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Why It Hurts so Much When a Friendship Ends

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It's expected that a romantic breakup will wreck you emotionally. Breakup albums are abundant to the point of cliché, and there's approximately a billion books and movies on the subject.

Little art has been made on the subject of losing friends, though. Which is surprising, given how frequently it happens. According to researchers in the Netherlands who studied the relationships of 604 people, over half of friendships expire after seven years.

And losing a friend sucks. Whether it's the result of a blowout fight, moving to a different area, or gradually falling out of touch, there are few among us who haven't had to deal with the heartache and anxiety that comes when a platonic relationship ends.

For a romantic breakup, a long period of emotional disarray is anticipated, but platonic breakups are often dismissed and quickly swept under the rug.

I talked to Irene Levine, psychologist and author of Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend about why it sucks so bad to lose a friend, and what we can do to get over it.

VICE: Why don't people talk about friendships ending that often?
Irene Levine:
Pop culture mythologizes friendships, suggesting they should last forever. So women, especially, are often judged by their ability to make and keep friends and are embarrassed that others will see the end of a friendship as a personal failure. Men often stereotype and dismiss friendship breakups among women as catfighting. Breakups are trivialized because it's hard for outsiders to understand the depth of feelings involved in a close friendship.

Why are friendships important for people to have? What do we get out of these relationships?
Our friendships are nothing short of life affirming. They make us feel valued, understood and connected to something larger than ourselves. Our friends introduce us to new experiences and ways of being. Good friends are there to cheer our successes and console us when things go badly.

Unlike [familial relationships], these ties are totally volitional. These are people we choose to be with because the relationship is a mutually satisfying one.

What is different about the pain of losing a friendship versus losing a lover?
Outsiders to the friendship may not appreciate the significance of the loss or offer up much sympathy. When someone breaks up with a lover or divorces, everyone rallies around her with support. The same isn't true with friendship endings.

Why do you think that the older you get, the less friends you tend to have?
It's not age, per se, that makes it more difficult to find and have friends. It's more likely to be related to circumstances. For example, when we are in high school and college, we are thrown together with people at the same stage of life, in the same physical location, with similar interests, who are eager to befriend their peers.

After that, people branch out in different directions as they further their education or pursue careers and romantic relationships. This also may entail geographical moves that put the kibosh on (or dramatically alter) past friendships. When people are juggling responsibilities and paving a path for the future, it's less convenient and more difficult to carve out time for friends.

With age comes more responsibilities and many people view friendships as self-indulgent.

How do you think a relationship becomes toxic?
A friendship is toxic when it is one-sided, unsupportive, and undermining. It isn't necessarily the fault of one or both individuals but a toxic friendship is no longer reciprocal. It feels draining and unrewarding.

How do you know when it's appropriate to step back from a friendship?
The decision whether to—and how to—step back from a friendship should be considered carefully beforehand. Ending a friendship opens the door for collateral damage. Your friend may know secrets you don't want spilled. You may have friends in common who will be uncomfortable with the breakup. You may be co-workers and the demise of the friendship can potentially strain your working relationship. Your ex-friend may become angry and resentful.

If you were to bear the brunt of a platonic breakup, should you take this personally?
If you said or did something wrong, or didn't say or do something you should have, of course, not only should you take it personally, but you should apologize to the other person and learn from the experience.

In most circumstances, however, breakups are "no fault." Neither person has enough interest and motivation to sustain the friendship. Bear in mind that it may have more to do with the other person and his or her life than it has to do with you.

What are good coping mechanisms for going through a platonic breakup?
Remember that it takes time to get over any loss. Also, remember you're likely to romanticize the positive aspects of the friendship and gloss over the reasons the relationship ended. Try to fill your reclaimed hours catching up with other people and activities you've missed. Don't succumb to the myth that all friendships are forever. Most friendships end, even very good ones end over time. The ending of the friendship doesn't invalidate prior positive experiences. Use your learning to be a better friend and make better choices in the future.


This Guy Makes Money Selling Fake Holidays to Corporations

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"Yesterday was National Kiss a Ginger Day. For some reason, nobody told me about it until today."

That's Conan O'Brien, in a monologue he delivered on January 13, 2015. And he's right. January 12 is Kiss a Ginger Day, if only by name. There are thousands of these dumb "National Days," and many can slip by you if you're not looking out for them. Several crowd the calendar each day of the year. Just take the current week, for instance. April 3 was, in part, National Chocolate Mousse Day, World Party Day, and National Find a Rainbow Day. April 4 marks National Chicken Cordon Bleu Day, National Hug a Newsperson Day, and National Walk Around Things Day, and April 5 is National Caramel Day and National Raisin and Spice Bar Day, among several others.

Why do these days exist?

The origin of many are uncertain. A lot of the product-focused holidays trickled out of local and national proclamations, like Reagan's "Ice Cream Day." Others, unsurprisingly, come from conspiratorial corporate marketing—like "Sweetest Day," which was explicitly engineered by a cabal of candy companies. But there are also plenty that happen by complete accident, like September 19's National Talk Like a Pirate Day, which was an in-joke between friends that went viral. The National Kiss a Ginger Day Conan missed out on was one guy's Facebook campaign to counteract National Kick a Ginger Day, which was inspired by an episode of South Park.

You've likely seen these types of uncertified and obscure "holidays" spread like wildfire on Twitter, which they're tailor made for. Morning-show segments, where they make for cheap and easy fodder, also help keep some of them in the public consciousness. Ditto late night monologues like Conan's. The days are in part a product of the modern media age, gobbled up and shared by people on socials and pilfered by sites hungry to make sharable #content.

But you can also thank Marlo Anderson of Mandan, North Dakota, population 20,000.

Back in 2013, Anderson started archiving all these "holidays" at one central hub, National Day Calendar. He began running them down as a fun hobby. It's become a job.

"Four years ago, I heard there was a National Popcorn Day, and I'm kind of a popcorn nut, so I was looking online to learn how that day came to be, and I couldn't find any information," he says. "I thought that was strange, so we [started the site]."

Anderson made use of old congressional records, and the Chase Calendar of Events (a guide to holidays that has been around since 1957) to populate his calendar. After a lot of hours and research, he became a go-to resource. Soon, he says, the media started following, and "it just kinda blew up."

Most of these holidays, he says, have existed for decades but were never particularly relevant. That's changing. On May 28, massive brands like Jack in the Box and McDonald's will no doubt factor National Hamburger Day into their daily marketing blitz. It'll likely trend on Twitter, and the National Day Calendar has a lot to do with that momentum. The site sends out regular media alerts detailing each day's jubilees to the 20,000 press outlets and entertainment figures on its mailing list. That reach has made Anderson the de facto czar for silly fake holidays.

"We kinda rose to this authority, and people started asking if they could register new days with us," he says.

Today, the National Day Calendar is a fully commercial institution, one that no longer lists these days but sells them too. Anderson has monetized by selling holidays through an application process. He says they receive roughly 18,000 applications a year, and of those about 30 turn into "National Days." Every week, a four-person selection committee convenes to whittle down the field. If they reach a unanimous agreement on a proposed day, it moves forward. Those approved can then pick packages that start at $2,300 and feature various levels of engagement.

His usual customers are nonprofits, and Anderson says his personal favorite day he's "registered" is National Astronaut Day on May 5—the same day Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. became the first American in space in 1961.

Of course, there's a lot of corporate involvement too.

Last year, the site sold a day to the Jeep marketing braintrust, giving birth to Jeep 4x4 Day on April 4 (get it?). August 14 is National Fajita Day, which was applied for by the On the Border Mexican restaurant franchise. Anderson isn't a government agent, he doesn't wield any licensed dominion, and these National Days are not nationally recognized in any real sense, but that seems to matter very little. The hope of them catching some kind of viral fire and possibly boosting business is what drives customers to Anderson.

The success of the calendar has taken him by complete surprise. By day, he is the president of Zoovio, a company that digitizes VHS tape libraries, and Awesome 2 Products, a local computer repair outfit near his native Mandan. He likely won't leave those jobs anytime soon, as National Day Calendar does have its own staff now. But who knows. Stranger things have happened. National Sneak Some Zucchini into Your Neighbors Porch Day, for example (August 8, btw).

