"I want to be accessible," writes Caitlyn Jenner in her new memoir, The Secrets of My Life. "[C]hanging attitudes may be the hardest societal task of all. The best way for me to do that is to meet people and show them I am friendly and 'normal'."

Since coming out as transgender on 20/20 in 2015, Jenner's made many attempts to get out there and meet people, from her bombshell Vanity Fair cover story to her politically-charged reality series I Am Cait. Secrets is her most in-depth effort to humanize trans issues for the general public yet; in revealing all the gritty details of her lifelong struggle with gender dysphoria, the athlete-cum-reality star-cum-activist aims to wage a hearts-and-minds campaign for transgender rights.

It's not the worst idea, in theory. As Jennifer Finney Boylan told VICE earlier this month, "You can say what you like about Caitlyn Jenner, and a lot of what you would say I wouldn't disagree with, but the day after she came out, everyone in this country knew a transgender person." With Jenner's caliber of cultural saturation, as both a former athletic superstar and a reality TV A-lister, she's in a position to do a lot of good.

In other words, when Jenner talks, Cisgender America, for the most part, listens. Her words would not carry such import if she were one of many trans celebrities, but as that category remains woefully underpopulated, the influence she wields is massive.

Watch Ex-Scientology Leader and Trans Icon Kate Bornstein on What It Takes to Survive:

Jenner claims in Secrets that wielding this power isn't something she had in mind: "It is the media that has ordained me the spokesman for the transgender community," she claims, and anyway, "much of our fight is to get society to remove such meaningless labels as representative." But she nonetheless knows full well the duty of her position; "I have written this book because I am lucky to have a public platform and want to use it," she writes in Secrets closing chapter.

In focusing that platform through her own story, Secrets needed to humanize herself and her struggle for the public while explaining her relationship with gender with as much clarity as possible. Success would mean a digestible, sympathetic account of one woman's dysphoria that could dispel confusion about the trans experience among cis readers. It's unfortunate, then, that while she handily ensnares the reader's sympathies, Jenner contradicts herself so extensively as to render her relationship with gender inscrutable.

Jenner's life at the intersection of transness and celebrity is as accidental as it is unique. It's hard not to feel for her in particular when she describes the consequences of hypervisibility. Having lived under intense pressure to be masculine and the constant threat of international ridicule, it's impressive she managed to keep her head together for so long. In Secrets, Jenner recalls close shaves with being recognized while en femme in public, how staying in the closet damaged her marriages, and how gossip reporters once drove her to contemplate suicide:

I have already been labeled a freak in the tabloids. It will only get worse… I am still in the process of talking to each of [my children] to explain the gender issues I have had all my life. And now they are going to see some story that humiliates them and humiliates me. I keep thinking the same thought. You keep a gun in the house. Why not use it?

It's chilling to consider what one might have done when placed in Jenner's shoes (whether track or flats). Though Jenner hasn't had the hardest life, she nevertheless faced down some mighty demons—and did so with good humor, all things considered ("if I know anything about myself," she quips slyly, "it's that the legs work").

But clarity begins to go out the window when she attempts to define her relationship with gender, arguably Secrets' most vital purpose.

Wrapping up her prologue—a story about delivering corporate motivational speeches while yearning to get back to her hotel room and ditch the suit—Jenner states bluntly: "I do what I do best: I play Bruce." That's a perfectly reasonable and common way of describing one's experience of trans identity, and one Jenner goes back to fairly often: she calls living as Bruce a "façade," laments not telling her father she "never really was [Bruce]" before he died, and so on. "I seriously think about putting a stipulation into my will that I be buried as was always my gender," she writes during a pre-transition story. "Maybe that's the best and only answer to be the woman I always was… for more than twenty minutes in a hotel lobby…"

But just as often, Jenner takes a far different approach: that of "the woman inside me," the feeling "almost like I was two people." "Bruce was not a lie," she writes, but "a good man" and "a valuable part of my life." At one point, Jenner reveals that she kept her old breast forms and hip pads because "they symbolize my struggle when I was Bruce" (emphasis added). Again, reasonable and common—but a big shift in tone and intent from her other statements. How can "Bruce" be a lie and not a lie at the same time? Was "Bruce" a fiction made fact by necessity? Readers are left to speculate for themselves.

Jenner claims elsewhere that while her gender "has always been female," "I was a man who decide[d] to wear a dress when his wife and kids are away." Muddying the waters further are her assertions that while "Bruce was gone" after changing her birth certificate, he is also still around "on the inside, where he will happily remain for the rest of my days."

How best to describe Caitlyn Jenner's experience of transness, then? Can all these contradictions exist in one person? If even a trans woman like myself can't parse a narrative meant to educate cis people about what it's like to be trans, what exactly is accomplished here?

At best, The Secrets of My Life bolsters its author's social capital while failing to make the idea of trans identities—even Jenner's own—any more understandable for the average reader. If anything, it makes that concept harder for others to explain. Jenner has done some good work in raising money for trans charities, but this attempt at direct education falls flat, and that failure has consequences.

To be clear, this isn't a callout of Jenner for being toxic. That's old news, and if I wanted to beat that particular dead horse, I'd be pointing to antagonistic chapters about how Jenner's critics among the trans community—described in similar terms as the paparazzi she so despises—are "hostile" people with ideas that aren't connected to reality and who need to "get a life." I'm hurt and angered by those words and many more, but I'm also not the person who's supposed to read this book: it's for curious cis people who want to understand, from someone who wants to be America's Trans Friend.

"My word is not gospel," Jenner disclaims. That's certainly so, but as someone trying to command an extremely large and timely spotlight, Jenner has a responsibility to make her advocacy effective and clear. In The Secrets of My Life, it is lamentably neither—a failing the trans community cannot afford.

Follow Sam Riedel on Twitter.

This week, we got a sense of just how many Americans are concerned about the financial prospects of a family that recently won a rumoured $60 million book deal. Social media erupted at the news that Barack Obama will accept a $400,000 speaking fee for a healthcare conference run by financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Some on the left denounced the buckraking; plenty of others expressed righteous indignation over anyone telling the former president what to do.

And almost no one was honest with themselves.

Talk of optics and norms and appearances of impropriety and who is allowed to take money from whom represents a grand exercise in denial. The truth is that Obama is perfectly comfortable with raking in Wall Street cash. After all, it aligns well with someone who spent massive political capital to shield financial executives from their self-inflicted wounds. Taking this money won't undermine what Obama believes in; it is what he believes in.

I know this because Obama spokesman Eric Schultz said so in a statement on his boss's behalf. "Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record," Schultz wrote. "With regard to this or any other speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I'd just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history—and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR." (He could have also said "the only reforms on Wall Street since FDR.")

Contrary to the complaint that liberals unnecessarily hold Obama to a higher standard, it's the president himself who is boasting that he can take their money, drink their booze, and vote against Wall Street, to paraphrase the legendary California lawmaker Jesse Unruh. But while he did many positive things, when it comes to Wall Street, Obama is either oblivious to his own legacy, or trying to fool you about it. On that front, it's precisely his values, vision, and record I call into question.

