This January, Sara Oliver Wight underwent genital reassignment surgery after a months-long battle with her insurance company. She documented the experience for VICE below, interspersed with portraits taken before, during, and in recovery from the procedure by photographer Amanda Hakan.

I really wish I could tell you a happier story. I'm a transgender woman, and I would love to be able to write about an experience with the American healthcare system that didn't feature moments of terror or sadness. While it wasn't always that bad, it most often fell between those less-than-ideal categories.

I decided I wanted Genital Reconstruction Surgery (GRS) in October of 2013. After three and a half years, I finally received the procedure on January 24th of this year. The amount of effort required to get to that point, both before and after surgery, has driven the majority of my decisions between then and now. In order to pay rent, I have stayed at jobs where I faced open and mocking discrimination. If I couldn't pay rent, I couldn't stay on hormones, and if I couldn't stay on hormones for 18 months, my insurance claim for GRS would be denied. I've hesitated to make travel plans, spend money, or seek out job opportunities because I needed to hold out for this.

Though I was beyond exhausted, hungry and dehydrated, I had more fun in the hospital waiting room at five in the morning than I thought I would.

I was 100 percent too nervous to read any of that hospital paperwork in my partner's hand. I still have it and I still haven't.

My procedure was originally scheduled for December 5th. About 14 hours before it was meant to happen, I got a phone call telling me my insurance claim for the surgery had been denied. I slumped to the ground in a way I have only ever seen in movies. I spent the rest of December fighting my insurance company; my partner and I made over 100 calls to the caseworker who denied the claim, and while she complained to my doctor's office about it, she never returned our messages.

Switching insurance companies was what finally made the procedure happen. By that point, it was January, and I'd been out of work since November, when I had held two jobs simultaneously—both part time, which meant no benefits and no medical leave. I left both to find something with more stability; my job search was cut short when I received the initial surgery date.

I think the look in my eyes reveals how fucked up on morphine I am. Getting up was never really a question at this point, but I couldn't even if I'd tried.

I'm used to feeling really strong. I work out a lot and pride myself on being self-sufficient. I found it hard to feel powerful when my lifeline was essentially this hole in my arm.

I threw out those socks in a Percocet-induced haze, and I miss them. That machine is called a wound vac and it pumps blood out of surgical zones. On the first day there was a lot of blood going through that hose.

The hospital stay was pretty sterile, and I was on a whole lot of pain killers most of the time. Thanks to those around me, I had some genuine moments of fun during my stay.

One of the first few moments after all the dressings and packing had been removed. I wanted to be more excited but was in too much pain to be that happy. I can be happy now, but was sad the pain took some of that moment away.

Those bruises were not fun, and I still have a few hints of them as I'm writing this. No, the doctor didn't punch me throughout the surgery—this just happens.

Sometimes we don't get to choose who will be around us in our most intimate moments.

Sometimes we do.

In order to stay on track for surgery, I sacrificed opportunities. I lost momentum in my modeling career while glued to the phone for two months straight trying to reschedule surgery. I had to turn down chances to work with artists and designers I admire because the surgery timeline extended from one month to three. This is what our healthcare system does to transgender people like me: It gives us panic attacks on the sidewalk when they accidentally bounce back claims, forcing us to spend our last $100 on medication. It forces us to fight for our survival. This systemic discrimination compounds with discrimination we face in housing, education, and employment. The message we receive is that we don't have a place here in this world.

Most cis people (and even some trans people) look at GRS as the "last step" in transition, but I considered my transition complete when I decided to change my name and pronouns. Everything that followed was just a step I took to make it easier to move through this world with a greater sense of safety and security.

That said, it's easy to fall under the delusion that this surgery would validate my identity in the eyes of those around me. I was still misgendered by my mother in the hospital—it hurt, even through the morphine. When a nurse came to check on me my first night at home, she misgendered me for over an hour. I was asked invasive personal questions that had nothing to do with my healthcare. My partner did her best to help, but the nurse persisted. When she left, I ugly cried like I never had before.

To have those who are meant to care for you perpetrate such violence against you when you're at your most vulnerable—it pulls your stomach up into your throat and ties a knot on either side. It made me furious and sad. It served to remind me that I will never be fully accepted by many of those around me.

This is the backyard I grew up playing and running around in, and this was my first real trip outside after the procedure. It was the first day that really felt like spring. Feeling the sun on my face the first time made me forget the difficulty I had just standing.

It's no secret that healthcare in this country is a mess—my road toward this procedure began well before the 45th president took office. Things have only gotten worse since. If we lose nondiscrimination protections enshrined in the Affordable Care Act, my situation could soon seem like an unachievable, best case scenario. And even if an insurance company is legally required to cover trans healthcare, as is currently the case, there's a difference between writing protections and enforcing them. Insurance companies can still ask for doctor's letters to access procedures and enact requirements for "consistent gender presentation." With those requirements in place, it's even harder for people who lack family and community support, as I've been lucky enough to have, to gain access to the medical care they desire.

Chelsea Manning—one of the most famous trans women alive right now—was denied trans-specific healthcare for years while imprisoned by the Army. Those actions have very real consequences: They broadcast the idea that trans people can be taken advantage of and that our healthcare isn't valid, ideas that are extremely damaging to trans people on an individual level. Seeing my insurance company deny my surgery the first time made me feel like I don't deserve easy access to a healthy life. I've been made to feel like months and years of work can mean nothing, and that I'd never be able to take care of myself in a self-sufficient manner. I have been scared, and I have been hurt, and I have been carried by those around me.

I have also laughed so hard playing video games with my brother and partner that I thought I would surely tear some of my surgeon's hard work. As one half of our relationship has been spent with me bedridden, my partner and I were made to connect in ways we had not before, and our relationship only grew stronger. I'm happy with the decisions I've made, and I carry with me the conviction that they were the right ones to make. I will continue to live my life, and I will continue to grow and thrive, but I have new scars now, and I've had to make peace with that, too.

It took a while before my partner could hold me like this. It's a unique struggle to not be able to show affection in the ways you are used to, but it forced us to build our relationship in new directions, and gave us tools we still use today.

After over a month of hospital gowns and sweatpants, I'm excited to be back to wearing my clothes again, because each piece makes me happy for a different reason.

I didn't wear make up for two months. I'm still getting used to putting it on and what I look like with it.

Two months ago I would not have been able to hold this position long enough to take a photo.

Follow Sara Oliver Wight on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Amanda Hakan on Instagram.

Women have always been horror's lifeblood. After all, one of our most iconic monsters was created one dark stormy night by a young woman who had (according to legend) grown weary of Lord Byron's threesomes. That monster was, of course, Frankenstein's creature, and our menage a trois-disdaining wunderkind none other than Mary Shelley. Fast forward a few hundred years through the genre, and we've amassed a veritable Lilith's Fair of horror femmes headlined by women like Carrie, Ripley, Regan, and Nancy.

