On Thursday night, Matty Matheson makes an epic return to VICELAND for the third season of DEAD SET ON LIFE, our show following the celebrity chef across the globe as he eats, drinks, and goes buck wild with his buddies. Matty's not pulling any punches (or screaming any less) this season, and he's hitting an impressive list of destinations—New Zealand, Las Vegas, Iceland, and more—on his quest for a killer time.

DEAD SET ON LIFE airs Thursdays at 10:30 PM on VICELAND.

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

The United States launched more than 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria Thursday night, according to multiple reports. The strikes were in retaliation for a deadly chemical weapon attack, launched by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad earlier this week, that left at least 80 civilians dead, including 30 children.

Initial reports put the number of U.S. missiles fire from two warships in the Mediterranean Sea between 50 and 60. The strike was focused on a Syrian airfield near Homs and reportedly destroyed a number of airplanes and hit the runway. Officials tell NBC no people were targeted, and it's currently unclear how many casualties resulted, if any. Russia, which has troops on the ground, was reportedly notified before the airstrikes.

Speaking from inside his Mar-a-Lago country club, President Trump called on "civilized nations" to join the United States in "seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria."

Continue reading on VICE News.

In mid-February, 21-year-old Rachel Tribble was getting ready to go on a trip out of town when she discovered an extensive surveillance system with a "lair" tucked away in the attic of the house she was renting. She'd moved into the St. John's, Newfoundland home with a roommate in November 2016, after finding a rental company called Metro Property Management on Kijiji. At the time, she was only informed of a security system with outdoor cameras that were controlled by a panel on a wall inside the house—a system she was told was disabled.

But in February, Tribble and her boyfriend discovered something disturbing when they entered the attic of the house, which the rental company had previously told them was not able to be used by tenants since it was insulated.

One of the feeds on the surveillance system shows Tribble in her living room

"We ventured up to the attic, my boyfriend went up with my roommate, and he found the 'security system,'" Tribble told VICE. "My boyfriend said 'I can see you right now.'"

What they had stumbled upon was a surveillance monitoring "lair": a desk setup with subwoofer speakers and two big monitors—one of which was displaying nine images of different areas of the house. Tribble, her boyfriend, and her roommate then went around the house to look for the cameras that were feeding the system: They discovered multiple tiny cameras that they had previously dismissed as motion sensors in most rooms of the house, along with microphones, and a labelled, intricate wiring system built into the walls. Even more disturbingly, Tribble found the system was connected to ethernet cords—which meant that it's possible the whole thing was connected to the internet and streaming. Thoroughly freaked out, they called the police to report what they had found.

Police were also dumbfounded at the expansive network of cameras, microphones, and computer equipment and cords when they arrived, according to Tribble. She said she remembered one calling it a "cop-like system." They made a report, left, and Tribble and her roommate moved out of the house after they got back from a short trip out of town. Tribble moved in with her boyfriend, and her roommate had to find a new place to rent. As students, moving suddenly was not something they had anticipated just four months into a lease.

On March 1, they contacted police again about the situation; two days later, police went to the home and seized the surveillance equipment. Today, police are still investigating the surveillance system Tribble, her roommate, and her boyfriend stumbled upon. When contacted by VICE, the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary provided the following statement via email:

"I can confirm that we did receive a complaint from residents of an address on Freshwater Road in St. John's regarding recording equipment being found, complaint received mid-February, 2017. The complainants were renting the home in question. This is an active investigation so there is no further information that we can provide at this time. Equipment was seized from the home as part of the investigation which is ongoing and there have been no charges laid at this time."

Though the house was being managed by Metro Property, it belongs to a man named Kevin Vokey. Vokey told CBC that the equipment belonged to him, that he used it for personal security when he lived in the house, and said, "The only ones who had access to it were whoever was in the house."

According to Steven Penney, an expert in privacy and criminal law who holds degrees from both University of Alberta and Harvard University, the owner of the house could be facing charges depending on the results of the investigation.

"If this is being done for voyeuristic reasons, if there are cameras set up in the bathroom or the bedroom… If you're taking photographs or video of people who are exposing their genital area and observing them for a sexual purpose, you could be committing an offence," Penney told VICE. "That's potentially a serious crime."

However, Penney said, there is another potential legal scenario that could very well come up in this situation: "Even if they don't have that voyeuristic or sexual aspect to the case, it's illegal in the criminal code to record private conversations without their consent. It constitutes a criminal offence." According to Penney, if audio was in fact being recorded, it doesn't matter what it was being used for or if it had any use at all: "It's simply illegal."

VICE reached out to Metro Property Management to get comment, but a representative for the company said that they will not being giving further comment until the police investigation has been completed. However, the company owner, Peter Curran, previously told CBC: "As a property management company, we do not own the home, we were not involved with the installation of the security system, and have no access to the security system in any way."

For Tribble, the discovery of the hidden surveillance system in the home she was renting for about four months has had a lasting impact on her life.

"It comes and it goes. Sometimes you don't sleep as comfortably at night… It's not just my life that has been affected: My parents are affected, my boyfriend is affected, his roommates are taking me on as well," Tribble said. "I didn't think something like that could happen."

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More is definitely more in the massive tableau paintings of Kent Monkman. The Canadian artist of Cree and Irish ancestry paints scenes that feel like modernized Renaissance paintings, depicting everything from Native Americans and colonial cowboys straddling a naked woman martyr covered in pierced arrows, to surreal mashups of uniform-clad prisoners, winged angels, and crashing helicopters, all squeezed within the same frame.

In embracing this sort of 'maximalist' aesthetic, Monkman is able to explore an extraordinary amount of subject matter and thematic interests across his already large body of work, different than many abstract or minimalist painters whose works often emphasize the subtle differences amongst each piece. This isn't to say Monkman doesn't have a distinct visual style; he most certainly does, but the storytelling ability of his paintings feels just as important as his own painterly capacities.

Continue reading on Creators.

Thursday night, Donald Trump got up before the nation to explain the justification for the cruise missile strike he had just launched at a Syrian airbase, a sudden about-face from a president who had seemed disinclined to antagonize Syrian president Bashar al Assad before chemical weapons were used on Syrian civilians earlier this week. "Assad choked out the lives of innocent men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack," Trump said after the missile attack. "No child of God should ever suffer such horror. Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched."

This act of war was the first thing that Trump did that earned bipartisan acclaim. On CNN, Fareed Zakaria said that Trump "became president" as a result. Republican senator John McCain applauded Trump on Morning Joe Friday morning, saying, "This is a beginning, and a lot of hard things have to be done, but without this [airstrike], those other things couldn't have been done either." Many Democrats took issue with the attack not because they didn't believe it should be carried out, but because he didn't seek congressional approval—Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi pretty much gave Trump a thumbs-up. Hillary Clinton even chimed in before the missile strike to say that the US should be "more willing to confront Assad."

On MSNBC, Brian Williams remarked, "We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US Navy vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: 'I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.'" A New York Times op-ed from a former Obama deputy secretary of state declared, "President Donald J. Trump was right to strike at the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad."

The notable thing here is that Trump's foreign policy was supposed to be a break from the usual bipartisan pro-intervention shtick. Although Trump isn't known for sticking to his word, he used his outspokenness against American intervention in Syria and the Iraq War to seem like a less war-prone candidate than the obviously hawkish Hillary Clinton. During the campaign Trump warned, "You're going to end up in World War III over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton." Before he was a candidate, he kept telling Barack Obama not to attack Syria, and even last week he was apparently fine with keeping Assad in power.

Nevertheless, the attack shouldn't come as a surprise. During the campaign, he also promised to "quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS," so to put it in the words of his most loyal supporter, Twitter gadfly Bill Mitchell, there was no question that he'd have "the guts to pull the trigger." First and foremost, Trump is impulsive. He doesn't care about ideology one way or another, and he loves cable news. More than anything, he wants people to see him as a winner, to be popular. And as he just appears to have figured out, nothing is more popular than military action in the name of "humanitarianism."

The disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan taught us that liberals, conservatives, and cable-news pundits love a good war. It makes for exciting television, gives talking heads an excuse to appear extra patriotic, and lets politicians signal to their voters how tough they are. It doesn't appear pundits learned their lesson from Iraq—it took hundreds of thousands of deaths and a shift public opinion in order for the political class to admit that the war was a mistake based on bad intelligence. Yet media outlets still warmly welcome George W. Bush on their programs, and cable news is still eager to champion more war, as was illustrated Thursday night.

Trump didn't start a new war on Thursday. The US was already engaged in the Syrian conflict; he's just ramping it up. The president has no qualms about using the world's most powerful military. And apparently, nearly everyone else is going to support him when he does.

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The Calgary man who was held not criminally responsible for stabbing to death five students at a house party in 2014 is seeking more freedom after stating this week that his treatment for schizophrenia is working.

Matthew de Grood said he heard voices telling him the end of the world was imminent when he killed Lawrence Hong, 27, Joshua Hunter, 23, Jordan Segura, 22, Kaitlin Perras, 23, and Zackariah Rathwell, 21 in April 2014. He was found not guilty of five counts of first degree murder last year on the grounds that he was psychotic at the time he carried out the stabbings. He was subsequently sent to a secure psychiatric hospital for treatment.

On Wednesday, de Grood appeared before the Alberta Review Board, which will decide if he will be allowed more freedoms, including taking escorted walks in an insecure part of the hospital, the CBC reports.

His lawyer Allan Fay read aloud a statement on his behalf, expressing empathy for the families of the victims.

"They may not care that I am a schizophrenic. The act of killing five innocent people and putting their families through that agony is unconscionable. To them, I am either a very evil person or a psychotic individual who is dangerous and can't be trusted."

He promised to do everything in his power not to relapse.

"I respect the decisions of the board," he said.

According to the Canadian Press, de Grood's doctor Sergio Santana said de Grood has been in full remission since July 2014 and that he's at low risk to re-offend, provided he stays on his medication in a hospital setting.

Read more: Calgary Man Who Thought Five People He Killed Were Werewolves Not Criminally Responsible: Crown

Fay said his client has been described as a model patient.

However, family members of those slain told the board the hearing, which came just before the third anniversary of their loved ones' deaths, is stirring up their grief.

"I cannot express the anguish and anger that I feel. Our nightmare continues every day," said Gregg Perras, father of Kaitlin Perras. Zackariah Rathwell's mother Ronda-Lee Rathwell said, "If he truly is sorry and never wants it to happen again, then he should voluntarily commit himself to be institutionalized or be hospitalized forever."

The board has not yet made a decision.

In February, Will Baker (formerly Vince Lee), the man who beheaded and cannibalized a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus destined for Winnipeg in 2008 was granted a full release. Baker was also schizophrenic and was found not criminally responsible for killing 22-year-old Tim McLean.

Over the years, Lee was granted more and more privileges, and had been living on his own with supervised medication intake before being granted a full discharge.

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In 2015, an image of a striped dress took the internet by storm. Some people saw the stripes as gold and white, while others saw them as black and blue. The debate raged for days in the trenches of internet forums, families were divided, and lives were undoubtedly lost in defense of stupid opinions. But when the dust settled and the carnage was seen clearly by the light of day, what did the internet have to show for itself? Were we any closer to discovering the true color of the dress, or had internet reputations been torn asunder in vain?

We could borrow Situationist critique and discourse on the Spectacle of the Dress until the end of days, but according to the company who made the dress the garment is actually black and blue. But that still doesn't answer the question of why so many people saw something totally different—a question that scientists are still puzzling over.

According to new research published today in Journal of Vision (which announced that it would be compiling a special issue on vision science related to the dress) the dress discrepancy boils down to individual assumptions about how the dress was illuminated.

Continue reading on Motherboard.

It looks like Twitter won't be facing off against the Trump administration in court any time soon. On Friday, officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reportedly dropped their summons requesting Twitter unmask the user behind the @ALT_USCIS account.

According to Reuters, Twitter decided to withdraw the lawsuit it filed Thursday in response. Back in March, CBP reportedly slapped the tech giant with a summons "demanding that Twitter provide them records that would unmask, or likely lead to unmasking, the identity of the person(s) responsible for the @ALT_USCIS account." In an effort to block the government from finding out who was behind the account, Twitter filed a lawsuit to block the summons, citing free speech protections.

"Permitting CBP to pierce the pseudonym of the @ALT_USCIS account would have a grave chilling effect on the speech of that account in particular and on the many other 'alternative agency' accounts that have been created to voice dissent to government policies," Twitter states in the lawsuit. "The Supreme Court has long recognized the extraordinary value of the kind of speech emanating from these accounts—pure political speech criticizing government policies and highlighting government waste and mismanagement."

"Alternative agency" Twitter accounts like @ALT_USCIS started popping up right after Trump was elected, and are thought in some cases to be run by rogue government staffers under the new administration who want to share their opposing views. There's now @altNPSandEPA, @AltStateDpt, and @Alt_NASA, among many others.

In recent weeks the alternative US Citizenship and Immigration Services account had been criticizing the new administration's approach to immigration, including ICE raids and the plan for Trump's "great wall." According to CNBC, the account is thought to be run by at least one federal immigration employee.

"I'm a grown-up woman," protests Tracey (Michaela Coel). "I just regularly make childlike mistakes." That's one way to sum up Chewing Gum, a British E4 series (also created and written by Coel) which recently premiered its second season on Netflix. At 24 years old, Tracey is straddling the line between childish and teenage impulses with an adult life and desires—and that's not even getting into the series' wonderful, and often filthy, balance between Christianity and sex.

Tracey and her family—strict mother (Shola Adewusi) and uptight older sister Cynthia (Susan Wokoma, performing exorcisms in both this and the also-great Crazyhead)—are Evangelical Christians living on a council estate. Much of Chewing Gum follows the conflicts between Tracey's religion and her somewhat-desperate mission to lose her virginity. Her upbringing contradicts with her current desires. While her mother prays for strangers' vaginas and Cynthia dreams of a life where the three of them continue to sit around a table playing boring games, Tracey is busy trying to convince her also-religious boyfriend to stop praying long enough to sleep with her. It doesn't help that Tracey tends to have bad nosebleeds whenever she's turned on.

The brilliant pilot episode sets up the hilarious, awkward, dirty, and sometimes sad series: Tracey attempts to seduce her boyfriend ("Rub your parts on my private parts!") but he throws a bible at her and calls her poison. Later, a new love interest Connor (Robert Lonsdale) is baffled while, still clad in her pajamas, Tracey literally sits on his face. "I don't remember if I was supposed to wear clothes for this bit or not," Tracey explains to the camera.

One element of Chewing Gum that especially rings true is Tracey's lack of knowledge about sex. It's portrayed throughout the series, particularly the first season, and is reflective of many young women (and even men) who grew up in religious households or religious schools that didn't provide proper sex education. Being sheltered in religion means having to look elsewhere.

Tracey seeks answers from her best friend Candice (Danielle Isaie), the girl who neglected to tell her the specifics of sitting on your partner's face. Cynthia, on the other hand, uses the internet—her "becoming sexual" searches lead her to step-by-step instructions on how to masturbate. Chewing Gum finds humor in this awkwardness, whether it's Tracey explaining to a pharmacist that she needs the morning after pill even though she only jerked off a guy, or going to the extreme and resorting to voodoo and Diet Coke to end a pregnancy that definitely doesn't exist. But even when the antics are exaggerated, they remain believable. Being forbidden to use tampons until marriage, as Tracey is, was a common refrain in my Catholic High School; the majority of my sex ed took place in LiveJournal comment sections.