"I never thought [the calendar] would get to this level," he says. "I laugh about it every day. It's an amazing role to have in life."

Follow Luke Winkie on Twitter.

Steve Bannon Lost His Seat on the National Security Council

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Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon no longer has a seat on the National Security Council (NSC), Bloomberg Politics reports.

Trump's national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster pulled the trigger on Bannon's removal Wednesday and made a few additional tweaks to the council. He restored Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, and Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as "regular attendees" to the NSC's principals committee, according to a regulatory memo. Their spots had been demoted with the presidential memorandum Trump signed in January.

According to one White House official, Bannon was originally placed on the NSC to keep an eye on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has since resigned, the Washington Post reports. Whatever the reason, Bannon apparently feels his work on the council is done.

"Susan Rice operationalized the NSC during the last administration. I was put on to ensure that it was de-operationalized," Bannon said in a statement. "General McMaster has returned the NSC to its proper function."

The move also added CIA director Mike Pompeo, US representative to the UN Nikki Haley, and Department of Energy head Rick Perry to the council, NPR reports. As members of the NSC, they'll play a role in decisions regarding diplomacy, counterterrorism, nuclear power, and cybersecurity.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Why I Don't Like Going to Bars as a Disabled Person

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Since I started this column six months ago, I've written on sex and disability issues ranging from paying for a sex surrogate to how much winter sucks when you have a disability. By sharing my stories with you, I've been able to better manage some of my fears, but one of my biggest ongoing hurdles is being social—in particular, going out to bars.

Fear of judgment by others is common among me and my fellow disabled friends. Even people who are otherwise well-meaning can inadvertently offend with their assumptions. "You're doing a lot of stuff," someone will inevitably say to me when I'm out. "That's really great. You're writing for VICE. I didn't know people with disabilities did that. Good to see you out." But where am I supposed to be? Am I supposed to be, like, in a closet, hanging out, wasting the day and my life? Just because I have a disability doesn't mean I don't want to have experiences. Things may take a little longer, but who gives a shit? I know they mean well, but it's hard to deal with.

Among me and my disabled friends there's also general fear of rejection, a fear of failure. I often wonder whether I will ever be able to find a partner; whenever someone is nice to me I can't help suspecting they have a crush. So what ends up happening is that I stay in. Rather than subject myself to all the anxieties and insecurity, I bathe in the glow of Netflix and video games.

But one recent night, that changed. A friend had been trying to get me out for a while and I decided to say yes. I've been in the middle of making my annual list of goals, which include "try new things," "don't let fear win," "be more confident and direct," and "fall in love with someone who loves you back." We ended up at the Cambie, one of Vancouver's oldest pubs and a backpacker's paradise, filled with pool tables, pinball machines, and hip locals and out-of-towners. I don't go to bars a lot, but the Cambie is one of my favorites because people there are accepting and treat me like anyone else.

That night, even though I was out of my comfort zone, I wanted to see how far I could push myself, to break out of my shell and not worry about stereotypes or the logistics of everything—in other words, to just try and enjoy myself. So I ordered an apple cider, my drink of choice because I like the sweetness.

Here is where I have to confess: I'm kind of a lightweight. Whenever I drink, it always seems I have to go to bathroom every five seconds. Looking for a place to relieve myself is always something of an adventure for me, because there's never any guarantee that the bar will have accessible facilities. Whenever a bar is lacking, which is often, it means I have to stop what I'm doing, leave, and go find a nearby coffee shop, which isn't always possible; I've even had to piss in an alley a couple times.

Thankfully, the Cambie does have an accessible bathroom. Or at least it seemed like it did. I had forgotten that, instead of a private room, the only accessible stall there was in middle of the men's bathroom. Because I have a female care aide, the setup can be uncomfortable sometimes. Weird looks often accompany us.

This time, I was lucky to find two Irish guys nearby who were nice enough to guard the door to allow me some privacy. I've always had difficulty going to the bathroom in front of people, no matter how long they have been working for me, but I did the best I could with what the bar had.

Whenever a bar is lacking accessible facilities, which is often, it means I have to stop what I'm doing, leave, and go find a nearby coffee shop, which isn't always possible; I've even had to piss in an alley a couple times.

I've been comfortable with women helping me use the washroom for many years. When I was in my teens, it was a much different story. I was always nervous I would get aroused or even orgasm in front of them, but I eventually got over it one summer at camp, when I realized that male counselors wouldn't always be around to help me and I would need to get used to women occasionally helping me. The experience of having a woman helping ended up becoming my preference.

That night at the bar, I needed to use the washroom again. This time, however, the nice Irish guys weren't around, and I didn't want to go looking for them again. I didn't know them and I didn't want to abuse their generosity. And I didn't want to go through the whole ordeal again. So my friend and I left the bar and went searching for an accessible bathroom at another bar, which ending up taking around 45 minutes.

As frustrating as that hunt was, I'm used to it. And going out had been fun. Along the way home I reminded myself that it's about the social element—hanging out with friends—and not how wasted you can get or whether you meet the person of your dreams. Sometimes it's the small victories that are important: having a nice enough time and being treated like anyone else.

If you've got questions or would like advice about dating and sex in the disabled community, drop us a line and Spencer will try to address it in a future column.

Inside the Abandoned Asylum That Was Made Infamous by Geraldo Rivera

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Letchworth Village was built specifically for "the segregation of the feeble-minded" over a century ago. It currently rots on roughly 2,000 sylvan acres in Rockland County, New York, about an hour's drive north of Manhattan. Shuttered in 1996, the mammoth decay of the former custodial asylum makes it seem like it's been closed two or three times as long. Vines and branches choke the many battered neoclassical buildings, nearly obscuring some from view. Inside, sickly colors of lead paint slough off walls redecorated with graffiti, while the tile floors are covered in broken glass, rubble from collapsing ceilings, and a host of detritus left behind by former residents and staff or subsequent interlopers. In its brokenness, Letchworth aptly reflects the horror show it became—the rampant neglect and mistreatment of the intellectually and developmentally disabled and the mentally ill.

It was Geraldo Rivera who took millions of TV viewers inside Letchworth as part of his unflinching, award-winning 1972 expose "Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace," which is as disturbing a watch now as it was 45 years ago. In it, children lie naked on the floor in their own feces and moaning. Adults wedge together in rooms with no one to care for them. There's a pained incredulity in the voice and face of late Bronx congressman Mario Biaggi as he tells Geraldo during a tour of the facility, "Inside we have housed the children of many of our citizens who are subjected to what appears to be the worst possible conditions I've ever seen in my life. I've visited penal institutions all over the country, I've visited hospitals all over the country, I've visited the worst brigs in the military… I've never seen anything like (this)."

As such, "Willowbrook" nudged public sentiment even further toward "deinstitutionalization" of the disabled and mentally ill back to their families or to smaller, community-based facilities—a process that began in the 1950s with the advent of new medications and approaches to treatment and was fervently championed by President John F. Kennedy before coming to full fruition in the 80s and 90s.

As far as abandoned asylums go, Letchworth is fairly unique. Many other similar facilities are fenced in and heavily patrolled by security to keep out squatters, vandals, and curious urban explorers. Others have been demolished or have been repurposed—including the bullshit "Pennhurst Asylum" haunted house attraction at the former Pennhurst State School and Hospital in southeastern Pennsylvania, which baldly exploits its harrowing history of abuse for Halloween thrills and paints former residents as monsters to be feared. Letchworth Village, however, is essentially a park where you can freely stroll the grounds (it's very popular with dog walkers), and while you're not really supposed to go inside the structurally unsound buildings, there's no one on the premises to insure you don't. Owned by the town of Haverstraw, a few Letchworth structures were turned into a school some years back, but most are too far gone to rehab and too expensive to demolish. So it rots in full view of anyone who cares to go and see.

Follow Michael Goldberg on Twitter.

What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After the US Attacked North Korea?

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"North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment."

That terse and ominous statement from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (that's the whole thing, by the way), issued after a provocative medium-range missile test from the Hermit Kingdom, shows just how tense things are between North Korea and the US right now. The issue of what to do about the world's most erratic nuclear power looms large over this week's meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping in Florida, and is one of the most intractable foreign policy problems the US has to deal with. North Korea and America have never been friendly, but right now they seem closer than ever to outright war.