But still, female horror icons largely exist in front of the camera. Even the canon's essentially feminine narratives, like Rosemary's Baby, The Descent, Let the Right One In, and Misery come from the minds of men. But the past few years have brought us a new generation of horror classics about women, by women. As films like Raw , Prevenge , XX , The Lure , and The Love Witch incite critical adoration and medical attention alike, women horror directors are having, as they say, a moment.

"Female horror directors and the things they are making are getting increasingly harder to ignore," says Alexandra West, horror journalist and co-host of horror podcast The Faculty of Horror . "The audience and the fan reception and the industry reception is so strong, that to plug your ears and say 'this is not a thing' automatically makes you a sort of dinosaur. And in the industry, that's something you never want to be."

Continue reading on Broadly.

One of the more heartwarming stories of 2017 has been people's obsession with a pregnant giraffe named April.

The fascination has been going on for months now. It all started when Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York started livestreaming April's pregnancy—as we all know, anything you livestream people will watch. Starting on February 22, the stream of the pregnant 15-year-old animal has attracted over 30 million people during its run. At one point the stream was taken down for being sexually explicit or having nude content but was restored when YouTube realized that, you know, it's just a video of a pregnant giraffe.

The pregnancy was mysteriously prolonged, so people who somehow became invested in this particular animal birth could sign up for text alerts that would let them know when the calf was due.

READ MORE: No One Knows Anything About Giraffes

It finally happened on April 15 during Easter weekend when, after months of waiting, park owner Jordan Patch posted a Facebook video of him enthusiastically racing over to April.

"Everybody, are you watching?" he yells ecstatically. "The labour alert just went out, our team is assembling. We are in labour! One hundred percent! So tune in! Don't stop watching! Cancel your plans! It's time to have a baby!"

And holy shit, did people ever cancel their plans.

Over a million viewers clicked onto the livestream to see the miracle of giraffe birth. The event took a few hours but in the end the calf ungracefully fell to the ground from it's mother womb happy and healthy. Baby giraffes typically come out of the womb at over 100 pounds and six feet tall and this little one seemed no difference.

This is April's fifth calf and the park will be holding a competition to name it so, most likely, we all just watched the birth of Giraffey McGiraffeface.

God speed, Giraffey, god speed.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders could've gone to Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Vermont on Friday for a number of reasons. Maybe he legitimately wanted to talk about energy policy with its employees, as the company indicated on Twitter. Maybe he wanted to tease a new free ice cream platform. Or maybe he just wanted to try out some new flavors. Whatever the reason, the one-time presidential candidate walked away with a pretty good photo op:

Maybe the man's PR team is genius. Or maybe this is just the podium everyone has to use when they visit the ice cream factory. But maybe—just maybe—Bernie Sanders actually wants to be turned into a meme. It worked pretty well that time he brought a giant poster of Trump's tweet to the Senate floor.

Or maybe not. But no matter; Twitter made the decision for him.

Bernie Sanders: The man. The meme. The legend.

Vinnie is a 15-year-old transgender boy living in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the heart of the fight for trans bathroom rights. And since the state decided last year that students must use the bathroom with the same assignment as their biological sex, he's left with no restroom he feels comfortable using at school.

Vinnie struggled for years with self-harm, and, at his darkest moment, suicide. The weekend after a suicide attempt, and a subsequent seven-day stint in the hospital, Vinnie stopped wearing his makeup, and cut his hair off. He finally didn't feel "wrong" and "didn't hate [him]self."

With a newfound commitment to staying true to himself, Vinnie is confident and sagely positive. Here's a little more about how he got to a place of trans positivity, and what he plans to name his dream dogs.

Continue reading on Tonic.

Say the words "omelette du fromage" to anyone aged 21 to 30 and it will spark something in their mind. Maybe it sparked something in yours just now? And yes, you might not know why, but luckily I have the answer: 20 years ago an episode of the cartoon Dexter's Laboratory was broadcast that would go on to define a generation – an episode centred around the phrase "omelette du fromage".

In this episode, "The Big Cheese", protagonist and boy genius Dexter tries to learn French by listening to a learning tape in bed. However, when he falls asleep the tape gets stuck and repeats one phrase over and over again: "omelette du fromage". Dexter awakes to find that all he can say – whatever the situation – is that phrase. While it initially seems like a nightmare, a sequence of good luck comes his way. Favourable test questions lead to hit records; hit records take him all the way to impassioned speeches at the UN; and, in one day, he manages to become a global superstar saying just this one phrase.

So to mark 20 years since the episode was first broadcast, I'm going to put this run of good luck to the test: by only saying "omelette du fromage" all day and seeing where it takes me.

I awake, face down in a fog of morning breath. My mouth scrunches into a smile: cheese fucking omelette. I haven't told anybody about what I'm going to do today, bar my notepad, in which I've written: "I want it just to happen, naturally, like in the episode."

I move into the kitchen, trying to make enough noise to wake up my girlfriend. After tossing a bunch of bruised bananas out of the back door directly at the fence, I'm successful.

"Are you alright?" She stretches out like a cat in the sun.

"Omelette du fromage."

"What?"

"Omelette."

Sitting up in bed, she looks at me. "I don't know what you're doing," she says, grabbing a towel and heading for the shower, "but just leave me alone until you're over it."

When she emerges, dressed, I'm sat at the table carving up a cheese omelette. She looks at me, then the plate, then me again, then shakes her head in disgust. "Couldn't you have chosen to do this another day, Oobah?"

"…Omelette du fromage."

"It's Saturday, probably the nicest day of the year, and I'm away all of next week. None of this occurred to you?"

"Omelette."

My girlfriend walks out the door, so it's on with the experiment: time to grasp for some of the money, fame and recognition bestowed upon Dexter. Where best to start? The bookies, of course. And which horse am I betting on?

Surely William Hill won't let this happen? To accept a fiver bet on a fictitious horse. A fictitious horse with made up odds. I approach the counter.

"Hello sir, is this it?"

"Omelette du fromage."

"Sorry?"

"Omelette du fromage… omelette?"

"No English? Let me have that, mate." He takes the slip and studies it. "Do you have a passport?"

"Fromage." I hand him the document. He stares intently at the slip and calls his manager. They chat, quietly. Eventually, he approaches.

I can't believe it. The house always wins.

Next, I'm off to my local café. Omelettes aren't even on the menu. I come here most days for coffee and I'll often put change in a pot that says, "Justin Beiber Assasination Fund" [sic]. Barrelling through the door, I'm greeted warmly by Molly – her accent, broad Yorkshire, and her hair coloured like chicken.

"So what do you want then, ma'love?"

I squint and stare at the menu I've looked at one thousand times. Soon, it comes out.

"Sorry, love?"

"Omelette du fromage."

"What do you mean then?"

One of the ladies cooking at the grill behind Molly chimes in: "Do you mean cheese omelette?"

I nod. We all laugh. I dab my forehead with my sleeve.

Pulses of adrenaline swell through me. Usually, when I'm doing silly shit like this, I'm giggling away, with my photographer friend Chris pointing an SLR at my moon-shaped head. Today, I'm alone, my jaw is vibrating and I'm struggling to swallow an omelette.

A message from my friend, and Noisey staffer, Ryan Bassil pops up on my phone.