This relatability works tandem with the surrealism that pops up throughout the series. Chewing Gum, similar to last year's other breakout sex-positive British sitcom Fleabag, is a fan of breaking the fourth wall and having Tracey speak directly to the camera in her infectious, rapid-fire narration. This device simultaneously brings viewers closer to her experiences in the most humiliating of moments. And Chewing Gum loves to portray the humiliating, grosser, and more awkward parts of sex that most TV shows that skew young tend to skip over in favor of romanticized, perfectly-soundtracked sex scenes.

Whether it's Candice arguing with her boyfriend that being interested in BDSM doesn't make her weird or Cynthia's highly clinical and researched version of her own sexual awakening ("I broke my hymen in preparation"), Chewing Gum offers viewers brutal and refreshing honesty. But the best material is saved for Tracey, with actress Michaela Coel embracing all of the gawky eccentrics of her semi-autobiographical character. In one scene, Tracey humps the pillow while complaining about the unrealistic aspects of porn. In another, she compares her boyfriend's dick to "raw chicken skin." As Tracey struggles to portray the right expression while taking a sexy selfie, Candice asks, "Do you want to suck his dick or smile at it?" Tracey, legitimately confused, responds, "Neither?"

Chewing Gum is much more than sex plots. The second season emphasizes the female friendship between Tracey and Candice and it depicts the awkwardness of navigating your first break-up—especially when you're still hanging out with your ex. One episode even finds anger and humor in the white fetishization of black bodies.

It's clear that Chewing Gum's main goal is to remain deliriously weird, honest, and charming (and to commit to a Ja Rule-heavy soundtrack) throughout its run. And it succeeds—not in spite of Tracey's childlike mistakes, but because of them.

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Sex surrogates work alongside licensed therapists, using sexual contact and coaching to help clients struggling with various forms of sexual dysfunction. While the industry experienced a boom in the 80s, things slowed dramatically with the AIDS epidemic. These days, the practice is moving back into the spotlight, but things look much different now than they did in its heyday. Surrogates once appeared to be all but reserved for male clients; as society inched forward, an increasing number of women began voicing an interest in improving their sex lives, as did gay men and lesbians. Today, surrogates say an increasing number of transgender people are turning to their services in order to become more comfortable with their sexuality.

When Dr. Laurie Bennett-Cook was pursuing her doctorate in human sexuality, there was a point at which she thought it would lead to a career as a sex therapist. She said she always enjoyed helping people in that particular area of their lives, and as a former sex worker, she's had solid experience doing so.

But there was something about the therapist's chair that just didn't sit well with her. "It's impossible for me to sit across from somebody pouring their heart out and just nod my head," she said. According to ethical guidelines laid out by the American Psychological Association, therapists are not allowed to engage in sexual contact with patients. So Bennett-Cook decided not to apply for her license to practice when the program ended. Instead, she looked into life as a sex surrogate.

"Sex is tactile," said Bennett-Cook. "It's hands-on." And for the past four years, Bennett-Cook has enjoyed a career in the field, helping cisgender and transgender clients unlock a deeper connection to their bodies and sexuality.

The sexual surrogacy model was first introduced in Human Sexual Inadequacy, a text penned by the famed sex research duo William Masters and Virginia Johnson back in 1970. The therapist helps the patient unearth issues impacting their sexual performance, while the surrogate relies on a more intimate approach to help them hammer it out. According to the International Professional Surrogate Association, one of the world's leading authorities on the model, a surrogate's job is to participate in a series of structured and unstructured activities with a client to help them achieve a therapeutic goal. That can include verbal instruction, sensual touching, and yes, sometimes sexual intercourse. The idea is to to help clients "build self awareness and skills in the area of physical and emotional intimacy."

Laura A. Jacobs began her transition in the late 90s, around the same time that she decided to pursue a career as a therapist specializing in queer and gender non-conforming issues. "I think being trans inherently involves a complicated relationship with your body," she said. Unfortunately, she explained, body parts that tend to cause some trans individuals discomfort are the same ones typically used for sexual pleasure.

It goes without saying, but that's not always the case—not all transgender people choose to transition, and many can't or don't want to receive sex reassignment surgery. Of those who do, many have no problem with their sexuality or having sex, either pre- or post-surgery. But for some, it can be intimidating or confusing to sexually engage their new bodies.

"You don't go through 20 or 30 years of being uncomfortable with your body and then, through hormones and surgery, be able to experience your body in all its richness. It just doesn't work quite that way," she said. "It can take a while to reconnect with your body and really experience yourself as a sexual being." Surrogates, she explained, can help in that process.

Bennett-Cook explained that while the majority of her trans clients approach her excited about transitioning, some worry about their bodies' ability to operate in a sexual context. But Dr. Sherman Leis, who has performed sex reassignment surgeries for over 30 years and today heads the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, said they may have little to fear. "I would say almost every patient is able to have sex in any variety that a non-transgender patient could have" after surgeries he performs, he explained. While certain procedures require him to reposition the genitalia, important nerve endings are kept intact. That way, everything remains functional from a stimulatory standpoint.

Bennett-Cook encourages her clients to find pleasure after sex reassignment surgery through a series of touch and exploration exercises. Her job is to guide them, offering support and, occasionally, a helping hand. To be sure, not all surrogates are able or willing to help trans clients, and because there is no single certifying body for surrogate partner therapy, surrogates aren't trained in any uniform way. Keeping up to date with the curriculum, so to speak, is a responsibility that falls largely with each surrogate.

Lola D. Houston began her transition three and a half years ago, and she is currently enrolled in a training program to become a surrogate partner. When she completes the process, she will be one of the the few trans surrogates working in the field. For her, the process of becoming comfortable with one's sexuality after transition doesn't start in the body—it starts in the mind. "You have to get past all that shitty enculturation in order to really claim a new way of experiencing your own sexuality," she said. "You have to let that go so that you can really sit back and enjoy what you're now becoming."

Helping others find a new mindset is one of the many ways a surrogate's duties can extend beyond sex. For Lola, being out in a time of political peril is its own sort of burden. "I think it's a huge challenge, and it's probably worse now than it has been," she said with a nod to the current administration. "To what extent can you retain your own sense of identity and still walk out the door and not feel unsafe?" she asked. "I'm not just talking about the possibility of being assaulted. I'm talking about feeling safe in that I don't want people to stare at me. I don't want people to ask me funny questions. I don't want to be misgendered."

Many therapists who work with transgender clients appreciate those concerns. "We teach clients how to get into and out of conversations," said Kaye. In her sessions, Bennett-Cook covers things like consent, eye contact, how to talk about your sexual history and boundaries. "While it is very physical, surrogacy covers a lot of emotional aspects," she said.

"People just want to feel normal," said Kaye. "I think it's really the same conversation with everyone. You just have to tweak the language a bit."

Lola, for her part, sees surrogacy as the beginning of a journey for her future clients. "My goal here is not to become someone's sex partner," she said. "That's not the point of surrogate partner therapy. My goal is to help them open that door and then step away as they walk through."

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It was a recent Saturday morning and my hangover was prohibiting much movement from where I found myself, which at the time was the Santa Barbara Wharf—not the worst place to be immobile and hungover on a cool, clear, late winter day. The night before I'd been beaten badly at pool in a State Street bar backroom where you can still smoke cigarettes, and been offered meth by a transient sleeping in a tree. Regarding the meth, I had demurred, but that didn't mean I wasn't up for a little adventure, Santa Barbara style—which was about to present itself to me in the person of Paul Teall and Paul Teall's rare, fire engine-red kelp crabs.

