests who arrived early that night remember what one called an "easy and cool" time until around 11 o'clock, when the first legit hordes of kids showed up. Police said that eventually there were members of two allied local gangs—the Westside Crips, and the Country Boy Crips—embedded in the crowd.

People recall the usual booze and weed at the party, and two girls fighting in the backyard before midnight—police think it had something to do with a dispute over boys. Onlookers joined in the fight. Things finally got so out of hand that Alicea Wallace ordered everyone to leave, but the crowd didn't go further than the front yard after midnight—an open air space that made them especially vulnerable targets.

Jesse Wallace saw the shooters firing from the back end of his driveway, and his instinct was to protect his daughter, who was standing nearby.

Police allege that members of the rival Eastside Crips descended on the Wallace house and fired over 40 bullets starting at a little before 1 AM. Guests describe hundreds of shots—or what felt like hundreds, spraying on the crowd in a sideways rain. One guest told me she scrambled into a friend's car for safety as bullets whizzed around her, making tight, whipping sounds as they tore into palm trees and human flesh. She squatted down as low as she could on the floor of the car, down below the back seat. From there, she listened to the clusters of shots popping above her head, ricocheting against and landing on unseen surfaces.

"I was so scared," she told me. "I couldn't get up from the floor."

Jesse Wallace saw the shooters firing from the back end of his driveway, and his instinct was to protect his daughter, who was standing nearby. He lunged for her, and a bullet zipped through the cartilage on the top corner of his left ear and then threaded in and out of the flesh that covers the back of his skull, like a safety pin entering and exiting a piece of cloth. He fell to the ground at Jocelyn's feet, bleeding onto the pavement, just one of 14 people injured that night.

The Stephens Drive shooting also resulted in one death, that of 21-year-old Miguel Bravo, a neighbor of the Wallace's who lived on Belle Terrace, a street that runs perpendicular to their own. According to one of his coworkers, that day Bravo had gone to work at his job at the Jack in the Box on Ming Avenue, mopping the floors and wiping down the cooking stations. He'd come home and pulled his mattress up to a spot adjacent to the thin wooden door, perhaps the coolest spot he could find.

Police suspect that the gun battle between rival gang members advanced from the Wallace residence up the street. They believe one of the bullets from the final stage of the fight slipped well over 500 feet from where it was fired on Stephens through the intersection at Bell Terrace, and down the long driveway of an apartment complex, penetrating the thin wooden door of Bravo's rented home. There, it entered his skull and killed him. It was some three days later that an acquaintance of Bravo's who hadn't heard from him called the cops. They soon discovered his body.

A neighbor told me that when the young man's family arrived to identify his remains, the mattress he slept on that night lay next to a dumpster, soaked with so much blood it looked like a crimson sponge.

On the corner of Bell Terrace and Stephens, a stone's throw from the spot where Miguel Bravo died, a black and white sign once announced the presence of a neighborhood watch. It has since been painted over and marked with the letters "WS"—ostensibly for West Side Crips. Neighbors can't quite recall whether the sign was vandalized before or after the shooting took place, but everyone who lives there understands what it means: gangs have clout here, and they want residents to know it.

The power gangs wield in Bakersfield takes the form of intimidation, which is part of the reason the shooters of this and many other cases remain at large, police say. Detective Richard Anderson of the Kern County Sheriff's Office, the lead investigator on the case, believes that guests at the party that night—as well as members of the Wallace family—know the identity of the shooters, as well as those who returned fire, but are refusing to speak out of fear. This is a common problem cops encounter in Bakersfield: Nobody wants to be called a snitch.

Bolstering any preexisting aversion to speaking with law enforcement is the police department's reputation for being trigger-happy. Last December, the Guardian published a five-part series about Kern County, where Bakersfield is located, called "The County: the story of America's deadliest police." In it, the paper claims that cops there killed more people per capita than in any similar American jurisdiction in all of 2015. A follow up report by the local NBC affiliate KGET News countered that story's findings, suggesting that the numbers were actually in line with other departments in the state. But locals frequently cite the original story when explaining why some mistrust the police. Cops, unsurprisingly, cite the follow up—insisting the original unfairly tainted their reputation.

If nothing else, prominent figures among the city's black and Hispanic populations and police both concede there is a glaring lack of communication between law enforcement and people of color. And the Stephens Drive shooting was just one of 50 mass shootings in America in July alone—and one of five logged on July 16, according to VICE's Mass Shooting Tracker. Bakersfield, in other words, is just one trouble-spot in a national maelstrom of mass gun violence, some of which is fueled by gang activity.

Joe Mullins, who runs the Special Enforcement Unit specializing in gang activity for the Bakersfield Police Department and shares intelligence with the Kern County Sheriffs Department, passed along data showing 934 gang-related shootings in the city from January 2000 to August of this year. He said residents live "in a constant state of fear" in East Bakersfield, and that the Eastside Crips, Westside Crips, and Country Boy Crips divide and control large swaths of the eastern side of the city.

For example, gangs dominate the burgeoning prescription marijuana industry in East Bakersfield, and place a tax on businesses, according to police, who said that there are 94 dispensaries in Kern County. The majority are located on poorer blocks, where they have partially overtaken the role of the neighborhood liquor store. Due to the fact that these are cash-only businesses, armed robberies are commonplace, and a Wild West atmosphere has colored the industry, as exemplified by a man and woman who were restrained, beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted in a Bakersfield dispensary in September 2015.

As in Chicago and other cities suffering from endemic violence, the roots of local gang culture are complex, but locals point to poverty as one of the chief factors. About 20 percent of Bakersfield residents live below the poverty line, a figure that is only slightly north of the 16 percent national average. But a more granular breakdown suggests that poverty rate is weighed down heavily by the eastern side of the city, where some neighborhoods are at or above 50 percent.

Though it is on the east side, Stephens Drive is not among the most destitute of Bakersfield's neighborhoods—it's racially diverse, and composed primarily of blue-collar families. Even so, street signs, fences, and palm trees on the block are dotted with bullet holes.

Fred Lancaster, a white, middle-aged construction foreman who works on gas stations in the San Joaquin Valley area, remembers a time when he didn't have to worry about gang violence erupting on the street. On the night of the shooting, he was sitting in his furnished garage five houses up the road from the Wallace place, watching TV with his cousin Bruce. The two men were flipping channels when they heard what first sounded like firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July, a mistake many neighbors made due to the proximity of the shooting to the holiday.

'My Dad built this house. I lived here my whole life, and we never locked the front door growing up' - Fred Lancaster

But all that crackling was followed by screams, and Lancaster quickly surmised that a shooting was underway. He made out six shots at first and then screams, followed by a "whole bunch of shots," maybe 30 or 40, and then a cluster of about eight more that were fired closer to his garage—somewhere by the stop sign at the intersection of Stephens and Belle Terrace. Each of these bursts of lethality was separated by a stretch of no more than a minute of comparative quiet, he recalled. His first impulse was to run out of the garage and see what was happening, but his cousin held him back.

"My Dad built this house. I lived here my whole life, and we never locked the front door growing up," he told me. "There's just too much violence in Bakersfield now."

These days, Lancaster keeps a loaded gun by his bed at night on the off chance he needs to "shoot any son-of-a-bitches that might come in the house."

Likewise, Julie Burton, a 64-year-old immigrant from the Philippines who lives with a family of 12 two houses up the road from the Wallaces, has grown more frightened of gun violence in recent years. Those fears were exacerbated on the night of the shooting: Burton had been outside until eleven that night, she told me, listening to the sounds of the party before retiring inside. She was in her bedroom when she "just heard bang-bang-bang-bang."

She waited for the flurry of shots to recede before fighting a tide of fear and venturing outside to see what had happened. She saw things in flashes—young girls screaming in terror, broken glass, wet blood, and a boy dressed in all black, walking zombie-like up the sidewalk, his hand resting on his wounded head. She remembers boys from the party escaping over a fence across the street at an abandoned house where squatters frequently crash. A car belonging to her grandson's girlfriend was checkered with bullet holes.

When I met Manuel Carrizalez, a soft-spoken ex-gang member turned peace advocate, he pulled up to an intersection surrounded by shuttered shops and bail bonds businesses and showed me the track mark scars on his arms. Pamphlets and flyers from the non-profit he runs, Stay Focused Ministries—a group that provides guidance to communities ravaged by gang violence—are strewn throughout his van. One flyer shows a row of blue Kansas City Royals hats, and red Kansas City Chiefs hats, all featuring an interlocking "KC."

"The gangs here wear KC for Kern County," he said, tapping his finger on the postcard. "Blue for Crips and Red for Bloods."

Carrizalez ran with a gang as a kid and did time for burglary before finding God. Among his chief concerns now is protecting children from the threat of gang violence. He showed me the bullet holes dotting peoples' homes in the way someone might single out the houses of celebrities in Beverly Hills, and said things have only grown worse around here since he was a kid. The endemic poverty of East Bakersfield and the violence go hand-in-hand, he explained, and the poverty has spiked—in part because of the exodus of oil industry and other blue-collar jobs.

Carrizalez said he's officiated at least 50 funerals in 2016, while serving as a minister in East Bakersfield.