I send a few more fromages – Ryan doesn't respond. He can't be serious, right? With an explanation he'll find it funny, I'm sure. Either way, I can't go to the barbecue – I'm meeting my friend Sam to watch the football. In fact, you know what? I'm going to call Sam now; this is exactly the kind of thing that would really, really annoy him, so I feel energised.

The phone hangs up and a valve is released; I keel over onto the floor. Laying on my side, I catch myself in the mirror. It's Ricky Hatton staring back at me; my face bright red, like it's trapped between a gigantic set of tweezers. Utterly repulsive. I stop laughing. Is this a normal way to react to hearing your friend is in hospital? I do hope he's OK. He sounds fine.

I decide to go and see another friend, Jack, who I know has a silly sense of humour; I once saw him fart on a basket of melons as a gag.

Opening his front door he's pouring with sweat: Liverpool are minutes away from kicking off against Stoke. He ushers me in, dropping comments about the line-up. I don't say a word; it's too tense. The game kicks off and he's asking me questions. Eventually one comes up that I have to humour: "Who would have the last word in an argument between Emre Can and Charlie Adam in which they're calling each other fat bastards?"

"Omelette."

Looking ahead at the television, Jack doesn't say a word. Moments crawl by; I hear kids playing outside on the estate. Jack turns to me: "I don't like this bit, mate. It's rude."

We sit in silence.

The game passes; we win. A great moment, but we're not really talking. We're drinking. Pointless: Celebrities is playing in the background. Half-watching, I'm on my phone, feeling a little anxious about the article – I barely have anything. But it's then that I hear it: Alexander Armstrong is asking Lee from Steps and Michelle from Liberty X a question: "What items are in a full English breakfast?"

I leap to my feet: "Omelette du fromage!!"

Jack is speaking even less than me now. It takes a while of staring into the bottom of a Holsten Pils tin to figure out what's needed. I have to show him "Omelette Du Fromage". I huddle up alongside Jack, pass him my phone and touch the screen to start playing the episode. I eagerly wait, watching his face to see if a smile emerges. The five minutes comes to an end and he looks at me for the first time in hours.

"So you're doing an article?" I smile. "What makes you think I'd give a fuck about that? I'm not Bam Margera's fucking dad."

At this point my brother clambers through the door. Dumping his bags in front of us, he senses an abnormal atmosphere. "What's going on?" Jack indignantly explains. My brother stops, looks at me and starts flaming with laughter. Jack asks what he's laughing about, but I know: he gets it. Finally, somebody fucking gets it. It's a great feeling. The yelps of laughter calm to a brief halt, and he manages to spray a phrase: "It's the idea…" Tears stream down his cheeks. "It's just so, so terrible."

I leave Jack and my brother drinking, waiting for a stitched-up Sam to arrive. I would stay, but I've spoken to Sam and squeezed all the blood out of that stone. Instead, I decide it's time for some dinner, and I'm in the mood for Nando's.

Walking away I'm grinding my teeth so hard it feels like they're going to shatter. It's physically painful. Sitting at my table, I can't believe I've managed to order. it. Are we living in the post-communication age, all destined to just bark one banal phrase at each other and for that to be enough? I don't know. I should be sad, really, but I'm just irritated. Why wasn't her reaction more severe? Will it read for the camera? My phone vibrates in my pocket.

Okay: forget your friends, loved ones, acquaintances – they can take it. But if there's anybody you should avoiding fucking with, it's probably coke dealers, if only for the fact they'll ignore you the next time you call them. I'm like 99.9-recurring percent sure I've never texted this number before, but texting back still worries me. The joke's not worth it. Walk away.

Oobah, what are you doing?

You don't have to do this.

Oops!

No. Just stop now. Apologise and block the number.

Is this what it's come to? Your work, your magnum opus: you, antagonising and prodding the last person still speaking to you, a coke dealer you don't even know?

He's given you an out. You've left it four minutes. You don't need the last word here. Walk away.

My eyes watering from an extra hot veggie wrap, I look up from my phone. I'm not even smiling. Tables filled with families, young couples laughing, busily reaching for sauces, and all I can think is: I feel such shame for everything I've done today. But I know I'm not going to stop. I can't. If you put me in front of Malala Yousafzai right now, I'd just say omelette du fromage.

As the clock makes its way toward midnight, I find myself alone and in bed, and decide to end the day as I started it – with a cheese omelette. I flick on the episode of Dexter's Laboratory and laugh through a mouthful of omelette at the same moments: the teacher asking the insane mumbo jumbo Maths question, and his look of surprise when Dexter is correct. His abrupt "omelette" soundbite given to an eager press. It's banal, it's brilliant.

Then, however, it gets a bit hazy. Dexter enters his home bursting with confidence. Approaching the door to his beloved laboratory, it asks him for the password – "Omelette du fromage," he says, cockily. ACCESS DENIED. He repeats it. An extra layer of metal shielding covers the door. Now furious, he yells again. More metal descends over the door. ACCESS DENIED: "Be advised, complete computer memory core meltdown engaged. All active experiments will be terminated and de-molecularised. Laboratory will self-destruct in ten seconds. Ten, nine, eight–"

Dexter, face contorted with horror, desperately yells: "Omelette du fromage!" before falling to his knees and erupting into tears. His sister Dee Dee dances around him, chanting, "It's all you can say! It's all you can say!" Quite traumatic/ I definitely have never seen this. I don't think anybody has. It's never come up in the many conversations I've had with people reminiscing about the episode. Dexter has undermined everything in his life. He's lost access to it; lost touch with reality. He handed it all over, and what had he got in return? A cheese omelette. No trade backs.

As the countdown hits one, the whole thing goes up in an atomic explosion. The video cuts out abruptly, leaving me in complete darkness. I look over to my side; an empty bed. Check my phone; no more texts. A chair is nailed to the wall above me, precariously. A T-shirt bearing the message "Masturbate: I love it" hangs from it. I take a bite of omelette. Bit cheesy. Nice texture. Great content.

@Oobahs

Joe Swanberg is one of the pioneers of the mumblecore movement, writing and directing micro-budget classics like LOL with Greta Gerwig and Hannah Takes the Stairs. While his early films were sometimes confounding to more mainstream audiences, his latest fare has become increasingly traditional in its narrative and structure. From the broody rom-com Drinking Buddies starring Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson to his Netflix anthology Easy, Swanberg is exploring a new, more adult world with movies that tackle the pains of growing up. This is especially evident in his latest feature for Netflix, Win It All, starring Johnson who also co-wrote the script with Swanberg. Win It All is definitely the director's most linear, straightforward film to date.

Johnson plays Eddie Garrett a riff on his New Girl character Nick Miller, a hapless gambling addict waiting for his life to magically turn around with as little effort on his part as possible. When he's presented with a mysterious bag of money his worst compulsions and habits take over, plunging him into a debt he may not be able to scheme his way out of. The movie is surprisingly sweet and moves along quickly, which isn't exactly a mumblecore trait.

I recently chatted with Swanberg about making more mainstream movies, parenthood and finding ways to make his movies a little less white.