I'd describe Teall as an old-fashioned seaman, a fisherman's fisherman—but that's probably because I don't know much about fishing or fishermen. He has rough hands and an easy smile and captains a hundred-year-old boat that he takes out to the Channel Islands the long way, a 6-hour trip each leg during which, according to some cursory Instagram snooping, he prefers to listen to old-time country and western music.

Teall spends four full days a week at sea, returning to the mainland each Friday with a haul of fish and crab that this year—for the first time in a dozen years, Teall says—includes a great deal of hard-to-find wild caught red kelp crabs. The crabs, which Teall calls "dragon crabs," are distinguished by their four-pointed carapace, which makes them look more than a little like baby crustacean Batmans, and their shells are fire-engine red. These, Teall puts on ice in a chest under a pop-up tent on the pier at the wharf and offers for sale each Saturday morning—$3/pound for whole crabs, $5/pound for claws.

Continue reading on MUNCHIES.

Here's an excerpt from Anelise Chen's debut novel So Many Olympic Exertions, out in June from Kaya Press. I first had the pleasure of publishing Chen's fiction in Gigantic, which I co-edit, in 2011. Although the story we published (also titled "So Many Olympic Exertions") isn't included in the book, it's wonderful to see how marvelously this project has evolved.

Chen's style is easygoing yet analytical, hilarious yet existential, poignant, and always surprising. A semiautobiographical work, the novel channels such influences as David Markson and Lydia Davis, fusing obscure sports trivia, self-help manuals, the journals of Kafka and Virginia Woolf, philosophy, mythology, and athlete profiles (along with conversations with one's immigrant parents) to explore the hazier interstices where the self exists within our culture's dichotomies of mind and body, nerd and jock, ecstasy and defeat.

—James Yeh, culture editor

An Excerpt from So Many Olympic Exertions

"Hey, Mom! Why did you want me to swim so badly? Where did you even get the idea?"

I am asking her this at breakfast as she eats her habitual bowl of plain, instant oatmeal. My parents have just finished a job, and now they stay home with me all day, Dad browsing funny things nonstop online, Mom barging into my room whenever she is about to do something. I am going to sauté some cabbage! I am going to hang the clothes out!

Throughout our childhood, their work would always seesaw like this: periods of dizzying, 16-hour days, then nothing. The doldrums. Waiting for the next client to call. As a kid, I could never be completely present with them: I resented them for all the times they were busy and couldn't treasure the quiet times, never knowing when another job was going to make them disappear again.

This time, I find myself silently irritated by their intrusion into my writing routine. At least this is what I tell myself. Actually I know I'm just using them as an excuse, armor against my own inability to finish my dissertation. I'll start again when they start another job, I tell myself.

"I mean, why did you throw me into the pool and force me to join swim team?"

Mom scoffs in protest. "How come I sign you up to do swimming? I did not! You want to swim all by yourself! You force me to!"

"Obviously you wanted me to do it. Why else would you let me do it for so long?"

"I don't know what you are talking about. You do it because you keep saying you want to do it. I just think OK, stubborn girl, I cannot stop you. I was confused mom. Because you know when you were five years old before we leave Taiwan? On weekend I take you to play with your cousins in Yilan, with San San and Di Di, and they always jump around like crazy monkeys, so active, so confident. But you? No, no, no. You always treat your body like diplomat, OK? Very polite and careful. They climb up and down playground screaming shouting jumping, but you just let your body hang upside down on monkey bars like wet mop. Like you can let go and fall down, no strength. I notice that right away. I think, Wow, this cannot be. We are about to go to America and you are like tiptoeing little mouse! You know my favorite show when I was a girl? Leave to Beaver. My favorite movie actor? Clint Eastwood. Cowboy Indians, so much excitement! We are going there to a big place so you have to be strong like that. But when we get here I take you to rolling skater rink and right away you break your arm! Then you fall down on bicycle and break your foot! My god. Next year when we looking to buy this new house, the pool was in backyard and I think yes, good idea! So after we go swimming. You were so scared of water. When you take shower you have to dip your head back like this so water only touch your forehead. Can you imagine when I throw you in the pool first time? You were so scared and screaming crying like crazy and fighting but I think it's OK, water cannot break bones. I walk around the pool with leaf net to fish you up, ha ha ha! You remember? Ha ha. Sorry. I was bad. Child abuse. Ha ha ha! But slowly you like to do it. Remember? All the time, telling me to take you to swimming class. I had no time because I had to work. Finally I say OK, take you to join swim team. Maybe you were fourth, fifth grade? Fifth probably. Take up all your time. Tammy's mama took you to practice every day right? You still get good grades, so I think it's OK. But in high school your grades are not so good, but I think maybe you can just keep going because it is American way. Didn't I explain to you? I never explain to you why I think swimming is so magnificent? About swimmer I saw on the TV? The boy from my town, Yilan? No? Are you sure? OK. Now I tell you amazing story, OK? Remember forever. Long time ago, when you were in my stomach, when me and Daddy thinking about coming here, I hear something in the news that is so unbelievable. One American woman is swimming from Cuba to Florida! With her body by itself! Her purpose accordingly is she want to fix relationship of US and Cuba..."

Mom says she never learned how to swim herself, and even the thought of being in a boat terrified her. Though she knew it was irrational, she never believed that water had enough density to buoy her up sufficiently. But late one night on her TV, she saw this American woman trying to swim across the ocean. The woman was fearless, almost inhuman, like a paddling, kicking, breathing machine, arms churning stroke after stroke without stopping. A tiny mote on the sea. The only sound that kept her company was the repetitive splash of her own arms hitting the water, the sloshy gurgle of the waves hitting the support boat that drifted behind her at a sanctioned distance. Sometimes this woman would unknowingly swim into patches of disc-sized jellyfish and Portuguese man o'wars. The pain of their stings were like nothing anyone knew the words to. It was not a terrestrial pain. As the hours passed, the woman's tongue became so swollen from the salt water that she lost the ability to speak. Morning came. Her crew fed her through a tube. Weather carried her farther from her designated course. Each time she poked her head up to hear her progress, how many more miles, her crew would have to lie. Her crew didn't have the heart to tell her that she wouldn't be able to make it.

Meanwhile, this boy, my mom's former neighbor, was down in Jinmen, Taiwan, where he had volunteered to join the military in a fit of patriotic feeling. A brilliant scholar who went to all the elite schools, he had bought into the nationalist rhetoric of his youth, but his stint in the military was causing him to have serious reservations. Ever since the Nationalists had fled the mainland to this speck of an island, the borders had been sealed tight. But he had begun to see the cracks in the edifice. Their bastion of democracy was nothing more than a kingdom of the shipwrecked.

That summer, this boy also watched the same television broadcast of the American swimmer. He thought about her often. At the lookout where he stood guard every morning, he could see China, an edge of land just beyond a cold stretch of sea. The propaganda that blared from its emergency system loudspeakers sounded like warbly, cavernous echoes. Return to the homeland! You will be a hero! Taiwan's emergency systems responded, clear and shrill: Join us! Join us! The future of the Han is in Taiwan!

For an entire summer, the boy considered his options. "This distance is nothing compared to what that woman swam," he thought to himself. "I can see the land. I can touch it." "You don't know how to swim," another voice in his head chimed in. "You won't make it across alive."

But he had made up his mind. Whenever he got time in the private bathroom stall, he would study maps and charts of the tides and currents. He did extra pushups and practiced the flutter kick while lying on his back.

That summer was particularly hot, and an unprecedented number of jelly fish washed up on the shore. At night, he would sneak out half naked to the rocky shore and pick up the goopy masses, spreading them all over his body. Their sting felt first like a mild itch, then like a hot iron. He would lie there, bearing it. If anyone asked, this was a new type of beauty regimen. If anyone asked, he was sleepwalking.