Taking me for a tour around the vicinity of MLK Boulevard, a main thoroughfare, he described the streets according to the shootings that have defined them. He highlighted Feliz Drive, where an officer-involved shooting this April unfolded after a 37-year-old man was accused of disobeying traffic laws. Next, he drove me to where volunteers from his non-profit guide school kids out of the house, offering them physical protection so they can play in the open air. Parents are grateful for the opportunity: One mother told me that when shootings start within earshot, she just comes out to bring her kids inside—as if it were the onset of a thunderstorm. The seven or so kids that were with Carrizalez's non-profit on the day of my visit ranged in age from five to 13, and were being supervised by two young women volunteers from his ministry. All of the kids, boys and girls, were black, and all of them claimed to have seen a gun.

"He was Mexican or white and had a blue bandana over his mouth, and was walking with a gun in his hands," an 11-year-old girl told me about the first time she saw a gun on the street.

He showed me the bullet holes dotting peoples' homes in the way someone might single out the houses of celebrities in Beverly Hills

One recent shooting in particular kept coming up as Bakersfield residents broached the dangers gang violence in the city poses to kids: An attack outside of a Chuck E. Cheese, in April. There, gang members traded shots in the parking lot while crowds of children screamed in terror, watching through the glass from inside. Curtis Harmon, the Chuck E. Cheese manager there, told me he sprinted out of the restaurant and into the direction of the gunfire, while one shooter dressed in all black fired on someone else who was wearing head-to-toe Lakers gear. Harmon said that when he ran out, the men were laughing at the panic they had unleashed.

"I just wanted to protect the kids here," Harmon told me, acknowledging the danger of the situation. "I didn't really think."

Three men involved in the shooting were arrested, according to the Bakersfield PD. Today, like Stephens Drive, the scars of the gun battle still linger—bullet holes on the external walls of the restaurant are covered in plaster.

The Wallace family stopped speaking to the press shortly after Jesse returned from the hospital, which he told me was just a day after the incident. When I met him, he spoke only briefly and through his screen door. He had abruptly cancelled what was supposed to be a sit-down interview with the entire family, citing the trauma of revisiting the mass shooting for everyone involved.

"My daughter doesn't want to relive that night," he explained. "Seeing her Daddy bleeding on the ground."

Illustrations by Luke Thomas

The Wallace family has come under scrutiny from some members of the Bakersfield community for appearing to sanction an atmosphere that is accepting of gang violence, or at the very least teens using drugs and alcohol. Jesse Wallace denied knowingly admitting gang members into his daughter's party, and refused to speak about allegations that the family permitted drugs and alcohol to be consumed.

Guests at the party told me that the invitation went viral online via a random Facebook post, which led to the overcrowding, as well as the presence of gang members. Detective Anderson countered that claim, suggesting that details of the party were deliberately held back until the last minute because the Wallace family knew members of the Westside and Country Boy Crips would be there. He told me that when the night of the party approached, a virtual flier was circulated online advertising the sale of Jungle Juice.

Wallace told me that he and his family planned to attend the Walk for Peace rally, an event hosted by the Wendale Davis Foundation, a group dedicated to stopping violence in the Bakersfield area. The occasion was staged for members of the community whose lives have been affected by gang violence, to show solidarity and demonstrate to the perpetrators of shootings that they are unafraid. The foundation is named after Wendale Davis, an innocent teenage boy who was murdered by gang members in 2006.

On the day of the walk in late September, families who lost loved ones marched alongside a police escort. A dance troupe composed of teenage girls, the Bakersfield Drillettes, chanted "When our hands are up, don't shoot," referring to the threat of police violence, as family members wearing t-shirts showcasing images of deceased loved ones walked side-by-side. Along the way, people stopped to weep or cry out—overcome with grief from the memories the march stirred.

Back at the one-story offices of the foundation, these family members mingled with police officers like Joe Mullins, and ex-gang members like Carrizalez, who came out to support the gathering. Pro-peace music like "Stop the Violence" by The Chestnut Brothers played from giant speakers as kids received free haircuts from a stand set up in the parking lot. A collage was mounted, filled with pictures of people from Bakersfield who had been killed in gun violence—at the hands of both police officers and gangs. Victims of the Stephens Drive shooting attended the walk too, as did Wendale Davis's younger brother, Wesley Davis the third.

"Streets know who did it," he said of his brother's murder. "I know their names and I don't wish anyone any ill will. I just feel anger that they took my brother away from me."

A 15-year-old girl who survived the Stephens Drive shooting, and attended the march, showed me the scar on her left leg where she was shot that night. The bullet struck her from behind, she said, and everything inside her leg went hot and numb. She hopped to the front door of the Wallace house as blood from a torn arterial vein sprayed out behind her. Once inside the house, she collapsed onto a carpet in the Wallaces' living room, listening to the gunfire crackle on the other side of the wall. Thick blood from the vein pooled around her before she blacked out.

Saddam Ali, who police told me was a member of the Westside Crips, also survived the Stephens Drive shooting, only to be murdered the very next night in a gang-related shooting.

Surena Dixon, his 24-year-old girlfriend at the time of his death, was on hand at the march with her mother and ten-month-old daughter. Dixon wore a t-shirt picturing Ali wearing a backwards baseball cap. She described him as an electrician who was a good father with a strong work ethic. She said that it was 10:30 on the night he was shot and they were standing outside their house when a killer pounced on them in the dark.

The Wallaces ultimately backed out of the peace walk for reasons they didn't explain, but it's possible that the atmosphere of paranoia that still hangs over their neighborhood had something to do with it.

There, at the entrance to the apartment complex, a yellow sign recently offered one-bedroom apartments for rent: "$475 to $550." One of the apartments, #5, sat alone and unrented. It was the apartment Miguel Bravo occupied for three brief weeks of his life. Inside, there was no furniture or any other sign of life. A single clothes hanger hung alone in an empty closet. Dust balls and dead roaches lay strewn along the floor.

On the bottom half of his tan front door, a small black hole still marked the spot where a single stray bullet took Bravo's life.

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Before Americans were panicking about heroin, they were freaking out about meth. By now you've probably heard something about the drug and its litany of evils; even leaving aside pop culture phenomena like Breaking Bad, the stuff is everywhere—even in the occasional donut, some cops seem to believe. If you look hard enough, we are often taught by the press, you will find meth lurking in the Midwest, spreading like a plague across the Great Plains, lingering like a scourge in the decaying heartland of small towns nationwide.

Of course, regular users of the drug, of which there are an estimated 569,000 in the United States, can suffer from addiction, anxiety, insomnia, weight loss, delusions, and other health problems; in 2009, nearly 100,000 meth users ended up in the hospital. Which is to say the drug does represent a genuine public health problem, one some supporters of President-elect Donald Trump seem to believe might be banished from America's rural idyls with his "big, beautiful wall."

But like most wars on drugs, America's Meth War has its detractors. Travis Linnemann has lived and worked in Kentucky and Kansas—prime meth country in the national imagination—all his life. A criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University and former probation officer, Linnemann has for decades wondered about two parallel realities of meth: the one he sees with his own eyes, and the far more sensational one depicted by police, politicians, and the media.

Linnemann's recently-released book, Meth Wars, is an intrepid investigation into the stories that have been generated by meth fears and the reality of the drug and the harm it actually causes. He explores how the drug has been used to sew panic and injustice in communities already on their knees in what is by far the boldest deconstruction of the meth epidemic yet. I spoke to him about how and why, as it continues to cast a shadow over rural America, he thinks a meth chimera was born.

VICE: When did you start to question what America was being told about meth?
Professor Travis Linnemann: I was a probation officer in Kansas when meth was a real hot-button topic in the late 1990s. It was consistently drilled into our brains that this was a threat, an emergency, and we needed to do what we could to address it. My job as a probation officer in mostly small towns in northeast Kansas involved lots of surveillance, high levels of drug testing and working with people who had a lot of contact with the criminal justice system.

But the rhetoric I was getting from the state authorities and the news media wasn't matching up with my experiences. In the field I just didn't see it—I can't recall a meth offender ever being on my caseload. During six years of drug test results from the Kansas state database on the highest risk community based offenders, only 2.7 percent of all positive drug tests were for meth. Even the most recent figures show that police only seized 21 meth labs in 2014 in Kansas, and those include two-liter "shake and bake" soda bottles.

In your book, you describe the "meth imaginary." What is that?
It's the way that people imagine everyday life, their relations to other people, what they encounter on the street, through [the lens of] this particular drug. So, for example, someone sees someone who's particularly disheveled, who fits the "meth head" trope, and rather than maybe having some compassion for that person and thinking, "What's going on in their life, what makes them act the way they do?" they are just imagined as a degraded junkie. It enables us to ignore issues such as generational poverty, interfamily conflict, poor health care and all kinds of other things that go on in people's lives everyday. In the imaginary, they are just "meth heads."

I don't want to disregard this as a completely mythical thing because there are people who have problems with drugs. But we imagine what's going on out there through the lens of this worst-case drug scenario. So someone with bad teeth, someone who broke into your car, is automatically a meth junkie. Maybe they don't have health care and eat a poor diet, maybe they don't have a job and are at the end of their rope.

Meanwhile in the media, we live in a meth epidemic?
Every time someone is arrested for meth, it seems to make the news. For the book I spent a lot of time with police and they would always identify meth as their biggest problem, particularly in Kansas and Kentucky, I think because it legitimizes their work. A lot of times people disregard small-town police because they don't have real crime. Well now we have this discourse around the meth epidemic—on their minds, because of meth, they are finally real police fighting real crime.

