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After months of resistance and public outcry, on December 4, 2016, the Obama administration announced it would halt construction on the Dakota Access pipeline, and the Army Corps of Engineers soon started conducting a study on the potentially harmful effects it could have on the environment. But the effort didn't last long. In January, President Trump gave instructions to cease the study, which meant construction could begin again. Then, in February, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, citing safety concerns, issued an emergency evacuation order, giving protesters until the 22nd to leave their camps near Lake Oahe. Larry Towell, who has spent years documenting Native American issues in Canada and the US, made his third and perhaps final trip to the pipeline. There, at the Oceti Sakowin camp, he captured the remaining water protectors—the demonstrators, many of them tribal leaders and young people from around the country. The next day, police trucks and construction vehicles entered the camp, and some holdouts fled onto the frozen Cannonball River.
Don't you hate it when you go see your favourite band and they don't return for an encore? It's not just disheartening, but honestly kind of disrespectful. That's how the media (and some of the general public) felt after White House press secretary Sean Spicer snuck out of a press conference without taking any questions.
During Wednesday night's episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts dissed "the Spiceman" for literally not doing his job—which definitely stung a lot more than when artists refuse to play their biggest hits.
You can watch last night'sDesus & Merofor free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
Body positivity is the hottest new trend in socially conscious marketing. If you want your brand in the news, it seems all you have to do is swap your stick-thin models with "real" people and watch the accolades roll in. But behind every photoshoot or body positive ad from Arie, Dove, or ModCloth, there's an army of fat liberation activists: women and men who've been working for decades to free themselves and others like them from the social stigma that comes with living in a fat body.
We talked to some of the fat-posi movement's rising stars about their pet peeves about the fashion industry, the hate they get from strangers online, and the ways allies of the cause be supportive without dominating the conversation.
Jessica Hinkle: Owner of Proud Mary, a plus-size fashion site and blogger, stylist and photographer at Fat Fashion.
VICE: What inspired you to get into the plus-size fashion scene? Jessica Hinkle: I always wanted to work in fashion but didn't pursue it earlier because I felt that I wouldn't be welcome. I used to fill books with sketches of clothing and then get rid of them. When I was 20, I came across a fan zine with nude photos of Beth Ditto from the band the Gossip. It was the first time I'd felt my internalized fatphobia to be challenged, and I started to unlearn all the bullshit society tells us about our worth as determined by our size.
As someone with such a public profile, what kinds of things do strangers say to you that get under your skin? How do you deal with that? I've gotten a lot of messages where people tell me I'm disgusting and/or to kill myself. They say I glorify obesity when I actually glorify self-love. I don't understand why that threatens people so much. It used to affect me pretty intensely, but now I just get sad that someone is so full of anger and hate that they'd feel the need to break a stranger down in such a way.
I get looks and comments in the real world just wearing some of the things I do. People feel like you should hide when you're my size—that you should be ashamed for existing and therefore aren't allowed to be stylish and happy. I also get a lot of men messaging me because they assume a fat woman visible on the internet would be happy to get their attention. That affects me the most, at this point. It makes me mad that just existing is treated like an invitation for sexually explicit messages.
You've written about the connection between intentional weight loss and fat-phobia. Could you talk a little bit about the thinly-veiled aura of anti-fatness you see lurking around "health" and weight-loss spaces? Everyone obviously should have autonomy over themselves, and I don't judge people for the choices they make concerning their bodies. Part of this issue is that the weight-loss industry makes a lot of money off of anti-fatness. We've been told our whole lives that being fat is one of the worst things you can be and that it's so "unhealthy." That health concerning has been used to justify anti-fatness countless times. People hide their fatphobia as "concern" for our health.
If people want to work out and eat only salad, go for it. Do what makes you feel good. The problem comes when people are posting "before and after" images, which inherently champions being smaller as better. If that's how you feel, fine, but do not call yourself body-positive. In order to be body-positive, you have to acknowledge that people truly deserve respect and autonomy over their bodies without judgement. Fat people aren't "before" photos. We need to stop centering conversations about body-positivity around health in general.
Ariel Woodson and KC Slack: Co-hosts of Bad Fat Broads, a podcast breaking down "the bad fat bitch perspective on everything important."
VICE: What does body positivity mean to you, and how do you practice it in everyday life? Ariel Woodson: That phrase doesn't mean anything to me. It's been so devalued that it doesn't carry any weight. But if we're playing the question straight, body positivity at its best means an intersectional take on bodies. You want to prioritize the bodies that are most oppressed in our society and make sure things are equal for people. It means doing away with the real world implications of living inside a body that people don't like.
KC Slack: I actually think of our work as more about fat liberation than about body positivity. Not that I'm not positive about all bodies, but my analysis is that when the most marginalized bodies are freed, everyone will be able to have a more free relationship with their body. For me, body positivity means getting to feel good about the weird amazing gift that having a body is. Sometimes it really sucks to have a body. Sometimes, you're oppressed because of the shape, size, or overall look of your body. Sometimes, your body itself is painful. Those things are all real, but it's still amazing to have this tactile interface with the world via a body.
You both recently did a show called "The Airing of Fat Grievances," in which you called out companies who are getting a lot of positive press for promoting a super-sterilized and white version of fat acceptance. KC: It's really popular right now for brands to champion body positivity for everyone while their clothes stop at a size 20. I think that's hilarious, because it completely misses the point! For me personally, Lane Bryant has been cancelled for a long time because they keep doing this advertising around every body being OK, but every time I've been in a Lane Bryant someone has tried to sell me something with a concealing stomach panel. It's just like, yo! Either my body is good and OK, or I need extra spandex in my pants so maybe people won't notice it. It's really upsetting.
Ariel: Aerie has really monetized this body positivity thing. They talk about how they don't airbrush models, but they're still using models who are well within conventional beauty standards. Their largest model is, like, a size 12, and she's white. That's not really pushing any boundaries. On the practical side of it, I still can't shop at American Eagle! I can't fit into any of their clothes. I'm not saying that every brand has to cater to every single kind of body, but let's talk about what makes body positivity useful in marketing beyond the money grab.
What are some of the most frequent body-related aggressions you've encountered from people in your life? Ariel: I went to the ER for something a couple weeks ago. Not that it matters, but I'm in excellent health. I don't have any of the things they like to tag fat people as having—I don't have high blood pressure, I'm not diabetic. Still, I couldn't get treated because the doctor couldn't stop harping on my weight. I was there because my feet had swollen up in the course of 24 hours, which had never happened to me before. All he could tell me was to go home and lose weight! OK!
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that as self-assured, fat-positive women on the internet, you might get a little bit of hate. What are some of the most common things you hear, and how do you deal with that? KC: I have a perfectly absurd number of people blocked on Twitter. If somebody enters my mentions, I use a program called Block Chain that lets you just block everyone who follows someone. I just don't care! I don't think people are entitled to my space and I don't think anyone is entitled to interact with me. I said something on Twitter recently about how you're actually not morally obligated to be healthy. A bunch of people told me to kill myself: "fat bitch, you'd be better off with a bullet in your head!" I also get a lot of people telling me I'm ugly and no one wants to fuck me, which is so incredibly not true that it's hard to take seriously.
What are some things people who want to be supportive of the fat-pos movement can do to change their ingrained stereotypes and behaviours? KC: I would like it if people would notice physical space and how it excludes fat bodies. If you go to a restaurant and the chairs have arms, think about what it would be like if your hips were too wide to fit.
Ariel: Listen to fat people. Fat people are the authority on the fat experience. If you have a friend who is practicing fat acceptance or body positivity, model that behavior. Even if you don't do it in your everyday life, just do it when you're around them.
Cat Polivoda: blogger, personal stylist, consultant and owner of Cat's Closet, an online plus-size thrift shop.
VICE: How do you practice body positivity in everyday life? Cat Polivoda: I strive to quash negative self talk and replace it with positive affirmations. I live as unapologetically as possible, especially when it comes to my size. Oh—and I pretty much remind myself how cute I am every time I walk past a mirror.
You recently came out with resolution resistance series which breaks down the assumption that losing weight should be a goal for everyone. Can you talk a little bit about why you started it, and what it means to you? In our culture, it's a standard assumption that if you're curvy, plus-size, or fat, you must be actively trying to lose weight. On a very regular basis, accomplished business professionals and experts in their field aren't taken seriously because of their weight. People don't get promoted because of stereotypes about their size. And I hear countless painful stories from people whose parents have "never been prouder" of them as they were when they lost weight—never mind graduations, landing jobs, creating works of art, or any other accomplishments. Somehow, weight loss trumps all of those? It's both infuriating and heartbreaking.
You use the word "fat" to describe yourself, and you mention in a recent blog post that many in the body-pos community might find that radical. Can you explain why? Body positivity comes from fat liberation activism. Though I value parts of body positivity because I think it has allowed more people of all sizes to embrace their bodies, I am way more connected to fat liberation.