In February, Trump vowed that North Korea won't develop a nuclear bomb capable of hitting the US, but as is often the case, the president left the details entirely to our imaginations. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Trump said he would "solve" North Korea with or without China's cooperation, a similarly vague sentiment. Last week, Tillerson said that the last 20 years of policy toward North Korea were a failure. "The clock has now run out, and all options are on the table," a White House official told CNN on Tuesday.

These statements sound grim, but they also make more sense than you may realize. More than two decades of diplomacy have amounted to essentially jack shit, and it looks like North Korea is on the verge of becoming an advanced nuclear power—yes, that means it could one day even have the capability to nuke the US. It's also true that multiple presidential administrations have been unable to "solve" this slow-rolling crisis. Repeated efforts to isolate North Korea through sanctions haven't gone anywhere and will probably never do anything. Given all those difficulties, and the Trump administration's strong language, it's no wonder that some people are speculating about the possibility of a preemptive strike. (Trump himself once said that he'd be open to bombing North Korea's nuclear reactors, though that was 18 years ago.)

But according to Rodger Baker, a North Korea analyst at the military intelligence firm Stratfor, if there's another Korean war, it probably won't start with carefully staged strikes. "Rarely, I think, do people wait until everything is ready before they go to war," he told me. Baker walked me through the first day of what he says is a much more likely scenario—a very fucked-up scenario—that brings the US and North Korea into conflict.

To help you follow all this stuff, here's a Google map I made:

Step 1: North Korea Screws Up a Test Launch

When North Korea tests a missile, it alarms the world for two reasons. First, it's a highly provocative advertisement of the country's military sophistication and that makes everyone nervous, even China and Russia. But the second thing to keep in mind is that these launches fling a whole lot of metal and explosives into the air near populated areas. North Korea is rushing to develop nuclear-armed ICBMs without the resources of a more developed country. "That heightened pace means you also have a lot of errors," said Baker.

Even a relatively innocent test launch could lead to a rocket breaking apart over Japan. Its guidance system could fail and careen toward South Korea, or it could look like it's being aimed at a US Navy base, which might merit a preemptive strike in the eyes of the US.

Any of these possibilities could lead to a situation, according to Baker, in which the US would feel backed into a corner. "It needs to make a clear demonstration against continued North Korean rocket and missile tests," Baker said. In that case, the US could "deploy the Aegis missile [defense] system and shoot one down." In another possible scenario, "they could use a cruise missile to strike it on the ground."

This is how wars start, Baker told me: "Some series of things where in a moment of heightened tension one decision is made, or two decisions are made, that heighten into something greater."

Step 2: The US Blows Up a Launchpad

The scariest potentiality of all is one in which the US feels threatened before a launch even happens and uses an offshore launcher to lob a cruise missile, blowing up the North Korean launchpad and probably at least a few North Koreans. All of a sudden, there's been an attack on North Korean soil. That means a lot of things are going to happen at once.

The US, Baker told me, will "go into full frontline alert posture right away anyway, because it's going to have to anticipate a North Korean response, and it's going to scare the North Koreans away from that response by putting everything on full operational posture."

This is a moment when everyone could stand down, Baker told me. The US could send a clear message to North Korea: We felt provoked, we launched a countermeasure, but now everyone can just cool it, OK?

Now North Korea has to make a split-second decision.

Step 3: North Korea Responds Badly

Doing nothing is not an option for North Korea, but the country could settle for what Baker calls "front posturing"—moving troops into position for war. A lot of North Koreans pointing guns at their counterparts across the border is the best-case scenario at this phase.

But North Korea's generals—whose heads would be spinning after hearing they've just been attacked—will be wondering if there are more attacks coming. North Korea is obviously prepared for a quick response to the start (actually the resumption) of war on the peninsula, and it has a short window to put the hurt on the US before it loses a lot of its capabilities. If cooler heads don't prevail very quickly at command and control in Pyongyang, this becomes a real war.

Step 4: North Korea Hurts the US and South Korea as Much as It Can

Frontline artillery, a.k.a. "shelling," a tactic Baker called "somewhat indiscriminate," is the most obvious first response. According to a report from Stratfor published last year, most of North Korea's artillery would only be able to hit targets near the border or maybe the Seoul suburbs. But a few of North Korea's biggest guns, including the tank-mounted Koksan 170-mm (see video above), along with its 240-mm and 300-mm rocket launchers, are capable of bombarding Seoul itself.

On a good day, North Korea's air force, along with its medium-range missiles, may be able to strike any of the US airbases in South Korea. Osan Air Base, which is 40 miles south of Seoul, is a good target. Knocking out at least some US regional air power, according to Baker, gives the North Koreans a little bit of breathing room.

If longer-range cruise missiles are in working condition, North Korea might have a decent shot at hitting US bases in Japan, too. Attacking Okinawa wouldn't do much strategically, Baker told me, but if they blow up the US base in Yokosuka, near Tokyo, "they can disrupt the US ability to run their major supply chains out of Japan."

Step 5: China and Russia Show Up

This war won't likely stay strictly between the Koreas and the US. It's a crowded geopolitical neighborhood, after all.

If we're this far along, we've already assumed that China hasn't tried to stabilize North Korea preemptively, but let's not forget that when all is said and done, China has no interest in a unified Korea that would presumably be allied with the US. "The bare minimum is China has to put a couple of divisions actively on the North Korean border, up their air defense, and up their air capacity around the area," Baker said.

Russia, similarly, would make its presence felt, Baker explained. Russia has a border with North Korea, and it has military ships and planes humming around. "It would have to do everything it could at least to secure that border and the water around there," Baker said, adding that on day one, "even if [Russia's] not a direct participant in the conflict, it gets drawn in very quickly."

Step 6: The US Matches North Korea's Escalation

The US responds to each of North Korea's measures as they come and tries to preempt others. That means the military's attention is divided, according to Baker, between trying to knock out the artillery firing on the South and taking out as much of the "air defense network"—North Korea's anti-aircraft weapons—as it can. "That gives you the ability to have aircraft roaming around to look for every time a new missile rolls out of a tunnel," Baker told me. Since much of North Korea's weaponry doesn't show up in satellite photos, the US needs planes to fly around and find it. "Once it pops out of the cave, it reveals itself," he said.

It's a grim game of whack-a-mole, where the more moles you whack, the easier it becomes to whack moles. If the US is able to knock out North Korea's air defense, "You have a lot of destruction of their military capacity," Baker told me.

Step 7: North Korea Plays Dirty

From the North Korean standpoint, Baker said, the idea is to create "as much chaos as you can." That means you don't play by the rules—called the Geneva Protocol—that say you shouldn't put chemical warheads on missiles. "North Korea is the underdog," Baker said. "It has to use whatever tools it has, and chemical weapons—at bare minimum—interfere with the speed and capacity of the US and South Korean response."

"If you've gotta put on your big rubber suit and move in that, that changes the pace of your actions, and it changes what you can do," Baker told me. But, he added that the "US has trained substantially for North Korean chemical weapons."

Then, North Korea will let loose with whatever cyber weapons it's been preparing for the occasion, and no one knows how severe that might be. There could be one giant, coordinated DDOS effort to halt traffic on the South Korean internet or a pre-installed Trojan horse lying in wait to, say, brick every smartphone in South Korea. North Korea will also deploy special operations forces, some of whom are probably already walking around, not just in South Korea, Baker said, but "maybe even off on mini subs near US bases in and around Japan."

The US will most likely engage in a cyberwar of its own. But North Korea has almost no internet to knock out, so it probably isn't a priority.

Step 8: The World Witnesses Civilian Deaths

About half of the South Korean population lives in the Seoul-Incheon area, about 35 miles south of the border, and North Korea will have no qualms about targeting civilians. As this war heats up, tragedies will mount. Meanwhile, according to Baker, North Korean civilians will be collateral damage as well. "If you're going after command and control you have to hit Pyongyang," he told me, "and it's not unusual for the North Koreans to have farming communities and small villages built on top of and around their military bases."