VICE: I really enjoyed the film. I was kind of on edge the whole time, expecting things to just get worse and worse.
Joe Swanberg: Yeah the movie definitely seems to walk that line. It's funny because we had a lot of fun writing it and shooting it but I don't think it quite dawned on Jake and I how close to disaster [Eddie] Garrett always feels. So that tension was a really happy surprise as we were working on the script and started to share it with people. We wanted these very classic plot mechanisms to work but you never know. I've never made a movie like this before so it was a really fun and new experience for me.

I think it's relatable though the idea that you are just one move away from total disaster. That feeling when he pushes the dresser against the door and he's like trying to talk himself out of making a mistake…
I know, it's like he knows himself well enough to be conscious of his actions and then also like really can't seem to help himself.

Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision for Chase Sapphire Preferred/AP Images

I relate very much. So what inspired this tale of woe? 
Uh well, there's a comedy from the 80s called Sticky Fingers that involves these two struggling New York musicians who end up in possession of a bag of money from their weed dealer and I really loved that movie so I was telling Jake about it and was sort of wondering about this idea of this character babysitting this duffle bag and it was interesting to him. So over time, we used this as a jumping off point and really thought about like who that guy might be and the character that Garrett develops into in this organic process. You know, Jake and I don't live in the same city and a lot of his year is spent on New Girl and there's these windows where he has time to do other projects so what's nice about that is that there's always a natural gestation period when we have an idea we're excited about.

Jake's a really good writer and I don't have much practice as a writer or faith in myself as a writer. It's just not part of the process that I've really ever been that excited about.

This is your third feature together. When did you realize that this was a partnership or collaboration that really worked? 
I think in the middle of making Drinking Buddies. For various reasons, we were both a little suspicious about each other so the choice to collaborate on Drinking Buddies really felt like one where we were each attempting to prove that we were who we said we were and that the process was going to be different from Jake's end. I pitched him how I work and it sounded good to him but I don't think that he really quite believed that it would be the way that I said it was. So what he felt from me was that coming out from the process of making that movie, he felt like I had delivered on that promise and for me, I really developed a total filmmaker crush on him and he's just so fun to watch, he's so funny, he's such a good writer, he's fun to have on set, he's a really inspiring and motivating person on set. So it was really nice coming out of that movie knowing that he wanted to work together again. It's a really nice collaboration and I'm hoping that we'll get to make a lot more movies together.

Photo by Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP

How do you think your own storytelling has evolved? I mean obviously you talk about this being a more scripted film, it's got a very traditional arc to it. How has your style evolved since LOL and the early days of your work? 
Yeah, I've gotten older. I think there's been a natural progression in the kinds of characters that I'm interested in. I've had a lot more practice so I can see in my own work, a growing confidence in my work that wasn't there on the early stuff. I mean, I still like those old movies for how crazy they feel and I felt very political early on in terms of my opposition to story and structure and coming out of film school, I was very motivated to break apart a lot of things I had learned to see what functioned underneath the traditional ways of making movies and I think I'm at a point in my career where I am putting those back together now and I feel like I've really investigated, at least for myself, the outer edges of narrative and story telling in terms of not prioritizing that and instead, focusing heavily on character. Now, story has re-entered the process in a big way. The Netflix series Easy that I do is a pretty heavily focused type of storytelling that I avoided for a long time. I don't know. I'm sort of curious myself about how that will keep evolving.

I'm always sort of following my gut and right now, telling stories is really fun to me. I could totally see swinging back that other way and making some really weird and experimental stuff soon. I think I have a relatively short attention span and I do a couple movies in a particular way or pushing in a particular direction and then I get bored and I feel like I'm not learning enough or growing enough so I try to switch it up. It sort of ping-pongs between different motivations but the end desire is to attempt to turn over as many rocks as possible and explore as many techniques and not get stuck making one kind of movie or being one type of filmmaker.

There's definitely a theme of growing up or dealing with the ramifications of adulthood. Do you feel like a grown-up?
Yeah, me personally? Definitely. I was one of the first people in my friend group to get married, to have kids, I own a house, I have a mortgage now. It was sort of like - certainly the signifiers of adulthood are there. But also, in Win It All, I definitely relate to Joe Lotruglio's character, the internal pressure to be responsible and look after people and take care of people. You know, I'm the oldest of three and it didn't feel to me like a thing I chose. It just felt like an inherent part of my personality for as far back as I can remember. I wanted to do good and be good and impress my parents and be responsible. So that's always been there and I'm in my 30s. But yeah, I would definitely say that I'm an adult, a grown-up.

But also, now that I have kids, there's an interesting level of exploration in terms of trying to make sure I'm not getting locked into any rigid ideology but remain open to change and I'm noticing in myself that that is becoming more difficult the older that I'm getting. To some degree, I'm sure that I'll get locked in my ways with thinking and being at a certain point but I really am trying to stay as open as possible and just remind myself that just cause it's the way I've always done it, doesn't mean it is the best way. Life will be more interesting in the long run if I just continue to change and evolve.

I want to ask you about diversity. Obviously it's been a big conversation, particularly in the last couple of years. You've received criticism for the whiteness in your movies, is it something you think consciously about when you're writing and filming now?
Yeah, I would say that I've been as affected by that conversation as anybody. It's less like a conscious change in my work and more of the same sort of awakening that I think a lot of white America is dealing with. You know, you sort of have different things brought to your attention and you can't unknow them. To me, it's very exciting that we're waking up to a lot of systemic racism and even aside from racism—I think a lot of the reason why people bristle when they're accused of any racial bias in their work is because most people don't identify as having prejudice. People are like, "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm a really liberal person."

In terms of the diversity in casting and in storytelling, what I noticed in my own work is that it's just easier to tell stories about white people who were my same age and going through the things that I am going through like that comes naturally and I don't have to think about that. The same thing goes for hiring practices basically. It's easy to fill my crew with people nearest me. So it's going to take a concerted effort on everybody's part to do the thing that is more difficult which is to say that if we just—this isn't born out of any hatred or prejudice, it's just born out of laziness. Without even thinking about it, you could be perpetuating a really damaging system.

So yeah, it's very much on my mind in a way that I am happy about and excited about and in terms of the stories that I'm choosing to tell with Easy and Win It All and some upcoming film projects, there's just a nice little voice in my head going, "Just think a little harder and try a little harder."

Follow Amil on Twitter.

A newly discovered pink shrimp that, by snapping its claw, can make an enormously loud sound registering up to 210 decibels, has just been named by a group of scientists. They're calling the new species Synalpheus pinkfloydi, after the British prog-rock band Pink Floyd. According to Zootaxa journal, the newly named and very noisy pink shrimp can be found in the tropical eastern Pacific.

Just for reference, the sound this shrimp makes is formidable—210 decibels is more than a shotgun firing (130 decibels) and more than your average rock concert (110 to 140 decibels). According to a press release issued by Oxford University, the shrimp is able to generate this enormous sound by "closing its enlarged claw at rapid speed," thereby creating "a high-pressure cavitation bubble, the implosion of which results in one of the loudest sounds in the ocean." The sound is said to be strong enough to stun or kill a small fish.