"Fat" is my preferred term. There is an element of reclaiming the word that I love. I think it's easier to actively resist misconceptions about fat people when I am comfortable with using the word. For instance, when people insist that I am "not fat" but I am, instead, "beautiful," I can remind them that I am both "fat and beautiful." Of course, "fat" is a very loaded term and everyone gets to decide what words they want to use to describe themselves or with which to identify.
If you could change one thing about the way fat people are viewed in society, what would it be? Our bodies aren't something to be fixed. It's our culture that is in desperate need of repair. We deserve respect and access and representation right now. Those aren't things to be gained only if we change our bodies.
VICE: Why did you start blogging? Kelvin Davis: I started Notoriously Dapper after a bad experience at Express. I went to go get a blazer and they unfortunately didn't have it in my size. I asked for a bigger size, and the lady said that they did not carry a larger size. That was really the first time, as a male, experiencing things not coming in my size. I felt the need to talk about that, but as a guy, the societal standard of masculinity is that you're not supposed to talk about body issues, anything emotional or anything that has to do with how you feel.
Scrolling through your personal Instagram , it looks like the vast majority of the feedback from fans is positive. However, you're also a mod for the Tess Holliday-led @effyourbeautystandards Instagram page, where I expect you see your fair share of negativity. How do you deal with that? Sometimes women in the community tell me to stop whining because women have to deal with so much more. I hear a lot of "suck it up and be a man." But body positivity is supposed to be for everyone. Tess Holliday chose me as a moderator because she wanted it to be for everybody. Not just for women. Not just for white people. For everybody! Every shape, every age, race and gender.
Have you ever experienced any real-life body aggressions from friends or family? I was at a pool party and somebody asked me why I had all these white marks all over my skin. It seemed like he thought I had a disease or something, he was worried about me. He was like hey man, what are all those white marks on the side of your stomach, do they itch? I was like NO! They don't itch! It's not a rash, they're just stretch marks. I just remember being like what the fuck! Are you serious?
Alysse Dalessandro: size-inclusive designer, writer, activist and owner of Ready to Stare, a plus-size fashion and jewelry brand.
VICE: Tell me about Ready to Stare. Where does the name come from? Alysse Dalessandro: I started Ready to Stare after I was fat-shamed on the street. I was walking along wearing a short dress, and someone yelled out of a car window: "Hey fat girl! Stop trying to look skinny!" When you're confident but you don't fit the beauty standard, people are going to stare at you. I stood out because people who look like me are supposed to hate themselves, we're supposed to hide. So I called my brand Ready to Stare. I took a moment of shame and turned it into a celebration of the things that the people in that car were shaming me for.
A few years ago you were in the news over photos of you in a red cupcake dress . You wrote a blog post about the hate you got, a lot of which was from women who objected to the shape of the dress on your body. Why was the cut of that dress controversial? Fashion for me is armour. I've always been bullied for the way that I dress, but as Rihanna says "she can beat me, but she can never beat my outfit." That's my mantra. I made this dress because I wanted it to exist. I actually modeled it after Rihanna's Grammy dress from a few years ago. When I put it out there, it bothered people, because it was a dress that was very obviously not trying to make me look thinner in any way. The idea that fashion for plus-sized bodies is only acceptable if you are actively trying to look thinner became this huge point of contention for people.
You're pretty open about the trolling you get from people – both online and in person. Do you employ any self-care tactics to keep yourself sane? Just last week, someone went in on me saying "look at this whale standing there like she thinks she's a human female." That really struck me. When that person looks at me, they don't see a person, they see a whale. How dare I stand in a pose that someone they consider to be human would stand in? When someone says something that dehumanizing about me, I'll talk to a friend about it, delete it, or sometimes I'll leave them up so people can see how we get talked to. I think it's important to give some type of visibility to these comments because if this isn't your reality, you have no way of knowing how people treat us.
I know there's a debate in the body-positive community about using the word "fat" to describe yourself. How do you use that word? I really believe that words have power that we give them. When I say that my body is fat, I am removing the power that it's held over me in the past as an insult. It's literally just a description of the size of my body – fat doesn't mean ugly, fat doesn't mean worthless. When we take back the word and say "yeah, I'm fat and that's OK," we're kind of taking that power away from it. I think it does a lot of harm when people say they don't want to be called fat or plus-size. There's already a stigma against those words, so when you deny them and say you just want to be seen as "beautiful," you're enforcing the idea that fat can't mean beautiful, and that's a big problem.
The accusers allege that Spacey sexually harassed crew members routinely over the course of the show's six seasons. They claim Spacey's "predatory" behaviour turned the set of House of Cards into a "toxic" environment, where young male staffers were frequently subjected to crude comments and touched inappropriately.
One production assistant said Spacey sexually assaulted him during a car ride to the show's set outside Baltimore. Spacey, who was driving, allegedly put his hands down the PA's pants, an advance he described as nonconsensual.
"I was in a state of shock," the PA told CNN. "He was a man in a very powerful position on the show, and I was someone very low on the totem pole and on the food chain there."
Minutes later, after the two brought Spacey's stuff into the star's trailer, the actor allegedly cornered the PA and touched him inappropriately. The PA said he told Spacey he was uncomfortable, and the actor reportedly left the set for the rest of the day.
Another crew member told CNN he was regularly subjected to Spacey's advances and crude comments.
"He would put his hands on me in weird ways," the crew member told CNN. "He would come in and massage my shoulders from behind or put his hands around me or touch my stomach sometimes in weird ways that in normal everyday conversation would not be appropriate."
The growing number of troubling allegations follow an account from actor Anthony Rapp who publicly accused Spacey on Sunday of lying on top of him and "trying to seduce" him when he was 14. On Tuesday, Netflix decided to halt production on the final season of House of Cards "to address any concerns of our cast and crew." By Thursday, Spacey's talent agency and publicist had dropped him.
In response to the initial claim, Spacey responded by apologizing to Rapp about the alleged encounter, which he said he doesn't remember. He also decided to come out, a move the LGBTQ community has widely criticized. On Wednesday, Spacey announced that he would "seek evaluation and treatment," Deadline reports. According to the Guardian, British police are now investigating a sexual assault claim against him in London.
A great schism has broken out within the organization that oversees the selection of new emojis, according to a new report from BuzzFeed News. But it's not a fight over the layering of cheeseburger ingredients or what the mouthless smiley means: The emoji overlords are reportedly battling over the need for a frowning poop emoji.
According to BuzzFeed, new emojis are decided on by a group called the Unicode Consortium, which, despite having a name like a villainous organization in a Dan Brown book, is mostly made up of typographers and unicode developers. The consortium is currently debating which new emojis will make it into the next update, and some of the proposed additions are a cupcake, a peacock, a smiley with a party hat, and the aforementioned sad coil of poo.
"FROWNING POO can express a range of meanings that the smiling poo emoji cannot," a 12-page proposal for the new emoji reads. "For instance, if someone wants to share whether they had a healthy versus unpleasant bowel movement (particularly in the context of travel or gastrointestinal health), the smiling poo is limited and may not always be suitable."
Not everyone at the consortium agrees, though. Two typographers, Andrew West and Michael Everson, are leading the fight to keep the frowning feces off our phones forever.
"Organic waste isn't cute," Everson wrote in an October 22 memo.
"Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next?" He continued, flaunting his apparent typographer's love for capitalization. "PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO?"
West agreed, saying that the now-beloved smiling poop emoji was a bad move to begin with, and that expanding the turd's range of emotion "is even worse."
"As an ordinary user, I don't want this kind of crap on my phone," Everson added.
West and Everson's screed against the sad shit has apparently ignited a bigger conversation within the consortium's ranks about the approval process for new emojis, according to BuzzFeed. It doesn't look like the pouty poo is going to make it into the next round of emojis, but the debate is a fascinating look at how intensely people scrutinize the goofy cartoons we use for Venmo transactions. It makes sense—these are the new generation of cartoon heroes, after all.
Everyone does it eventually, and we don't always have control over when it happens. But the problem is that death is a very sensitive subject. It's loaded with emotions, it's expensive, and it's hard to get right. Perhaps that's why "death" and "innovation" don't tend to be so closely associated. But why not? With an eye toward Halloween, let's discuss whether death, one of our most ritual-based processes, can actually be innovative.
"It is much more than just seeing an electric hearse at the exhibition. It is the relentless change in culture that embracing technology brings to society. It is transforming all industries, including the funeral."
— Peter Billingham, a British speaker and consultant on bereavement industry issues and the founder of a website called Death Goes Digital, pondering whether self-driving vehicles could possibly disrupt the funeral industry. (This came after the National Funeral Exhibition, in which an electric hearse, based on a Nissan Leaf, was displayed.) Billingham's ultimate point is less about self-driving vehicles in general and more about the fact that the funeral industry doesn't do innovation well—which is a problem.
We're getting cremated more.According to statistics from the National Funeral Directors Association, cremation has become more popular than traditional burials in the past few years, with 47.9 percent of choosing the ashes route in 2015, a number that is expected to jump to 53.3 percent next year and 71.3 percent in 2030. Costs have traditionally been a differentiator, and still are: The association reported that a cremation cost $6,078 in 2014, versus $7,181 for a traditional funeral and burial.