We've been seeing a lot of cell phone pictures and footage of zonked out heroin users in the last few months, among them a photograph released by police in Ohio in September. Does this remind you of "meth zombie" imagery and Faces of Meth, a project set up by cops in Multnomah County, Oregon, that aimed to deter meth use via graphic before-and-after mugshots?
Yes, it's the same thing as the "meth zombie" trope—it allows people to diagnose others as monsters. Faces of Meth is thrillingly voyeuristic for us all to gawk at, looking and judging people's lives…. "What a scumbag!" "How can they do that to themselves, look at their face!"

Maybe it makes us feel better to do this?
What these images do is hide longstanding social problems under the narrative of drugs. This is people caught on camera at painful times in their life so others can sum up their life and judge it. It's the logic of horizontal violence, where we can just write somebody off because they are a drug user. The history of someone's life, all the things they've experienced, all are linked to the one problem of drugs. So it makes them quite blameworthy.

Faces of Meth seems like a form of propaganda in this war, a kind of modern day WANTED poster.
I agree. It's all about keeping a lookout in your community, alongside all the public service warnings about meth labs and the ingredients they need to cook. It's like the anti-terrorism stuff; if you see something, say something, these people are in your community, this is what you need to do. It's incredibly divisive and unhelpful.

What did you make of Breaking Bad?
It's the same old story, the dealers were bad people, most of the users were zombies who would do horrible things for the drug, so it replayed all those old narratives. But it gives us something good to look at, right?

You spent many hours riding with police in Kansas as fieldwork for your book. What was their take on meth?
Police are in the business of identifying threats. So they generally saw all community dysfunction and crime as drug-driven. In the very small towns in particular, they felt that everything they dealt with in the community they could trace back to meth. For example, they didn't see homes in disrepair as anything but signs of meth, drugs, and depravity.

But when I looked at the statistics, they didn't follow that logic. These police were dealing with very few drug crimes, and very, very few for meth. But forget the truth. One of the wellsprings of the meth war is everyday cops, they are important producers of this logic—talking to people in the coffee shop, doing anti-drug talks in schools, they continue to spin and spin a yarn that is very important in legitimizing their place in the community and frankly their own power.

You seem to think police and the DEA are playing fast and lose with the facts on meth labs…
Well, it's true that with clandestine labs some of that stuff does explode, but it's rare. And I would question the veracity of the DEA's stats on the number of meth labs local police find. If they find some suspicious junk somewhere or a two-liter soda bottle with a strange liquid, these are counted as "meth labs," but it's not exactly Walter White. It's simply misleading. Worse, people are charged with manufacture and even jailed if they are found with two-liter "shake and bake" bottles, so are looking at a serious amount of prison. The point we have reached is the product of years and years of apocalyptic thinking, so now we have these really out of whack punishments.

So why do these cops believe meth is the culprit for rural decay?
Like a lot of other people here, they can't bear to face the truth: Life has been hard for a long time, life's probably not getting any better. Jobs have gone because of corporate agriculture and the consolidation of family farms, and the consequences of accumulation.

But I think it's easier to blame the local drug user, whether it was a kid you grew up with in high school, or someone you believe is an immigrant who happens to be working in a meatpacking plant who brought over a small amount of meth. It's easier to locate all your anxieties on this one visible problem than it is to confront your own history and to consider that your life may have never been that easy and probably never will be.

Watch the VICE doc about the 'Real' Walter White:

Do people in these troubled parts of Kentucky and Kansas see their neighborhoods as decrepit meth zones?
From the outside, the rural Midwest and Appalachia are viewed as the proverbial "flyover land." It's written-off territory. "White trash" is used to denigrate people, of course, but for some it's also a marker of pride and transgression in a lot of ways, a kind of noble deprivation, flicking the middle finger at the upper classes and saying 'I'm white trash, fuck you."

But even those who live here succumb to the meth head rhetoric.

Are there any parallels with America's urban war on crack?
Well, meth is associated with white people, but it's the same discourse on depravity and dependence, the same punitive logic as it was for the so-called urban black underclasses and crack. Charles Keating, the governor of Oklahoma, famously said that meth was a white trash drug just like crack is a black trash drug and that we should shame both. The cops didn't have a drug war out here, now they do. In this way, the drug war is a kind of a market that has to find new places to set up shop, otherwise it will stagnate and die.

How does the meth war compare to what is going on now in America in terms of opiate addiction?
We do one thing with drugs in this country: we treat their use with police and prisons. So I don't think its all that different. There are parallels with crack, but the opiate problem is different from the meth problem. In Appalachia, eastern Kentucky and West Virginia in particular, pharmaceutical companies identified a population and market and quite literally pumped millions of pills into the area, via some aggressive marketing aimed at patients and doctors, with disastrous consequences: mass addiction to Oxycodone and subsequently a big rise in the use of heroin. As far as I know, meth has had no such corporate sponsorship, and is far less prevalent. Even so, in Appalachia and the Midwest there is very aggressive policing of meth, and frankly all drugs.

There is a kind of rural decay porn going on here.
Yes. I think in a lot of ways we are obsessed with the death of small rural towns. A 2004 investigation by the New York Times into meth in rural America quoted a sheriff in Nebraska saying every violent crime runs back to meth and that meth was linked to several murders. For the book, I looked at the statistics and crime had not increased in the way it claimed. Also, Adams County had just three murders in the four years leading to the article—it was just a sound-bite. The readers of the NYT want to know about the meth narrative in rural America, and it's much more sexy than the effect corporate agriculture and Monsanto are having on the community.

You say that police stand to benefit from the hype. How is this?
What meth did is that it brought the drug war en masse to new territories. It's a rhetoric used to justify increasing intrusion and police violence. So there is a call for more cops, more funding for cops, that it's fine for cops to have Kevlar helmets and assault rifles in a small town. Because of this powerful [Meth] Imaginary, the public believes that something has to be done, and so people become even less critical of the kind of police behavior they might not stand for normally.

When I moved into academia, I realized how much the whole meth regime mapped onto everything we've done in this country relating to drugs, one drug after another. We erect this kind of edifice, advance it and really what it does is accomplish other political goals underneath: it brings funding, political careers are made. The authorities can [use meth fears to] broaden the types of political power they have, expand the number of police, get them new equipment.

And you say the meth war is also being used to ratchet up social control.
Mexican cartels have been bringing meth into America for 20 years—it's nothing new. But recently there has been a shift in emphasis by police and politicians onto meth production facilities to Mexico and China. This provides a powerful framework for a lot of serious political work to get done: funneling millions of dollars to militarize the border, to arm and train Mexican police, help them build new jails and prisons and provide drug education to Mexican school children.

But meth obviously is an actual issue for some Americans, so what's the way forward here?
I'm calling for a realist approach to social problems, getting honest and serious about what's going on in our communities and our country. But I'm skeptical about whether we can do that, as a nation and as individuals, because that means confronting a lot of things. It's difficult, but we need some grim realism.

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At least 39 people were killed and 69 injured when a gunman opened fire in an Istanbul nightclub packed with revellers celebrating the New Year early Sunday, Turkish officials say.

A manhunt is underway for the attacker, who struck the popular Reina nightclub—an upscale waterfront nightspot, popular with celebrities and foreigners—at about 1:15 a.m. local time, officials say.

"Our security forces have started the necessary operations. God willing, he will be caught in a short period of time," said Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, calling the attack an act of terrorism. Sixteen of the twenty-one victims identified so far are foreigners, said Soylu, with four of the injured in critical condition.

Read more on VICE News

Join a gym, eat less pork fried rice, whatever, sure, go for it. But as we've explained before, it's really not worth treating the new year like some grand excuse to wipe your slate clean of indulgences.

For one thing, science has already shown that's a surefire recipe for failure—one of the many reasons only 8 percent of people who make resolutions ever hit their goals, according to one study . "The greatest challenge I have with my patients this time of year is reeling them back from the black hole of overambitious resolutions," says Paul Hokemeyer, a New York City therapist who specializes in addiction treatment. "Too many people view January 1 as some magical date from which they can become pure as snow. That's delusional thinking."

For another thing, we all need a little vice in our lives. Fucking up—and getting fucked up, within reason—can be just as refreshing as whatever week-long moon juice spa cleanse BS your latest fitspo idol is touting. "Perfect people are annoying and off-putting," Hokemeyer says. "We connect with people through their cracks. It's what makes them human and, ultimately, attractive. This certainly isn't to condone vices that cause destruction, but a little dirt in the corners can be fun and exciting."

In 2017, embrace the dirt in the corners. Here are some of the vices we're standing by, and science's logic for why you should too.

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Amy Clifton has known she wanted children since she was ten years old. "So when it came to transition and going to the gender identity clinic and starting hormones," she said, "the first thing I asked was, 'How do I ensure that I will be able to have my own progeny someday?'"

Amy is a transgender woman living in Belfast, Ireland. Born with male genitalia, she was capable of producing healthy sperm prior to beginning her gender transition. After starting female hormone therapy in her late 20s, however, the ability of her sperm to produce an embryo via in vitro fertilization would decrease significantly.

Having her own biological children was important enough to Amy that she'd have delayed hormone therapy if necessary in order to bank sperm, she said. Luckily, she didn't have to; at Northern Ireland's National Health Service gender identity clinics, waiting lists are relatively short, and most services—including sperm collection and banking for 10 years—are free.

Amy is one of many transgender people who want to have families of their own. And while the assisted reproductive technology available to people like her isn't particularly novel, there is minimal data and no clinical practice guidelines to help doctors best apply that technology to the care of transgender patients.

The hormones and reproductive organs present in a transgender person differ depending on the types of treatment the person has had. Reproductive organs present at birth, also referred to as the natal organs, may be removed if they do not align with gender identity, although many transgender people do not have this surgery for reasons including cost and surgical risk. As a result, many transgender men have a uterus and ovaries, while many transgender women have testes.