The shrimp was named by Sammy De Grave, the Head of Research at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. A lifelong Pink Floyd fan, De Grave said, "I have been listening to Floyd since The Wall was released in 1979, when I was 14 years old." He claimed the discovery of this pink shrimp was the "perfect opportunity" to honor his favorite band; De Grave said he had been waiting to name a newly discovered species of pink shrimp after Pink Floyd for some time now.

READ MORE: Elton John Now Has a Species of Shrimp Named After Him and It's Glorious

Oddly enough—and unbeknownst to the scientists who discovered the new species—an urban myth about the volume of a Pink Floyd concert actually killing fish has been circulating for decades. According to Nicholas Schaffner, who wrote a band bio called A Saucerful Of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, back in the early 70s, Pink Floyd played a show at the Crystal Palace in London where "a 50-foot inflatable octopus, shrouded in dry ice" emerged from a small lake that separated the audience from the stage. After the concert, the fish in the lake were said to have died from "trauma"—allegedly because of the volume of the music. When asked by NPR about the urban legend and its possible veracity, De Grave said he had never heard the story before but said, "Yeah, that doesn't really sound possible."

Read the full story at Munchies.

Last week, a 75-year-old man was admitted to Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark only to learn he had days, or possibly hours, to live.

Carsten Flemming Hansen had internal bleeding and an aortic aneurysm—a bulge on the main vessel that delivers blood throughout the body. The hospital staff knew he was too sick for surgery, and it was only a matter of time before the bleeding ended his life.

So, instead of continuing treatment, they offered Hansen a different way to spend his last moments. They wheeled his bed out onto a balcony so they could honor his dying request: to smoke a Green LA cigarette and drink a glass of cold white wine. He got to watch the sunset with his family.

The hospital shared a photo on its Facebook page (which the family presumably gave them permission to do) writing that, even though there's no smoking in the hospital, the nurses and family agreed that Hansen's last wishes were more important than treatment and smoking rules. "This is his moment and his farewell to life," Inge Pia Christensen, the nursing director at the hospital, told a Danish news publication, per a translation.

Read the full story on Tonic.

Though Gorillaz' fifth album Humanz isn't due out until the end of April, we already know it promises to be a very guest-heavy LP, with Damon Albarn sharing vocal duties with (or relinquishing them completely to) Benjamin Clementine, Popcaan, Vince Staples, Savages' Jehnny Beth, D.R.A.M., and most recently, Pusha T and Mavis Staples.

It takes a certain kind of sensitivity as a songwriter to be able to step back from your work and say "I'm not the right person to sing this song." You can find much of that self-awareness in the British musician's output with the virtual group he and Jamie Hewlett created in 1998 . Not only is Albarn skilled in recruiting vocalists with defined voices and personalities, he also knows just how to deploy them in his music to sustain particular moods, and to get across certain ideas or themes. Whether it be grime, trip-hop, or soul, here's our ranking of the 20 best guest vocalists to appear on a Gorillaz song, and how they bring the cartoon band to life.

1. Del The Funkee Homosapien - "Clint Eastwood," "Rock The House"

As the lead single from 2001's Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood" was the first taste we had of Albarn's Blur side project, leveraging Del The Funkee Homosapien as the voice of Russell possessed to help define the group's hip-hop-meets-Brit-pop sound. His performance set the bar for the kind of energy and personality any subsequent guest vocalist had to bring to a Gorillaz song, and hasn't been topped since.

2. Shaun Ryder - "DARE"

While most of the melodic heavy lifting in "DARE" is courtesy of Rosie Wilson, Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder is left to do his own thing, and colours outside the lines with a brash, in-your-face performance. His dopey, almost out-of-time delivery is a strong counterpoint to the song's glittery, lithe beat.

Read the full list at Thump.

For more of Jana Vasiljevic's work, check out her website.

The time is right. The lights are low. The CD player is playing soft, sexy tunes in the background. You're so into the moment that you barely stop to wonder why anyone still has a CD player anymore. There's a pretty face in front of you and it's slowly approaching your own, lips pursed, a gentle blush spreading across their cheeks. It's smooch time, and you're into it.

And then the face-skin disappears and you're both just disembodied eyes and tongues flapping in the breeze. Your mother never warned you about this.

Ah, you know what? It's too easy to make fun of Assassin's Creed Unity for its buggy kisses. That whole face-disappearing thing was fun, but the kissing in that game—when the faceflesh was present and accounted for—was actually really, really good. And not even with a "for games" caveat.

And it was more than just a good snog, too. The scene that everyone's hopefully seen by now—if not, do so, here—is intimate and passionate in a way that many games don't quite manage to convey, because animating two discrete entities is, frankly, a total pain in the arse.

Read the full story on Waypoint.

On Easter Sunday 1977, while humming the words to a classic Irving Berlin song, I pretended to be Judy Garland:

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,

You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter Parade.

I'll be all in clover and when they look you over,

I'll be the proudest fellow in the Easter Parade.

On the avenue, Fifth Avenue, the photographers will snap us,

And you'll find that you're in the rotogravure.

Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet,

And of the girl I'm taking to the Easter Parade.

There I was, in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral's in New York, attending—and photographing—my first Easter parade. Even though I wasn't brought up as Christian (I'm Jewish), I've always been interested in how other people celebrate their holidays. Adults and children (and even some pets) showed up wearing their best hats and bonnets. Many were walking in and out of the cathedral, while others looked like they had been partying since Mardi Gras.

I took their pictures, and now it's 40 years later. Looking back, it's easy to see that things change—that styles come and go, that traditions take new forms. But we're still one community, one people, one planet.

Meryl Meisler is an artist based in New York City. She is author of the internationally acclaimed photo books A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick and Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY 70s Suburbia & the City. Meisler is working on her third book in a trilogy about the 1970s.

If it could be proven that Jesus never rose from the dead after he was brutally crucified, would that be the end of Christianity? Journalist Lee Strobel seemed to think so in 1980 when he spent two years of his life attempting to debunk the resurrection myth in order to save his wife from her new-found Christianity. It's a dramatic tale of theology and marriage that was chronicled in the bestselling book, The Case for Christ, and a newly released film from the evangelical production company, Pure Flix.

In the film, young Strobel is a cynical atheist and hard-drinking journalist for the Chicago Tribune, who simply cannot accept that his wife has begun praying and attending church. "I should be the thing that gives her life meaning," he whines to his atheist friend as they swill whiskey and quote Bertrand Russell. In an obsessively dickish move, he devotes his nights and weekends to finding holes in the resurrection story, believing that if he can prove Jesus was a fraud, he will get his wife back.

After two years of applying all his skills of science and reason to the matter, interviewing various experts on Jesus and his death (essentially treating it like a crime story), Strobel succumbs and tearfully admits to his wife, "the evidence for your faith is more overwhelming than I could've imagined." This experience drives him to quit journalism and become a pastor of one of the first megachurches, Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois.