Startups are starting to enter the sector. The startup accelerator Y Combinator has backed at least two funeral-related startups, though one, Halolife, is no longer active. Fellow YC alum Willing, which focuses on estate planning, was able to score a Series A round last year and reportedly is used to create 25,000 estate documents per month.
Funeral homes use funeral-specific software platforms to manage their businesses. Niche industries often have hardware and software needs specific to their own industries, and the world of funerals is no exception. Among the vendors in the space are FrontRunner Professional, FuneralTech, and Aldor Systems.
The signage is digital now. Digital signs have become increasingly prominent in funeral homes in recent years, with vendors like FuneralScreen specifically targeting such use cases.
Tombstones are getting much more sophisticated. As we pointed out earlier this year, there's nothing stopping you from getting an elaborately-engraved tombstone featuring your favorite pop-culture icons. But only recently have people started to add technology to the mix. Earlier this year, a Slovenian cemetery introduced a digital tombstone, a device that can play digital content that reflects the person's life. The concept is similar to the above-mentioned FuneralScreen, of course, but the fact that it has to be outside adds a layer of complication. A blue screen of death on this thing would be terribly ironic.
"I remember my dad was saying, 'I've used Angie's List for contractors. Is there something like that for funeral homes?' And I said, of course, yes, there had to be … But it turned out there wasn't."
— Mike Belsito, the cofounder of a company called eFuneral, discussing with The Atlantic his reasoning for founding the company with Bryan Chaikin. Simply put, the startup firm attempted to make it easy to go through the complicated steps of planning a funeral—something Belsito's family struggled with after the death of a cousin. While the idea was a pretty good one, the firm struggled to break through and was sold off to a life insurance company in 2014. "The experience was a great one, but ultimately, we failed," Belsito recalled in a post on Medium. Other firms with similar missions, like Parting, have since cropped up.
Lemmy Kilmeister's custom urn, made by Foreverance. Image: via the company's Facebook page
When famous musicians pass on, they get their urns 3D-printed by this startup
We've lost a lot of major stars in the past few years, in particular in the music world, and especially in 2016, when we started the year with the loss of David Bowie, lost Prince a few months later, and ended the year with the passing of George Michael.
But it was the death of two rock stars at the tail end of 2015 that highlighted what is expected to become a prominent trend in the years to come.
At the beginning of December 2015, former Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland died on his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota. Foreverence, a company that had only started the previous year and whose headquarters are only located roughly 10 miles away from where Weiland died, would eventually be responsible for creating the famed vocalist's urn. (Weiland's family chose a megaphone, a popular on-stage tool for the singer, for its urn design.)
A few weeks later in Los Angeles, Motörhead icon Lemmy Kilmister died of cancer, and he very much was not the kind of person for whom a traditional urn or casket was a fit. So Foreverence created a custom design for him that featured both his iconic hat and his iconic style—specifically, the Ace of Spades.
Clearly, Foreverence had hit on a smart idea. The company came about as a result of founder Peter Saari, who put together two-and-two while consulting for a company that sold 3D-printing equipment. He learned about the growing popularity of cremation for non-financial reasons in Time magazine—and realized that the two concepts fit, especially as it was becoming clear that cremation would continue growing in popularity.
"There was a market gap for high-value cremation for individuals and families who desired a high-value cremation product," Saari told Twin Cities Business last year. "It just didn't exist. The reason for that is this false presumption that I think many funeral professionals still have, which is that people who choose cremation are doing so because it is a cheap alternative—not out of matters of practicality and pragmatism."
In other words, there were people who could afford something like a customized 3D-printed urn, and who might want something unique because their loved one had a larger-than-life personality. Like the families of rock stars.
In fact, the first person that Saari's team worked on something for was Bob Casale, a Devo member whose iconic energy dome hat became perfect final resting place for the late musical icon.
Weiland, Casale, and Kilmeister, obviously, were big stars in their own right, but Saari soon would be working on something for a much bigger icon—a local, in fact. Prince.
Prince's final resting place. Image: via the company's Facebook page
When the Minneapolis pop giant died last year, his sister, Tyka, reached out to Foreverence, which came through with a replica of Paisley Park, his famed studio and residence, where the elaborate urn is currently on display.
Saari, understandably, has taken pains to emphasize that this is something that regular people can do too—not just famous folks.
"Through conversation, photographs and sketches, we arrive at what is the most appropriate and meaningful expression of a person's life and legacy. We then design and manufacture the perfect memorial," Saari told People of his company's approach last year.
We want to honour and respect our loved ones, not have disembodied recreations of their heads on our mantles.
Jae Rhim Lee, shown during her 2011 TED Talk. Image: TED
How ecological concerns are helping to change the conversation around death
More than ever, the way we discuss death is in context of environmental impact. Lots of people try to minimize their impacts on the planet by recycling, being eco-conscious, and all that, but what about when they die?
A huge amount of materials—from embalming fluid, to wood, to metal—are used to put on a traditional funeral, and burials take up a whole lot of space in cemeteries.
And while cremation takes up less space on the whole, it's known to create a lot of air pollution. But the rise of "water cremation," or alkaline hydrolysis, could help cut down on some of that waste. It's currently legal in 14 states, and California will become the 15th, with a measure legalizing the process becoming law earlier this month.
The process, which is controversial in some circles, involves putting the deceased inside of a machine that bathes them in an alkaline solution for four hours, effectively speeding up the decomposition process while leaving the bones, which are then cremated. The process is seen as better for the environment than traditional cremation, but there has been confusion about the process, and religious groups are unsure if they want to allow it.
From a more outre perspective, if you're concerned about the environmental impact of your casket going into the ground with you inside, you might find the concept of Coeio interesting. The startup's "infinity burial" approach—which involves burying people directly in the ground, in a suit made of mushrooms—has gotten a lot of attention in recent years because it's so outside of the norm.
If you haven't heard about it, here's the gist: Artist and scientist Jae Rhim Lee came up with the concept of Infinity Burial as part of her graduate studies, having found concerns with the ways that waste materials are involved in the funeral and burial processes.
On top of all that, the human body's own toxins are problematic on their own. Lee, however, was aware of the purifying effects of mushrooms in decomposition, and she analyzed this impact by feeding different kinds of mushrooms her own hair, skin, and nails. This helped her find the right kinds of mushroom for turning a deceased human into compost.
Then, with the help of fellow designer Mike Ma, she turned it into a suit that people wear when buried. Rather than getting buried in a casket, you'd get buried in the suit. If the mushrooms do their job right, your body will turn into compost.
The result is striking—Lee, famously, was the subject of a 2011 TED Talk—and it's actually not all that expensive when you break it down. You can go on the Coeio website and buy a mushroom suit for $1,500, which is comparable in price to a traditional casket or coffin, but cuts out costs like the grave liner and embalming process with the goal of going natural.
However, you may have a harder time finding a burial site, as early adopter Dennis White, who died last year, learned when he tried looking for a burial ground.
Whatever the case, whether or not you think Jae Rhim Lee's unusual approach to this issue is weird or even a bunch of hooey, it's the kind of thinking the world of funerals simply does not have enough of. If nothing else, the mushrooms are provocative.
One of the strange things about the business of death is, when you break it down, how rare it is. To be clear, yes, it's common—but only at a distance. We may see this constant stream of people dying in the media and on our social feeds, but when it comes down to actually having to plan the process for your own loved ones, you may only have to deal with the process of managing someone's funeral a few times in your life.
If your family moves around, you may only use a specific funeral home once or twice in your entire life, and even if you don't, it may be decades between funeral home visits for some.
On top of that, many funeral homes are family businesses rather than corporate conglomerates, it's a business where tools common with other consumer businesses—like, say, loyalty programs—would be difficult to pull off. You only get one shot at this.
Mixing that with the ritualized nature of funerals, which is less prominent now than it was, say, 50 years ago, it's understandable why technology has been so slow to revamp the business and process of death.
The final resting place may not be tech's final frontier, but it's definitely a place where we, as a society, haven't intently focused on in the same way we have, say, our smartphones.
Maybe all this death talk is weird or morbid, but perhaps if we discuss it and ponder how technology can improve the process, we'll make what's already a painful process for the folks we leave behind a little bit easier.
It's a tough process—but one that's important to get right.
On Wednesday, a body found weeks earlier on a farm near Silver Creek, BC, was positively identified as missing teen Traci Genereaux.
The 18-year-old had been missing since May 29 and her death is being treated as suspicious. Genereaux was described by family members and friends as an energetic, artistic, and funny young woman on the upswing after a battle with addiction. The RCMP are asking for the public's help in piecing together Genereaux's final days.
Since the discovery of Genereaux's remains three weeks ago, police have, with the help of heavy equipment, been searching the farm on which she was found. In the last 20 months, five women, including Genereaux, have gone missing in the area: the others are Nicole Bell, 31, Caitlin Potts, 27, Ashley Simpson, 32, and Deanna Wertz, 46.