Obama inherited a bailout he whipped Democrats to support while he was still a candidate. In office, he failed to overhaul or shrink a financial system that represents everything wrong with the modern economy. He didn't even stop the bonuses flowing at AIG.

During his transition, Obama promised up to $100 billion in bailout funds to prevent foreclosure; eight years later, only about $24 billion has been spent, most of it too late to stop the over 9.3 million American families who lost homes in the worst foreclosure crisis in 80 years. The government program Obama's Treasury Department built to mitigate foreclosures, without congressional interference, became a foreclosure-creation machine instead.

No banker with any real agency in the crisis ever saw the inside of a jail cell in the most punitive nation on earth. Even when mortgage companies got caught falsifying mortgage documents in courts nationwide, and stealing homes with false evidence, Obama's Justice Department made no effort to hold individuals responsible, instead stonewalling promising investigations and stringing along a disappointing series of no-fault settlements barely worth the paper they were printed on. For those who say a president is not a prosecutor, I'd submit that then-HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan spending two hours on the phone with me in 2012, defending the 49-state foreclosure fraud settlement that let bankers off the hook the day before its announcement, suggests that maybe the White House had something to do with it.

Obama's legacy isn't on the line because of a few speaking fees. It's not even about the money. He made his choice while in office to align with financial power, with the people who write the checks. And this damaged both America's economy and its sense of fairness, rupturing the nation's social fabric. It set the stage for the worst leader in modern times to tweet his way into office on a wave of indignation.

I've made these points over and over, so let me just illustrate with a story: Robynne Fauley of Sandy, Oregon, is a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy who is probably going to be kicked out of her home on Monday. The case is an absolute mess, replete with a chain of internal emails going back nine years, showing bank employees plotting to fabricate documents so they can evict this woman once and for all. In the absence of accountability, this is what our system has devolved into: three line workers on an email chain figuring out how to squeeze foreclosures past a judge. When nobody pays a price for fraud, fraud proliferates.

Obama's defenders call this irrelevant when lives are on the line with President Trump. But there will be another president someday (let's hope), and if Democrats ever want that kind of power, they'll have to stop pretending about their past, about where they stand while incomes stratify and power concentrates.

In the meantime, as long as everyone's telling a complete stranger what to do with $400,000, I'd say: give it to Robynne Fauley. She could use it.

Follow David Dayen on Twitter.

It's apparently been a wild year for Joseph Murphy. The Ohio man kicked off 2017 by getting arrested outside Disney World on New Year's Day and allegedly pissing on a police officer's leg. He then slammed his Mercedes into a sign near his hometown before blowing a .121 blood alcohol content. Now, Murphy's racked up yet another run-in with the cops by dialing 911 to ask his local police department if they could help him track his stolen heroin, a Cleveland ABC affiliate reports.

According to the 911 call, Murphy apparently thought he could just phone up the police and order a drug-sniffing dog from the canine unit. A police officer working at the local Bath Township police department told News 5 Cleveland that it was "the most bizarre" call he's heard in his 41 years on the job.

"You need a police dog?" the dispatcher asked. "What's going on there?"

"She stole heroin from me," Murphy replied.

Though understandably confused about a) who "she" might be and b) why Murphy specifically requested a police dog, the local police figured the whole heroin thing merited a trip over to Murphy's place. By the time the cops arrived, he'd apparently realized that telling a police officer you had heroin on you probably isn't the best idea. So Murphy changed up his story—claiming some woman actually stole his money, not his drugs.

But that story didn't fool the cops, because a few minutes later, Murphy reportedly reached into his pants and pulled out a "brown waxy substance," which authorities presumed to be drugs. The cops then threw him in a squad car and took him to the station, where they fingerprinted and booked him before letting him head home.

According to police, he's now looking at facing a felony drug charge.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

In the blessed week leading up to of 420, Noisey ran a glut of bizarre and enlightening articles for the astute marijuana enthusiast. Well, potheads, 420 may have passed, but the spirit of the holiday lives on. The Taylor Gang/TM88 remix of Tove Lo and Wiz Khalifa's stoned duet "Influence," premiering on Noisey today, is proof.

"I was very excited about this remix, not usually what I get back when sending out stems," Tove Lo told Noisey in an email. "They definitely took the pop out and gave it the real stoner vibe. I wasn't really involved in the process, it was more "here, do your thing." It gives the song a whole new feel. I'm super into it."

Listen to "Influence feat. Wiz Khalifa (TM88//Taylor Gang Remix)" above.

Continue reading on Noisey.

Don't miss the debut of BEERLAND, a new show on VICELAND following the founder of California's Golden Road Brewing across the country as she searches for the best beers America has to offer. On the series premiere, Meg Gill links up with a few home brewers in New Mexico, kicking off a quest that's just as much about the beer she's drinking as it is the people who make it.

BEERLAND airs Thursdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

Plus, Matty Matheson is back with a new episode of DEAD SET ON LIFE, where he'll take a tour of Las Vegas for some damn good prime rib. He and Master Rang wind up getting pretty into cowboy culture—learning how to use a lasso, hitting up a gun range, and donning some ridiculously large hats.

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

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

Tonight marks the premiere of Logo's latest reality series, Fire Island, which follows six gay dudes and the self-discovery, fleeting relationships and excessive drinking that accompany one hot summer in New York's gay mecca.

While it's sure to feature sights familiar to anyone who's visited the island (like the annual Pines Party), it's also faced criticism for being a bit, well, contrived. Some say the show sets the gay community back; SNL even parodied its ridiculousness with a lesbian spin-off, contrasting its hard-partying dudes with a house full of even-keeled, wine-toasting, tearful-midnight-conversation-having lesbians.

The real reality of Fire Island lies somewhere between all that. This show, to be sure, plays on stereotypes—when many think of Fire Island, they probably think of a place not far off from Logo's version, where gay guys let down their hair and sparks and claws fly. But what happens on the island goes far deeper than White Party selfies. It's a near-magical place where people grow up and learn hard truths and sink their teeth into life itself, and from Edmund White to Andrew Holleran, novels about the Island have enshrined both those qualities. For close to a century, it's been as high culture as it is low, as catty as it is revelatory. There's more to find than dicks in the Meat Rack—you might just find yourself.

One would hope the stars of Fire Island find themselves, too; judging from the first few episodes, they've all got some growing up to do. But that's what makes for good reality TV, after all. We tapped a roster of gay dudes to hear their life-changing stories from the island, whether ridiculous or profound.

Aaron Perry, LA-based sales executive, on self-consciousness (and choking on meat):

I've only been to Fire Island once, for one day, and I somehow managed to publicly humiliate myself in that short amount of time.

Everyone on Fire Island has some level of self-consciousness—whether it's fear of bumping into an ex or not looking great in a bathing suit—but not everyone has choked on meat alone at Fire Island tea. From what I saw and what I've heard, everyone is always grilling out there. But that doesn't mean they do it well. I was at a pool party where I only knew one person. I did what anyone does in those circumstances, hovered by the food. The food happened to be (high protein, low carb) steak kebabs that were wildly overcooked. I started to choke. My throat did this crazy thing that dislodged the steak in what felt like an out of body experience. Embarrassed and alone, I instinctively hid from the party to choke in peace, away from the gays.