Like George W. Bush trading in hooch for the holy ghost, evangelicals love a good conversion story. It's a narrative that makes audiences feel good about picking Christ. It's a big part of why The Case for Christ the book became such a huge hit with believers, with 14 million copies currently in print.

"It's one of those books, like The Purpose Driven Life, that you often find in evangelical Christian homes," says Adam Holz, an editor with the Focus on the Family movie review site, PluggedIn. "It was a phenomenon."

Attempting to prove the Bible's legitimacy using science and history is nothing new. The tradition has been going on since the birth of the religion in the first century. The most well-known modern example is C.S. Lewis, creator of The Chronicles of Narnia series. Lewis spent years writing books like Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, which have become the foundation for the Christian apologetics today. It's authors like Lewis and Strobel whose books are given to teenage Christians when they start asking questions about why the Bible stories of their youth appear to contradict the science of evolution, archeology, or physics.

Like a lot of evangelical books, The Case for Christ has been expanded into a veritable library of study guides, lecture series, specialized bibles, and student and children's versions of the book. This merchandising empire often becomes the primary source of historical information for people in evangelical culture (particularly for children who don't attend public school), with little secular information to compare it against.

In 2001, Ryan Connell was one such evangelical Christian who leaned heavily on Case for his understanding of Biblical history. Though his experience eventually became the mirror opposite of Strobel's, going from believer to atheist via a historical investigation.

"I'd say Strobel's book did more to damage my faith than strengthen it," recalls Connell, who now runs his own former-fundamentalist blog called The Holy Apostate, mostly read by people grappling with their religious past.

Back when he was a 19-year-old bible-college student in Dallas, Texas, Connell would often go out and proselytize to random people in bars, parking lots, or sidewalks (a common practice among evangelicals). He was armed for debate against non-believers with a copy of Strobel's book in hand. "That book gave me a lot of confidence to talk to intellectuals and academics about Christ. But when I found out that the general scholarship around Christ and the history of the church is not what Strobel presents, it kicked the legs out from under me. I felt lied to."

Connell says that despite having never actually encountered an atheist before he began street-witnessing, he felt he'd already known what all their arguments against Christianity would be, because he'd read Case. When actually confronted with non-believers, he had no answers for their questions.

"I'd never heard of the pagan roots of Christianity, or basic information surrounding how the gospels were written, how many copy errors there were, or that we don't have the original documents," he says. "Nothing I'd read had prepared me for those arguments. In his book, Strobel doesn't ask the same questions that scholars or skeptics would. Like trying to prove Jesus faked his own death and then coming up short. [But skeptics don't] wonder if Jesus faked his own death. They wonder how reliable the Bible's manuscripts are."

Among many, the biggest criticism Strobel's book receives is that all of his sources for historical or scientific information come from Christian apologists, never any non-believers, a circumstance Connell likens to "scientists who work for oil companies trying to prove global warming is a hoax. They'll start with the answer, then go looking for the question: 'The Bible is real, now how do we use science to prove that?'"

Strobel, who did not respond to request for an interview, has dismissed this by saying "I was standing in the shoes of a skeptic" when he set off on his quest, and that he reiterated arguments of atheists when he was conducting his interviews. The book wasn't written until the late 90s, after he'd already built a lucrative career around evangelicalism. This means Strobel had to recall what his mindset and arguments were as a young man in 1980, who was influenced by the writings of Freud and Bertrand Russell he'd read years before that.

The idea of putting the gospels to the test as a piece of journalism is one that makes most secular historians a little uneasy. After all, no one really knows who authored them (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not compose the books attributed to them), but historians do agree that the authors never met Jesus, never met anyone who met him, didn't speak the language of Jesus's land, most likely lived in another country, and wrote the gospels 40 to 70 years after Jesus's death, based on rumors that had been going around.

According to Dale Martin professor of religious studies at Yale University, there are no Roman records about Jesus from anywhere near his lifetime (assuming his execution was around 30 CE). The earliest mention of him outside those by Christian believers comes from around 60 to 90 years after his death, and some of those were later doctored by Christian scribes. The Gospels themselves contain contradictions, especially in the details of Jesus's birth, death, and resurrection appearances. Moreover, the text of the Bible was altered by Christians for political and theological reasons in thousands of manuscripts, copied over and over by hand, for centuries before the text of the New Testament could be said to become relatively "stable" with the invention of the printing press in the 1450s.

The Case for Christ refutes a lot of this, claiming that there were 500 eyewitnesses to Christ's resurrection, and that they were interviewed months after the fact. Strobel also maintains that the Bible is historically sound within itself, and when compared with secular sources.

Attempting to unravel the science behind evangelical claims that the Earth is 5,000 years old, or that Noah lived on an ark with two of all the world's animals during a global flood, or that Jesus's death and resurrection were "one of the most attested events of the ancient world" (as a doctor in the movie claims), and then compare them with the secular scientific opinions that refute those claims, would be quite an epic undertaking.

For Dale Martin, such a debate is not only futile and unnecessary, but misses the whole point.

"The gospels are not designed to be journalistic documents," says Martin, who specializes in origins of Christianity and the New Testament. "They're written more like sermons in order to illicit faith and strengthen different theological point of views by people who were already believers. None of these were written to send out like a newspaper, or with the aim of converting people. The gospel of Mark wasn't even considered a book until the end of the second century, just a series of notes."

Unlike Ryan Connell, Martin identifies as a Christian, and says that his faith has never been dependent on whether or not the Bible is historically sound.

"I teach students how to read the Bible from a critical, historical perspective, but that's not the only way to read this text. If you need the Bible to be confirmed by modern historiography in order to be true, then you're putting your faith in historiography, and not in God. And that's idolatry. As a believer, I put my faith in God. I can't explain why I have faith, I just have it. The Apostle Paul said that 'we are justified by grace through faith, not works.' That's a fundamental tenet of protestantism, and yet these people don't seem to understand that. They seem to think if you can't prove it there's no reason to believe it."

In addition to Martin, the New Testament scholars I'd reached out to from Duke and Vanderbilt had never heard of The Case for Christ either, which illustrates the massive divide between evangelical education and those of secular universities. Often the academic world knows nothing of best-selling Christian educational texts, and vice versa, so the two realms of thought are rarely forced to contend with one another.

Holz, the film editor for Focus on the Family, doesn't feel that this is as much of a problem as it was when Strobel began his quest in 1980.

"At the time of this film, the church was still responding to modernism," he says. "In the 19th and early 20th centuries there were all these folks leveling a scientific and historical criticism of the Bible, and the church began to struggle with what is true and what isn't, and how to respond to these attacks. And they responded on the scientist's terms, using rationality and history to fight against those arguments, which is the context of this film. Forty years later we're very much in a postmodern culture that seems to be far less interested in the idea of truth: There's your narrative and my narrative, let's all coexist. So this movie feels a little anachronistic. But I still think it was a legitimate approach for the church to make, because ultimately even if there is historical evidence, you still have to decide whether or not to put your faith in Christ."

Follow Josiah on Twitter.