While some have remarked that the case shares similarities to that of one of the most infamous killers in Canadian history—Robert Pickton—police are asking that the public not jump to conclusions in the case, according to the National Post.
Spanning from the early 80s to the 2000s, Robert Pickton conducted the worst killing spree in Canadian history—some estimate that Pickton killed up to 49 women. A similar search was conducted on Pickton's pig farm outside of Port Coquitlam from early 2002 to late 2003.
CBC reports that the RCMP has contacted the families of the missing women in the area. As reported by APTN, the parents of Caitlin Potts have been told by RCMP that their search has nothing to do with her daughter. Meanwhile the parents of Ashley Simpson were told that their daughter was not found on the farm.
"I'm happy that it wasn't her and that maybe there's still a chance that she's still around somewhere, but saddened by the fact that it wasn't her and that we can't get closure,'' Ashley's father, John Simpson, recently told the Canadian Press.
The man who lives on the property, Curtis Sagmoen, 36, has recently appeared in court. Sagmoen is facing several charges after an escort was allegedly threatened with shotgun near the farm in late August—another similarity to Pickton, who targeted sex workers.
No one, including Sagmoen, is facing any charges in relation with Genereaux's death.
For now, the search of the farm property outside of the small BC town goes on with no timeline on when it will be finished, and all the families of the missing women can do is wait.
It doesn't help that Christian communities can be out of step with the rest of the country when it comes to certain issues. While 50 percent of American adults believe that global warming is manmade, according to the Pew Research Center only 28 percent of white evangelicals would agree (for what it's worth, the same study found that 56 percent of Black protestants do attribute a warmer earth to people). Another Pew Research Center study from earlier this year found that 62 percent of Americans in 2017 supported same sex marriage. Just under 45 percent of black Protestants and 35 percent of white evangelical Protestants shared that view.
The young Christian leaders below are advocating to change some of those discrepancies in how churchgoers tend to view everything from the death penalty to immigration to climate change:
Photo courtesy of Brandan Robertson
Brandan Robertson Age: 25 Issue: LGBTQ Rights Brandan Robertson felt called to Christian ministry at age 12. He was street preaching a year later. At age 15, he created a podcast, and later a radio show in his college years, where he interviewed well-known evangelicals. Somewhere during that time, he began thinking about his sexuality, and publicly came out as bisexual last year. "Sexuality is a fluid thing for me," he explained. Although his calling and his sexuality might seem a contradiction to some, Robertson has blended the two. He is now the lead pastor of Missiongathering Christian Church in San Diego, a church he describes as like "a typical evangelical church, but we are unashamedly progressive" on LGBTQ issues. Despite losing a Christian book deal for his stance on marriage equality, Robertson wants to see churches get over the fear that being political will drive people away. For Robertson, that looks like a recent meeting with two potential presidential candidates on engaging faith voters with a progressive message, or speaking with politicians in Northern Ireland about banning conversion therapy. And Robertson might one day run for office himself. However, his ultimate goal is simpler. "I want to bring as many people forward as I can into this redemptive life I have found," he said.
Photo courtesy of Rachel Lamb
Rachel Lamb Age: 27 Issue: Climate Change Rachel Lamb grew up with plenty of voices questioning the magnitude of climate change, but a love for the outdoors won out. Now, she is an environmentalist because of her faith, not despite it. Lamb did environmental studies for her undergrad and completed two master's degrees, one in public policy and the other in sustainability and conservation. To support and gather other evangelicals that share a love for the environment, Lamb co-founded Young Evangelicals for Climate Action five years ago. "As Christians, we should be doing all we can to participate in [climate change] solutions," said Lamb, adding that the organization helps bridge environmental advocacy to "Christian witness." Lamb is currently working on a Ph.D. in geographical sciences and her day job involves identifying areas for afforestation, which is creating new forests. In the future, Lamb sees her role as a policy advisor or working for a think tank. "A parallel part of my identity is communicating to people in my own faith," she added. Practically, that looks like speaking at Christian colleges and seminaries or at local churches on "creation care," which is Christian speak for environmental stewardship.
Matthew Maly (in red shirt). Photo courtesy of Matthew Maly
Matthew Maly Age: 24 Issue: Death Penalty Almost 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants support the death penalty. Matthew Maly could easily have been one of them after growing up in the "thick of evangelical culture" in Nebraska—church every Sunday, conservative parents and siblings who are missionaries. Instead, it was the words of Jesus in the Bible that led him to join the anti-death penalty movement; advocating against the death penalty gelled with the social justice emphasized by his faith. It also fit nicely into his fiscally conservatives views. It costs Nebraska $14 million a year to maintain the death penalty rather than sentencing people to life without parole. As the operations coordinator for Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Maly spends his days speaking on the issue and enlisting death row exonerees to share their stories at schools and churches. He also rallies church leaders to speak against the death penalty because "a lot of people will change their minds based on what they hear from the pulpit," said Maly. Although the death penalty in Nebraska was reinstated after it was momentarily abolished in 2015, Maly believes within three decades the death penalty in the US will be no more.
Photo by Seth Reese
Broderick Greer Age: 27 Issue: Racial Inequality "When it is easier for a 21-year-old white supremacist to obtain a gun than for a 21-year-old black person to registered to vote we must cry 'Do you not care that we are perishing?'" said Rev. Broderick Greer, in a recent sermon. The sermon's title, Charleston Nine, referred to the Bible study attendees massacred by terrorist Dylan Roof in a South Carolina church in 2015. Greer is black, gay, and the associate rector at Grace-St. Luke's Episcopal Church and School in Memphis, Tennessee. He also isn't afraid to bring the black experience into his sermons, the articles he writes and his well-followed Twitter feed. That experience, Greer told me, is reflected in the earthly life of Jesus, a target of state-sanctioned violence and an unfair criminal justice system. Greer is concerned with changing that black experience. That could mean partnering with nonprofits to expunge nonviolent criminal records, which disproportionately impact black lives, or simply walking out his home each day. "A lot of it is just existing, waking up and saying I have value and I have dreams and I want to enjoy my life," he said.
Photo courtesy of Tabitha McDuffee
Tabitha McDuffee Age: 23 Issue: Refugees Tabitha McDuffee believes the lackluster support amongst some American Christians—or in some cases, the outright rejection of generous refugee policies—is due to a disconnect with what the Bible teaches. Yes, Jesus said in Matthew 25 "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" but it also goes much deeper, according to McDuffee. Her ebook, Refugees in the Bible: Understanding Today's Refugee Crisis takes a deep dive, detailing several Bible characters who would be labeled refugees today. Like Moses and the entire nation of Israel when they left Egypt. "We are seeing a lot of people chose their political opinions over what the Bible has to say... which is heartbreaking to me," said McDuffee. Along with her ebook and working for an organization that resettles refugees, McDuffee runs a website called Faith and Forced Migration. When President Trump signed the first executive order on the travel ban earlier this year, traffic to the website grew 500 percent, she said. To McDuffee it shows that Christians are at last searching to understand the refugee crisis from a biblical perspective, an intrigue she intends to satisfy with more books on the issue. Ultimately, a change in how evangelicals see refugees "could force the hand of the Republican party on this issue," McDuffee said.
Liz Dong Age: 28 Issue: Immigration Liz Dong, who came to the US from China aged 10, is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). "I struggled a lot with identity especially because I couldn't drive, or work or go to school," she said. Her Christian faith, she said, filled out that identity. It also guides her passion for her idea of "sensible and just immigration policies." Dong is a member of Evangelical Immigration Table, which advocates for immigration reform that lines up with biblical values. She is also hoping to change the perception some conservatives have of undocumented immigrants like her. That means sharing her story in the media and at forums both in and outside of churches. "I do think many folks are willing to absorb information," she said. "That information just needs to come from people they can trust." And often that means someone from the same faith.
Ontario has announced where some of its first legal weed stores will be located.
The municipalities currently selected are Barrie, Brampton, Hamilton, Kingston, Kitchener, London, Mississauga, Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor—additional locations will be later identified, according to the LCBO's news release.
"Over the coming weeks, staff from the Ministry of Finance and the LCBO will meet with staff at the identified municipalities to discuss the guidelines and process for siting stores and local interests," the release said.
The release states that the people living in these cities will be consulted regarding the tentative locations and will be able to give feedback (cue the inevitable stories on weed NIMBYs). Guidelines will ensure the stores aren't near schools while still "providing access within communities and addressing the illegal market."
The province's plan has been criticized by many. In September, the province outlaid their aim opening only 40 stores upon legalization—this will increase to 80 in 2019, and 150 by 2020. The Ontario Cannabis Retail Corporation, the body that will control the stores, will be a subsidiary of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).
The province tabled a new law Wednesday that, if passed, will make it illegal to consume recreational weed outside of a private residence. That means you won't be able to smoke weed in public places, workplaces, inside a vehicle, or on a boat. On the same day, the province also let the world know about their plan to deal with dispensaries and businesses outside of the government—this plan includes issuing massive fines that reach up to half a million dollars or sentences that are up to two years in prison.