The day he'd set for his departure finally came. The weather that day was balmy and sedate, the ocean placid and inviting. No, actually, there was a storm brewing, a Category 2 hurricane. But he was a desperate man. With a basketball tucked under each arm, he launched himself quietly, an airplane on water, kicking quietly underwater so as not to be heard...

After he swam to the mainland, he became a Chinese hero. He worked as a translator, an ambassador, and eventually as leader of the World Bank. He was so rich he became one of the first people to own a private car in Beijing. All because he dared to swim.

"OK. Seriously? That's not even a real story."

Mom smiles. "If you say so. But I think to myself all the time."

I just went and googled the World Bank guy. He really does exist. And he really did swim to China.

So, after all these years, it turns out that Mom always thought of swimming in this imperial, conquering way, as though it would eventually take me somewhere. But I never swam my way anywhere, never arrived any place worth getting to.

Did I even learn anything from all those years in training? I learned that I could not be the best. I learned that I had no fighting instinct. I learned I was desperate for approval and spurred on always by fear and shame rather than by desire. I had no desire to win. I learned mantras that only filled me with more shame. Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work. Winners never quit and quitters never win.

We learned so many of these mantras, with more and more coming at us all the time in different variations. How did this motivation mechanism work? was something I never learned. In the deepest depths of the most punishing swim workouts, when my fingers and toes would get tingly and I would start seeing stars from lack of oxygen, I was never able to derive power from those phrases, not when it really mattered. It was like holding onto a charm that contained no magic.

Another troubling observation: Mom is always sitting down. "Why do you sit to blow dry your hair? Why do you sit when you wait for the kettle to boil?" She makes a motion along her legs.

"What? Sore back?" She nods.

"How long has it been?" I demand. "Please go see a doctor! Go see one right now!"

She shakes her head and snorts in a semi-patronizing way. That brusque "Hnh! " that means "Silly girl! Do you know how much it costs to go to the doctor?"

"What insurance do you have anyway?" I interrogate further. "Don't you pay like $800 a month?"

She shrugs. "Business is bad so we can't afford now."

For the next hour, I make promises to myself: One day I will... and One day this won't... and One day when I... The promises sound empty. I'm afraid to finish the sentences. One day when I get a well-paying, secure job with my American Studies PhD...

All I can do is look up chiropractors on Yelp and read the reviews out loud to her.

She says: "Don't you have a dissertation to finish? You take care of yourself, and I take care of me, OK?"

From now on I am going to the library to work.

And here I am writing about bodies, bodies, bodies.

Excerpted from So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen by arrangement with the author and the publisher. So Many Olympic Exertions will be published in June by Kaya Press.

On Saturday morning, onlookers and press gathered at Sergels Torg square to pay their respects to the victims of Friday's attack. Sergels Torg is right next to department store Åhlens City, where a hijacked lorry rammed into pedestrians before crashing into the building around 3PM yesterday.

People held hands, some cried, and others left flowers at the scene. One police officer told me that he had been working all night and would "continue until this matter is resolved."

One witness told Swedish Radio that he saw "people on the ground in pools of blood" and that the scene "felt like a war zone – but you had no idea who was fighting against who or why."

Police spokesman, Lars Byström, told Swedish Radio that "the police urge people to stay away from the crime scene as the investigation still is ongoing." This has also been communicated via the Stockholm Police's official Twitter account.

However, the hundreds of people who gathered at Sergels Torg on Saturday didn't seem to care. "First I was afraid, but then I thought: 'Fuck it, I won't give [the attacker(s)] the right to terrify me,'" 28-year-old Anna told me as she left flowers at the fence surrounding the department store.

Last night, many of Stockholm's citizens responded to the attack by opening their homes to people who, due to public transport being taken out of service, were unable to commute back home from the city centre. Additionally, a "Love Demonstration" will take place at Sergels Torg on Sunday afternoon.

Most political leaders have already visited the scene too. They've all told local media that it's important to not let party politics get in the way of dealing with the attack in a unified manner. "We refuse to be afraid," Moderaterna party leader Anna Kinberg Batra told Swedish Radio this morning.

Following a press conference held by police on Friday night, one man was arrested on suspicion of having committed a terrorist attack through murder. Four people died on Friday and, at the time of writing, 10 people are being treated at hospital.

Scroll down for more photos.

Previously: Everything We Know So Far About the Attack in Central Stockholm

All photos by Thomas Skrlj

When my editor asked me to find the worst bar in Toronto (inspired by this VICE US article) the rules were simple: pick a bar that I think is the worst, go to that bar, ask another denizen of the boozy depths what they think the worst bar in Toronto is, go to that bar and repeat the process until I am a feeble, drunken mess, face-to-face with the bleak realities of alcohol's demonic influence upon us all.

Simple enough.

Where to begin though and what does it mean for a bar to be the worst?

There are of course shit bars. Grungy, anonymous holes in the wall occupied by a smattering of the human equivalents of crunched up empty cigarette packs, nursing corporate lagers and grudges against all who have wronged them whether it's their brother or whatever liberal female politician it's trendy to shit on in MRA circles.

To me though these aren't bad bars. They are merely bars, places for the downtrodden to commiserate. They aren't hurting anybody (metaphorically, I'm sure actually a lot of people have been hurt on their premises). And as Toronto's rapid transformation into a fantasy land for the wealthy continues unopposed, I appreciate the continued existence of these shit bars that act like gnarly food stuck in the shiny condo teeth of the city.

So I wanted to stay away from the dives and the Portuguese sports bars and start at a bar that I truly think is bad for humanity. But where? As I would discover in my travels, determining a bad bar is not always easy but as I sat eating some pizza to gird my stomach for the night to come and wracking my brain for horrible bar experiences I looked up at the TV playing CP24 and there in the background, across the street from the newsroom, was my answer, the first stop on my depraved journey aglow with its own garishness:

EL FURNITURE WAREHOUSE

El Furniture Warehouse if you are fortunate enough to be unaware, is a Canadian chain that specializes in cheap eats, overpriced drinks and an extreme sports/first half of Spring Breakers aesthetic that will make you root for the society destroying effects of climate change.

After waiting in a late afternoon lineup (an afternoon lineup!!!) to get in I saddle up to the bar, order myself a beer and a shot called a Mind Fuck (it was either that or one called Red-Headed Slut) and let myself soak in the ambience, soak being the appropriate verb because it felt like I was being held down and pissed on by a bunch of a marauding jocks. The place is loud and bright with cranked music, hard bodies and retro neon-signs pulsing.

The bartenders are the worst part. They are human surfboards dressed like professional wrestlers who, whenever you order a drink, flip the glass into the air in a bid to astound you with how fucking cool they are. Listen man, I just want a glass of water not front row tickets to the X-Games.

Beside me are two women enjoying some of the the cheap eats who I inform about my mission to find the worst bar. One ignores me completely, while the other is shocked at first that I don't like the place before rethinking and agreeing that the service is both bad and hilariously over the top. She is also the first of a pattern I'll run into throughout the night, people repeatedly unable to name a single bar they don't like and claiming they don't waste their time in bad bars. I drink another pint hoping more time will give her some inspiration for my next destination but she does tell me a story about an Uber driver fucking her over in case I want to write a story about why Uber sucks.

I turn my attention to the young couple on my right. He's from Saskatchewan, has grenade stud earrings and is excited for the upcoming John Mayer concert. She's a student who thinks that the worst bar in Toronto is The Imperial. So I finish my drink, watch one more complementary glass air-flip from the staff and head out on the road alight with the knowledge that El Furniture Warehouse is a blight on the earth and every minute you stay in there you will forget one book you have read.