However, many transgender people take hormone therapy that not only produces secondary sex characteristics, but also suppresses the activity of the natal organs, if they are still present. A transgender person taking hormones would need to stop hormone therapy for several months before trying to use the eggs or sperm produced by their natal organs.

How well those eggs or sperm work after stopping hormones is one of the biggest questions facing reproductive specialists, said Dr. Paula Amato, a reproductive endocrinologist at Oregon Health and Science University. Amato was also a lead author of an opinion published last November by the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), which concluded transgender people should have equal access to fertility services.

We don't have the data yet to answer many of the most important questions about transgender fertility, said Amato, including "how long do you have to be off hormones before your fertility recovers? How often does it recover? Does it sometimes not recover? Are there any long-term effects of exposure to these exogenous hormones on eggs or sperm or potential children?"

Although there's a lot we don't know about the impact of transgender hormone therapy on reproductive potential, that impact does seem to be different between transgender men and transgender women. Testes become much smaller in volume after long-term estrogen therapy, which may reduce sperm production and function. However, ovaries and egg follicles often regain full function after testosterone therapy is stopped, even after years of exposure to high levels of the hormone.

Dr. Jessica Spencer, a reproductive endocrinologist in Atlanta, Georgia, is an expert in fertility issues related to both gender transition and cancer chemotherapy. For the treatment of transgender people seeking fertility preservation or ready to start a family, she said, she and her colleagues "make inferences from other populations who have similar but not identical experiences."

Because people treated with chemotherapy may have reduced egg or sperm function as a result, those who think they might someday want children sometimes opt for fertility preservation—banking eggs or sperm—before treatment. For similar reasons, transgender people are more frequently being offered fertility preservation prior to starting hormone therapy.

Referral to a specialist to discuss fertility preservation prior to transition should be the standard of care, said Amato. But as transgender people are self-identifying earlier and earlier, questions about how to treat younger patients are arising.

When children identify as transgender while still relatively young, they are sometimes started on puberty-blocking hormones when they start showing early signs of sexual maturation. They may stay on these hormones in a prepubertal state until their mid-teens, or until they are ready to decide whether they want to transition. This prevents the development of unwanted secondary sexual characteristics associated with the gender assigned to the child at birth—breast development, hair growth, and voice changes that may be difficult to reverse, as well as tremendously distressing to the child.

The challenge, said Amato, is that eggs and sperm don't mature into viable, bankable sex cells until after puberty. "It's hard to know what to offer those patients," she said, "because in order to freeze eggs or sperm, they would have to go through puberty in their natal sex, which would often be discordant with their identity."

Beyond the biological challenges, not all adolescents may have the maturity to contemplate the importance of having a biological child, said Spencer, or a reasonable comfort level with the procedures needed to obtain eggs and sperm. Those procedures are particularly invasive for egg banking, which involves daily injections for two weeks, multiple transvaginal ultrasounds, and egg harvesting, an outpatient surgery.

Costs are an additional challenge—sperm banking costs about $400 annually, while it can cost between $8,000 and $12,000 to freeze eggs or embryos. Although private insurers often cover the physician consultation and diagnostic testing, they rarely cover egg or sperm banking without a diagnosis of infertility, said Spencer. And after all the expenditure and effort, there's no guarantee a healthy live birth will result.

There is strong support among reproductive endocrinologists for the rights of transgender people to have families of their own. Several studies have demonstrated good psychological health and secure attachment to parents by children of transgender parents. And while counseling the growing population of transgender adolescents about fertility preservation may not be straightforward, it may have an important impact on family dynamics.

"Some of the parents of the teens have a great sense of relief after the consultation," Spencer wrote in an email. "They can start to imagine their child building their own family one day, something that may have been quite stressful for them to think about before."

Follow Keren Landman on Twitter.

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the mass shooting on New Year's Eve in a packed Istanbul nightclub that left 39 dead, as Turkish authorities continued their hunt for the attacker Monday morning. The Associated Press reported that police have detained eight people, but the gunman is not thought to be among them.

The claim, released on the encrypted Telegram messaging app and circulated on Twitter, praised a "soldier of the caliphate" for carrying out the attack on a target date when "Christians celebrate their apostate holiday."

Describing Turkey as "the servant of the cross," the statement said the attack was carried out under the orders of leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and suggested it was a response to Ankara's military activities against IS. Turkey is a key member of the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition, and has forces in northern Syria and Iraq involved in operations against the jihadi group.

The claim of responsibility was unusual: While IS has been blamed for a number of mass-casualty attacks on civilian targets in Turkey in the past 18 months, it has not officially claimed any before. "The apostate Turkish government should know that the blood of Muslims shed with airplanes and artillery fire will, with God's permission, ignite a fire in their own land," the statement said.

Read more on VICE News.

It's 6:45 AM. It's Friday and the kids have just woken me up. They want to go to school. I've had two hours of dead man's sleep and I have a hangover of biblical proportions. My head and body are on the verge of exploding. My legs are cramping, I've got a cold sweat and in a few minutes I'll be face to face with other parents my age who are in a far better condition than the sad, tormented shape I've ended up in. I'm pissed off with The Ambassador. It's all his fault. He tricked me into this and I should never have said yes. There is no way in hell I'll survive the next two days.

I'm in the middle of Dining Impossible, the world's most exclusive dinner party. A three-day gourmet extravaganza at three of the world's best restaurants in three days. Copenhagen is the current destination and I'm part of it.

Read more over at Munchies.

Justin Trudeau's come-from-behind victory in 2015 heralded the onset of some pretty drastic changes.

Marijuana would be legal. A new voting system would be in place within five years. Canada's anti-terrorism legislation would get a renovation. Mandatory minimum sentences would be cut down. Government information would be open by default. Veterans would get a better deal. Infrastructure spending would boost the economy. Canada would win a seat on the UN Security Council. Pipelines would revive Alberta's oil economy.

None of that was supposed to have happened immediately. But, more than a year later, a healthy skepticism is now growing around whether Trudeau and his nascent government can really deliver on his more ambitious policy plans—and whether he can, as he promised repeatedly, change politics as we know it.

Read more on VICE News.

US News

Anti-Pipeline Activists Stage Minneapolis Stadium Protest
Two anti-Dakota Access Pipeline protesters interrupted the Minnesota Vikings-Chicago Bears game Sunday, climbing the rafters to unfurl a banner urging stadium sponsor US Bank to "divest" from the pipeline project. Karl Mayo, 32, and Sen Holiday, 26, dangled down using rappelling gear before being taken into custody and charged with trespassing. - CNN

Chicago Murder Rate Hits 20-Year High
New figures released by the Chicago Police Department shows there were 762 murders in the city during 2016, the highest number in 20 years. There were 3,550 shooting incidents in total, described by the department as an "unacceptable rise in violence." New, district-based police intelligence centers will be set up in the city later in January. – NBC News

Russian Diplomats Leave the US
The 35 Russian diplomats expelled by President Obama have now left the US along with their families, according to the Russian embassy. Obama ordered the expulsion and imposed sanctions over the hacking and election interference that the White House and US intelligence agencies believe was ordered by the Kremlin. – The Guardian

Possible Missing Plane Debris Found at Lake Eerie
Officials in Ohio said possible debris from the small plane that went missing shortly after leaving Cleveland Thursday has been found washed ashore on Lake Eerie. It has not yet been verified as coming from the plane. Superior Beverage Company CEO John T. Fleming was piloting the plane, and his wife, their sons, and two close friends were also on board. - AP

International News

ISIS Claims Responsibility for Istanbul Nightclub Shooting
ISIS has claimed it carried out the attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul in the early hours of Sunday that left 39 people dead. Turkish police are still searching for the gunman who burst into the club and shot those celebrating the New Year. ISIS described the man as a "heroic soldier." Another 69 people were hospitalized with injuries. According to Turkish media reports, 27 of those who died were foreign. – BBC News

Daughter of South Korean Presidential Advisor Arrested
The daughter of Choi Soon-sil, the South Korean president's former confidante accused of interfering in the country's political affairs, has been arrested in Denmark. Chung Yoo-ra, 20, was arrested on charges of staying in Denmark illegally. Special prosecutors in South Korea had sought Interpol's help in finding Chung after she did not return to the country to answer questions about the corruption investigation. – Al Jazeera

Migrants Attempt to Storm Spanish Border
A Spanish border guard lost an eye after more than 1000 migrants tried to clear a fence at the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the North African coast. Only two migrants made it over the fence, but both were injured and hospitalized in the process. Five Spanish border guards and 50 Moroccan guards were injured in all. – AP

Car Bomb in Baghdad Leaves 16 Dead
A car bomb detonated in the Sadr City district of Baghdad has killed 16 people and wounded another 40. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but ISIS has regularly targeted civilians in the Iraqi capital. Separately on Monday, ISIS militants killed 16 pro-government fighters in military attacks north of the capital. – Reuters

Everything Else

Hollywood Sign Changed to 'Hollyweed'
Los Angeles' hillside "Hollywood" sign was creatively vandalized to read "Hollyweed," an apparent nod to California's legalization of recreational marijuana. Police said the vandal could face a misdemeanor trespassing charge if caught. – ABC News

Dick Clark Denies Mariah Carey Sabotage Claim
Dick Clark Productions has angrily denied Mariah Carey's claim her live New Year's Rockin' Eve performance was sabotaged. The company said the accusation it had "set her up to fail" after she struggled to sing with a pre-recorded track was "defamatory, outrageous and frankly absurd." - Variety

Ariana Grande to Star in Final Fantasy Mobile Game
Ariana Grande will feature as a character in the mobile video game Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius. She described her avatar, who wears black bunny ears, as "the cutest thing I've ever seen in my entire life." - TIME

The XX Drop Track from New Album
British chillwave heroes the XX have released new track Say Something Loving from the forthcoming third album I See You. The band also tweeted a clip of themselves singing the new track at a karaoke bar in Tokyo. - Noisey

Researchers Discover Anti-Hunger Neurons
Harvard Medical School researchers have identified "anti-hunger" neurons in the brain that counter the neurons that urge you to eat. Activating the ARC glutamatergic neurons reduced the food intake of mice under study. - Motherboard

Nasty Women Exhibition Gives Proceeds to Planned Parenthood
January's "Nasty Women" exhibition in Brooklyn, which features artists' responses to Donald Trump, will donate all sales proceeds to Planned Parenthood. Co-director Roxanne Jackson said organizers wanted to channel "angst into something productive." – The Creators Project

Drug overdoses killed hundreds of people in British Columbia in 2016, and no group died more often than men.