So, if you live in one of those cities, you should be able to get your hands on some legal weed at some point in the future but be fully assured the provincial government is going to make it a goddamn headache to enjoy that bud.
It looks like humans aren't the only species who are currently burying their feelings about the sorry state of the world under mass amounts of food. On Thursday, police in the Chicago suburb of Zion had to rescue a raccoon after the little guy ate so much that he wound up getting stuck inside a sewer grate, NBC Chicago reports.
The little plumper was apparently hanging inside the sewer like a whiskered Pennywise, feasting on some discarded sewer foods. But when he tried to climb out, the sewer grate's mouth wasn't quite big enough for his newly-filled belly.
Police found the raccoon stuck halfway out of the grate's opening, flailing to get free with bits of bread scattered around him. With the help of Zion Public Works and Animal Control, they managed to break the big guy loose.
In a video of the raccoon rescue, one worker secured the spooked animal as another pulled up the sewer grate. "Fatty!" one of them laughs.
"They were able to free him and our friend was no worse for wear," the police department wrote in a Facebook post. The raccoon scurried back down into the sewer and disappeared, likely off in search of another delicious subterranean snack.
Good luck out there, buddy. Hope your future is full of more tasty sewer morsels and pipes wide enough for your rotund form to fit through. If you need us, we'll be spending the rest of the year in various stages of food coma.
"Larry, motherfucker, what the fuck do you want to talk about?" When Taika Waititi answers the phone just like this, in a thick accent, I'm taken off guard—then, he laughs. "I don't really talk like that, man. I can't have a conversation like that."
Catching people off guard is kind of a thing that the 42-year-old director's made a career out of. 2014's What We Do in the Shadows and last year's Hunt for the Wilderpeople were both left-field takes on genre-ish trappings that oozed a specific wit, and Thor: Ragnarok is no different. Waititi's take on the third installment in the Thor franchise—and, what, the sixteen-millionth installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?—is packed with colour and even more so with laughs, the one-liners zinging around like Iron Man's suit. (Note: Iron Man is not in this movie. The Hulk is, though!)
Even if you don't like MCU movies in general, you'll likely and mightily enjoy this one, and that's owed in large part to Waititi's vision and unique outlook. We talked to him about his unlikely marriage with Marvel, making a funny superhero movie, and what's next:
VICE: Thor: Ragnarok is quite a leap for you, stylistically. Taika Waititi: Oh, it's a leap—a leap of faith, a leap of stupidity, a leap into the void. You don't do these films unless you're very sure of yourself or you have a career suicidal tendency—and I have no interest in my career. The closest I can come to destroying my career is the happiest I am. I'm not trying to be a smart ass—It was never my dream to do this shit. I just fell into it. It's like an arranged marriage: I don't hate it, I love it, but I had to learn to love it, and the reason I did was that, every time I've done a film, it's been the least expected move—either in my opinion or other people's opinion.
So this was a very big risk for me. I had a few admirers in little independent pockets, and I thought, "What's the best way to piss them off? To sell out?" Turns out, now they love me even more.
For some reason, it seems like Marvel films allow more leeway with director creativity than other mega-franchises. The genius of that studio is that they bring in voices that are unique, different, and very unexpected. When they gave me this job, the Marvel fans on Twitter were like, "Who the fuck is this guy?" And I was like, "Yeah, who the fuck am I? Why'd they give me the job?" Props to them for taking chances on people like me, James Gunn, and Ryan Coogler—and thank God they did, because I think this movie is really good. It's been the best thing for the Thor franchise, a very colorful and exciting film—and what the world needs right now are films that make you laugh and smile and don't make you depressed, because the world's a pretty sad place right now. The last thing I want is for an audience to go into a movie and be reminded of that for two and a half hours.
This film's approach to colour and visuals reminded me of another recent MCU film, Doctor Strange. That approach is something I was keen on doing. I'd seen the first couple of Thor films, and I appreciated what they were, but I wanted to go in a completely new direction. I grew up with comics that were colourful and just ridiculous— Flash Gordon is a good reference to where we were headed in terms of colour and tone. If you look at the Thor comics from the 70s, they're very dreamlike, the costumes are ridiculous, and the storylines are ludicrous. For this movie, it was like they gave creative freedom to a bunch of six-year-olds and said, "Here's a hundred million dollars, go and make a movie."
Thor: Ragnarok is as successful at being a comedy as it is as an action film. The way that jokes appear in these movies is that they're written about a year before they start shooting, and if they're not stale by then, they're almost dead. In Hollywood, the jokes suck, because they're written by a bunch of dudes in an office before they've even know who's cast in the movie. The way I've always done comedy with my mates is that you may think ahead and have some suggestions, but you'd never lock it in so far in advance. You get to set and you figure out what's funny. That's where the humor [on Thor: Ragnarok] differs from every other one of these superhero movies—not to detract from the comedy of something like Guardians of the Galaxy, but you can tell that certain things rely on the skill of the actors.
Also, the comedy in this film is surreal and tangential, and it's got a life to it that can only exist if you're coming up it in the moment. A lot of the stuff between [Mark Ruffalo] and [Chris Hemsworth] was ad-libbed—there was a shit load of ad-libbing, which I was pleasantly surprised that we were allowed to do. Things that were never thought of that were just done to loosen things up turned out to be good enough to be put in the movie.
What's next after this? I just want to keep it interesting—to keep shocking and challenging myself. One of my next films is a stop-motion film about the life and times of Michael Jackson's chimpanzee Bubbles. There's also a smaller film that I've written that I'm going to try to shoot next year. It's a Nazi comedy.
A Nazi comedy? Did I hear you right? Yeah.
That seems pretty accidentally relevant. Isn't it? I wrote it five years ago, and now it's weirdly perfect timing. Nazis are cool again. [Laughs]
A 39-year-old woman has been criticised after posting photos that make it look like she's getting on it in a hospital ward.
The pictures include one image of a woman exhaling what looks like smoke, and another of two lines of white powder racked up on a table, next to a rolled-up receipt. Rebecca Barns-Gambrell, from Plymouth, says the photos were taken as a joke because she has "become tired of seeing images of drug abuse shared online", reports the Metro.
Fair enough. But also: bit weird, if you're fed up of drug photos being posted online, to then post drug photos online?
Anyway, there's more:
"The white powder didn't belong to me or my friend – it belonged to somebody that was staying with myself at home," said Barns-Gambrell. "I'd found it on the Friday and I had it on me [when I got to hospital]. I'll tell you now that that product wasn't taken. That product was handed into the staff at the hospital; it wasn't used. I didn't want it in my house and my lodger is gone now."
Okay!
As for the "smoking" picture, she explained: "The smoke was just messing around – it was a [vape]. My friend and I were mocking it up as a joke when I was in hospital."
A spokesperson for Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust commented: "The social media post has been brought to our attention and we are investigating."
The Law School Admissions Test (LSAT)—the appropriately named test you take to be admitted into law school—is a three-and-a-half hour examination. In it, time is divided evenly between five multiple-choice sections covering critical reasoning, logic, and reading comprehension, plus one writing sample. Each multiple-choice section has around 25 questions, and each has five possible answers. The test is graded on a curve; a perfect score is a 180, and the lowest is 120. The writing sample is not graded.
I knew almost none of this information when I sat down to take the LSAT early one Saturday morning in September, because I had decided to take it without studying or researching the test at all.
Like most people, despite knowing better, I have always suspected that maybe somewhere out there is an activity at which I could be a genius. I've watched enough biopics to feel I possess some of the eccentricities—issues with shirt tags and sock seams and eye contact, repetitive food habits—that are the mark of singular achievers. But I am getting older, and lately have been aware I'm running out of time to be a wunderkind. I had been searching for my special talent when, at a dinner party, I found out one of the smartest people I know, newly unemployed, planned to spend four months studying for the LSAT like it was a full-time job.
"Do you have to memorize the Constitution or something?" I asked him. (I don't know any lawyers.) "No," he told me. The LSAT simply tests logic and reasoning skills, not factual knowledge. I've always considered myself a pretty reasonable guy, so why couldn't I just take the test cold? Why waste months of my life studying if all the test does is gauge my ability to think? (This is the sort of question someone who excels at logic would ask, I thought.) He laughed and said I would do terribly. Besides, the test costs $180, so it would be a waste of money.
Yet I went home that night wondering, What if going to law school is my genius?
For people of a certain milieu, law is the ever-present backup career for a less-exciting but more-stable future. It's not a life I've ever particularly wanted, but what if I could have it extremely easily? I might just take it. So I signed up to take the LSAT at Brooklyn's Medgar Evers College.