On the Friday before Good Friday, I did what any good lapsed Catholic would do: I overate at IKEA. Specifically, I went to the company's Brooklyn outlet for Easter Påskbord, the festival it hosts in all its stores to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the dawn of spring. Confusingly, the feast is both three courses and all you can eat.

The suggested first course included hard-boiled eggs with mayo and shrimp, marinated salmon with mustard sauce, smoked salmon with horseradish sauce, and poached salmon with no sauce at all. Though most people, like me, just took trips to a giant buffet armed with three-tiered cafeteria carts and stacked them high with as much food as they could wheel back to their tables.

On my first trip, I loaded up on meatballs, mashed potatoes, ham, rice pudding, chocolate cake, cookies, more potatoes, and salmon, cooked all the ways. I plopped on various sauces, careful not to spill any on my clothing because my friend Matt (also a lapsed Catholic) and I had decided to wear our Sunday's best. I put on a green blazer. He wore a yellow jacket with a purple tie.

In addition to all the food, there were more drinks to choose from than ways to fuck up your Billy Bookcase—a variety of sparkling waters like "lingonberry" and "elderflower." The three course, all-you-can-eat meal was $16.99, or just $12.99 as a member of IKEA Family.

Easter's just one of four of IKEA's annual festivals; it has one for each season, including a similar smorgasbord for the longest day of the year in the middle of the summer, a crayfish barbecue in the fall, and of course, a Christmas-themed feast in the winter. These dinners are a way "to introduce Swedish culture to the American public," Peter Ho told me over the phone. As IKEA's food product developer in the US, Ho said he eats in an IKEA cafeteria every day, and he described the furniture giant's edible offerings with the passion of a perky waiter at a high-end restaurant: "For the spring, we're going to have the veggie balls paired with a Thai coconut curry sauce!"

At the Brooklyn store, most festival attendees were there by total (happy) accident, save for a Swedish family I met. There, as in most IKEAs, it's easy to get lost. Or rather, it takes a lot of time to finally get to what you're looking for. A recent Quartz article described IKEA as the "capitalist version of Stockholm syndrome," explaining that the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, designed his chain "after a research trip to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim," creating a "winding road" that gives the customer "no choice but to follow the singular, well-demarcated route."

But on the Friday before Good Friday, ascending the escalator, it wasn't a problem immediately finding our destination. We just followed the music coming from a blaring two-piece band—a pair of men in traditionally Swedish garb, one playing the accordion, the other the drums—who were seated near the most-populated area of the dining space, toward the back where there's a completely unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty.

The two entrances to the cafeteria were blocked with bright yellow barriers, as if what laid beyond them was a gigantic spill of some sort. At one, there stood an aloof security guard, who seemed, like the fully assembled furniture around him, to be present only for purposes of display. At the other, I met Lorna and Chris. They were tasked with door duty; with a stack of pamphlets in their hands, they enthusiastically explained to the perplexed shoppers that they'd be unable to eat regular IKEA fare in the cafeteria but could purchase tickets for Easter Påskbord.

Inside, it was crowded but not badly. Everyone kept to themselves, but the mood was an overwhelmingly happy one, especially toward the back, where a few tables had been covered with ornate cloths. I met a woman named Heidi, who designs weird costumes for a living, and asked why she had come. I mentioned that some people go to IKEA only for the food.

"I'm just here to get organized," she said, as her boyfriend modeled a hat she had made out of wire.

"I don't know what I'm doing," the boyfriend said.

At one point on the phone with Ho I told him I'd always assumed IKEA sold food at near cost to keep customers in the store longer to buy more things, but he dismissed my cynicism with a laugh. "It's really about bringing community together to celebrate Swedish culture and traditions."

This, I assumed before experiencing Easter Påskbord, must be a complete lie. When I picture "IKEA food," I think $1.50 frozen yogurt, not a Nordic country where the population is freezing and still apparently happy all the time. Most people consume their food products in-store, rapidly shoving them into their mouths while shopping. To Ho's point, a majority of the Swedish stuff he discussed is bought online or in-store and prepared at home or located in the sit-down restaurants in each of the company's 40 US stores. He said IKEA sells a billion meatballs globally each year, and clearly, despite my initial skepticism, there's no denying the four festivals IKEA annually throws are as Swedish as whatever comparison you want to make here so I can convince you they're very, very Swedish.

Beyond all that salmon on the first-course menu, Easter Påskbord featured assorted Swedish cheeses, Swedish ham, small Swedish sausages called prinskorv, lingonberries (in their purest form, before they're crushed up and added to sparkling water), and something called Janssons Temptation, a traditional Swedish casserole made with potatoes, onions, pickled sprats, bread crumbs, and cream. (If the devil had brought this into the desert, Jesus wouldn't have lasted a second, much less 40 days.)

Later, as employees hurried around trying to clean up a baby's vomit, the father of the Swedish family, who lived nearby, told me IKEA's the closest place to him where he can get actual Swedish cuisine. A nice reminder of home.

Ho said that most IKEA customers don't know there's a sit-down restaurant in every store, but of the ones who do, there are many fans. "If you were to ask any of the restaurant managers, we do have customers who are coming in just for breakfast or just for lunch." Ho said he sees many of the same faces when he stops by the Philadelphia store near his office. "One gentleman came in and he said, 'Hey, this is the place I have lunch every day.' I guess it meets his needs."

With the dinner winding down, and after consuming what must have been 30 of the 1 billion meatballs IKEA sells globally every year and chatting with a few strangers, a man inexplicably dressed in a bunny costume (not made by Heidi, it turned out) began walking around posing for photos with some of the gathered children. When he finished, he sat on a display toilet and stared at himself in a hall of mirrors. (He did not appear to be officially associated with IKEA.)

Watching it all, I started to think Peter Ho might have had a point: There we were, at an Easter celebration, two lapsed Catholics in fluorescent blazers, smiling children, a man in a wire hat, a mysterious bunny, a random Swedish family, all eating too many variations of salmon in its respective sauces.

If that's not "community," I don't know what is.

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

Mike Breen is a director and comedian living in Brooklyn. Subscribe to his YouTube page.

As copy editor of VICE.com, it's my job to read every word that appears on our Webby Award–winning site and make sure everything is in its right place—that all the commas and semicolons are where they need to be, names and places are spelled correctly, and "fuccboi" is written in the proper style. Over the course of the day, some sentences from our stories catch my eye, usually because they're good or funny or odd or compelling in some way. Often they're about sex. Here they are now, presented with zero context, for the week of April 10. To find out why they exist or how they were used, simply click the link for the full story.

- Cows aren't stupid.

- We are coming for you.

- OK, I'll just go fuck myself!

- As a result, he's remembered today as a terrible person.

- If you can pull off an Easter Egg Roll, you can do anything.

- The only school I ever graduated from was grade school.

- The shrimp chips are some heavenly stuff.

- I'd walk around bothering everybody for their pickles.

- After I manage to assure the girls that I am an adult woman in no way competing with them for their idol's attention, they release me from their circle.

- Yep, I'm gay.

Follow Alex Norcia on Twitter.