In South Korea, grisly images of civilian casualties will proliferate quickly thanks to social media. "There's a speed to the movement of information [that] you really haven't had in the past. You've always had the use of imagery of violence, but it's often long delayed. It's not that overwhelming real-time immediacy," Baker told me.

"That's assuming that the North aren't really fast at disrupting media communications in the South as a part of their disruption campaign," he added.

Step 9: Ground War

"This isn't a war that's winnable by air," Baker told me. "You're going to have to go onto the ground."

By the time all this stuff has happened, it'll be too late for deescalation; the North will try to go through the DMZ and invade—though it won't be able to do so easily.

"It's actually really challenging for them to do anything into the South [because] there's a lot of minefields, and the North knows about them," explained Baker. "All the roads up there have those big anti-tank giant concrete overpasses or pillars that are all set to blow, so they block roads and delay." But North Korea might spend day one moving troops into the south in biplanes. (Yes, tactical biplanes.) It'll be an effort to survive long enough to turn it into a guerrilla war and "maybe cause enough casualties that it changes the political dynamic in the US or China intervenes to protect [North Korea]."

For the US, according to Baker, "the first few days is going to be mostly aviation and cruise missiles," but US ground troops will be there to meet any North Korean infantry. "If they roll south, you're already starting to engage with them," Baker said. As the US advances into the North in the ensuing weeks, it's going to get ugly. Baker compared it to the Pacific Theater of World War II, when Japanese forces occupying islands like Saipan and Iwo Jima held their positions ferociously for months in the face of the American onslaught. "Take the Pacific Islands—which were tiny, but riddled with tunnels and mountainous—and make that the size of a country," Baker said. To make matters worse, North Korea has what Baker called a "militant population," meaning random civilians could, and probably would, take it upon themselves to fight. "So how do you define 'civilian' in that country?"

Yes, somewhere in this process, the US would knock out North Korea's nuclear program, and it's ability to make and test long-range missiles. But in the process, it will have started a major war, and "now you have the long slog," Baker said.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

How 'S-Town' Explores the Murky Ethics of Privacy

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When the first season of Serial premiered, changing the game for podcasts, it also brought with it a new wave of true crime mania. Making a Murderer, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, In the Dark, and so many more extended true crime explorations descended upon us. But if Serial changed the game by introducing true crime to a whole new medium, its second season proved that capturing lightning in a bottle wasn't so easy. In some ways, the new podcast from the Serial team, S-Town, is the true heir to the sensational story of Adnan Syed. In S-Town, producer Brian Reed goes down to a small Alabama town to investigate a potential unreported murder. What he finds there is an evolution of the true crime genre in which the crime doesn't matter at all. It's all about the people.

In this case, it's one person in particular who catches Reed's attention. John B. McLemore's email to Reed is what kickstarts the story, and very quickly his unique personality dominates the show, and Reed's interest. As the show pulls further and further away from the crime McLemore had originally written to Reed about, the abstraction of the true crime genre into pure character study turns S-Town into a podcast—or story, frankly—unlike anything most listeners have heard before. But as with anything new, boldness engenders pushback.

"S-Town is a stunning podcast. It shouldn't have been made," reads the headline of a Vox article. While acknowledging the impressive journalistic effort, and its almost undeniable emotional heft, writer Aja Romano makes the case that by plumbing the depths of McLemore's personal history down to his more private details, Reed and his team have produced something of a violation. S-Town, Romano writes, "proceeds with the familiar confidence of a production that believes it had open access to all facets of John's life." It's a concern. One I shared, admittedly, many times over the course of the seven-episode series. The podcast allayed any concerns, though, convincing me with its core ethic: compassion.

Spoilers for S-Town follow.

A part of Romano's unease with S-Town derives from the fact that many of the most private details Reed unearths about McLemore did not come from the man himself, nor could he have given his permission. That's because, as is revealed at the end of the series' second episode, during reporting on the story, McLemore committed suicide. The reveal is a shock, but it also stands as a clear shift in both the story itself and the storytelling. The setup to the podcast—a mysterious possible murder in a backward, corrupt Southern town—was merely prelude to another kind of investigation. McLemore himself was always far more interesting than the yarns he was spinning.

Right from the first phone call Reed has with McLemore, it's clear that S-Town will be driven by the man's incredible, odd personality. He's flamboyant in that Southern way, charming as hell, quick to witticism, strikingly cynical, and prone to the most elaborate, engaging tangents you've ever heard. He's openly crude, but intensely caring, often expressing deep dismay at the degradation of his hometown, and the world at large. And while not everything in the universe revolves around John B. McLemore, he sure makes it feel that way in the best possible sense. It's not hard to see why Reed quickly became attached to him as a person, and as a subject.

That sort of attachment can become gross, sycophantic even. Look no further than Missing Richard Simmons, the other podcast sensation of the season. In that show, Dan Taberski caught the thread of a story about fitness personality Richard Simmons possibly being held at home against his will, and spun it into an elaborate and queasy tale that was far more an indulgence of Taberski's own fantasies and proximity to fame than anything else. Romano discusses the case of Missing Richard Simmons, making a connection between that show's ugly ethics and S-Town's finer grained problematic-ness. The central question both must answer is, what right do these podcasters have to delve so deeply into the lives of their subjects? In essence, is there no right to privacy?

But there's a major difference between the two popular podcasts: compassion. Where Taberski was blinded by his own lust for celebrity, Reed is guided always by compassion. This is true even of the side characters in S-Town. People who originally come across as villains are given voice, making them human, allowing them each a measure of understanding, respect, and yes, compassion.

As Reed digs into McLemore's own story, uncovering in one episode his battles with living as a queer man in the South, it is always with an eye toward complexifying the man. Reed seeks to understand McLemore, not because we need to understand him—he's not a public figure to be unmasked—but because to try to understand McLemore is to grant him a kind of compassion he so clearly yearned for in the world. Though so often cynical about the world—he goes off endless about his "shit town" and the destruction of the world by climate change—McLemore's conversations and his deeds show him to be a man of deep love for people. S-Town is that love given back.

S-Town fits into a long tradition of journalists writing character pieces, even of non-public figures, so concerns about privacy are nothing new. They're expected. But the real measure of quality journalism and true life storytelling cannot be whether privacy was violated. Privacy is necessarily violated in all such stories, even when permission is granted. Instead, we must look to the storytelling itself, how it works, where its interests lie, and what it ultimately reveals.

In the final episode of the show, Reed reads portions of McLemore's suicide note—possibly the gravest violation of privacy in all seven episodes. Oh, but what it reveals: What we've been witness to, we come to see, is the imagination of a person who loved the world so much he couldn't bear it. We see a man who lived his whole life in the same shit town, and his anger at its failures were a result of his unyielding belief that it could be so much better. By granting us access to McLemore's story, his personality, and his life through his own words and the people he touched, S-Town proves its worth many times over. It's a story of humanity that includes humanity's worst, but always pointed in the direction of its best. In that way, it's a true testament to McLemore. A great elegy. And one we're all lucky to have heard.

Follow Corey Atad on Twitter.

Pepsi Is Pulling That Controversial Kendall Jenner Ad

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Pepsi announced Wednesday it's nixing an ad featuring Kendall Jenner that's been slammed by pretty much everyone on the internet for trivializing protest movements, New York magazine reports.

"Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace, and understanding," the company said in a press release. "Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are removing the content and halting any further rollout."

In the ad, Jenner hits a curiously vague anti-bad stuff protest as one might "hit" a nightclub. With a Pepsi in hand, she walks with smiling picketers, swapping cheerful glances with folks of all creeds, colors, and genders. Then comes the climax: As Jenner and her fellow protesters face off against a line of police officers, Jenner hands one an ice-cold Pepsi. He smiles, and the move diffuses all tension from the rally before the crowd goes wild.

The spot drew criticism from activists like Deray McKesson, of the Black Lives Matter movement, and Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter, who dogged Pepsi for suggesting an issue as thorny as police brutality or racism could be solved with a soft drink.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.