THE IMPERIAL PUB

My heart dropped when I was sent here because I love this place. I can understand why the young woman who sent me her does not like it, she's young and hence has hope and probably believes in the promise of tomorrow and does not yet understand that existence is continual disappointment carved out of the oblivion that surrounds it on both sides and so does not get the appeal of a place like The Imperial which is comfortably fuzzy, brown and gross like your grandfather's nicotine stained teeth.

Tucked behind the Dundas square and open since 1944, The Imperial Pub is divided into two levels. The bottom consists of a wraparound bar, a fish tank that would give Spielberg nightmares and back room with a stage where I've have had some of my bleakest nights as a stand-up. Upstairs is the library, a big room with a pool table that is ringed by dusty bookshelves and where you can get free popcorn. The clientele is a mixture of faded regulars who may be ghosts and older students from nearby Ryerson University.

I head upstairs, with a headache and shot nerves from El Furniture's party or die atmosphere, and am immediately soothed by the grainy yellow lighting and a vibe of casual despair. There is jazz music playing which is appropriate because this is the kind of place where a jazz musician could find a nice corner to curl up and die in obscurity.

I order a beer and a box of poutine hoping for some of that dish's famed curative properties, and begin scoping out for some people to guide me to the next destination. A crew of solidly regular dudes behind turn out to be a bust as two are from LA and the third is another person who for the life of him can't name a bad bar. "Any bar is good as long as you're drinking,"stated the young man, his logic sound and unassailable. I move on to another group who also have a hard time naming a shitty bar ("Why would you go to bar you don't like?") before one woman asks me if clubs are ok. When I answer in the affirmative she says, much to my delight, that, "Croc Rock is pretty shitty." Yes!

CROCODILE ROCK

I have been hearing about Toronto's infamous Crocodile Rock since I moved here. Legend has it that Crocodile Rock is where cougars and silver foxes congregate, where the middle aged gather and get freaky, where moms and dads can get away from their kids and grind like there is no tomorrow. I've always been tempted by the appeal of Croc Rock, maybe tonight would be night where I fulfill my destiny to become a kept love-boy for an emotionally aloof divorced mother of one.

When I show up to the Rock though I am appalled to discover tonight this destiny will not prevail because Crocodile Rock is one of the many bars participating in a bar crawl called The Bunny Hop, which is one of Canada's largest bar crawls. I enter Croc Rock (which looks like a combination between a garage and a Batman villain's lair) to find the place teeming with newly legal drinkers dressed in white t-shirts and wearing bunny tails and ears, wasted on cheap shooters and horrific, youthful horniness.

It's a terrifying scene. Sort of "Lord of the Flies" but with a stripper pole instead of a conch. It's the kind of scenario that, if he could have foretold it, would have inspired Al Capone to turn himself in.

At one point while I'm sitting alone at a table taking notes (admittedly a creepy look considering there is more grinding going on around me than in my mouth when I'm asleep) a bouncer comes up to and asks what I'm doing. When I explain my evening he goes, "That makes sense, some people love us and some hate us." Bonus points to Crocodile Rock for having staff that have no illusions about where they work.

I ask the bouncer if he has any suggestions for a worst bar but he's a little busy. I next turn to a middle aged man who is the ringleader of a group of very uncomfortable looking dads. Not my man though, when I ask what the worst bar is in Toronto, he goes, "Life is too short to not have fun. I have a wife and kids at home, tonight I'm having fun," before dragging a miserable looking friend out onto a dancefloor that resembles a club from The Smurf movie universe.

Finally I spot three put upon adults with 'let's get the fuck out of here' printed on their faces. Two are also from out of town ("I've been in Mexico for three months. This is nothing, nobody is naked pouring tequila on themselves.") but the third, a jacked Irishman tells me the worst bar he's been to in Toronto is dbar at the bottom of the Four Seasons in Yorkville. So I say goodbye to Judy Bloom's nightmare and make my way to the tony Yorkville neighbourhood.

DBAR

Dbar is a fancy bar for the rich as hell. Everything in here glitters: the lights, the glass case displays of Prada clothing and jewellery hanging on the wall, the bar and especially the patrons.

I don't belong in here at all. I feel like I'm walking around wearing garbage bags and that at any moment a huge hand will grab me by the collar and best case scenario throw me out onto the curb and worst case scenario toss me in the kitchen and chop up my poor body and serve me up like carpaccio to the hungry-eyed socialites prowling around.

I go to the bathroom to get my head straight. It's the nicest bathroom I've ever been in with high walls and gauzy warm light. It's less a bathroom and more a mausoleum for your body's waste. The paper towels are insane, thick and soft at the same time. I'm tempted to take a stack and see if I can use them to pay off my student loan.

I go upstairs and get a beer and fearfully wander around, not wanting to stay still long enough to be noticed. My drunken paranoia is soothed when I spot a former customer from my coffee shop days. We greet each other and I tell him that I think I'm going to get kicked out, he reassures me not to worry his uncle just bought the place and I can say I'm with him. Yes! Thank you Liberals and your knowledge economy for the hook up.

Feeling less like a mouse caught out in the open, I turn an appraising eye over my surroundings and am struck by one clear fact: rich people suck at having fun. Oh sure people are getting drunk, going to the bathroom in lines and returning sniffing away, but overall this place is lame. There is some dancing going on but it's reserved and awkward. Everyone is too worried about being seen, about who's here and who's not to enjoy themselves. The DJ actually drops a sincere dance remix of the motherfucking Thong Song and everybody cheers. The Thong Song! Between the awkwardness and social stratification, this place is like if someone invested one hundred million dollars into one of my high school dances.

I finish my beer. I delay my exit in the hopes that my coffee shop acquaintance is going to take me on some whirlwind tour of the sweet life but he soon takes his leave off the place and I am off as well. I'm super-drunk and my head is pounding and I just want to go to sleep and what I've learned tonight is Canadians don't like to admit where and when they have had a bad time, El Furniture Warehouse is still the worst place in the city and that alcohol should be illegal. It would probably make the bars better.

Follow Jordan Foisy on Twitter

New Mexico became the seventh state in the US Friday to place a ban on gay conversion therapy for minors, officially prohibiting the controversial practice, AP reports.

Senate Bill 121, signed by Republican governor Susana Martinez, prohibits licensed doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health practitioners from administering conversion therapy to those under 18. According to USA Today, the law would not apply to ministers or people who don't have a medical license.

Gay conversion therapy covers a wide range of semi-psychoanalytic methods used to try to convince a person that they can rid themselves of homosexuality, often with a religious bent. A typical session might involve violent role-playing, shock therapy, or physical abuse, according to the New York Times and Huffington Post.

"This is an incredible victory for LGBTQ youth in New Mexico," Sarah Warbelow, the Human Rights Campaign's legal director, told LGBT Weekly. "No child should be subjected to this dangerous practice that amounts to nothing more than child abuse."

The American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and a host of other medical organizations have explicitly denounced gay conversion therapy. Aside from the fact that it treats homosexuality as if it were a "disease" that requires a "cure," conversion therapy is dangerous. Those subjected to it are eight times more likely to attempt suicide, and nearly six times as likely to report struggling with serious depression, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Minors are particularly vulnerable.

Jacob Candelaria, an openly gay New Mexico state senator who sponsored the bill, stressed to reporters that protecting children from abuse "transcends party labels and ideological differences." He also thanked victims of conversion therapy for sharing what they went through to muster support for the bill.

"Their stories did not fall on deaf ears," Candelaria told LGBT Weekly. "They turned their suffering into a force for good, and because of them, and for them, we have made history."

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

The crown-of-thorn starfish is probably the Great Barrier Reef's most serious threat, perhaps only rivalled by the Australian Government's apathetic approach to climate change. The species is indigenous, but due to a range of human-led changes in the environment it's seasonally breeding in vast numbers and ingesting large sections of the reef. Attempts to reduce numbers have so far been unsuccessful but marine scientists from the University of Queensland think they've now got a solution. They're going to lure them to their deaths with pheromones.