After you register, it quickly becomes clear that everything about the LSAT provokes bureaucratic dread, which makes sense given its source. Space is limited, so sign-up occurs months ahead of the actual test date. In the interim, you receive dozens of sternly worded email reminders: You must upload a clear picture of yourself, which must be different than the one on your accepted form of ID and match how you'll look on the day of the test. You may bring a sealed one-gallon Ziploc bag to the test with "ONLY the following items: valid ID, wallet, keys, feminine hygiene/medical products, No. 2 or HB wooden pencils, a highlighter, erasers, pencil sharpener, tissues, beverage in a plastic container or juice box." Absolutely no cellphones and so forth. Over time I became less nervous I would fail than that I simply wouldn't be allowed to take the test due to some improperly filled-out form.
I wasn't sure how to prepare myself the night before the test, so I stuck to business as usual. "You're probably the only person taking the LSAT tomorrow who's drinking Coronas on a stoop right now," my friend told me at 9 PM. Considering I had to be at the testing center no later than 8:30 AM, I decided to give myself a fighting chance and head to bed early. The LSAT was to be the first test I'd taken in the near-decade since college that wasn't either medical or on BuzzFeed, so I felt a bit worried.
Inside the college, I was led into a sort of holding pen to wait while everyone else arrived. Here I was introduced to our proctor, Nigel, who kept yelling, "Always follow the rules," in a charming accent. One woman walked into the room texting, which made Nigel extremely unhappy. He told her she should be kicked out for this, despite her protestations that last time she took the test it was no problem. Similar things happened over and over, with people being reprimanded for having the wrong items in their plastic bags, or for failing to have IDs out, or for having printed the wrong papers. The inability of LSAT takers to follow the test's extremely onerous rules is slightly disconcerting, considering these are the future arbiters of our legal system.
Around 8:45, the 15 of us were led into a classroom. I appeared to be the oldest and tallest one there. Realizing I was probably the only person in the room whose future didn't depend on the results was freeing, until I thought about how that meant I was probably destined to live a less remunerative life. I shouldn't judge, but everyone looked pretty square, and I thought about how the very process that allows someone to enter the professions to enact social change couldn't be better designed to repel the rebellious types who would want to enact such change.
Inside the testing room, which was just a classroom with cubicle dividers between the desks, we were given another stern talking-to from Nigel. He told us he has to follow the rules to the letter, not because it's fun but because sometimes the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), the corporation behind the test, sends the equivalent of secret shoppers to make sure it's being administered properly. Nigel asked the guy next to me if the Rolex his father had given him had a camera in it. Nigel looked at me, and I wondered if I looked like an LSAC snitch. He told me I couldn't keep my Chapstick out, not buying my argument that it's a medical product.
We were all forced to sign documents promising we were taking the test for no reason other than the intention of applying to law school, which made me nervous. I'm probably no match for LSAC's legal team.
Part 1 of the test was handed out, and I was stunned to find I wasn't lost at all. Basically, I had to read brief legal or academic–seeming paragraphs and then answer questions about things that would summarize, strengthen, or weaken the presented information. It sounds boring, but it was sort of fun. It's possible that reading articles on the internet eight hours a day for a decade perfectly prepared me for Part 1 of the LSAT. There were a few questions I was shaky on, but I finished the section feeling pretty confident.
Part 2 was bad. I've since learned this was the notorious "logic games" section. The test sets up a situation. Say, "You have shirts, shoes, and pants, each in red, blue, and white. You cannot wear a shirt and shoes of the same color. You cannot wear the same shirt two days in a row. White shoes must be paired with red pants or a blue shirt."
Then it asks a series of questions in the vein of "If you wore a white shirt and blue shoes Monday, which of the following outfits cannot be worn Tuesday?" I had never really seen anything like these questions, and had no idea how to go about solving them in the allotted 35-minute time frame. My dreams of getting into Yale (median LSAT score: 173) were dashed. After spending ten minutes trying to plot out the first question, I rushed through the remaining 22.
Fortunately, the third section was similar to the first. Maybe I wasn't getting into Yale, but what about UConn (median LSAT: 156)? It had been years since I'd held a pencil for longer than a sentence, so I was working through serious hand cramps by this point. I was relieved when Nigel announced it was time for break.
We spread out into the hallways, eating trail mix, stretching, and avoiding conversation. Everyone looked pretty out of it, understandably. The school staff looked at us like we were nearing the culmination of the hardest months of our lives, and I stole a sense of pride. After 15 minutes, we were called back in. A boy in a New York Giants hoodie did a set of push-ups before entering the classroom.
Sections four and five were roughly the same as sections one and three. The writing sample was easy but also doesn't get graded, so who cares. I walked out into the hot Brooklyn afternoon stimulated. Minus one bad section, was it possible I actually did pretty good?
I was told my results wouldn't come for a month, and in that time, my feelings wavered. Maybe I was delusional and did very poorly. I worried the answers I selected were decoys for people who didn't study. I had a dream I got a 153, which would've seen me finish around the 50th percentile. I talked to people who had studied, and they seemed slightly insulted by my endeavor.
At some point, Barack Obama, everyone on the Supreme Court, and Judge Judy all took the same test. As I waited, I wanted to know how a bunch of logic problems let a school know if I'm good enough to share their rarefied air.
"Sometimes young people don't know exactly what they want to pursue," Kellye Testy, the president of LSAC and a former dean at the University of Washington School of Law, who is very nice and has "test" in her name, told me. "We thought it important to make sure we're opening the legal profession to all walks of life."
Directly testing one's knowledge about the legal system would defeat this aim. Instead, LSAC, "survey[s] lawyers and legal educators to find out which skills people need to do well." A group of people with PhDs in psychometrics—test-making, essentially—then puts together an exam to assess these skills. "The abilities to think critically and creatively and to solve problems have always been at the top of the list."
Testy told me she too once took the LSAT, though she doesn't remember her score. Unlike many of today's students, she didn't spend months studying. "Honestly, I didn't even know at the time people did that." She says LSAC actually worries test-takers spend too much time preparing. It suggests students familiarize themselves with the test and the rhythm of the questions and maybe take an online course. (LSAC will launch a free one next year.) Scores don't usually improve much, so taking it multiple times isn't advised.
So what would happen if someone took it without studying at all, I asked. "I find it's good to at least have looked at the kinds of questions," Testy told me, before conceding it's not absolutely necessary. "You know, you might do great. You might have a mind that thinks really critically."
Which led me to feel my 158, while respectable, doesn't make me a prodigy.
A recent report by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Serbia details how child refugees are being abused by border force officials all along the Balkan Route. The Balkan Route is a path – popular with Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees – that runs from Turkey into Greece, Bulgaria, and north towards Germany. Last year, the EU and Turkey placed extra border control forces and electric fences along the route to stop asylum seekers from reaching Western Europe – though thousands of people continue to attempt the journey every month.
The report covers the first six months of 2017 and finds that children on the Balkan Route are not only assaulted, but also illegally deported after they're arrested. "In a real-life game of snakes and ladders," it's stated in the report, "human beings take one step forward and two steps back as they are forcedly moved from one place to another."
Of the children treated by MSF, just over 75 percent were assaulted by either state police or border force officials, while 8 percent were hurt by traffickers. Most of them – the youngest only 12 years old – had visible signs of mistreatment, including knife and razor blade cuts, scars from severe beatings and symptoms of dehydration and food deprivation. "At each border crossing, instead of fair and protection sensitive border procedures," the report reads, "asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants are pushed back, robbed, beaten, humiliated and attacked by dogs."
The abuse is not just happening with children, but with refugees of all ages – and not just at borders, but also in camps, police stations and detention centres along the route. In November of 2016, the Bulgarian government quarantined people in the Harmanli refugee camp in southeastern Bulgaria after false media reports of asylum seekers carrying infectious skin diseases. Bulgarian officials placed all of the roughly 3,000 refugees into a small confined area of an already overcrowded camp. Riots inevitably broke out, to which police responded by firing rubber bullets and using water canons.
"I saw with my own eyes people getting beaten by the riot police with their heads cut open," a 30-year-old refugee who was living in the Harmanli camp at the time explains to MSF. "Many were young, like teenagers, and their faces were covered in blood. First they shot teargas and then they entered our rooms and beat everyone with sticks. Many of us were injured."
According to MSF, the worst abuse of refugees is happening near the border between Serbia and Hungary. "After some hours of walking, the police saw us and caught us. There were maybe six or seven policemen, five brown dogs," one refugee tells MSF. "A friend of mine was bitten in the arm; there were holes on both sides of his wrist. I myself got a knee in the face, here at the eye, so I fainted for a few minutes and when I came to, I saw that the policemen had bound the others together at the wrists with a plastic rope, and then they all stood in a line. While we stood in line without being able to do anything, we were beaten in the arms and legs."
Some authorities have encouraged "civilian vigilante groups", the MSF report claims, "such as the 'Border Hunters', who are now an official part of Hungary's border patrol team, employed by the state and openly promoting xenophobic discourse and violence against refugees." So far, the Hungarian government has carried out 44 investigations into police brutality, but only two officers have ever been found guilty. Both were fined.