This Bike Poet Delivers Dreams to Your Doorstep

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The dream deliverer's workday begins somewhere between 2 and 3 AM. He rises, gets dressed in bike gear (including a headlamp for the darkness), and begins traveling to his subscribers' homes to make a delivery before dawn. The dream they will receive, printed on a card left at their step, has been custom-written for them by the deliverer the day before, lacing the waking landscape with something inexplicable and uncanny. After 25 to 40 miles of travel, the deliverer returns to his workshop and begins work on the next day's batch. On Sundays, every subscriber has the same dream.

Since 2014, poet Mathias Svalina has been performing the role of the deliverer, a job he dreamed up for himself as a way of combining all the things he loves into a role only he could fill. His acts of local service have slowly spread over the US, including monthly residencies in Austin, Tucson, Marfa, and Richmond, as well as internationally by mail. Current subscriptions are available at $60 for a month by mail inside the states and $85 internationally; meanwhile, his "nightmare" package costs $3.75 more, because "whereas writing dreams is very open and improvisatory and expansive, writing nightmares for me is very closed and narrow. I usually dread writing the nightmares every day." In June, he'll return to his hometown of Denver, where local delivery by bike for the month runs $45. Svalina also donates 15 percent of proceeds to Planned Parenthood in whichever state he happens to be. As for the future, the 41-year-old is open to suggestion as to where to head—it's a road that could lead anywhere.

Mathias Svalina preparing for the day's delivery. Photo courtesy of Mathias Svalina

So how does one compose individually scripted dreams for a wide group of people—some of them strangers, others friends? How is it possible to bring to life a kind of service that most realities would insist could never be?

"When I'm in the zone, the dreams just come flying out," Svalina tells me. "And I can sometimes write eight or ten an hour." Then, he provides an example dream off the cuff, beginning with the lines: "You are in a haunted castle. You work at the ice-cream counter inside the gift shop. The ghosts that haunt the castle all think they are doctors." The 162-word dream example takes him about seven minutes to conjure in full, somehow along its way demonstrating an oddly emotional relevance in even such a short space. He usually spends eight to ten hours a day inside this mindset, producing a constant stream of micro-works of pure imagination. With some simple math, one might estimate a single day of Svalina's output might result in a hundred miniature creations.

Judging by Svalina's other writing—including more than ten works of published poetry—one gets the sense his brain is naturally connected to the curious, unwinding undercurrent of the subconscious such a project would require, able to deep dive into illogical landscapes and return with uncanny treasure. His 2011 novella, I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, provides an array of short vignettes in which a man describes the insane array of all-but-impossible businesses he's created, out of which something like a dream-delivery service could itself have been pulled.

Because, as Svalina puts it, the writing of these dreams are "formal experiments, not in the sense of recreating dreams themselves, which are expansive and uniquely freaky-deaky, but in how we relate dreams to each other." In a time of such heavy daily political and social turmoil, his service seems not like an escape but a rebinding maneuver, applying warmth to places uncared for, left to flounder. "Writing the dreams and taking experiences and stuff and making them into weird, illogical narratives," he continues, "that feels more complete and realistic than trying to navigate the byzantine complexities and veiled meanings of real life."

"Thirty Dreams" chapbook from the Denver June 2016 Dream Delivery Service by Mathias Svalina. Photos courtesy of Mathias Svalina

The idea of Svalina out on his bike in the morning dark of some small US city carrying poetry to the still-sleeping seems like an act of total faith, some kind of medicine. At the very least, it's also act of rebellion, veering completely out of the lane we're supposed to be in. It's work almost no one else could do, would even be able to conceive of employing as reality.

"I often feel like a douche writing these mostly whimsical pieces every day," he says of his pursuit, amid the national climate, "but I try to remind myself that the spirit of the project is to create this intimate relationship with the subscribers and that these forms of intimacy exist parallel to the horrors of the political scumocracy."

"Writing the dreams and taking experiences and making them into weird, illogical narratives feels more complete and realistic than trying to navigate the byzantine complexities and veiled meanings of real life."

As such, the dreams aren't political at all, by definition: They operate with space that allows the reader to fill in his or her own context, to reformat one's reality amid illogic. Svalina tries to combine images from whatever city he's in with intersections of other media—art and photography and film, as well as random dreams the people he runs into daily in the act of his delivery, like a neural network absorbing both the conscious and unconscious limits of his local world. Like a "whirlpool in the middle of a Wendy's maybe," Svalina offers.

"I can write something like, 'Then your mother walks in holding a rusted rake,' and I can trust that regardless of what kind of relationship the subscriber has with their mother they have or had a mother," he says. "And then the subscriber hopefully imbues the moment with some kind of intimate interpretation. I guess that's a basic trick of most writing, to leave enough space for the reader to make the thing feel important."

In the end, too, what's being created here isn't only an arbitrary system of flighty ideas and hidden logics but a work of literature devised specifically for its reader, an ongoing set of texts created in a series numbered only ever one of one.

"I want the whole month to feel like some kind of attenuated book," Svalina explains, "a book that only that subscriber will every read." Like the Chinese poet Li Po writing poems only to release them onto the flowing water of a river, Svalina's work is a waking form of magic, returning a feeling of the fantastical and unknowable to a culture that could surely stand a better example of how to be.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

Learn more about Mathias Svalina's Dream Delivery Service.

Bigger Corporations Are Making You Poorer

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Increasingly, the problem of corporate concentration, and in its more extreme form, monopoly, is returning to the American political debate. In 2016, Senators from both parties lambasted the failure of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice for failing to enforce anti-merger laws.

During last year's presidential campaign, everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton talked about the accumulation of corporate power in few hands, a nod to growing concern that it may be leading to inequality or imbalances of political power. (Just weeks before the election, Trump comically said of the proposed ATT-Time Warner merger that "deals like this destroy democracy.') But there has been bizarrely little research on what corporate concentration actually does to the income of ordinary citizens. As Lina Khan, my colleague at the New America Foundation who looked into this issue in 2014 put it, "A paper from 1975 was the only thing we found on the links between concentration and inequality."

Now, because of elevated recent interest in corporate power, experts are coming up with data showing just what it's costing Americans. And last week, economist Simcha Barkai presented his recent paper at the University of Chicago suggesting corporate concentration leads to substantial declines in money going to workers across the country.

According to the paper, there's been roughly a 10 percent decline in what's known as "labor share" over the past 30 years. (Barkai's paper looked at the non-financial corporate sector, which encompasses roughly 80 million workers.) What this means is that out of the total amount of goods and services produced by corporations, less of it by percentage terms (10 percent less) is going to pay for salaries and benefits—a.k.a. income.

What's behind this significant drop in this percentage of wealth going to labor? Various arguments have been presented over the years, like cheap Chinese imports displacing workers; there is some evidence for this. But perhaps the most popular explanation is that robots are taking jobs. This idea comes in part from Silicon Valley, and was popularized by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in a 2011 essay titled "Why Software Is Eating the World".

Andreessen posited that a lack of education was behind the decline of job opportunities. "Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high," he wrote. "This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There's no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go."

But Barkai found no evidence for this in his study, which used government data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, he found that spending on capital inputs, which includes robots, is declining even faster than spending on labor. As Barkai put it, "Measured in percentage terms, the decline in the capital share (30 percent) is much more dramatic than the decline in the labor share (10 percent)."

So where is all the money going? "Profits have been rising over time," Barkai said last week. And he put a number on it. "To give you a sense of how large these profits are, if you look over the past 30 years... per worker, how much have these dollars increased? It's about $14,000 per worker. And that's a really big number because, in 2014, personal median income was about $28,000." Barkai's models show that this effect is more pronounced in concentrated industries and less pronounced in competitive ones. Had concentration remained at the levels we saw 30 years earlier, one model in his paper suggested that wages, output, and investment would be substantially higher.

Barkai's work is part of a wave of new research on how changes in the corporate sector and concentration are having a significant impact on the labor force, prices across the economy, investment, and productivity.

Among others, one trend that has puzzled some economists is why productivity, or the amount that an American worker produces with the same amount of machinery, isn't increasing as fast as it once did. But one younger scholar in this field, German Guitierrez, a Ph.D student at New York University, has shown (with his French economist co-author Thomas Philippon) that corporate concentration may reduce firm investment, and could potentially explain that, too.