I lived, barely. Had a sore throat for a good week. It remains the perfect metaphor for the fear and shame of Fire Island. And I still have to relive the humiliation every time I tell the story about choking on meat on Fire Island, and then explain it's not a euphemism.

Jeff Leavell, writer, on theoretical physics:

When I was 18, it was late at night, and I was walking back to my friend's parents' house on Fire Island (his dad was gay). I was walking down the boardwalks that cut through the island, and I heard all this moaning in the bushes, and walked into this dune and stumbled upon like 20 guys fucking this one dude. It turned into a full on mini-orgy right there in the night. It was kind of stunning. One of the guys told me he was getting his PHD in Theoretical Physics. He and I spent a lot of time making out, and then we branched off on our own and went down to the beach. We had these long and crazy talks about physics and multiple universes and all kinds of shit. We did a lot of fucking on the beach as well. He talked a lot about infinity and how all the choices we make, the people we are, everything we do, branches off into different directions, creating different universes, so in one universe he and I met and ran away together, living our lives in love. The next day I was walking the beach with my friend. Ahead of us was a wedding ceremony. And, in all the weird ways the world works, there was the guy I had spent the night with, getting married to this blond chick. We made brief eye contact but that was it. I never saw him again.

Frankie Sharpe, DJ/party promoter, on getting a desperately-needed cigarette:

One year I DJed at the BOFFO art festival. I was done with the festival and me and my boyfriend were just wandering the boardwalk, as one does. And then my friend offered me liquid mushrooms, which I had never heard of before? And I hadn't done mushrooms since I was in my early twenties. So I thought, okay, this is hilarious and fun, let's do them. We took them, and we just started wandering all over the boardwalk, from Cherry Grove back to the Pines. It was me, my boyfriend Alex, and my other drag queen friend, Claudia. We decided to lay down on the boardwalk because it felt like the best thing to do while high, and I decided I really wanted a cigarette—but we couldn't go to the Pantry, because it was like 5 AM.

And I look over, like, do you guys see that? Maybe half a block away there's this moving sling inside of a kitchen—and I'm like oh, there's people in there, and I think they're smoking, because I think I can see smoke. So I really want a cigarette, I'm high on drugs, and I super need this, so I just marched on over there confidently and rang their doorbell, and a full-regalia leather daddy smoking a cigarette was like, "can I help you?" And I said, "yeah, I was just wondering if you guys had any cigarettes? I really need a cigarette. I can even give you a dollar." That shitty thing people do. And he was like no, sorry, we have nothing for you, and slammed the door in my face, and I was like, wow! I came back and we were laughing, and we just left, but when we were maybe a block and a half away, all of a sudden we hear "Hey, hey!" and out comes this guy running down the boardwalk, and he's wearing nothing but a harness and one of those puppy tail butt plugs. And he said here, here, here, I have this for you! And he gave me my cigarette for the night.

That's one of those great things about Fire Island, where it's so absurd that you think it's completely appropriate to interrupt this random weird sex leather sling party for a cigarette. But in actuality, it is totally appropriate. It's part of the magic there. And then I saw my puppy butt plug guy all fresh and dewy with a to-go coffee, a briefcase and a Thom Browne suit on the first ferry back Monday morning on the way to work.

Mitchell Sunderland, Broadly staff writer, on wild bears:

I've mostly gone to Fire Island for journalism. One time, my colleague Matthew and I stayed at the Belvedere. It's a roughly $400 a night hotel where clothing is optional, women are banned, and most of the furniture comes from estates and old movie sets. The food, though, is mostly danishes that tasted like they came from Costco, served by a boy who kept yelling about how he was going to make Taylor Swift a drag icon. Somehow neither Matthew nor I managed to have sex there. We were sitting outside our room, though, and a fully nude man started hitting on us, trying to pull the "I'm an actor" line—he later let slip he was a real estate agent. But the worst part was that we got no sleep all night because a bear was getting fucked next to a statue outside our window for HOURS.

Brandon Graeter, broker, on underwear party footage you won't see on TV:

At the underwear party there's a back room with people hooking up. I don't go back there, but one time I lost my (very drunk) friend and someone told me they last saw him there. I went in and found him wandering the abyss. It reminded me of Sandra Bullock in Gravity—floating in this vacuum of nothingness, grabbing for random dicks and anything that would give him life. I took his hand and pushed us through curtains of sweaty bodies. I was George Clooney in this situation, leading him back to the light. Being at the underwear party is a lot like being space—no one can hear you scream, you can't really breathe, and you go into complete darkness on a mission to explore, only to end up desperate to be home and safe.

Michael Musto, actor, author, and columnist, on that commute:

I don't like the speedboat between the Grove and the Pines because it's terrifying (and I'm cheap), so I always walk through the Meat Rack to get from one resort to the other. The problem is, once you're in there, you run into creepy looking people wanting to be paddled and adorable deer who are dying to infect you with Lyme disease, not to mention sand that's extremely challenging to walk through, especially if you're exhausted from a full day of gossiping.

But one year, a friend of mine and I tried to do the Meat Rack walk, and we couldn't see any of the above because a thick fog had set in. We couldn't even see our hands in front of our faces. So we clung to each other for dear life and went one scary step at a time for what seemed like hours, ultimately navigating our way back to civilization. It was like some gay Nancy Drew adventure, and ever since then, the speedboat doesn't seem so bad.

Jason Moore, director of Pitch Perfect and Sisters, on sharing a house and unscripted bonds:

Having a share on Fire Island in my twenties taught me how to share small spaces, responsibilities, stories, and in some cases, I suppose, how to share men. In these houses, walls were thin and doors were open, so if you drank someone's protein shake or borrowed someone's speedo (perhaps directly off their boyfriend), you were going to come under scrutiny for it. This is where we learned to make amends for such transgressions—or how to throw shade, even on the brightest of days. But mostly and happily, it accelerated friendships. There's nothing like sharing a water view, a walk home, or a common address to bond you to others and to make you feel like you belong to a tribe.

Follow Khalid el Khatib on Twitter.

This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

I met Raheem in an arraignments shift at the Bronx Criminal Court in New York, where I was slated to serve as his social worker.

Raheem had been arrested for stealing lice shampoo from a pharmacy and then getting into a scuffle with the security guard who caught him. As we talked, he fidgeted and scratched at his body while explaining that a lice plague was ravaging the world and only he knew the secret cure. He added that he actually had enough money to buy the shampoo, but couldn't let the store employees know about his plan, so he had tried to sneak out without paying.

At the time, Raheem was on parole, stemming from his record of over 30 arrests, almost all of them minor misdemeanor charges related to his unmanaged schizophrenia. The new arrest meant he would be sent to prison for a year.

The outcome of Raheem's case was hard for me to swallow—and not just because I was part of his defense team. Like Raheem, I too had once shoplifted from a pharmacy while in the grips of a manic episode. For some reason that had felt completely compelling at the time, I needed to stock up on over 20 bottles of nail polish without anyone knowing about it.