Men accounted for more than 80 percent of OD deaths across the province, or 605 of the 755 recorded deaths between January and November of 2016. Nearly 60 percent of them were between the ages of 19 and 39.

The super-potent opioid fentanyl has been detected in 299 male OD cases so far, compared with 75 cases involving women.

Though the gender gap appears to be a striking one, it's far from a new trend. Over the last decade, the proportion of men dying of overdose has hovered around 75 percent—rising from 72.2 to 80.1 percent since 2011, according to coroner data.

Why do so many more men die of drug overdose than women? As anyone who has ventured onto a Reddit comment forum can probably guess, it's difficult to raise this question without eliciting a fair volume of rage and anti-feminist conspiracy. What you don't tend to hear are answers based on scientific research and first-hand experience. VICE reached out to a few experts to get a fuller picture of what's going on.

Read More: We Asked Experts How to Solve Canada's Opioid Crisis

One of the reasons for the disparity, say researchers in the field, is that men on average take more hard drugs than women. The most recent Canadian survey on alcohol, tobacco and drug use found that about one percent of women reported taking "hard" drugs (including coke, crack, ecstasy, meth, acid, or heroin) within the past year, compared with three percent of men.

According to a University of British Columbia nursing professor who studies youth, gender and drug use, the way men and women use drugs may also be a contributing factor.

"Some research has shown that women tend to use with others, and are less likely to be alone when they're injecting drugs or using other medications," UBC's Elizabeth Saewyc told VICE. When other people are around, there's a better chance that someone will be able to respond quickly and get them some help, she said.

With the rise of deadly synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil, which have increasingly been found in BC street drugs, the risk of dying while using alone has risen significantly. On top of using alone, opioid-dependent men may be less cautious, according to Saewyc: "It may be that they're taking larger doses without recognizing the potential risks there."

Frontline activist Sarah Blyth, who helped establish a cluster of volunteer-run overdose prevention tents in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, told VICE that theory is backed up by her experience on the ground. "Men are more likely to use alone," she said. "Using alone is the thing that's actually killing people."

Blyth added that men are also over-represented in Vancouver's homeless population. "It's not surprising to people in the Downtown Eastside," she said. "There are more men than women living here." The latest homeless count in Vancouver found that about 76 percent of the city's street homeless were men.

Although the percentages may match up, Saewyc warned against jumping to conclusions about street homelessness and overdose rates. "You have to be careful about definitions of street homelessness, and who gets counted where," she said. "If women are able to temporarily access couch surfing, or go home with a sexual partner, they may not be counted… I would be cautious, as we don't have an underlying denominator."

Though risk taking, drug use and homelessness are cross-cutting issues, Saewyc says more research is needed. "It's clearly a huge health issue, and one that we definitely need to get a better handle on," she said.

VICE reached out to the BC Coroner for comment, but did not receive a reply by press time.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Deep in the Moroccan mountains a large brick building sat in the basin of a valley. It was night, and a dull light crept out from the windowless holes in the walls. I was in a car headed down a dirt track toward the building with a man calling himself "Patron" – Spanish for boss. It had taken us five hours to get there, driving up through the mountains via cliff edge roads that dotted with gendarme checkpoints. Every time we were stopped the police would open the door and shake Patron's hand – big grins on their faces.

"I'm paying these guys off all the way from here to the coast," laughed Patron.

The journey into the valley made me feel sick. The tarmac roads had ended a good five miles back and the driver had pulled several pointless 180 turns without warning, "to throw off any tracking signals". But eventually we pulled up outside the brick building and got out. The driver beeped the horn and a man in overalls emerged and embraced Patron. They spoke for several minutes in French before leading me through the metal door at the front.

Inside the modest brick building there were bags of cannabis the size of hay bales. They were stacked up to the ceiling. "I think that's about two tons of weed," said Patron.

A large quantity of the weed belonged to him. It was his product. It wouldn't be sold on the street, though; these drugs would be wrapped up in small packages and delivered by the postman. Patron, as he says himself, is "not a gangster". He's a large-scale deep web drug dealer. He sells opium and premium quality hash on the internet, and claims to be making "around £100,000 a month" in Bitcoin in the process. His drugs are distributed all over the world after he pushes them into a postbox. I'd met a deep web drugs boss who explained the business once before, but with Patron I'd see it firsthand.

The deep web drug markets began with the notorious "Silk Road", headed by "Dread Pirate Roberts" (DPR). The FBI shut down Silk Road in 2013 when they arrested DPR, identified as 32-year-old Ross Ulbricht. The former deep web kingpin was handed a brutal prison term: two life sentences without parole, along with 20 years and 15 years for two other charges. The FBI's aim was to put an end to the brazen rise of online drug distribution, but what they actually did was create a hydra. When Silk Road was around there was only one real competitor: Black Market Reloaded. Now there are over 15 deep web drug markets, many of them with much more robust security than Silk Road. It could be argued that the deep web drug scene has never had so many options.

For Patron, who sells his product on the new sites like Hansa Market and AlphaBay, the deep web is a place where he believes he can "ethically sell drugs". Like most in this community, he doesn't consider himself a criminal. "Look, there are criminals and there are criminals," he said as we walked through the brick building to a back room. "If you drink and drive you're a criminal; if you speed you're a criminal; if you've got cancer and decide to source your own cannabis to alleviate the pain, you're a criminal. I think, rather than rely on the government to decide what's good and bad for you, you should make your own mind up."

Patron paused to light a cigarette – something he'd do every few minutes. If he wasn't chain smoking he was sucking on a vape. "With the deep web we help people obtain what they want in a safe and secure manner. [They're not] forced to go to a heroin dealer in some shady place on the street; we're letting them sit on their sofa and get their drugs delivered."

While Patron doesn't at first glance strike you as the kind of guy who wants to be known as "the boss", he has an edge to him. Seeing him deal with his business partners in the mountains was an education. One minute he was the most charismatic person in the room, the next he was aloof and serious – cold, even. He switched rapidly. The more we talked, though, the more he seemed – deep down – to be a bit of a geek. A tough geek, mind you.

He was genuinely fascinated with OPSEC, computers, technology and hardware. Earlier in the day, for example, as we walked along the docks in Morocco, Patron pointed out all the coastguard speedboats in the water. He knew the names, the model numbers, which engines they used, how fast they could go and what kind of security personnel would be manning them. Patron wasn't a drug dealer who'd fallen into the deep web world, but a deep web guy who'd fallen into the drugs world. This is perhaps what's currently keeping him one step ahead of the authorities.

Patron reached into a sack in the backroom and dumped several kilos of pressed hash and three bags of "shake" – cannabis that's been ground down into a fine dust – onto a table. "There we go," he said. "That's my next shipment. That's coming over with the team soon" – his team being a group he calls "Cartel Norte Africa" (CNA) – or North African Cartel in English. The CNA is a small team of Spaniards and Berbers (indigenous North Africans) headed by Patron. They work in both Morocco and Spain. With the help of CNA, Patron can get his product smuggled from North Africa to Europe, where it's then distributed all over the world from the orders the team receives via the deep web.

"Right now I'm doing quarter ton shipments – 250kg each run. Depends on how much the clients want, but we're doing about two runs every month." Patron explained that while he makes decent money from this, he's by no means a rich man. "I live well, but I have to pay everyone in the team. I have to pay for my own personal security team, the farmers, smugglers – everyone. I want everyone to get their fair cut. But that's why I work with these guys here: to get the premium product for a fair price. These farms have been in operation for generations."

Patron opened a bag of shake. The smell filled the whole room. "Once the plants are grown, they're cut, dried and the shake is prepared and the hash is made from that. We then transport using a number of vehicles."

Once his blocks of hash have been pressed at the building in the valley, Patron then helps load them onto flat bed trucks. They're transported down to a coastal region of Morocco where they're placed onto rigid inflatable boats. "The boats have around five 300 horsepower motors on them," he explained. "They're very fast boats. It's just a fucking blur when you're on them. It's scary. We then head toward Spain, offloading everything at the coast when it arrives."

From here the drugs are taken to safe houses. This was our next destination. The following day we left Morocco, after a freezing cold night's sleep in a half constructed building with no heating – "the only place around", according to Patron.