What you could mention, if you feel like it, is that we are a museum—not a petting zoo," Candance Frazee says about the frustrations she encounters with some visitors of her Bunny Museum in Altadena, California. "You can't go to the Getty and touch everything."

Let's just say this isn't your typical museum. You won't find works of art, but you will find something far more approachable to the masses: roughly 33,000 pieces of bunny memorabilia.

The museum opened in 1998, but the collection began years prior when owners Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski started their courtship. "I would call him honey bunny," Frazee recalls. "On our first Valentine's Day, he gave me a plush bunny, and then on Easter I gave him a porcelain one. He couldn't wait for the holidays any longer, so it became exchanging a bunny every day as a love token. It's a love story, really."

This is both the greatest love story of all time, and why the couple holds the Guinness World Record for having the largest bunny collection in the world. After years of a successful marriage that resulted in thousands upon thousands of bunnies, the Bunny Museum relocated from Pasadena to Altadena to accommodate the growing collection.

Read more: Photos of Moms Drinking Wine at Beautycon

Here you'll find their entire collection on display, from the White House Easter Eggs to a collection of bunny garden statues. A noteworthy addition since the expansion is the Chamber of Hop Horrors, a room that only visitors 13 and older may enter. This room has no shortage of creepy bunnies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, protest art, rabbit dog food, and a bunny with a cigarette in its mouth.

Unlike cats and dogs, bunnies keep their innocence and youthful appearance as they age, which is what draws Frazee to the animal. If you feel the same way, and are looking for a "hoppenin" good time in Southern California as the owners would tell you, pay the Bunny Museum a visit.

Read the full story at Broadly.

Your late-night pizza binges and lazy Saturday morning bagel orders are about to get a futuristic upgrade thanks to a new kind of a delivery service that replaces man with machine.

This week, Yelp's food delivery investment, Eat24, announced a partnership with Marble, the makers of "your friendly neighborhood robot," to begin testing robot food deliveries around San Francisco.

The Bay Area robotics company claims to be "creating a fleet of intelligent courier robots to reliably and securely transport the goods that people need and want in a way that is accessible to everyone." Though the Marble machines will replicate the duties of a red-blooded delivery person, don't expect a human-like Android to arrive at your door, tacos in tow.

The clunky machine, which looks more like an office copier on wheels than the Terminator, uses a combination of supercomputers, high-res 3D maps, cameras, and sensors to navigate the city with minimal collateral damage to passersby or your Pad Thai order. And while the street-savvy bot won't be able to climb up to your fifth floor walk-up, it does have a built-in security system, ensuring that no hungry thieves intercept your order along the way.

Read the full story on Munchies.

The US Navy has moved to ban vaping and possession of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) aboard its ships, subs, and aircraft. According to the Associated Press, the move follows a recent 8-month stretch in which 12 separate incidents of exploding ENDS put sailors out of commision for a combined 77 days. The ban is temporary but indefinite.

The concern, according to a US Navy news release, are the lithium-ion batteries that power most e-cigarettes. Lithium-ion batteries in any context are at risk of explosion via an overheating feedback process known as thermal runaway. A good lithium-ion battery will have checks in place to make doubly sure that this can't happen, but the e-cig industry is a total Wild West.

According to a 2014 US Fire Administration report, most cases of exploding e-cigs occur as their batteries charge via USB port, a feature of many e-cigarettes. The presence of a USB port means that the devices can be hooked up to any number of different power sources that may or may not align with the battery's specs.

Read the full story on Motherboard.

David Dao may not quite yet be a household name, but his face is everywhere.

Dao, 69, the doctor who was bloodied and dragged off an overbooked United Airlines flight leaving Chicago Sunday, is in the midst of taking legal action against the airline. United has been heavily criticized for its actions and subsequent public relations strategy.

The incident, caught on cell phone cameras by other passengers, shows Dao refusing to give up his seat and saying that he needed to get home to Louisville to see patients. Police then intervened and beat Dao, dragging him off the flight as he said "they'll kill me." He later returned bleeding from the mouth. On the surface, there's nothing funny about this—it's a disturbing example of police brutality and the misuse of force on a racialized person.

But images of Dao's anguished face have become prime meme fodder and are now being paired up with catchphrases like "Drag me ousside, how bow dah?"

I think most people agree that United deserves to get roasted here. But what about Dao? What does it say about us that our instinct is to make jokes at the expense of someone who has just been through a terrible (and public) situation? I reached out to Whitney Phillips, an associate professor at Mercer University who has written a book exploring the ambivalence of online culture, to ask if memes can actually do more damage than we might want to believe.

VICE: Is memeing about something tragic like the United Airlines incident in poor taste? 
Whitney Phillips: It's complicated. You have people who are participating with this meme and even when they're calling attention to this issue, obviously a terrible thing, it still ends up sort of flattening this guy into a punch line. He becomes essentially a sort of fetishized snapshot rather than a totality of a human being. People are sharing the meme and they're not really engaging with what are his feelings—does he want to have his image spread across the internet and to have it relived? You can't escape it.

So by memeing it we're dehumanizing what happened to him?
You never really know how people are sharing a meme. People can use that format to show some degree of solidarity affirming the fact that it was terrible. But even when your intentions are really good it doesn't mean they're going to remain good once its on social media. Other people can then use them to make fun of this guy, to minimize his emotional distress. It becomes a vessel for expressing someone's wittiness rather than this is traumatic embodied experience for a human being who may not be comfortable with being a meme du jour.

In a way, we saw the same thing happen with Harambe, where even the Cincinnati Zoo said the memes were preventing them from moving on. 
Harambe is really interesting. It actually was kickstarted or further amplified by the fact that the kid who fell in was black. On far right blogs people were really mad that this gorilla died to save this black boy. It was used as a way of shaming these parents look at these bad black parents who can't even watch their kid.

Wow, I didn't even know that.
Most people don't. In the Harambe case you had people who were concerned about animal rights issues, then you had people who were reacting in a racist way, essentially using this as a racist response to Black Lives Matter and then you just had the Weird Twitter camp. You don't know the trace of the story you're actually propagating—someone who was creating Weird Twitter stuff was creating images that could be adopted by a racist. You become potentially an unwitting part of something that's hateful and damaging.

Do you think there's a racial element to David Dao getting memed?
You can't not consider a racial element these days. You can be sure the kinds of memes being circulated on 4chan or certain parts of Reddit those are going to be racist and ugly. Other people might take the meme and go in an opposite direction. You can point to that case and say honestly do you think they would have done that to a white businessman? This is a way of entering into some significant conversations about race.

But even beyond that, does him being an Asian man play into how people are more inclined to meme or dehumanize him?
You can't exactly know what people are thinking but that was my worry too. Some people might be less inclined to care as much except for the extent that it's a funny punchline.

Anything else you wanted to mention?
With the United passenger, his daughter gave a press conference and that was the first time I had seen the family. It's like, we don't immediately ask questions about what people's kids think, instead we just tell the funny jokes we tell on Twitter. And those sorts of experiences especially something that's sort of violent and weird, there's that question of how would you react if this was your dad or mom?

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.