As a well-dressed white woman, however, nobody suspected a thing and I had simply walked out of the Chapel Hill, N.C., store without notice. The episode ended in a psychiatric hospitalization, through which I received the treatment I needed to get my symptoms under control.

Even as someone who advocates every day for people with mental health diagnoses, and whose work involves dismantling the stigma that surrounds them, it is still hard for me to disclose my own struggle.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year I graduated from college. It happened after my first full-blown manic episode, in which I sped on a highway at over 100 miles an hour after buying a $3,000 engagement ring on a whim, planning to surprise my then-boyfriend halfway across the world.

Needless to say, this plan did not come to fruition, and my spontaneity, risk-taking, and impulsivity soon morphed into terrifying psychosis. I was suddenly convinced that my reality was just a big stage and everyone was acting out a script, and I was hospitalized and prescribed anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers.

About four years after my first episode, I pursued a master's degree in social work with the intention of becoming an advocate for those like me. In a mental health policy class, I remember debating the use of physical restraints, and arguing vehemently against the practice. My classmates did not know that I myself had been strapped to ER beds and restrained in seclusion rooms.

But it was in that same class that I learned about the deinstitutionalization and subsequent over-incarceration of people with mental illnesses, and began to slowly comprehend my privilege as a white woman whose circumstances had allowed her to lead a productive and fulfilling life in between episodes.

Now that I am a social worker at the Bronx Defenders, I've met many people like Raheem: men and women of colour struggling with mental illness while trying to survive in the South Bronx, one of the poorest districts in America. Many end up ensnared in the criminal justice and immigration systems instead of getting the health care they need.

And I have met many more clients whose experiences are eerily similar to mine, even if their outcomes could not have been more different.

Not too long ago, I had to call a man to inform him that his brother, Jose, my client, had been arrested in a psychiatric hospital for allegedly assaulting a nurse. I heard him weep on the other end of the phone—and I remembered the time that, in the throes of my own psychosis, amid the chaos of a hallway in the ER, I bit a nurse because I thought she was trying to kill me with laser beams.

I was not arrested. Instead, I was admitted to the psychiatric ward and walked out, restored to my sane self, about two weeks later.

I'll never forget Jacob either: a green-card holder from South America whom we represented through an immigration public defense program funded by New York City.

Check out the Motherboard documentary about the strange, troubled fate of smart gun technology in America.

Jacob had been working as a medical professional when he first began experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. His illness caused him to lose his job, and he fell into homelessness and substance abuse in an effort to self-medicate. He was in and out of hospitals and ended up being arrested as the result of an incident in which he found himself responding to powerful command hallucinations. His convictions landed him in immigration detention, where he continued to deteriorate and even attempted suicide.

Despite our effort to explain his symptoms and need for treatment, an immigration judge denied his application for relief. Jacob was put on a charter plane back to a country he hadn't been to in decades, where he no longer has any family or access to meaningful treatment. I never heard from him again.

It is in moments like these that I feel survivor's guilt most acutely. I have struggled to live with my diagnosis, but how can I reconcile the stark contrast between my experience and those of Raheem, Jose, Jacob, and so many others? Every time I visit my psychiatrist in her Park Avenue office, I feel a pang of guilt accompanied by overwhelming gratitude. Gratitude that I have access to quality care, and gratitude that I respond well to treatment.

My personal experience has been both a blessing and a curse. It has made me more compassionate and patient in working with clients experiencing mental health symptoms, but it also challenges me with painful reminders of past experiences that continue to be shrouded in shame and a feeling of unearned privilege.

So I've learned that to be the best possible social worker for the community I serve, I must understand that vicarious trauma is real—that if I don't try to understand how my own experiences affect my interactions with clients and vice versa, I am doing them a disservice. In the social work profession, we are often in a position of power over our clients, and to some extent, we separate them fully from ourselves.

But I think we should all recognize that many of us share much more in common with our clients than we would readily admit. It is time for people like me to say: I, too, am one of them, but I have been permitted to survive . Survival should not be a luxury.

Kristen Anderson is a social worker at The Bronx Defenders, a public defense office serving low-income communities in New York City.

"Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen."

It's hard to watch this episode and not think about every "We all let Trump happen" tweet.

The most terrifying scene in Atwood's novel gets pride of place here, with increasingly agitated handheld camerawork following June—not Offred, yet—as her money gets cut off right before every woman in her office is dismissed. It's a perfect staging of her stomach-dropping realization that she waited a day too long to get out. (Later, June and Moira flee a protest as soldiers open fire; later...well, by then it's too late.)

The world of The Handmaid's Tale is chillingly prescient, but that stomach-dropping horror is also a distinctly white fear—a straight fear, the fear of someone whose complacency is shaken for the first time. Enter Moira, a black lesbian, for whom this is just the other shoe dropping. ("They can't do this," June protests. Moira, flat: "They can.") Moira's the one who points out they've already been ignoring red flags and living on borrowed time. June dismisses her; it was just to prevent another attack, she says. But even as she says it she can't look at Moira. She's horrified, realizing.

"We all" did not let Trump happen. Many were vocal about why he was so dangerous—particularly people of colour, the LGBT community, and everyone who you were getting tired of seeing at protests before states started passing legislation to make protest illegal. And "we all" were not asleep before; those same people were up in arms about voters' rights, transparency, and abuse of power before such things became suddenly endangered. But the people who actually let Trump happen were so used to ignoring those other people that it didn't matter to them when it should have, and now the people who will suffer anyway are also asked to share the blame.

The horror of The Handmaid's Tale isn't that misogynists are using religion as an excuse to codify hatred—we have that now. The horror is what happens that morning at June's work. It's the fact that the soldiers have already bought in to the new world order. It's when the men at June's work don't say a word in the women's defense. It's Luke's response to their outrage, a well-meaning "You know I'll take care of you" that visibly makes June's stomach drop. It's the last good night's sleep she ever has.

The episode title is almost more pointedly about this meaning of "late" than it is about Offred's brief, mistaken pregnancy. But that phantom fetus is a fairly potent question. Suddenly Rita's kind, even friendly; suddenly Serena Joy is telling Offred they're in this together. Suddenly someone's asking Offred what she wants. Elisabeth Moss absorbs it with an incredulity that swings from dry humour to quiet despair, as this hypothetical fetus is granted a level of consideration—of humanity—Offred hasn't gotten, and won't get. (We have that now.)

George Kraychyk/Hulu

But this is an episode about dropping the act. So Offred doesn't play along and pretend there's a pregnancy. Instead, Offred tells Serena Joy exactly how Ofwarren is doing. "I'm afraid she might be losing touch," she says, practically a dare to see if there's any empathy left in Serena Joy.

And there is a twisted flicker of fellow-feeling here. Sure, that madness happens to those "weaker girls," but Serena Joy comes strikingly close to admitting the horror of it all. "What you do—what we do together is so terrible..." she says, and almost forgets to finish it on an up note, because the relief of cutting the crap is so visible for both of them that she can barely drag herself back to the party line.