Watch our short explainer on why some banks are too big.

Likewise, economist John Kwoka has shaken up the antitrust profession with work showing that mergers allowed by the Federal Trade Commission in concentrated industries lead to price hikes. And Justin Pierce, an economist at the Federal Reserve, found that companies that acquire manufacturing plants simply raise prices for the products those plants make, without increasing the efficiency of how those plants operate. Mergers are often justified as bolstering the efficiency of the companies being bought; Pierce's paper may undercut this rationale.

This change in thinking is also taking place at the upper rungs of America's economic regulatory apparatus. In 2016, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen noted that the 2008 financial crisis might prove a "turning point" for thinking in the economics profession—one as significant as that of the 1970s, when the establishment became substantially friendlier to big business. She suggested that the failure of small business to recover as quickly as larger corporations was a potentially significant factor in the ability of the Federal Reserve to organize an economic recovery.

"These findings bring to the fore critical and troubling trends that would otherwise be hidden from view," said Sabeel Rahman, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in the intersection between money and democracy. "Economic power and concentration increases inequality while also undermining economic dynamism. We need findings like these—and hopefully there will be further such studies to build on these papers—to shape a new wave of policy reform and debate over how to make the 21st century economy inclusive, fair, and vibrant."

Follow Matt Stoller on Twitter.

Newsflash: Hookah Smoking Is Terrible for You

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Hookah bars now seem as common as Dominos in college neighborhoods. In recent years, studies have found that one in three students uses the ancient tobacco pipes, and that use among college women is on the rise inhale on a hookah hose by the end of freshman year.

But those undergrads may not entirely understand the potential side effects of what they're inhaling: A recent study also found that 27 percent of college students believed hookahs did not contain tobacco and 38 percent thought what they were smoking did not contain nicotine (wrong on both accounts). The CDC warns that hookah smoking "is not a safe alternative to smoking cigarettes" and "carries many of the same risks." They point out, for instance, that a typical hookah session involves inhaling about 90,000 milliliters of smoke, versus the 500 to 600 milliliters you inhale when smoking a single cigarette. This has done little to stop an increasing number of young people from smoking the flavored tobacco with their circles of friends.

The increase in popularity of hookahs has created a market for simpler heating sources for the pipes, which are traditionally heated by placing small chunks of hot charcoal near gooey tobacco. One of these methods involves the use of electronic heating disks and pads, which are now sold in head shops.

Continue reading on Tonic.

'Snake 'N' Bacon,' Today's Comic by Michael Kupperman

An Artist Drew 900 Self-Portraits on Post-Its to Remember His Father

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The passing of a loved one is dealt with in a myriad of ways. In 2012, right before the artist Admire Kamudzengerere was to travel home to Harare, Zimbabwe, his father passed. The death of his father inspired the artist to search for his father's image in his own features by glancing into a mirror before drawing, fast and dark monotype self portraits on post-it notes and on phone books from Harare. Each phone book drawing was created with earth and oil, recalling how Kamudzengerere's father told him that when he arrives in a new place he should drink a little bit of earth in the water in order to become part of that place.

Kamudzengerere is one of four artists who will represent Zimbabwe at the upcoming 2017 Venice Biennale. The portraits appear in small and large scale installations titled, Unmasking, Open Line and Registrar, currently on view in I am gonna...you. Till you run., Kamudzengerere's solo exhibition of works on paper at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery.

Continue reading on Creators.

'Dharma Bowls,' Today's Comic by Brian Blomerth

Steve Bannon Reportedly Called Jared Kushner a 'Cuck'

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One's the foul-mouthed right-wing populist whose website essentially created the nativist ideology that got Donald Trump elected. The other is the smooth-faced scion of a scandal-tinged real estate empire who got where he is today thanks to being the president's son-in-law. And apparently, they don't get along.

On Thursday, the Daily Beast reported that White House adviser Steve Bannon has been going around calling fellow Trump aide Jared Kushner a "cuck" and a "globalist," and that fighting between the two has been "nonstop."

The news comes as Kushner seems to be getting a more important role in the administration and Bannon seems to be losing influence. The 36-year-old husband of Ivanka Trump is trying to make the government more efficient, just visited Iraq, and is advising the president on China. Meanwhile, yesterday the former Breitbart publisher lost his permanent spot on the National Security Council. One official told the Beast that Bannon has accused Kushner of trying to "kick him out the back door."

The particular insults that Bannon allegedly used toward Kusher are, uh, interesting. "Cuck" used to mean "cuckold," or someone who lets another man fuck his wife, but now just means "moderate Republican." On the other hand "globalist" is often used to tar anyone who believes in a multi-cultural society, immigration, or international institutions.

This is just one of many, many stories about how chaotic and paranoid the government under Trump has become. Also on Thursday, Politico reported that federal agencies were being chewed up by a "civil war" between Trump loyalists and establishment Republicans. "Backbiting is further paralyzing federal agencies, which have been hamstrung by slow hiring, disorganization, and an overall lack of direction since Trump's inauguration," Politico wrote.

Bannon wouldn't comment on the Beast story, but just the fact that his aides are leaking that sort of information to the media—even if it's not true—is a pretty good indicator of what life in the White House is like.

It doesn't seem like Kushner is necessarily the only person to blame for Bannon's waning influence. As the New York Times reported, Trump is apparently pissed by repeated suggestions that "President Bannon" is really in charge in the West Wing. But the Bannon-Kushner war is probably about policy. Kushner, who was a Democratic donor before Trump ran for office, is viewed by Bannon as an obstacle to achieving his right-wing ideological vision.

"There's tension [between them] on trade, health care, immigration, taxes, [terrorism]—you name it," an official told the Beast.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.


Dying Is Radical: Talking Taboo with a 'Death Doula'

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Sometimes it freaks me out that we're all just walking around, ignoring the strangeness of existence and the reality of inevitable death. I feel crazy to be plagued by these thoughts, while the people around me are discussing an episode of Game of Thrones and what they are going to eat at Chipotle. I don't fault these people. It would be difficult to live in a state of constant obsession about one's impending death. I too have buried many existential questions under The Cheesecake Factory menu or in the fraught love affair between Chuck and Blair on Gossip Girl. But when the reality of death is upon me, it feels lonely and isolating that no one else seems to want to "go there" verbally.

But some people in America are going there. Bodhi Be is a "death doula," coffin maker, and executive director of Doorway Into Light, a nonprofit organization on Maui, providing advocacy and educational programs for those approaching death and their care-givers. Doorway Into Light seeks to "re-invent and revolutionize the funeral home and the funeral industry, transforming the 'business of dying' and returning it to 'sacred service'" in environmentally sustainable and spiritually inclusive ways. Be is also the founder and president of The Death Store, Hawaii's first certified green funeral home, which features a library and bookstore, biodegradable urns and wooden caskets, as well as a three-body refrigerator.

I spoke with Be about the relationship between death aversion, consumerism, and the destruction of our planet.

VICE: How did you get into this?
Bodhi Be: I wonder sometimes. I'd been an ordained minister for 30-odd years and started running into people who needed counseling if they were dying or someone else was dying. I didn't feel that I was skilled enough, so I went and became a hospice volunteer and took their training and then started being asked to go sit with dying people in their homes. That was a tremendously powerful learning line for me, and it still is. And as a business person I studied and looked around, and researched the funeral industry and the cemetery industry—which is a billion-dollar business—and they're often using quite toxic practices. They're thinking of their bottom line, It's the last present you'll give to Grandma, don't you want to give her the most expensive coffin? Even hospice had become a billion-dollar industry dependent on insurance money, which really limits what they can do. So then I thought, OK, I wanna do something. I asked [spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now] Ram Dass if he wanted to do something and we put on an event that drew over 100 people for three days, because I wanted to find out who in this community was interested in caring for the dying in a more conscious way. And the rest grew out from there.