"[When] we arrived near the Horgos border [at the border between Serbia and Hungary] they ordered us to take off our clothes and leave our blankets. It was very cold, it was snowing, and we were shivering," a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan recalls. "They ordered us to be in a line, keeping our arms up in the air, and those who could not keep them in the air, a policeman was beating us on our ribs with a baton. While we were in the line, they forced us to keep our eyes open, spraying them with a painful spray."
"Why is this cruelty happening to us?" asks a 24-year-old refugee from Afghanistan who was sent back from Croatia to Serbia. "We are humans, not animals, we're not dogs. The dogs sleep on the garbage here and so do we. The last time I was beaten by the police I told him to just take his gun and kill me… just finish my life."
"I was caught by the Croatian police, I was nearly at the border with Slovenia, and they beat me for a long time," a 15-year-old adds in the report. "They stripped me naked, it was very cold. They put me in the back of the car and drove me all the way to Serbia."
In the six months covered by the report, at least 78 people died attempting to take the route. Most of the deaths were caused by drowning (38) and car accidents (12), while seven people died of hypothermia and four died by suicide. Near the border region of Šid in Serbia in June of 2017, two Afghan teenagers, aged 12 and 15, died when they jumped from a lorry after realising it was heading in the opposite direction to the Croatian border.
Of course, all the numbers and incidents mentioned in the report are just the cases that MSF came across. It's hard to say what else is going on along the Balkan Route.
"What if we took somebody, a headbanger from Alberta and sort of threw him into that world of the internet for the first time. How would he use it? How would he harness it?"
That's what Canadian director Michael Dowse thought when he reunited FUBAR's Terry and Dean for a new eight-episode series on VICELAND.
FUBAR was a small film about two headbangers in Alberta, filmed on a little digital camera, with a budget that left everyone on the cast broke. But Terry and Deaner's legendary antics shot the film up to cult acclaim, inspiring a generation of hosers to continue shotgunning Pilsners. With two successful films under their belt, Dowse reunited with actors David Lawrence and Paul Spence, who are reprising their roles as Terry and Dean. The new series, FUBAR: Age of Computer will still feature Terry and Dean's classic antics, but now with the internet.
"It was a good way to not only show what's interesting out there but to also mock the internet and really blur the lines between reality and fiction," said Dowse.
VICE caught up with Terry and Dean to find out about their escape from Fort McMurray, Terry's thriving internet drone marijuana business and Dean's new "sex odyssey" record.
VICE: How's it going? Terry: Alright, not too bad.
So we haven't seen you for a long time, seven years, what have you been doing? Terry: Oh, we were working up on the pipelines up in Fort McMurray there. You know, pretty much just givin'er, you know—
Dean: Big fucking fire, and now we're back—
Terry: Yeah, we had to flee, we had to flee there so we ain't really employed right now. And my buddy, my cousin buddy is like "you guys can crash here for a while." He was recording a record, and I'm like I got a few things cooking on the internet. I finally figured out how to like click it and you know.
Yeah, you've discovered the internet? Terry: A little bit, yeah.
What are you doing on it? Terry: Oh you know like watching funny videos.
Dean: Yeah there's like one with fish.
Terry: Yeah like this dolphin, oh it's really gross. Sometimes you watch it over and over.
Dean: Yeah, like, that's normal now! The first time you see it you're like "you shouldn't stick that in a blowhole," now you're like, "oh that's hilarious."
Image via Daily VICE
Are you on Tinder? Uh no, 'cause I don't have a smartphone. And so there's some stuff that I'm learning, like you can't do it just on—I have a 486 computer. Yeah it's that one, it's 46. Sometimes it's a bit slow but I'm getting it. We have our internet provided by Pentatron internet service provider, and it's slow.
So this is your computer? Yeah, right here you got my computer there, on here there's all sorts off—this is where I can call people on Skype. I got email. See this is my homepage. It's actually Shank's computer, my neighbour, my landlord guy. Yeah I have all sorts of different things going on—"Airijuana"
Your company? Terry: Yes, my marijuana delivery company. This is the headquarters, this is where it's all coming from. This is where I'm learning to run businesses off the computer. Yeah and I'm just getting my fingers wet so to speak.
Cool. So you're still drinking Pilsner? Terry: Yeah, It's the—you know I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, it's actually a beer that they use real German hops to make the Pilsner like they used to. In most pilsners they just use hops that aren't made in Germany but Pilsner hops are actually from Germany.
Have you tried other beers? Terry: Oh yeah, I've had a few other but this is like—every time I go in and there are so many, I think about it, I spend like days there and I always end up going with the old favourite.
I guess you're pretty used to drinking a lot of beer huh? Terry: Yeah, yeah slow and steady you know. I know if I've had too much, I know it's like "Terry take five or you're going to not be able to work the next day" so you know.
Terry: So I'm growing some pot here. This is sort of some of the product you might expect to find in—what I'm going to be delivering through Air-ijuana. Now, this is just a little one, this is Betsy, she's coming along real good.
This is Betsy? Terry: Yeah, that's the one plant there, she's smaller. And this one's sprouted up and I don't even think it's dope, I think it's like cabbage or something.
Yeah, it looks like it. Terry: So I could also deliver cabbage or whatever, like this is just the start. I also have another invention called the beer bot. I can't show it to you right now, it's kind of top secret but it's like a backpack that will give you an extra arm. And like, when you're partying, it'll just like sip your beer for you and then your other hand's free to smoke and this hand's free to tell stories with or high-fives.
So like a beer robot? Terry: Yeah, right on, like an extra. That's not public yet, so keep that on the low down. You'd be surprised how many people wished they'd had a third arm.
Image via Daily VICE
How's the band? Dean: Tour's going deadly man, yeah my album's coming out soon. 3069 Space Rock Sex Odyssey. It's really, really good. It's really good, it's fucking, it's really deadly man. It's this whole odyssey, it starts off with me as a survivor, kind of what like happened in Fort Mac. Anyways, after that it goes into me facing off with myself, like I'm a dragon and I have a dragon's face and I have to enter the dragon's lair. It's really intense man. It's going to come with a whole full album and every song's going to have a painting with it.
This is a nice place, it's need some cleaning though. Terry: To each their own, do you play instruments?
Yeah I do. Terry: Yeah, sometimes having a messy space and the right vibe, it gets captured in the recordings. If it's too clean and sterile then the music might be that way. You know you got to be free down here. You could jam here with Deaner maybe, what do you play?
The saxophone. Terry: Oh I don't think so, that's not really an instrument. Not really.
Why? It's not rock enough? Terry: No, it's like a bird.
FUBAR: Age of Computer premieres November 3 on VICELAND.
The fall of 1997 was, simply put, one of the most remarkable moviegoing seasons of our time: Boogie Nights. Jackie Brown. The Sweet Hereafter. Wag the Dog. Eve's Bayou. Good Will Hunting. The Ice Storm. Amistad. As Good as It Gets. Gattaca. And so many more, culminating with what became the highest-grossing movie of all time: the long-delayed, oft-trashed, yet eventually unstoppable Titanic. Each week yielded another remarkable motion picture—sometimes two or more, taking bold risks, telling powerful stories, introducing formidable new talents, and reaffirming the gifts of master filmmakers. This series looks back at those movies, examining not only the particular merits of each, but what they told us about where movies were that fall 20 years ago, and about where movies were going.
The two major science-fiction movies of the fall of 1997, released two weeks apart, couldn't have looked more different. Andrew Niccol's Gattaca was a thoughtful hybrid of sci-fi, thriller, and character drama; to give you some idea of its high-mindedness, it not only opens with a relevant Bible verse (Ecclesiastes 7:13), but in the opening credits that follow, Gore Vidal is fifth-billed.
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, on the other hand, was a futuristic action cartoon, dramatizing a battle with giant space bugs; its gravitas was best summarized by the fact that its director's previous film was the widely reviled 1995 stripper drama Showgirls. Yet both films proved more complicated than their marketing—and both would turn out to have much to say, and predict, about the future they were set in.
Gattaca takes place, per the opening titles, in "The Not-Too-Distant Future"; Mystery Science Theater 3000 had been on the air for seven seasons at this point, so draw your own conclusions. It imagines a world in which DNA testing has evolved to a point where one's "genetic quotient" is the deciding factor of their station in life—to such an extent that nurses read out one's life expectancy and chance of disorders in the delivery room. As a result, wealthier citizens engage in prenatal genetic engineering ("Still you," as it is described, "simply the best you") to ensure their children's success. Those whose parents can't swing it? Well, they can look forward to a life of menial work.
But occasionally, one gets through. Like any good futuristic storyteller, writer/director Niccol fleshes out his tale with terminology and mythology, so we discover that while Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) is a "borrowed ladder"—an "invalid" who uses the identity of a "valid," and the advantages it affords. Every morning, he undergoes the process of turning himself into someone else, genetically speaking; he scrubs off any scraps of his own skin and hair, prepares urine and blood samples, glues on fingerprints, and grabs a vial of dandruff, dirt, and the like. It's working. He's about to go up on a one-year manned mission to one of Saturn's moons. But then a supervisor turns up dead, and the cops find a single eyelid that matches up to an "invalid"—him.