Maybe that moment, soured by the first glimpse of the black van, is what drives Offred to stand her ground rather than just play along with something that, in the scheme of things, would cost her nothing. Maybe it's Moira, casting a shadow of resistance across time and space as Offred's abject fear slowly calcifies into a refusal to give in. It's a bold, even foolhardy move for her, given how hard she's trying to play the long game. This isn't the treason charge Offred fears—she could easily "Yes, Aunt Lydia" her way out of it. But even under penalty of pain, she doesn't. She says "gay," not "gender traitor." She says Ofglen was her friend. When she's very nearly out of the woods, she answers chastising Scripture with righteous Scripture; she's not taking the blame for this one.

For all the good it does her. Though it's unclear whether she was pregnant and lost it after the interrogation, or just a few days late, whatever benefits that pregnancy may have gotten her are gone as soon as her period comes. (Those who suffer anyway are asked to take the blame.) She's locked in.

Of course, not all the horror of The Handmaid's Tale is portent. Sometimes it's just horror. Serena Joy spits that things for Offred could always be worse; we cut to Ofglen.

Before We Go:

• That beat in the courtroom in which the accused women stand with gags on while sentence is laid out is one of those scenes you know will be chilling but aren't really prepared for. (Alexis Bledel does more acting in this episode than she's done in the rest of her cumulative body of work. What an affecting bout of silent misery.)
• Something about the interrogation deliberately calls to mind the first episode, where June's forced to shame Janine to give up the last public vestige of solidarity. But she's had time to bear the unbearable; she's seen Janine slowly losing her mind. Sometimes refusal to collude is all you have.

Follow Genevieve Valentine on Twitter.

Only three days ago, we wrote on this very site about festivals. They can be life-changing experiences, rites of passage from the gangly mess of adolescence into the slightly more refined mess of adulthood. Whether encountering a druid at Glastonbury's stone circle or flying a beer and MDMA jet to nirvana huddled between friends at some late-night Primavera set, the ways we celebrate music and not giving a shit about what time it is over the summer has the power to form parts of our identities.

Then again, festivals can also be absolute trash. I have been known—and believe me, I'm not proud of this—to describe a certain camping festival as not too far off from the feeling of a refugee camp with live music. Sometimes, the events billed as the parties of a lifetime leave you trapped in a space where no electricity, limited running water and housing made out of nylon placed directly on the ground doesn't feel worth paying more than $100 for.

Well, friends, if you tend to side with the latter opinion of festivals (and tbh even if you don't) then you'll probably be delighted to hear about Fyre Festival. It was pegged as a luxurious event held over two weekends in the Bahamas, and organized by Ja Rule's Fyre Media company. But not even the DSLR-shot videos of Bella Hadid and other model friends frolicking on the beach, or a lineup boasting names like blink-182, Skepta, Major Lazer, Lil Yachty, Rae Sremmurd and Disclosure (a DJ set, let's be clear) were enough to make the festival kick off according to plan.

Continue reading on Noisey.

Among the books everybody's forced to read in high school, The Great Gatsby is one of the most famous and definitive. Its legacy goes hand-in-hand with the idea of the Great American Novel—relatively easy to read, lesson-imparting, "universal"—and it's so ensconced in framing who we think we are that its name possesses a stamp of its canonical concreteness.

I, for one, hadn't read Fitzgerald in the last 20 years, and hadn't planned to before the advent of I'd Die for You, a collection of Fitzgerald's previously undiscovered stories that came out earlier this week. I couldn't even remember why I hadn't exactly loved Gatsby years before, feeling only a vague lingering effect little beyond its name. How had The Great Gatsby continued to stand the test of time? What gave it grounds for being deemed by Time magazine as "one of the most quintessentially American novels ever written"?

What I found in my rereading was not what I would call great—or even necessarily sharp—writing, but the mirage of such. Somehow, since its 1925 publication, Fitzgerald's prose seems to have grown bloated, decorously written yet so bland that it feels like it requires a translation from purple to purposeful. The book's certainly not poetic, nor is it particularly well-paced, mostly either digressing about upbringing or meandering through the motions of yet another bourgeois day. "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope," Nick Carraway admits up front, on the first page. "I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."

What is he trying to "snobbishly" warn us of? That if we don't see the value in the story he's about to tell, it's we, the readers, who have the problem? At once, then, we can detect the foundations of the myth of Gatsby: Here's a prick of a book we have for too long been afraid to simply call a prick and walk away.

Carraway is a young, well-to-do white guy who takes it upon himself to affectively mansplain his basic life plan to the reader, like some scotch-breathing friend of a friend at a dinner party you should have skipped. We're supposed to be along for the ride with this guy, or so it seems—he's neither so unlikeable as to have a temperature, nor likable enough we hope he turns out OK in the end.

He's like human wallpaper: a state of being that should be understood up front as devoid of irony, and the kind of people F. Scott Fitzgerald surrounded himself with in daily life and in admiration. He depicted them in this work, whose climate he described to his editor Maxwell Perkins as "a sincere and yet radiant world." Looking back, we shouldn't see the flaws in these characters' outlooks or practices as caricature, or even criticism, but instead as a tale intended to reveal the troubled intersection of their dreams—to feel their yearning, however misplaced. To write it all off now as satire or even foreboding would be to gift it context it does not mean to earn.

Plot-wise, The Great Gatsby—like so much realist narrative fiction—is easily boiled down to a handful of bullshit tacked around some semblance of Character Motivations. Nothing substantial really happens—and not in a conceptually compelling kind of way, like Gaddis or DeLillo or Delany, or in a way that nonetheless brings the text alive with nuanced language, like Gass or Stein or Morrison. Basically, we just follow Nick around as he is witness to infidelity on the part of his cousin's husband, later to become drawn in as a sort of wingman for Gatsby to try to help him get in said cousin's pants. There's a bunch of parties where Nick is mostly a bystander, periodically interjecting whitewashed observation as people bicker over relationships and Gatsby blathers amidst his privilege about how he was in the war once. Eventually, there's a car crash and some murder, but even that seems only there to force the story to a head, to wield its point—which, I guess, is that life is short and no one's happy? Well, no shit.

Essentially, the book resembles the least titillating episode ever of The Real Housewives of East Egg. If The Great Gatsby is indeed definitively American, it's in a way like American Psycho, without the comedy or the gore—another who's fucking who and who wants to be fucking who tale, phrased in the most lame and sexless possible way.

Did I mention that several of these characters speak like white nationalists? "It's up to us, who are the dominant race," says Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, "to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," Daisy concurs, cementing such an outlook as part and parcel of the novel's emotional marrow. "We're all white here," Nick's date Jordan offers later, an attempt to calm down a fight between the men, as if that fact alone should end the struggle over who owns Daisy's heart.

Can we just please, at last, say fuck these people? While we're at it, fuck their story, its author, and the book itself. Regardless of how it evokes some state of how things were, perhaps even still in some ways how they are, the book's position as an icon among language-based ambition has long gone stale. As literary fiction, Gatsby holds up the table for everything we've been told for decades books are "supposed to do": to set up what's going to happen at the end of the story on the very first page, and to display in tedious detail who is speaking and where they are and why. I can actually feel myself getting dumber and more mindless as I read it, almost like suffocating, which is perhaps exactly why it has become inculcated by American schools as a cornerstone of the foundation of our learning: Most media is meant to numb you out, making you care only to the extent that you will buy more of it.