Every time we arrived at a new location Patron would methodically swap the SIM cards in both of his phones before placing them into special bags that shut off all signal. He'd also stash one of his two passports – the two that I saw him with, at least – in whichever car came to pick us up. In Spain, over the space of a three-hour journey from the coast to the safe house, we changed car twice – the second time at the side of a road with no streetlights or barriers. Patron was paranoid, and rightly so. If caught he could face up to 15 years in prison.

"Okay," said Patron, cautiously, puffing on a cigarette as he checked his mirror. "We're coming up to the safe house now." We sped down a dark track through the middle of nowhere, eventually pulling into a small courtyard with a few houses. Two young men approached and hugged Patron. The three of them spoke Spanish among themselves. After a few minutes, Patron and I headed into the safe house as the two men peeled off into the courtyard somewhere.

The inside of the safe house looked like a cyberpunk hideout. There were several laptops, messy wiring, a flat screen TV and USB card readers all over the place. There was a settee and a table and some leftovers. On the wall there was a long range hunting rifle with a mounted scope. I asked Patron if he liked to hunt.

"Yeah, I like to hunt," he replied. A pause. "I tell you what, though: if you shot someone with that it'd fucking hurt."

Patron vanished into another room before retuning with a laptop and another sack. He emptied the sack onto the table: a kilo of "Amnez" hash and a large puck-shaped brick of opium.

Patron plugged a USB stick into the laptop. It booted up. "I use Tails, you see." He pointed at the USB stick. Tails is an operating system that's used for maintaining privacy online. It blocks all non-anonymous connections and forces all its outgoing connections through Tor, a web browser designed to keep the user anonymous. Basically, anyone selling drugs on the internet without Tails is much more likely to get caught.

Once logged into the deep web markets, Patron checked his orders. There were quite a few. Business was going well. "Here we go," he said. "This woman wants hash. I'll show you how we do it." He clicked around a few times and then lit up another cigarette. Watching Patron at work in the safe house, on his computer doing the orders, was like watching a good mechanic fix a car – he was absolutely in his element and knew by instinct how to work.

Suddenly there was a mechanical grinding sound. It was a printer booting up in the corner. A fake invoice for a gym membership came out. Without saying a word, Patron pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, grabbed a knife from his coat pocket and headed to a desk in the corner of the room. He took the invoice and a block of hash with him. There was a portable fan heater at his feet. He switched it on and stuck the knife in between the metal grill. He placed the block of hash on a chopping board and lit up another cigarette, having left his last one unfinished in an ashtray. "Look," he said, pausing to inhale. "Okay, yeah. I am doing something that the government classes as illegal, but on a moral standpoint I think it's perfectly reasonable."

Patron went off on a tangent while he waited for the knife to heat up. He told me that his dream, ultimately, was to someday open up a health clinic of sorts – a place where experimental drug treatments with CBD (the non psychoactive chemical in cannabis) can be done legally.

Then the knife was hot. Patron stubbed out his half smoked cigarette and got to work, chopping off about a gram of hash from the block. He then wrapped it in cling film, glued it to the back of the invoice, folded it all up and popped it into an envelope. The drugs were hidden. "There you go," he laughed. "You get that in the mail and open it up and it's just a gym invoice."

Patron is perhaps as much a product of the internet as he is the drugs war. Sat in the safe house, surrounded by laptops, cigarettes and drugs, he seemed to be more at home than in the mountains where he was doing the more dangerous work. For him, the money and the lifestyle aren't worth it if he doesn't have the community and the camaraderie of the deep web. As he said himself: "I like what DPR believed in. He created a new culture."

Before I finally said goodbye to Patron, I asked him what it is he loves so much about the deep web drug markets he operates on.

"Generally, on the deep web, everyone is trying to get along," he said. "They solve their disputes through admins on the markets and it's all very civilised and very nice. Then there's the bulk [drug] transport business – the stuff that happens outside of the internet. Think about it: that's been going on since the actual Silk Road [ancient trade route through Asia], and it's ironic, as this all started with violence – with the Opium Wars and what have you – and now, without the deep web and the Silk Road [marketplace], it all ends with violence."

@Jake_Hanrahan

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

For obvious reasons, last year saw a surge of discussion around how to engage with people who hold prejudiced or racist views – and if those people should even be engaged with at all.

This debate tends to fall into two broad themes. The first is to say, essentially, fuck you: your prejudice is your problem – why should people of colour or anyone from the LGBTQ community have to go out of their way to fix what is largely a straight, white problem?

The second approach emphasises the need for empathy – for talking people around – no matter how repugnant their views. At the end of 2016 Barack Obama made it clear that this is the strategy he prefers. "There have been very few instances where I've said, 'Well, that was racist, you are racist [...] I don't think that trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln put it, is somehow compromise."

While this discussion might have generated plenty of pinned tweets and rage posts, there appeared to be very little data on what actually works. However, in April of last year, a study was published that seemed to offer an answer. "Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing" by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla was hailed as the first large-scale experiment to achieve significant results in creating long-term change in prejudice.

To put it in very simple terms, this experiment reversed how door-to-door canvassing is usually done. Most of the time, the canvasser floods the participant with information and statistics as quickly as possible. In this experiment, Broockman and Kalla used techniques developed with the LA LGBT Center, and let the voter do most of the talking.

Using the issue of transgender rights legislation, Broockman and Kalla got people to open up about their own experiences of discrimination. Once they had achieved a non-judgmental common space, even voters who had been initially hostile or transphobic were able to gain empathy, and said they would vote for transgender rights.

Crucially, this opinion change held even after three months, and after participants had been subsequently bombarded with anti-trans attack ads. This was a unique set of results, hailed as "monumentally important" by Betsy Levy Paluck, a leading professor in the field. The study was immediately seized upon as giving weight to the strategy of not "calling people out", but establishing empathy and common ground.

I caught up with David Broockman to talk through the implications of the study on the climate we find ourselves in at the start of 2017, with xenophobia whipped up by the Leave EU campaign still pervasive, and the hatred stoked by Donald Trump's politicking set to become further entrenched after he's inaugurated later this month.

"The vast majority of experiments on prejudice take place in labs," said Broockman. "Ours was unique as we were out in the real world, and the outcome stayed relevant months later. Our method is based on "active processing" – when you get the voter talking, you get them thinking. Research indicates that when people engage more effortfully, they are more receptive and more likely to remember whatever they decide. It's a simple matter of time and effort."

An anti-Donald Trump protest (Photo: Flickr user Mal3k)

The idea that people engage more openly with a subject when they are forced to stop and think about it in more depth makes sense, of course. But what's more interesting is how Broockman and Kalla's method harnessed the problematic dynamics of confirmation bias (people interpreting new evidence to confirm the beliefs they already hold) and the "Backfire Effect" (when people confronted with conflicting facts actually "dig in" further to their pre-existing prejudices).

"We use Active Perspective Taking – getting people to talk about their own real, lived experiences," said Broockman. "We don't bombard them; it's better they talk about their lives. If they say something discriminatory, you ask, 'Well, has anyone ever treated you like that?' Then they realise: 'Wait, I've maybe never even met a transgender person, but now I see we have something in common…' When people tell their own stories they empathise with the experience."

This all sounds fantastic, and it's wonderful that it seems to work, but a) how easy is it to engage a racist, homophobe or transphobe in a sensible 20-minute conversation? And b) how likely is it that they're going to delve into their own experiences? Is this all just a bit too much like wishful thinking? Perhaps surprisingly, Broockman seems to take this onboard more than some of the hyperventilating press that surrounded his work.

"I don't think the takeaway from this is that it's never productive to call people racist or transphobic – we didn't try that [so] we don't know," he said. "It's complicated. But the idea that it might make sense to take a person who is racist or transphobic and make them believe that they have something to lose if they express that... experiments suggest that it might be useful. Crucially, they are less likely to pass those attitudes on to their children."

Broockman also recognises one of the main differences between this study and arguments happening out in the world – most of the conversations around these issues now take place online.

"Face-to-face does have a special ability to get people to think and open up. I'm sure people do some of that on a Reddit forum, but maybe there are things we can develop to get people to open up more online – I'd like to do a study on that..." said Broockman. "But where I remain optimistic is what I saw out canvassing: that many of us who exist in this world of arguing on Twitter come to believe that everyone is walking around with this impulse to dig in – and that is a tendency. But more often than not, what we found was that when you knock on someone's door and listen to them and talk about both views, people will talk, and will express uncertainty – most average people will."

So is there a simple formula in all this? Unfortunately not. Shouting racist at a racist is never the best response, but sometimes it's the only response available – and it's certainly better than no response at all. There's no one answer to tackling prejudice. These are hard, complicated battles. They are battles that take time, energy and multiple strategies. And they are battles we are all going to have fight over the coming years.

@jsrafaelism

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Ireland has become the latest European nation to approve a bill allowing for the use of medicinal cannabis. The bill, which was passed on the 1st of December after the government said it would not oppose it, is yet to become law (its ratification will be debated in the early months of the new year), but campaigners are confident it will pass and that much-needed cannabis products will be available through the health system for those in need.

A variety of factors contributed to the passing of the bill, but the main driving force was that of grassroots action. Various patients, activists, politicians and parents of those in need worked together on a campaign that will change the lives of so many people on the island.

I caught up with Graham de Barra from Help Not Harm (HNH) – a campaign to update Ireland's current drug laws, reduce harm and promote health policies – to find out how this bill came to pass.