Has doing this work affected your relationship with your own mortality?
I'd say it's changing my life every day now, because being around death makes it more real to me. Of course, most of us don't really know we're going to die. We don't act like it. We treat the world like we have plenty of time. When people are dying we tell them they are going home, and of course I question that, because that has implications that may be connected to why the Earth is in such terrible shape—because many of us don't think this is home. I don't take the time I have here as much for granted. I know I'm going to die and I don't know when. I don't procrastinate anymore. My relationships to the people in my life have become way more important. I say we're constantly leaving a trail behind us and that trail is either filled with love, respect, and appreciation or anger, jealousy, resentment, and unforgiveness. I see how hard dying people are working cleaning up that trail, and the best time to clean up that stuff is today and not when you're dying.

What differentiates a green funeral from a regular funeral? I know you don't use any toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, but what else?
Everything we sell, all of our caskets and urns are made out of materials that don't have any chemicals, toxins, or poisons. I'll make a simple plain wood box coffin that doesn't use any screws or nails. I sell a bamboo casket and urns that dissolve in the ocean. Under the Green Burial Council we're certified as a green funeral home.

What about the custom funerals that you do. If someone wants to do a burial at sea, you're allowed to just put the body in the ocean?
If we weren't, you'd be interviewing me from my prison cell. There are laws regulating body burial in the ocean, but there's no law against it. People have been buried in the ocean as long as there were ships. The armed services still buries people in the ocean. So yeah, I've been doing that for years, and we're one of the only ones doing that here in Hawaii.

What are some of the other more creative or unique funerals that you've done?
I think the one that stands out was that of a well-known artist died, and she had a community of artists and crazy people who came over and dressed her up and made her up, and it was a burial in costume. They had a coffin from The Death Store, and in fact if you go to our Facebook page the cover photo is from that funeral.

So what exactly is The Death Store?
The Death Store is what I call a community education space. We provide our services, counseling, products and resources for people who are dying and their families, people who work in these fields, and people who just want to educate themselves and explore the fact that they might die one day. There's a library, a bookstore, a reference library, there's a bedside notary, we have a minister there, a couple of counselors, and then in the midst of that we showcase our biodegradable caskets and urns. We also sell things like candles and oils to help you have your own home funeral so you don't need us.

What happens if you don't embalm the body? I know that in California you don't have to embalm the body, but you have to refrigerate.
You don't have to embalm anywhere in America. You can't put a body on an airplane or travel between states with a body—there may be certain laws about that—but it's a common misunderstanding that there's any law that says anyone must be embalmed. Nobody needs to be embalmed. In Hawaii, a body needs to be buried, cremated or refrigerated within 30 hours. It's different in every state. And actually in California I don't think there's any time limit on how long you can keep a body at home.

Wow.
But people embalm Grandma so their last image of Grandma is some kind of made up, beautified picture. People have a lot of resistance and aversion to seeing Grandma looking dead. I think that's a real problem in our culture, that we aren't used to seeing what people look like dead. And I've heard some things like, "Well I don't want to remember Grandma from the last picture I saw of her being dead." So I think there's a lot of work to be done in terms of our aversion to what death looks like and the fact that we're going to be dead at some point. I mean we don't even say, "Grandma died." We say the car died and the tree died, but Grandma always seems to pass away or transition.

What would you say to someone who has a lot of death anxiety?
That's everybody. Just about everybody.

So how do we find more peace about the fact that we're going to die?
[ laughs]

I guess that's the million-dollar question.
I give presentations about it: making friends with death. Sometimes I walk around in my skeleton suit. That's why I have a store called The Death Store. People say I can't call it The Death Store. They want me to call it the Until We Meet Again store. That's why some of my work is very bold: to try and bring death out from under the taboo we've turned it into in this culture. And I would say that's connected to why what's happening in the world. Because we're so disconnected from our place in the natural world and the importance of death and dying. If you watch nature, you see there is no life without death. And that's true for us. There ought to be a Death Store next to every Starbucks as a way to help people wake up and see that life is so precious and fragile. When people die in other parts of the world we think, Oh well that's just a statistic. It's not me and my family. We don't think it will happen to us. It's just other people.

How do you feel about your own death? Do you feel like you have a certain amount of peace around it?
Yeah, sure, because I'm around it a lot, death is a great teacher to me. Most people, not excluding me, have been walking around sleepwalking in a hypnotic state. But when you find out you're dying or your friend just died, it's the most radical thing I've seen. I've been to big funerals where hundreds of people have been shaken out of that hypnotic state and it's some of the most spiritual experiences I've ever had, because people have cut out all of the crap and bullshit.

It can feel scary to be shaken out of that sleepwalk, but maybe it's just because we've spent so much time hypnotized that we're just not used to being awake.

Well if we don't get shaken out of it soon, we're all gonna be asleep for a bit.

Buy So Sad Today: Personal Essays on Amazon , and follow her on Twitter.

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #116

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I am Nick Gazin and this is my comics column on the VICE site in which I discuss comics, zines, art books, toys, and anything of aesthetic merit.

I went to the MoCCA Arts Festival this past weekend, as I have done every year since 2001, when it began. The necessity for MoCCA has been mostly removed by Gabe Fowler's carefully curated Comic Arts Brooklyn festival, but I found this year's MoCCA to be more worthwhile than the last few years. I'd like to tell you about the objects I obtained and the people I saw.

Drew Friedman. Photo by Nick Gazin

This is famed illustrator, Drew Friedman, promoting his 2014 release from Fantagraphics, Heroes of the Comics. I had never met Drew before. I found him both charming and eager to leave the festival.

Photo by Nick Gazin

Fantagraphics gave me a copy of Hip Hop Family Tree 4: 1984–1985 by Ed Piskor. Piskor weaves together all these disparate elements based on the real events that formed the history of hip-hop culture, focusing on rap music. As with the first three volumes, this book is fun, educational, perfectly designed, and hyper-readable. Unlike the previous volumes, the sense of an overarching narrative is kinda lacking. I don't really blame Ed for this and it doesn't hurt the enjoyability of reading the comic. This one focuses on the Beastie Boys, the rise of Def Jam, Krush Groove and Beat Street, KRS-One, Dr. Dre, and Egyptian Lover. As with previous books, Russell Simmons is a constant presence, lisping and being goofy. You're not going to read another comic about rap music that is as fun to read and own as this one. The oversized format and fake-yellowed pages transport you to the joy of childhood comic reading and it's exciting to see the foundation of hip-hop culture being cemented.

Kelsey Wroten. Photo by Nick Gazin

This is comicker and illustrator Kelsey Wroten, who has made several very long comics for VICE and illustrates a lot of our queer-interest stories. She recently moved to New York and this was my first time meeting her in person. I feel like I've been involved with her career for a long enough time that I can say that I'm really proud of her progression as a professional artist without it seeming patronizing or unearned.

John Malta. Photo by Nick Gazin

This is sometimes VICE-contributing cartoonist John Malta holding up the latest issue of his anthology comic, Universal Slime.

Nick Bertozzi. Photo by Nick Gazin

This is Nick Bertozzi holding up his most recent book, Becoming Andy Warhol, which he scripted and drew page breakdowns for. (Artist Pierce Hargan illustrated the book.) In recent years, a lot of publishers have tried to make smart comics by adapting celebrated books into comic form or making biographical comics about famous folks of sophistication. Those comics are almost universally garbage. This one is not.

Bertozzi and Hargan have deftly skirted the common bio-comic pitfalls to make a really nice book. Instead of attempting to retell Warhol's entire life story, they include a spread at the front of the book with a timeline containing all the publicly known major milestones of his life and career. In his introduction, Bertozzi mentions that this isn't an objective historical document. It's a subjective, albeit well-researched, account of Andy Warhol's struggle to be more than an illustrator. Bertozzi and Hargan present you with the objective facts and a macro view of Warhol before presenting their own personal micro view. I admire this presentation very much.

Being a master of comics storytelling, Nick also avoided cramming in too much text or narration boxes and lets the visuals tell the story. I told Nick that he "Kurtzman'ed the shit out of this book" and he told me it was the highest praise he's ever received as a cartoonist.

I asked him a little about Becoming Andy Warhol.

Photo by Nick Gazin

VICE: Mike Allred's Madman and Dan Clowes's Ghost World are probably the most famous spot-colored comics. Were you thinking of either when you chose this coloring method?
Nick Bertozzi: I'd used spot color in my comic series, Rubber Necker, and in a map comic that I'd made. I was influenced by the artists you mention. Toned comics pages, gray-toned, or spot-colored limit cartoonists and push them into habit-breaking choices. Purple was Pierce [Hargan]'s perfect choice. It's warm and cold and complements the line. It fits the mercurial content of the story, too.