Which brings me to the conclusion that The Great Gatsby is not only not a great novel, but one by which the continued CPR over its legacy has only done us all a psychic damage, both literarily and as a culture. There might have been a time when The Great Gatsby seemed newfangled or boundary-breaking, or even just a solid literary book, but in our current landscape, it's a barely passable melodrama, one played out by dick-bag socialites and white supremacists, satire or not. Reread The Great Gatsby as an adult who has read outside of the canonical framework we're presented and you'll realize why so many young people hate to read; because, if nothing else, they can just as easily absorb the exact same sort of story on most any channel on TV. What good's an imagination, after all, when our "greatest novels" seem secondhand to reality's script?

Blake Butler is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the novel 300,000,000. Follow him on Twitter.

For decades, stem cells have offered rich potential, promising an age of "regenerative medicine." They're being used to in early-stage treatment for Parkinson's disease, macular degeneration, hearing loss, arthritis, and paralysis, among others, with new applications (impotence?) appearing seemingly all the time. They're generally hailed as a motherlode for medical treatment, even as some unregulated clinics cross the line from research into dangerous hype.

But a recent letter in the journal Nature shows that some of the stem cell lines used in these therapies have been found to contain cancer-causing mutations. That raises the concern that patients treated with the cells could face a real risk of developing cancer—though that hasn't happened so far.

To reach that conclusion, Harvard scientists examined 140 stem cell lines, most of which were registered with the National Institutes of Health; each line is a collection of identical stem cells that's reproduced and provided to researchers. They performed DNA sequencing and found that five lines had cells with a cancer-causing mutation, specifically in the TP53 gene. Of those five, at least two have been used in clinical trials of experimental treatments. It's not known how many people received them.

Continue reading on Tonic.

Fyre Fest was supposed to be the most luxurious music festival ever — an ultra-exclusive party spanning two weekends on a private island in the Bahamas, with private jet travel built into the extravagant ticket price, where Instagram ingenues, including Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid, were headed to dance on yachts.

That's not what happened.

The production was "a shit show" from its inception to its spectacular collapse Friday — the exact words separately used by three people who bought tickets, though only two actually made it to the island, Great Exuma, in the Bahamas. Beginning early Thursday, many of the advertised private jets — which turned out to be chartered commercial planes departing from airports like La Guardia and Miami International — failed to take off at all. And those passengers may have been the lucky ones. Festival-goers on the ground found their luxury accommodations replaced with disaster relief-like tents, significantly less amenities than promised, and no clear way to leave.

Kitty Green grew up in Australia watching American television. Although her favorite sitcoms presented the US as idyllic and family-oriented, her favorite show taught her the exact opposite could just as easily be true. After six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was murdered in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas Eve of 1996, a young Green became one of the millions of people around the world transfixed by the ensuing investigation.

"This case punctured that image for me," she says. "I was 11 or 12 when it was on TV, and as a kid I was obsessed with it."

That obsession apparently followed her into adulthood. Green, now 32, is the director behind a new JonBenét movie premiering today on Netflix. Like American Crime Story and Made in America did for the O.J. Simpson saga last year, Casting JonBenét introduces the story of the Ramseys to a generation who missed the original media spectacle around it. The film is a hybrid of documentary and scripted narrative––a CliffsNotes version of an important piece of Americana.

Part of the reason Casting JonBenét defies easy categorization is because Green has never felt comfortable in either genre. She says that, as a young woman, it was hard to be at ease around the large gaffers and grips that typically populate huge cinematic productions; after making a documentary about a feminist group in the Ukraine in 2013, she missed the control she felt while working on narrative films at school in Melbourne. To solve her dilemma, Green pioneered a liminal genre in 2015 with Casting Oksana Baiul, a short film about Ukrainian women who derived feelings of strength from the titular gold-winning figure skater.

While it's tempting to suggest that Green is riffing on the JonBenét case as part of a larger, multi-work meditation on how different societies treat their young female performers, she says that any thematic similarity is merely a coincidence. Instead, she says that JonBenét is more accurately described as a meta commentary on the community members who were affected by having an infamous true crime story take place in their hometown. For instance, the film starts off with a scene of matriarch Patsy Ramsey dialing 9/11 to report the murder but then transitions into a montage of casting tapes. Each prospective Patsy talks into the camera about her personal connection to the case––whether it be experience as a pageant contestant, as a teacher with students who knew JonBenét, or simply as a mother.

Perhaps it's to be expected that the acted bits seem straight out of a Lifetime movie. After all, the people trying out for the film are not professional Hollywood actors by any means, but largely blue-collar workers like grocery store managers or cops. What's interesting is not whether or not the actors are being convincing in their portrayals of the crime's players, but rather how their lived experiences inform those portrayals.

Green told me that she spent 15 minutes with each actor who showed up to her casting call pitching the premise of the film: There was a three-page treatment and no script. Casting tapes would be used in the film. Multiple actors would be playing each role. It was an experiment––a sort of choose-your-own adventure meets community playhouse––and would they like to participate?

She attributes the almost-universal enthusiasm to the notion that Americans love to talk in general. Amplify that by the fact that nothing's really going on in Boulder, and she had people talking about their experiences with murdered family members, molestation, and more within the span of a 45-minute interview.

"They've been living in the shadow of this crime for 20 years and they're a little sick of the media coverage, so they've tried to make sense of it themselves," she explained. "So it was nice to have someone ask them about their experiences and how they've found closure. I think they found it a little cathartic."

Historically, there have been two camps of people who follow the JonBenét case: those who think she was killed by a home intruder and others who that thinks a family member did it. Both theories are deftly explored by Green without her giving obvious preference to either one. In a later scene with the Patsys, a series of actresses reads from The Death of Innocence, which is the memoir co-written by both JonBenét's parents. One stops reading practically mid-sentence when confronting a self-aggrandizing passage about Patsy's past as a former beauty queen. Another reads the same part but then thinks aloud that JonBenét herself clearly wanted to participate in the contests and wasn't the victim of a so-called pageant mom trying to relive her glory days. Montages of people contradicting each other's theories are woven throughout and become more complicated and compelling as each actor or actress reveals more about their backstory.

One theory about the murder is that JonBenét's older brother Burke accidentally committed the murder and that the parents covered it up. Green gets the kids trying out for Burke's role to talk about teasing their siblings and intercuts that with actors trying out for patriarch John talking about dangerous games they played as kids—games that could have easily resulted in her accidental death. Later, the little boys hit a watermelon with a flashlight until it bursts––and the preceding interviews make this the most disturbing and clever portion of the film.

The film ends with a scene of the Ramseys on the night of the murder with different sets of actors playing out several possible scenarios all at once. The camera pans across them, giving the viewer an experience that's not unlike attending a performance of an immersive play like Sleep No More. While it's a wonder that Netflix picked up such a bizarre, genre-defying movie, it's perhaps even more insane when you contemplate the amount of work the company's legal team must have gone through in order to make sure that the film didn't result in a libel suit. After all, when CBS aired The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey last September, Burke Ramsey sued the network for $750 million in a case that's still working its way through circuit court in Wisconsin. In that docuseries, investigators hired a random 10-year-old boy to hit a pigskin-wig contraption with a flashlight to prove a child could have committed the murder.