"It really began seven years ago; we had a protest in Cork in 2010 with a number of patients, including one man, John McCarthy, who had motor neurone disease. He would have been well known in Cork for his writing and campaigning, and he was sitting there in a wheelchair giving his talk, and what really struck me was when he stood up – this guy was essentially paralysed from the neck down – and he stood up momentarily and walked over to the microphone and finished the last minute or two of his speech by saying that he was able to stand up because he was lucky enough to have been gifted a weed brownie that morning. For me, that's when I realised it is an essential medicine. John passed away about a year after giving that speech."

That speech took place during the early stages of the movement, back when it didn't quite have the momentum it needed and later found. The death in 2013 of another vocal campaigner, Aodhrua Fitzgerald, from a rare form of cancer was another blow to the community and its campaign.

In fact, it wasn't until about a year ago that Graham and Help Not Harm really began to focus on medical cannabis. It was also around this time that they got to know a woman called Vera Twomey, whose daughter Ava suffers from a severe drug-resistant form of epilepsy called Dravet's syndrome. This is an extremely debilitating illness which can see Ava have multiple seizures every day, many of which can leave her hospitalised. Particularly bad seizures put Ava's life at risk.

I called Vera at her home in Cork, which she shares with her husband and three children, and she explained Ava's condition. "Doctors didn't have much hope for Ava at all," she said. "They told us she'd never walk or talk and that we'd have to accept all of these terrible things for her future."

Vera ran her own campaign alongside HNH and other affected families, such as that of Erica Cawley, who has the same condition as Ava. This involved setting up a Facebook page, a petition and making numerous appearances in Irish media. She told me that since Ava began using Charlotte's Web – a product containing CBD, a non-psychotropic compound in cannabis used for medicinal purposes, and legal in Europe and Ireland – her seizures have decreased dramatically. Over the last three months she has had an average of six seizures per month. According to Vera, before she started using the cannabis-based medication "she could have that many in two hours... her life has changed utterly and completely".

WATCH: 'High Society – Weed in the UK'

The medicinal cannabis bill was drafted by HNH and the political party People Before Profit (PBP), and in July PBP TDs (the Irish equivalent of MPs) Brid Smith and Gino Kenny submitted it to the Dail (Irish Parliament). In September, HNH organised a global medical cannabis summit, attended both by officials – such as those from the Department of Health – and about 40 patients, many of whom spoke out about the benefits the bill would have on their lives and the lives of their families.

One such man is Mark Gaynor, whose son Ronan was diagnosed with DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma) – an extremely rare, aggressive, inoperable and ultimately terminal brain tumour that predominately affects younger children – in April of 2015. The family was told that life expectancy upon diagnosis and treatment with radiation is approximately six to nine months. For seven months Ronan has been taking Endoca CBD hemp oil daily, and Mark has done extensive research and is convinced that medical cannabis, coupled with other treatments, is the best chance his son has for a better quality of life.

He explained to me how the ratification of this bill will help Ronan and his family: "Most importantly, Ronan would be guaranteed a safe, lab-tested and reliable supply of medicinal cannabis, enabling us to better manage his neuropathic pain. It would also mean that he wouldn't need or rely on other expensive prescription medicines he has been prescribed, such as fentanyl, buccolam and oramorph [an opioid]." He added that "We would like the Irish government to help, not just by passing a bill which says we can no longer be prosecuted for a criminal act by sourcing and administering cannabis-based medicines to our children to alleviate their suffering, but by placing medicinal cannabis on the prescribed medicines list and helping to also alleviate the financial pressures borne so far by us, our family, our friends and our community."

In early November, Ava suffered a massive fit and had to be hospitalised. At her wit's end, Vera decided that she would walk the near 200 miles from her Cork home to Dublin to confront minister for health Simon Harris, who despite previous calls and meetings with her had still not delivered on promises to help. Under the glare of the media, and with Vera 21 miles into the walk, Harris called her and told her to call it off – that he was going to do something.

"We met him the following week," said Vera. "He said he was going to try and get an exemption for our daughter, and we're still working on that, but they are trying. The legislation was due to be brought to the Dail in January, but due to the efforts of a number of politicians it was brought forward to December 1st."

On the day of the bill Vera and Graham were giving a talk about medicinal cannabis to the European parliament when Vera got a text message from Simon Harris' assistant, telling her that the government would not be opposing the bill. It came as a shock to the pair.

This bill is very much the beginning – there is still work to do – but the foundations have been laid, and some form of legal medicinal cannabis will become a reality. Importantly, though, the people behind the bill – and the beneficiaries of it – do not want to see a restrictive version applied. All patients are different, so what is needed is a diverse amount of products on offer.

Ireland has a chance to lead the way in this pocket of Europe, setting examples for other countries like the UK to follow. So here's hoping the government won't water down this legislation and undermine the hard work done by all those trying to bring much needed relief to those in need.

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Normally I open here with two paragraphs that are barely-if-at-all related to the ensuing list, and I am flitting here and flitting there – you know, making jokes with it, doing an entire paragraph-long sentence that my editor just deletes entirely; I'm feeling good, I'm feeling foolish, I'm having fun. But also I am back at work today – just like you, unless you're one of those doomed souls who had to work in the dead days between Christmas and New Year, or worse on Christmas and on New Year, and if you are one of those people I applaud your bravery in the face of such appalling torture – but yes, normally, all the stuff I do at the top here: that is cancelled. That is cancelled forever, because I am back at work today and I want to die.

And worse than the feeling of death-wanting is this: the unendurable same seven conversations you have to keep having, again and again and again, with all the people you work with – who, similarly, want to die right now, bloated and sickly on the fumes of the last few Quality St. and nice Belgian biscuits; the same seven conversations that you have to have, again and again and again, again and again, until you're allowed – fucking finally, fucking hell – to go home again.

So here's a fun list!

"AH, OH GOD. OH, GOD. GOD. I HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO MY JOB."

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: It is always the colleague who is sat opposite you, because they can lean just slightly around the raised plinth of their laptop stand and eyeball you with clear, piercing contact, and they have said it already, quietly but perceptibly, to themselves, and now they repeat it, although this time focused on you: "God," they say, then the words "ha ha." Then: "I have forgotten how to do my job."

CONSIDERATIONS: Have they forgotten how to do their job, though? Does anyone ever really forget how to do their job? If it's a particularly skilled job, I would argue: no, you cannot forget how to do it. You have put too many hours into study and work and finesse to forget how to do it just because you spent a day watching six (six!) Pixar movies in a row. And if it is not a very skilled job – which, come on, let's not be ludicrous here: a very tired toddler could feasibly do what you do – there's even less chance you can forget how to do it. Your job is literally logging into three separate backend systems, checking your email, then doing a big spreadsheet for eight hours with a Meal Deal in between. You can't forget how to do that.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: "Thank you for telling me this."

"OOH: E-MAILS"

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: This conversation happens anywhere someone half or one entire notch above you on the career ladder can talk to you, so it could be the kitchen or it could be an anonymous grey corridor or it could be – harrowingly, and did actually happen to me once – side-by-side at a urinal. "Ooh," they say, a sound you never want to hear when you've got your cock out, "emails."

CONSIDERATIONS: For some reason there is an unspoken rule in the office environment that whoever got the most emails in the eight-day period when they were ignoring their emails is by extension the most important, even though – what you can't see, because they have their screen tilted away from them – even though at least 50 percent of those emails are from ASOS telling them about a since-expired sale. Little heads bob over glowing screens and you hear the numbers yelled out across the floor to no one. "Two hundred," your boss says. "And forty-one!"

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: Two ways into this one: take the number of emails they have and add exactly one to it (people who think the number of emails they receive in any way matters just get so furious to be very literally one-upped) or say something nonchalant like, "Oh, I didn't check. I just deleted them all before I could count them." And then, if you really want to get inside their head, casually quote a number ten higher than the one they just cited. "But it was probably something like 250, or something." But another good answer is, "Thank you for telling me this."

HOW WAS YOUR CHRISTMAS?

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: Everywhere. Little low murmurs of it curl at you on the bus while everyone warms up for it in the office. It's just a stream-like question pouring out of everyone's little mouth. "How," they ask, eyes grey and filmed over, desperately trying to remember the one same password they use for fucking everything. "How was your Christmas?" And you lean close to them and whisper: " Fine, thanks."

CONSIDERATIONS: There is nothing to consider here. Someone asks you how your Christmas was and you say, "Fine, thanks." Then you ask how theirs was and they say, "Yeah, good." In olden days they had society dances, particular waltzes. In Japan they have complex little ceremonies with the tea. Here, we have our tradition, our warm little grooves that we have to slot into every year: the call and response of How Was Your Christmas, Fine Thanks.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: Breath out the word "fine" and then suck in the word "thanks", a holy chant that edges you ever closer to nirvana.

WHAT DID YOU DO FOR NEW YEAR?

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: It happens wherever people's focus on their actual work dies, so I'd say about 9.01AM and directly in front of their computers.

CONSIDERATIONS: There is Work You, and there is Real You, and so it was ever thus. Work You, you think, is quite buttoned down, conservative: messy, yes, undoubtedly, and likely to turn up with a hangover at least once a week, but you've been there a year now and they sort of trust you – maybe bumped your hourly wage a little to reflect that – and you actually took that firm email from HR quite seriously, and you comb your hair and tuck your shirt in sometimes, and, hauntingly, in quiet moments, you find yourself having tried, having actively wanted to do better at your job, a fleeting feeling you buried deep down inside yourself, hid by getting two pints at lunch and coasting your way through the ensuing afternoon. And then there is Real You, which spent New Year's Eve in a sort of ketamine haze, found yourself at a weird house party in the bright stark light of the day come the 1st of January 1st. It was 11AM and you were still going, down to the real muck, the real swill of the booze, drinking flat warm Diet Coke mixed with amaretto, and the few people still awake and moving their limbs chopped out one final line and went, "Shall we call some more in?" And, long story short, you didn't get home until 9PM that night, and didn't get to sleep until 1AM, and you spent all of yesterday crying into a Domino's that was growing slowly greasier in the warm heat of your house, the smell pervading everywhere, the smell of it on everything, crust dip all down your pyjamas and on your bedding. Which one are you going to present to them, when they ask? Work You or Real You? How much of yourself dare you reveal?