What do you think about the wave of biography comics and comics based on famous novels? Which are the best?
It's better than the current proliferation of terrible fantasy and sci-fi comics that degrade their genres. The best biographical comics show the reader the quotidian life of the past and how it effected a protagonist and examine—not lecture about—the culture and mores of their times. Louis Riel by Chester Brown and Billie Holiday by Muñoz and Sampayo are successful examples of that.

Did you learn anything that surprised you while researching for this book?
I was surprised that Warhol couldn't get a solo New York gallery show. He was considered a joke and a loser. His first solo gallery show was in LA. He hanged the soup cans and it was a failure. It took him a while to find his feet. That's the story covered in the book.

Get Becoming Andy Warhol from Abrams.

Christopher Forgues. Photo by Nick Gazin

This is the super-amazing Chris Forgues, or C. F., holding up his newest comics. He's always breaking down the barriers. What he's holding up are two of his recent comics that are printed on long rolls of receipt paper. C. F. was a revelation when he first appeared on the comics scene and although he's not currently being promoted with large PR pushes, his influence is with us all the time.

Sammy Harkham. Photo by Nick Gazin

This is Sammy Harkham, comics master, holding up the latest issue of Crickets, which continues his serialized story, Blood of the Virgin, a story about an independent Jewish filmmaker in 1971. Each chapter shifts focus and deals with different aspects of his life. One issue will focus on his frustrations with the movie he's working on. Another will deal with his problematic marriage. Sammy Harkham is perhaps the most masterful comic storyteller I can think of who is still making comic-book pamphlets, besides the Hernandez Brothers.

Felipe Muhr. Photo by Nick Gazin

As we approached this table, the Chilean friend I'd brought with me started chanting, "Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le! Le! Viva Chile!" in a moment of pride for her homeland. The man holding up the book is Felipe Muhr from New Chilean Comics. The book he's holding is La Tormenta Perfecta by Rodrigo Salinas, better known as Guatón Salinas (Fatso Salinas), who is better known as a comedic TV star than a cartoonist. This large book collects all his various early comics, which are often commentaries on Chile's military dictatorship and the Chilean Marxist fantasies of the 1970s. Salinas's approach to comic-making changes from story to story. This is a great book of funny and pretty comics.

Nick Gazin, drawn by Nick Gazin. Photo by Nick Gazin

At the back of MoCCA, my old SVA classmate Panayiotis Terzis was hanging out by a risograph machine. The School of Visual Arts now has a riso lab and they were letting people make their own riso prints. A risograph is a machine that sort of combines a photocopier with silkscreen and makes very cheap multi-layered images. I made this one and then I went home.

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram.

New Numbers Suggest Trump Really Might Be Driving Away Tourism

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Apart from the policy implications of President Trump's nationalist approach to government, one potential consequence of throwing around the phrase "America First" is that it's a bad tourism slogan. By implication, you're essentially saying "Hi, I'm US President Donald Trump, and I think other countries and the people in them are second rate at best."

New numbers suggest that Trump's rhetoric might be driving tourists away from the US in droves. Specifically, Mark Whitehouse of Bloomberg View dug through numbers from The Bureau of Economic Analysis, and spotted a dip in tourism spending of 10.2 percent over the three-month period ending on February 1, following Trump's election. The largest drop since the 2008/2009 recession.

Trump has created tangible reasons to stay away. His two attempts to suppress travelers from some majority Muslim countries from entering the US were very tourism un-friendly just on the face of it, as is the illogical new policy of not allowing airline passengers from eight majority-Muslim countries to use their laptops and tablets while they fly to the US. The bizarre new proposal to demand the social media passwords of incoming travelers from such places as Europe, Australia and Japan would be even more unwelcoming.

Dimitri Ioannides, professor of tourism studies and geography at Mid-Sweden University, and author of the book Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis told me that anecdotally, he's seen changes in people's travel plans, both to boycott the US for political reasons, and to avoid it because being in the US sounds unpleasant. "I'm not talking about people from the Middle East. I'm talking about people from Scandinavia saying 'maybe we should go somewhere else for the holiday,'" Ioannides told me.

Ioannides, who has spent decades studying travel-related matters in the US, has also seen other signs of a strain. For instance, he told me a series of two minute ads originally commissioned by Visit the USA (a.k.a. the federal government) in 2015 to drive tourism to America's seldom-visited cities, have been recut into quick-cutting blurbs that seem to highlight American diversity. These TV spots, he says, have been in heavy rotation all over Europe this past month.

Ioannides' explanation for the sudden advertising blitz: "Obviously Visit the USA is worried. I haven't seen commercials like this before." Visit the USA itself did not immediately return a request for comment about this, and we will update this post if they do.

Laying all the blame for the decline in tourism at the feet of Trump, however, "would be a dangerous assumption," according to Ioannides.

In his Bloomberg piece, Mark Whitehouse, who calls the dip "small" in comparison to the drop-off in tourism after 9/11, notes that the US dollar saw a two percent gain in value against European currencies, which makes US travel a tiny bit pricier. But according to statistics from the US Bureau of Transportation, the value of the dollar makes for an erratic and unreliable predictor of tourism spending. Whitehouse also claims that short-term dips in spending "often reverse themselves."

Ioannides suggested that this may all blow over, because, in the grand scheme of things, it's not as unusual as it may seem.

"I'm a US citizen now, but the first time I came to the US was in 1986, and I stupidly crossed a yellow line and got chewed out by a guard, and that kind of thing didn't really happen in other places," Ioannides told me.

"The US has always been kind of strict," he added.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Here's What's on Danny Brown's Totally Weird 'Easter Pizza'

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If you've ever contemplated dumping an Easter basket full of chocolate and jelly beans on a pizza, you were probably stoned.

Or in Danny Brown's case, trying to help out a good cause (...and also probably stoned). The rapper, who was born and raised in Detroit, has partnered with one of the city's all-ages arts venues on a tasty campaign to raise money for a local nonprofit dedicated to introducing poetry and creative writing to young people.

The culinary collaboration comes from the mind of Matt Z, head chef of El Club and drummer of the band Tyvek, who has teamed up with other Michigan artists in the past to create unique pizzas for charitable causes.

Continue reading on MUNCHIES.

Legendary Comedian Don Rickles Has Died at Age 90

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Don Rickles, the comedian who pioneered an abrasive (but hilarious) breed of in-your-face humor and inspired a generation of imitators, has died at 90 of kidney failure. His publicist, Paul Shefrin, confirmed the news to the Washington Post Thursday.

As a performer, everything Rickles did was spontaneous, and no one was spared from his comedic crosshairs. He absolutely mastered the art of the celebrity roast—skewering A-list stars like Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and Mr. T. His signature style—launching barbs at anyone who caught his eye, spitballing joke after joke—can be seen in the work of Louis C.K., Lewis Black, and Zach Galifianakis, among many others.

Whereas today's stand-up comedians often break out to pursue film and TV, or hope for a Netflix deal, Rickles never really launched an on-screen career in his own right. The American Academy of Dramatic Arts alum was more of a hit onstage and on the late-night talk-show circuit, with a small part in Martin Scorsese's Casino and as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story. He also appeared in some classic sitcoms, like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Gilligan's Island.

Rickles spent most of his successful years at the Sahara Hotel's Casbar Lounge, the kind of place the Rat Pack—of which Rickles was a kind of honorary member—would frequent. Dean Martin once called the comedian the "funniest man in show business," and Rickles went on to join the singer's Celebrity Roast shows as a regular.

Despite being known as an "insult comic," Rickles always insisted his goal was never to be malicious or mean.

"There's a difference between an actual insult and a friendly jab. So I don't think I'm offensive onstage," he once told the New York Daily News. "I like to think I'm like the guy who goes to the office Christmas party Friday night, insults some people but still has his job Monday morning."

According to the LA Times, Rickles is survived by his wife, Barbara, his daughter, Mindy Mann, and two grandchildren.

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