The plan, published in Nature journal today, comes from husband and wife duo Dr Sandie and Dr Bernard Degnan. "Crown-of-thorns is one of the biggest threats to not only the Great Barrier Reef but other reefs throughout the Indo-Pacific," the latter tells VICE. "The idea we came up with is to trick the crown-of-thorns so that we could trap them. Basically we let them do all the work. We set the bait and the traps, and they'll come to us. Rather than having to swim around and kill them each individually."

So what's luring the starfish into the traps? Through their research, the Degnans discovered that the crown-of-thorns' greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The starfish breeds by releasing large amounts of pheromones that attract crowds of other starfish, which then all spawn en masse. The Degnans were able to identify the genetic code producing the starfish pheromones, and replicate them, creating a synthetic version to use as bait.

"We wondered how they attracted each other into these aggregates. We thought, 'There must be some chemical they're releasing to attract each other.' So we proved that in the aquarium, and used some pretty fancy tools to characterise the proteins they were putting in the sea water, and then mapped the whole genome," Bernard explains.

Now that the research is complete, the traps need to be designed and placed around the reef. "The next phase is to engineer some traps so the starfish can get in but can't get out," says Bernard. "I guess the thing that's really different is that we can put these traps out and make them really big and put them in good locations, then just go away and come back a few days later to harvest the traps, basically like a commercial fisherman does."

"Harvesting" for the Degnans means diving down to the traps with syringes filled with poison. They then inject starfish individually to kill them. It's a very targeted procedure, which along with the environmentally-friendly nature of the pheromones is the benefits of the plan. "The starfish are making this chemical already. It's their secret communication system, so we don't think any other animals will be attracted to it. It's specific to these starfish," Bernard says.

Unfortunately, the crown-of-thorns is but one of many threats to the Great Barrier Reef's future. Still, Degnan is confident that this research will make a big difference to coral health. "The reef is under a lot of different stresses, but the crown-of-thorns is definitely up there as one of the major ones," he says. "What we're really excited about is that what we're proposing is solving a problem, instead of just identifying it."

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It was their ticket to life in the fast lane. A team of Indonesian hackers allegedly broke into the popular online ticketing site Tiket.com, stealing some Rp 4.1 billion ($308,000 USD) worth of airline tickets for the low-cost carrier Citilink. The mostly teenage hackers then sold the stolen tickets on Facebook, using the funds to buy expensive motorcycles, the group's self-confessed leader told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday.

"I bought a Ducati and went on a shopping spree," Haikal, 19, told local media. "I didn't invest the money in anything."

Haikal led a group of hackers known as "Gangtengers Crew"—a play on the word "ganteng" or "handsome"—and was admittedly behind more than 4,000 websites in Indonesian and abroad. The 19-year-old, who only completed middle school, reportedly taught himself how to exploit the kind of weak security measures found on sites like Tiket.com.

"He is quite sophisticated and the website was also not that hard to hack," Adj. Comr. Idam Wasiadi, of the National Police's Criminal Investigation Department's (Bareskrim) cyber crime division, told local media.

Haikal's crew consisted of likeminded young men, police said. Two of those arrested had just finished high school, another was a college dropout who spent al day playing video games, National Police Spokesman Brig. Gen. Rikwanto told CNN Indonesia. Together, they successfully hacked the websites of the National Police and the ride hailing app GO-JEK.

"He's hacked around 4,600 sites, but not all of them for profit," Rikwanto said. "He'd hack them and show it to his friends, as a way to show off."

The hack itself was actually quite simple. Haikal and his crew broke into the company's website and located the airline tickets reserved for travel agents. Travel agencies typically pay for the tickets in advance and then sell them to their customers. The hackers then allegedly stole the booking numbers and resold them on Facebook.

Tiket.com's parent company Global Network noticed the suspicious activity and reported it to the police. They hackers were caught a short time later.

The four members of "Gangtengers Crew" face up to 12 years in prison under Indonesia's Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE). Only Haikal was named by the National Police. The other three alleged hackers remained anonymous.

Haikal pocketed Rp 600 million ($45,000 USD) in the heist. The other three took home about the same amount.

Citilink, a subsidiary of the state-owned carrier Garuda Indonesia, said that none of its customers private data was compromised in the hack. Tiket.com was able to recover Rp 1.9 billion ($142,546 USD) of the stolen funds.

The footwear revolt in Canada is starting to make some strides. (Not sorry.)

On Friday, after much urging from the public, and human rights activists, the government of British Columbia banned employers from forcing high heels on their workers.

Heavy use of high heels can, obviously, fuck up your feet and body pretty badly. The shoes can cause bleeding, mess with your posture, cause your toenails to fall off—you get the drift, they cause an uncomfortably long list of unpleasant effects.

In Canada, the footwear revolt has been brewing in the country for some time now. Petitions have been generating thousands of signatures and the controversy forced Earls, a popular restaurant chain, to change their dress code policy after photos of one worker's bloody feet when viral. 

In March, the leader of the BC's Green Party, Andrew Weaver, filed a bill that focused on the gender inequality of footwear in the workplace that would prevent employers from "setting varying footwear and other requirements based on gender, gender expression or gender identity." The government didn't accept Weaver's bill but they did make changes to the provinces existing regulations and Weaver did get thanked by the government in the end for his efforts.

The government stated that high heels in the workplace was a safety hazard as they cause the wearer, at times, to shred their feet and also increase the workers risk at falling at work. In a statement, BC Premier Christy Clark said that forcing employees to wear high heels was "unsafe and discriminatory."

"In some workplaces in our province, women are required to wear high heels on the job," said Clark. "Like most British Columbians, our government thinks this is wrong."

To create the change the government amended the existing footwear regulation in the province's workers' compensation act. The amendment ensures that workplace footwear is "of a design, construction and material that allows the worker to safely perform their work." Furthermore, by the end of April WorkSafeBC, the province's workers compensation board, will draft a guideline to support the amendment.

The province's labour minister, Shirley Bond, said that she expects "employers to recognize this very clear signal that forcing someone to wear high heels at work is unacceptable."

While it is only a small step towards gender equality in Canada's workplaces, at least it's a step that won't make your toenails fall off.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

This post contains spoilers for the April 7 episode of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Reality TV villains love nothing more than to say how poorly they were portrayed and how they're not actually villains. And that, of course, is the bill of goods Drag Race season nine evictee Kimora Blac would like to sell you. After this season's first three episodes, where she did little more than talk about how amazing she is and how terrible all the other girls are, she was the second queen to be eliminated—and had nothing but sour grapes to share afterward.

In tonight's episode, Kimora faced off against Aja in the final lip-sync, and Kimora was sent packing, possibly because it looked like she never bothered to learn the words to "Holding out for a Hero." But never fear: like a classic reality TV villain, she has an excuse for that.

VICE: How do you feel now that your elimination episode has aired?
Kimora Blac: It's going to be a big release for me, just because the way I was portrayed was very much not the truth. But it is what it is. I've just got to accept it.

How do you think you differ from the way you were portrayed?
Well, I'm not a villain, and I'm not a bitch. A bitch and a villain? They haven't even seen one yet. I didn't even cut anyone's hair off.

How were you made out to be the villain?
I think they knew I was very blunt, and they knew my facial expressions were, too. They knew I was the only girl this season who spoke what I thought. I could tell a lot of the other girls held back. But I didn't go on Drag Race to hold back—if you're saying something weird, my face is going to go along with it. I think that's what the show liked, and what it got out of me, and why they projected me the way they did. But people who know me in person just know that's how I am, and they love me for it.