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: "Yeah, good."

THE PERSON WHO ASKS YOU WHETHER YOU HAVE "ANY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS, THEN?" AS A NOT-EVEN-TRANSPARENT EXCUSE TO TELL YOU ABOUT THEIR OWN

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: It always happens when you're off to do something that contravenes a generic New Year's Resolution, so while you're putting your coat on to go for a lovely cigarette, or while you're making coffee, or while you're eating a big bread-heavy lunch, or crying in the toilets. "Any New Year's Resolutions, then?" they ask, and you say no – well, you say either "no" or some bullshit response like, "I don't like to set short-term goals, I just like to be constantly evolving, you know?" which is just a wanker way of saying "no" – and they go, "Ah," and then, "I do," and then you have to listen to them. They got you.

CONSIDERATIONS: Well, I mean, we all like to be cynical about the process of self-improvement, don't we, especially when other people's very real efforts to get on shine a light on and through our own perceived flaws, so like if we are feeling bad about our weight or caffeine intake or the amount of alcohol we drink and someone else is making a concerted effort to tackle exactly that in themselves, then I think it's a very human reaction to just very baselessly hate them for it and call them a twat, either in your head or to their face. I think that's what separates us from the animals. So there's that.

But then also there's a whole thing about if people are doing something to make themselves happier then that's nice too, so it's tricky. Basically: we all just want to be better people by the same old metric we use to judge whether something is good, and that metric is always the same, it's just we're the ones who shift around it. I'm just saying don't tell me about your diet please, lads, I put on seven pounds over Christmas and I'm pretty sure it's all stollen.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: I find if you want to distract someone from talking about the £160 running trainers they just bought because "they're trying to get out and run on their lunch hour more" then just hit them with any one of the conversational dead-ends above and below or, if you're feeling fruity, slam them with the old, "Thank you for telling me this."

SOMEONE HAS BOUGHT A GROSS LUNCH IN BECAUSE THEY WANT TO STOP SPENDING MONEY AT PRET

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: In the kitchen, always, unless there is some sort of shared eating area, where a colleague will rock up next to you with a glowing Tupperware of microwaved fish and unseasoned brown rice and, when you look at it, go: "Last night's dinner. I'm tired of giving Pret my money. £6 for a sandwich? No thank you!"

CONSIDERATIONS: This person is always, always saving in a very doomed way for a flat deposit, and for some reason the lunches are the first bit to go on the new hell regime, as if eating lunch every day is some sort of wanton luxury and not a deeply necessary refuelling, and so they try it, for a week or two, always plain rice – perhaps they'll put a small bottle of sauce on their desk to "jazz it up a bit", but they rarely ever use it – and a simple protein is in there, too, and a really burnt-looking sweet potato, and they eat it cheerfully at first; then, after a few days, with a sort of deep in-the-bones resignation; then, by the end, fury – they are just mad at their little Tupperware of rice – and go out on a Tuesday to a nearby burger bar and blow, like, £26 on one big burger w/ shake, fries and cheesecake, and they just feel awful afterwards, and that dream of the flat is gone, because is it really worth living anywhere if you can't even eat a fresh sandwich at work now, and then, the next day, so predictably, they slink back from their lunch break with that telltale white bag: apple cider vinegar crisps, ham and greve baguette, latte and a love bar. Fucked it.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: You don't say anything. Just tip an entire bag of vegetable crisps into your mouth in one. Wordlessly chew £1.05 into a mush. Then, somehow, through the mess, choke out the words, "Thank you for telling me this."

SOME LAD WHO IS STRUGGLING WITH DRY JANUARY ON, LIKE, DAY THREE, WHICH IS ASTONISHING REALLY WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: At the water cooler. "Gor, just this for me now," he's saying, holding his forehead, filling a pint glass up. Turns to you. "Heavy Christmas. Even heavier New Year." Did you? "Err, think so: I forgot what I was drinking after the tenth pint!" Okay. "… of vodka! Only joking. No, doing that 'Dry January' – have you heard of it?" Yes, you say; you have heard of the most basic concept of seasonal sobriety. "Yeah, it's this new thing. Go all through January without drinking at all." He takes a half-step closer to you now, suddenly conspiratorial. "Although, to be honest, mate, I'm already struggling." It's 11AM and I'm still hungover from three days ago. How is this man itching for a pint already? How is he not on a drip, in a hospital, dead?

CONSIDERATIONS: If you do Dry January and you mention you are doing Dry January anywhere before the 14th of January, go to the doctor and tell him you have a drinking problem, because you should off the bat be able to go two weeks without a pint without complaining about it.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: I don't know. "Thank you for telling me this"? Something like that??

SOMEONE WHO "WENT FOR A JOG YESTERDAY. DIDN'T LIKE IT MUCH!"

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: Literally anywhere. The jogging people do not care for your social norms and boundaries. Plus, they can run up to you. One moment you're alone in a rec room, quietly thinking about setting off a fire alarm to see if you all get sent home early, and boom: here's a jogger, in full Lycra somehow, stretching out their hamstrings. "Second jog of the year," they say, unbidden. "Went out for one yesterday – 5k, not ran since December 23rd." Did they like it? Wait for it— wait for it. Wait for it. "Didn't like it much!"

CONSIDERATIONS: On one hand, it's good that they didn't like it much. On the other hand: I do think that, secretly, they did actually like it. So it's tricky, isn't it? We all want the joggers to be unhappy. But we also want them to be quiet about it.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: "Thank you for telling me this."

"DON'T WANT TO BE BACK"

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: It's not even a conversation; it's just a whine that emerges, a hum that sits high on the air for just a moment or two too long, a mass regression. We are all toddlers today. We are all toddlers, impatient and crabby. We are all stamping our little toddler feet, balled up little toddler fists by our sides. We are all toddlers who are at work in front of our computers, almost in tears with it, and going: "Don't want to be back."

CONSIDERATIONS: Nobody wants to be back, right? So saying "don't want to be back" is necessarily useless. However: has anyone considered how little I, the most persecuted man in history, want to be back? I don't want to be back. I want to be on a sofa, in my new dressing gown, eating exquisite foreign biscuits off a small clean plate. I want to watch family-friendly films in the middle of the day and slowly peel a satsuma. I don't want it to end. I don't want it to be over. Shower me with gifts and food again. Put on the fairy lights and bring me gammon and attention. Without them life is hell.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: "Don't want to be back either."

"YOU KNOW, YOU'VE HAMSTRUNG ME HERE. YOU'VE GONE OVER EVERY POSSIBLE CONVERSATION I CAN HAVE WITH YOU TODAY. THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING I CAN SAY TO YOU NOW. YOU'VE ALREADY TAKEN THE PISS. I DON'T KNOW WHY I TALK TO YOU, JOEL. WHAT AM I MEANT TO SAY TO YOU NOW? I CAN'T EVEN ASK HOW YOUR CHRISTMAS WAS. IT– IT'S JUST SMALLTALK, MATE. JUST A LITTLE SOCIAL LUBRICATION TO OIL THE WHEELS OF THE DAY. IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN'T BE A COMPLETE FUCKING TWAT OVER? FUCKING HELL. FUCKING HELL."

WHERE THIS CONVERSATION HAPPENS: Exclusively in front of and towards me.

CONSIDERATIONS: I had not considered this. I have, as our lord and saviour DJ Khaled might say, played myself.

WHAT YOU SAY IN RESPONSE: The "you" in this case being… me? God, I don't know any more. Ah, mate: by turning my misery alchemy-like into content, I have condemned myself to an entire day and maybe a bit of the week to people not talking to me. Fucking hell. This is what 2017 is going to be like, isn't it? Long year ahead. Long, long year.

@joelgolby

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It can be unsettling to realize that only five percent of the universe is made of the kind of matter we know and understand—everything from the planets and stars, to trees and animals and your dining room table.

Roughly one-quarter is dark matter. This is thought to knit the galaxies together, and has been called the "scaffolding" of the universe, but we've never detected it directly. Scientists believe they can see dark matter's traces in the way that galaxies rotate, but they still have no idea what it is. (Most of the universe, about 70 percent, is dark energy, a mysterious force that permeates space and time. It's even less well-understood than dark matter.)

Confirming dark matter's existence would change humankind's perspective on the universe. 2016 was a year of dark matter disappointments, as big searches came up empty. Most are looking for WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles, the leading contender for a dark matter particle.

Image via Ben Ruby

2017 might just be the year we finally catch one. And if we don't, well, it may be that our best theories about dark matter are wrong—that we're looking in the wrong places, with the wrong instruments. Maybe dark matter, whatever it is, will turn out to be even weirder and more surprising than anyone has so far predicted. Maybe it's not a WIMP, but some other bizarre kind of particle.

Then there's the outside possibility that dark matter doesn't exist, that it's an illusion. If that's the case, we'll have to consider whether we've been fundamentally misreading the universe's clues.

Continue reading on Motherboard.