Green says that it wasn't hard to not promote a specific theory, though, and that's because she genuinely doesn't have one. Although she read every book and watched every film she could get a hand on before going into production, she claims she went in with an open mind. And even after talking to more than 200 people in Boulder about who they thought killed JonBenét, she said that she's still no more closer to the truth than when she was 11 and watching the investigation happen in real time.

"There's not enough evidence to know who did it, so you have to live with this uncertainty and ambiguity," she says. "And that's what the film became about."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Sympathy opens with what must be the most intense description of an Instagram follow request ever committed to print. Alice Hare, the 23-year-old narrator, relates the agony of waiting to be granted access to a private account. She aches for that pale grey "requested" button to give way to its more reassuring successor; to confirm that she's "following". With this, the stage is set for a contemporary tale of obsession.

It feels as though the world has been waiting for a literary take on the photo-sharing app. Who among us hasn't been queasy after a bout of girl-crush stalking, or that very particular self-aware frustration when unable to find the right angle for a cocktail snap? Not posting would be like having a margarita without the salt. What makes Sympathy such a standout in its approach to social media is a move way from Black Mirror-style satire and, instead, a smart and lyrical evocation of that murky emotional terrain between our online and offline selves.

The novel, written by 28-year-old London native Olivia Sudjic, has already been praised by the likes of Diana Athill and is one of the most talked about debuts of the year. We meet in a cafe near my flat, which I've chosen specifically for its Instagrammable properties: millennial pink tables, food served on pastel plates. It's the kind place I imagine Sympathy's characters might post about, tagging the location like a breadcrumb to be found.

Alice, the book's lead, is living in limbo after graduating university, and in search of a "single, coherent narrative" about her origins (something her adoptive English mother has been unable to supply). After striking up a correspondence with her ailing grandmother, Alice travels to New York to help out during Silvia's cancer treatment. Once there, she becomes increasingly obsessed with a Japanese writer and Instagram cool-girl named Mizuko, in whose life story Alice detects odd parallels to her own. Any similarities that might not be present between the pair, Alice is able to manufacture, mining Mizuko's online presence for likes and interests with which to furnish her own personality. When Alice orchestrates a "chance" encounter with the writer – cheers geotags – Mizuko is unable to see that what feels like a happy coincidence is anything but.

Olivia Sudjic portrait at Cafe Miami, Clapton by Imogen Freeland

Full of wry humour and sharp observations, Sympathy explores the ways we struggle to fully understand an experience that is not our own. We relate to others – as we must – through our own limited perspective. In this era of hyper-connectivity, the illusion of sympathy is everywhere, but are we really connecting in the way that we imagine ourselves to be?

Sudjic describes how, at 25, she'd tried a few different jobs and found herself working at a branding consultancy, but the idea that would evolve into Sympathy had already begun brewing. She decided to take a six-month sabbatical. "Of course, what happened is that I didn't write anything." she says. "Suddenly I had all this free time. I just freaked out."

Nearing the end of the six months, Sudjic's boss told her that they'd given her job to someone else, but that she was welcome to take a role in the Dubai office. "There was nothing like the threat of having to leave London to light a fire under my ass!"

"Throughout history, the tools we make end up shaping us" - Olivia Sudjic

She wrote the bulk of the book in three months in a self-confessed "fever-dream", fitting for a novel rife with mysterious illnesses, identity slippages and swift, feverish descents down social media's rabbit holes. The narrative's non-linear structure imitates the feeling of scrolling through an Instagram feed, where past and present co-exist and a #tbt might pop up at any time. It was meticulously plotted, so that Sudjic's writing space looked more like "a crime scene" than an author's desk. "It just felt like a much more authentic way of storytelling according to the way modern minds work," she says.

Surprisingly for a book that reads like The Talented Mr Ripley for the 21st Century, Sudjic says that she initially conceived it as a historical novel about a 17th century "medicine" called Powder of Sympathy. "I'm quite glad now that I can talk about this historical element, because it guards against the idea that this book is only about now. I feel like there are these age-old human frailties that technology can take advantage of. The point is that, throughout history, the tools we make end up shaping us."

That Alice's character has been shaped by life online is immediately evident. "I was interested in how the internet sees you," says Sudjic. "To a machine, you're viewed as this collection of metadata; the things you like and click on, what you've spent time doing." What's most specific in Alice's characterisation are the traits that can be easily understood by our devices; locations she visits, the amount of time she spends walking around the city and the sights she trains her iPhone lens on.

Despite the first person narration, Alice's inner-psyche remains blurry, mimicking the way someone is seen by a browser's internal algorithms. Later in the novel, strange coincidences begin to occur that mirror how a Facebook advert might anticipate a user's needs. "These things that we think are all about choice are actually being predicted, nudged and shaped. What we get access to online, the links that float to the top of our searches – that's all coloured by information we often don't even realise we've given out".

"The digital apparatus we have with which to affect change slightly tricks us into feeling like we're more powerful than we are, and actually, we're quite passive" – Olivia Sudjic

Sudjic compares buying a smart phone to a kind of Faustian pact: "There's this trade off between privacy and convenience." She points me to the novel's epigraph, a line from Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice tells the Red Queen, "I wouldn't mind being a pawn, if only I might join." It is exactly this bargain we enter into when we share information about ourselves online. I ask whether Olivia was nervous about writing Alice as a character who, though the driving force of the novel, is quite passive – a pawn – when it comes to her interactions IRL. "She is passive, but I feel like that passivity is what a lot of our generation is coping with. The digital apparatus we have with which to effect change slightly tricks us into feeling like we're more powerful than we are, and actually, we're quite passive."

It's proof of Sudjic's electric talent that Alice's voice remains captivating, even as she seems to become a conduit for other people's experiences (her boyfriend Dwight's, for instance). Alice is simultaneously relatable and inscrutable, sympathetic, caustic and infuriating all at the same time. Of course she is – she's a 23-year-old trying to figure out her place in the world.

Acutely aware of the difference in the ways male and female novelists are asked to promote their books, Sudjic says she fought hard to keep the novel's original title. "I just thought, if Franzen can do it, I can. Men seem to have ownership of those one word titles. Also, I couldn't believe that it hadn't already been used, given what novels, from their genesis, are supposed to be about."

We discuss the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy: "It was about how we can over-identify with characters and it can lead us astray morally." Sudjic was drawn to the idea that novels used to be a slightly perilous moral undertaking. "Now novels are good and it's Instagram that's bad. Every single time a new format comes up for identifying with other people, we all throw up our hands thinking it's a disaster."

For Alice and Mizuko, it just might be.

'Sympathy' by Olivia Sudjic is published by ONE/Pushkin Press on the 4th of May, via Pushkin Press. Also available on audible.co.uk.