But you did talk a lot of shade on some of the other girls—you called Jaymes a one and yourself a ten. They didn't manipulate statements like that.
No, I wasn't saying they manipulated anything at all. I was saying that if you ask me for a rating of each queen, I'm going to give you a rating. That's what I meant about being blunt. If you ask another girl that, I'm sure they wouldn't say anything. If you wanted to tell me if she's a one or a ten, okay, you gave me your option. I'll say that's a one. And you can decide what the one means.

So do you think that you're better than all the other girls?
No, not at all. I don't think I'm better than anybody. The only queen I feel in competition with is myself. I didn't come here to think I'm better than anyone. We all got on the show, we all had the same script, and I'm so completely proud of all my sisters. We talk all day, and there's no shade. People think we have shade when we're on the show, but we're sitting here laughing about it because it's really not that way.

How did feel when you found out that you were going home?
I don't want to say I was relieved, but I was done. I felt like I gave it the best effort that I could—I got on the show, I did it, and they just sent me home! I didn't come in backstabbing anybody. I didn't come here cheating anybody. I didn't come here cheating myself. I came here, did what I could have done for the challenges I was doing. I walked out of there honest, loyal, and okay.

Why do you think they chose for Aja to stay over you?
I think the song matched Aja more than [me]. She's a dancer and knew the song; I didn't. Half the songs on the show are older than me. So it was a struggle for me to know the lyrics. Give me Nicki Minaj, give me Beyoncé, I'll slay it. But we didn't get that.

Did they give you time to rehearse the song beforehand?
They do. But there was so much emotion and feeling running through me that day—it wasn't just the song that I was upset about, it was multiple things. When I have two minutes to shine, it's hard.

What were some of those emotions?
I was really upset that while I stood there in an outfit that I sewed, created, and hand-made, I had Farrah Moan next to me with safety pins on her skirt, tucking it into her thong, then Aja on my left with an uneven jacket—it was like, what is going on? I thought this was a sewing challenge. I don't want to bring down the other girls, but if you're going to give me a sewing challenge, then let the sewing win.

In this episode, out on the runway, you were talking to the judges about not wearing your hip pads or breastplate—can you explain a little more what you were trying to convey in that?
I was just explaining that in my drag, I've been wearing hip pads and a breastplate for the longest time. I'm a body queen, and there I was with no body. So for me to walk down the runway without them on was a lot. I'm coming out a completely different shape, and I was just letting the judges know that. I wasn't trying to blame myself or hide behind it. But I was completely glued down with my costume, ass out for the public to see, so it was a bit hard for me to do that. That wasn't my drag. That's not what I've been doing for so long.

If you were to do the show again, would you do anything differently?
I would let my personality shine more. I don't think the bitch edit is the right way to describe me. I don't even think I was a bitch, I was just confident. I don't think "villain" is the right word either, because I didn't cut anybody's hair off or fight anybody. So I think just showing my personality, like, 'Oh she looks concerned, but she's actually dope, like she's nice and she's cool.'

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.

Who is Kirsten Gillibrand? According to New York magazine's Rebecca Traister, the New York senator is "a Democratic holy warrior against Donald Trump." According to an even more glowing profile from Refinery29 writer Torey Van Oot, she's "a progressive leader of the anti-Trump resistance." Teen Vogue says she's "setting the Internet ablaze for creating the political slogan the resistance deserves." (That slogan: "We're here to help people, and if we're not helping people, we should go the fuck home.") Refinery29 again: "She's not our newest feminist leader: She's the one who has been here, waiting in the wings, for years." And that's just the press she got this week.

Gillbrand is the only senator to vote against all of Trump's cabinet picks (with the exception of Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador), a symbolic measure of defiance seemingly designed to give her cred with the completely fed up contingent of the Democratic base. She's firmly in the Hillary Clinton mold—she was appointed to Clinton's seat by then New York Governor David Patterson when Clinton became secretary of state—except plainspoken enough to say "fuck." People are asking if she'll run for president in 2020 in a way that means the answer is almost certainly yes.

But if she's a "feminist leader" and a "holy warrior," she's a relatively new one. Less than ten years ago, Gillibrand was an anti-immigration, pro-gun Democratic congresswoman from upstate New York with an A rating from the NRA. Before she got into politics, she was a lawyer who represented one of the biggest tobacco companies in the world. She fought against amnesty for undocumented immigrants and wanted to cut aid in sanctuary cities. When then Governor Eliot Spitzer proposed a policy to give undocumented people driver's licenses, she was firmly against it. Her past record is being mostly glossed over at the moment, but as she rises in stature, some of her allies in the resistance may wonder: How sincere is she?

At the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, she "was involved in some of the most sensitive matters related to the defense of [Philip Morris] as it confronted pivotal legal battles beginning in the mid-1990s," according to a 2009 New York Times story. Eventually she was placed in charge of a team of lawyers defending the tobacco giant; after she changed firms she represented Philip Morris's parent company, the Altria Group, assisting them with securities and antitrust issues. Her spokesperson naturally played down her relationship with Big Tobacco, telling the Times, "It is a small part of her 15-year legal career," but her former coworkers remember it differently. Vincent Chang, who worked with her at Davis Polk, told the paper, "The client was always in her office... She was probably accorded more responsibility than the average associate by far."

Along the way she volunteered for Hillary Clinton and acquired her as a mentor. Clinton helped Gillibrand win a deep-red upstate House district in 2006, though the candidate's folksiness helped too—she was the type of politician who openly bragged about having shotguns underneath her bed. A fierce opponent of immigration reform, she pushed for local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration policies. She wanted English to be the official language of the United States and cosponsored the SAVE Act, which aimed to "to crack down on illegal immigration with more border guards and surveillance technology, accelerated deportations and a mandatory program requiring employers to verify the immigration status of employees." When Patterson appointed her as a senator in 2009 she was immediately criticized for her inexperience, her obvious ambition for higher office, and her flip-flopping on issues.

The flip-flopping was real: Shortly after her ascension to the Senate, she hired "a public-affairs consulting company with ties to the Hispanic community" and pledged her support for the DREAM Act, according to a 2013 Atlantic profile. All of a sudden she was pro-immigrant and pro–gun control, which she attributes to going on a "listening tour" through New York State, a move borrowed from Clinton.

In an interview with Politico's Glenn Thrush last year, during the Democratic primaries, Gillibrand explained that she was deeply affected by meeting with families of gun violence victims. "It's so crippling—I mean, I sat down with a mother last week in Brooklyn, and she lost her four-year-old baby… she took her kid to a park," she told Thrush. "Every mom takes their kid to a park. And she took her kid to a park and the kid was killed, a baby, a four-year-old."

The catch is that she was telling that story in part to criticize Bernie Sanders, who, she said, "doesn't have the sensitivity he needs to the horror that is happening in these families. I just don't think he's fully getting how horrible it is for these families."

Now, it seems, Gillibrand has shifted to the left again: She's cosponsoring Bernie Sanders forthcoming "Medicare for All" bill. But she's hardly the next Sanders—the Vermont senator, after all, was beloved for his dogmatically dependable ideology, and his position as a Democratic party outsider. Will lefties embrace Gillibrand the same way they embraced Sanders, even if she's talking his talk?

Gillibrand has owned up the the fact that her views are different than they once were, though she insisted to New York that "I never changed my values." In 2009, she told the New York Times, "In a lot of these issues, it's a case of learning more and expanding my view."

Lots of people shift their opinions over time, but such processes are often slow; they don't necessarily come about after a couple of conversations. But if some part of Gillibrand's positions are based on opportunism, they are still powerful positions. The left is genuinely lucky to have her in the Senate, especially with the Democrats so far from power, and with some of their red-state senators, like West Virginia's Joe Manchin, being far from progressives.

We need more firebrands who aren't afraid to vote against Trump and talk clearly and convincingly about why he's wrong. As long as she's advancing progressive policies, does it actually matter what's in her heart? Only time will tell.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.