@KLoftusOBrien

More female writers:

An Interview with Viral Poet Lindsay Hera Bird

Remembering Sarah Kane: the Playwright Who Changed British Theatre Forever

The VICE Interview: Patti Smith

Acknowledging what many have long suspected, Facebook admitted Thursday that nations have tried to use the platform as a propaganda machine, directing covert campaigns to influence public opinion by spreading misleading information and manipulating users.

But Facebook now understands how these "information operations" work, and it's ready to fight back.

In a white paper penned by the social media giant's security team, Facebook outlined just how subtle such operations can be — they include more than just spreading so-called "fake news," a term the company cautions against using, since it's become a meaningless catch-all. Not only have countries and non-state groups set up fake accounts dedicated to spreading hacked or false information, but they've also used these accounts to cajole Facebook users into believing specific narratives and thus further certain political or ideological outcomes.

Such operations have occurred, the company admitted, during the French and American presidential elections. Facebook also revealed that it had "taken action" against more than 30,000 fake accounts — or "false amplifiers," which are often operated not by bots but by humans — in France.

Read more on VICE News

President Donald Trump's first 100 days have been a fucking mess. The White House has tried to sell (via error-laden lists) Trump's prolific use of executive actions as proof of profound productivity, and Trump has tried to undermine the 100-day yardstick he himself highlighted on the campaign trail. But there's no denying that Trump hasn't delivered on many of his firm promises to voters so far: Aside from putting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and cracking down on undocumented immigrants, most of his actions have proven to be more showmanship than substance. Trump's wild accusations and erratic behaviour may have already damaged the institution of the American presidency. And as I write this, it seems he'll barely avoid a government shutdown (by letting Congress extend negotiations for another week) that there was no need to fly this close to on his first miniscule funding battle. The list of Trump's failures is so long—we haven't even scratched the surface here—that presidential historian Jonathan Alter recently told NBC News "this is the worst, least successful, first 100 days since it became a concept in 1933."

But other presidents, notably Bill Clinton, have had disastrous first 100 days and recovered. Trump's advisers seem confident they're coming to grips with the slow pace of the legislative process, and his supporters still back him. It's possible his next 100 days will be better than this stretch, at least when it comes to his legislative agenda. Given where he is on his apparently steep learning curve at day 99, though, that seems unlikely.

Over the past few days, a media narrative has emerged that Trump has come to grips with the fact that a president is not a CEO or a reality TV show host who can clap his hands and get things done. Recognizing the complexities of Congress and his initial failures, this interpretation goes, Trump has started to develop a subtler mode of operating. Case in point, soon after the implosion of the Republican Affordable Care Act replacement bill in the House last month, Trump reportedly quietly revived it, allowing Vice President Mike Pence to take lead on a softer and more open-ended approach. The result was a negotiated compromise bill with buy-in from conservative Republicans and at least one moderate.

The one-page sketch of a tax reform plan Trump released this Wednesday also read to some as a sign of growth. It was the White House taking point on a priority, but it also offered legislators basic principles to build upon rather than trying to stuff a fully-formed bill down legislators' throats, as in the case of the initial ACA replacement bill.

"It is a step in the right direction," said William Antholis, director of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. "But it's only one step."

The Trump-backed revived healthcare bill failed to secure enough votes to move ahead in the House this week. Antholis notes that the administration could possibly eventually pass this bill through backroom wheeling and dealing, but sees no clear path for it to proceed as is. And Trump's tax proposal has already spooked conservative Republicans who don't know how it would be paid for. "Everyone who's looked at his tax reform proposal says it's dead on arrival," Antholis said.

Antholis suspects that the Trump administration still doesn't have a great deal of legislative know-how on staff. Villanova congressional expert John Johannes added that while Trump seems more capable of wining and dining congressmen than former President Barack Obama, there is still "no strategy for the big picture."

Trump also hasn't abandoned the reliance on public threats, even those these have failed to work for him to date. When he lambasted conservative Republicans after his first healthcare failure, they ignored him. More recently, he hinted that he'd stop making subsidy payments to keep insurers in Affordable Care Act markets if Democrats didn't fund his border wall as part of the 2017 budget—then backed off.

Trump doesn't need to shift fully to soft touches, noted Johannes, but "clever presidents know when to push, when to beg, when to cajole, when to threaten… Trump is a long way from that skill level."

While his latest legislative push has seemingly had more time and breathing room built into it, Republicans reportedly still felt like he was rushing on both healthcare and the release of his tax plan to score points by day 100. And Johannes believes that while some flexibility is good, Trump still seems to care too little about policy details. "He seems too focused on getting something done," said Johannes, "rather than getting it right."

It doesn't help, the experts I spoke to agree, that Trump is so unpredictable; to make deals with Congress, legislators have to be able to trust you. Nor does it help that his administration has yet to fill, or even nominate candidates for, more than 500 key administrative jobs, many of which deal with shepherding policy priorities along. "There is absolutely no evidence that Trump even cares about filling those" positions, said Johannes.

"I have not seen anything that would indicate [Trump] has changed his modus operandi as it relates to legislation," said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former longtime Senate staffer. "He is still learning that it's not quite that easy to take on major policy changes and [have it so that you] snap your fingers and it happens."

Hoagland believes that to actually move forward on any of his key legislative promises, Trump is going to have to learn "that compromise is not a four-letter word [but] a necessary ingredient for a democratic process." He'll have to temper his own positions into a middle ground between whatever coalitions of willing Democrats and Republicans he can put together. Hoagland has heard from people who've worked with Trump that he can be a good listener behind closed doors. However, some observers worry that Trump's initial failures and hostility towards Democrats have poisoned the wells for this kind of pragmatism. "To be brutally frank," admitted Hoagland, Trump "is going to have to invite the Democratic leadership to Camp David—I would hope not to Mar-a-Lago. He's going to have to find some way of reaching out."

Even if he remains as he is—still bellicose, inexperienced, and prone to chaos—Antholis suspects Trump can still score a few legislative agenda wins over the next 100 days, or by year's end. "If you forced me to bet," he said, "it would be the repatriation of foreign earnings for companies. You might also get some sort of marginal corporate tax cut [or] a few other tax changes. For each of those, it's 50-50. It's a coin toss… But those things could happen."

That may be offset by the fact that team Trump is running out of other low-hanging fruits. According to Wake Forest University regulatory expert Sidney Shapiro, Republicans can slash a few more regulations via the Congressional Review Act, which Trump and Congress have used to eliminate several Obama-era rules. But the CRA only applies to rules enacted late in Obama's second term and most of the GOP's top target regulations have, he said, likely already been axed. Shapiro notes that Trump and company will find it a grueling process to actually change rules moving forward, and almost impossible to fully rescind them in most cases.

Though it's only spring, Trump actually doesn't have much time to tackle healthcare and taxes. "Moving not just one but two major pieces of legislation not just through the House, but through the Senate, through the requisite committees, then reconciling what's different is just hard to do that fast," said Antholis. And as the midterm campaign season approaches, some members of Congress will worry about taking risky votes, especially in the service of a president whose approval rating is below 50 percent.

All in all, Trump will be fairly lucky if his next 100 days aren't just as bad as his first. Or as Antholis put it, "as different as these two characters are… he really runs the risk of having a Carter-like presidency."

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