The shadowy photography, fedora-clad detectives, and innocent-man-wrongly-accused elements place Gattaca not in the future, but the past, recalling the great films noir of yesteryear. But there's an ingenious twist: Vincent is an innocent man rightfully accused—guilty not of murder, but of an act of impersonation that, in this society, is perhaps as much a crime. And as in such stories, there's a trusting woman (Uma Thurman), piecing together what he's done while simultaneously falling in love with him. (There's also some overlap with the Hitchcock heroine—and for the record, Uma Thurman would've made an excellent Hitchcock blonde.)
Yet for all the nostalgic echoes of its storytelling and production design, Gattaca felt very much of its moment. Just a couple of years earlier, the O.J. Simpson trial had properly clarified the concept of DNA for the handful of people who hadn't seen or read Jurassic Park. As for the future, potential romantic partners doing hair-strand tests don't feel that far removed from the match and compatibility algorithms of present-day online dating services.
But Gattaca's most compelling ideas are its most timeless ones. When Vincent's boss compliments the quality of his work ("Not one error in a million keystrokes," he beams) it recalls the kind of "work twice as hard," Talented Tenth ethos that people of color have struggled with for centuries. When Vincent's "ladder" Jerome (Jude Law) first meets him, his white-privilege bitterness shines through: "What makes you think you could be me at all?"
Jerome is hardly surprised when Vincent's interview for his dream job consists entirely of a blood test; that's how it works, because his blood is his birthright. And as our country buckles under the pressure of a white-supremacist president, who has bragged extensively about his "good genes" and whose children say he believes in the "race-horse theory" of eugenics, maybe Gattaca wasn't that far-fetched after all.
Future Breaking Bad star Dean Norris pops up in a brief role in Gattaca, as a beat cop harassing Jerome; he has a much larger role in Starship Troopers, as the commanding officer of star Casper Van Dien, who bears the implausible moniker "Johnny Rico." He and pals "Carmen Ibanez" and "Dizzy Flores", played by equally white co-stars Denise Richards and Dina Meyer, live in a version of Buenos Aires that has apparently been entirely gentrified.
In its early scenes, Troopers is basically a goofy high-school movie, complete with love triangles, a big game, and a school dance (and sex) after. But after graduation, our heroes sign up for "Federal Service," assigned (perhaps via DNA?) to be officers, scientists, or in Johnny and Dizzy's case, military grunts. Once they've begun infantry training, the flexing of machismo so over the top, it can only be satire; director Paul Verhoeven fills the movie with little winking nods, like Johnny's video "letter home" that even includes a lonesome fiddler, a la Ken Burns' The Civil War.
Verhoeven's American crossover success began with Robocop, another big action movie with an unexpectedly wry perspective, and Troopers seems very much an attempt to recreate that success after the belly-flop of Showgirls (even if it turns into a boiler-place action/mission movie in the back half, as the back-to-back combat sequences grow more than a little monotonous).
Starship Troopers' best scenes are its funniest, echoing the corporate double-speak of Robocop's metropolitan dystopia; the film begins with a "Join Up Now!" military recruiting ad, complete with a little Hitler Youth kid ("I'm doing my part too!" he cheeses, as the rest of the troops chuckle-chuckle), and it's sprinkled with witty parodies of WWI propaganda films, one of them cleverly titled Why We Fight.
But Troopers is also, in spots, weirdly prescient. The big attack that sends them off to war ("Goddamn bugs whacked us, Johnny") is observed via a large group gathering, 9/11-style, to gawk at a television; the "countdown to victory" is captured via flashy, graphics-heavy news reports that look eerily similar to Fox and CNN's coverage of the days that followed. (And we also get a glimpse of a Crossfire-style sneering-argument TV show, complete with a bow-tied, Tucker Carlson figure.)
Other elements are just as haunting. The militarism and fascism of the story, arguably embraced by Robert A. Heinlein's original novel, is both questioned and tacitly embraced by Verhoeven's (and his Robocop screenwriter Edward Neumeier's) interpretation. In an early classroom scene, we – via a lecture to our heroes – are told, "veterans imposed the stability" of the current civilization (so, y'know, support the troops!) and it thus operates under an authoritarian dogma, wherein violence is "the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived." And in that same scene, we learn that there's a difference between "civilian" and "citizen" – as with Gattaca, some are created or considered "more equal" than others.
Thank goodness for fantasy escapism, am I right?
Next time, we'll look at a pair of introspective character dramas from November of 1997: Kasi Lemmons' critically acclaimed "Eve's Bayou," and Mike Figgis' less-acclaimed "One Night Stand."
On Tuesday, Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old who immigrated to America from Uzbekistan in 2010, allegedly rammed a rented truck into cyclists and pedestrians in Manhattan, leaving at least eight dead and a dozen wounded in an attack for which ISIS claimed responsibility. Just six hours after the attack, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to denounce the tragedy, but also to politicize it as fuel for his nativist agenda. Since then he's used it to justify calls for the rapid imposition of further restrictions on and scrutinization of legal immigration.
"I am calling on Congress to TERMINATE the diversity visa lottery program that presents significant vulnerabilities to our national security," he tweeted Thursday.
That marked a break from Trump's attitude after the white nationalist attack in Charlottesville this August, when he said he liked to wait for all the information before making a statement. It's also different from his insistence that suffering should not be politicized after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Still, his response wasn't exactly surprising.
"We've been expecting that any isolated terrorist incident" committed by an immigrant "would be used as an opportunity to make the case to slash immigration and increase immigration enforcement," said Ali Noorani of the pro-immigration National Immigration Forum. "If there's one thing he's good at doing, it's taking advantage of an opportunity."
Trump's rhetoric has succeeded in bringing his anti-immigration agenda back into the spotlight. A number of conservatives have gotten on board with his calls for a rapid crackdown on immigration in the name of national security. But policy experts don't think big changes are coming anytime soon.
Trump has made three proposals in the wake of the attack. Firstly, he wants to kill the diversity visa lottery program. Created via bipartisan legislation in 1990, it offers just 50,000 green cards a year to individuals from countries that do not send many immigrants to America under other programs. Originally intended to benefit Irish and Italian immigrants, the plurality of the approximately 1.5 million who've come to the US on these visas over the last 27 years have been from Africa or Eastern Europe. The program accounts for less than 5 percent of green cards issued every year, but it is how Saipov came to the country, and the Trump administration contends that recipients undergo little vetting.
Secondly, Trump wants, for similar reasons, to end "chain migration," a term right-wingers often use to describe the process by which immigrants can sponsor the immigration of their family members. Trump claims that Saipov had brought in 23 other immigrants. His White House has proposed replacing both of these programs with "merit-based" immigration, and would limit them to sponsoring immigration by their spouse and dependent children.
Finally, Trump has called for more "extreme vetting" of immigration applications to block entry to future versions of Saipov. However he has provided no details to date on what that could entail.
None of these proposals are new. According to Theresa Cardinal Brown, once part of George W. Bush's Department of Homeland Security and now the immigration policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, the diversity program has been a focus for immigration reform debates for about a decade. Moving to a merit-based system is a big part of the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act, which was introduced by immigration hawks in the Senate in February and gone nowhere since. It was also at the heart of Trump's big list of asks, issued in early October, for inclusion in any legislation that would renew protections for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who came to America as children. And "extreme vetting" was one of the vague buzzwords that defined Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
It's also not unusual, said Brown, for immigration hawks to seek a crackdown on any program they can link to a terrorist or criminal in the wake of a violent incident. "No matter who is president," she said, "it becomes part of the immigration policy debate."
But Trump and his nativist allies will have trouble, the experts I've spoken to believe, using this incident to build momentum for these old ideas. For starters, said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, the national reaction to Tuesday's attack has been fairly measured. "There is, at least so far," he said, "not the pressure that we've seen for reform in the past," when the public has sought rapid crackdowns after terrorist attacks.
As Brown pointed out, there's really no connection between immigration policy and this attack that would gin up popular support for action, either. Despite Trump's claims, diversity visa applicants get just as much vetting as any other prospective immigrant, including "chain migrants." Reporters have been unable to substantiate Trump's claim that Saipov helped 23 people to immigrate, and even anti-immigrant advocates say that claim makes no sense. Finally, early indications suggest that Saipov radicalized after coming to America, so it is unlikely more extreme vetting would have helped. "He's conflating things in a really bizarre and incorrect way," said Brown.
There's also no will in Congress to tackle immigration reform right now, even among Trump's allies. The legislative fix for Dreamer protections is the nearest vehicle for negotiations on immigration. Yet while Democrats want to hash this out by mid- December, Republican leaders this week indicated they may not get to this legislation until January or February, just before the March deadline Trump set for the Obama-era policy protecting them to sunset, both because they're focused on tax reform and because don't want to bog down a December government funding bill with this hot-button issue. Although Democrats have been open to putting the diversity program on the table in immigration reform negotiations, it's unlikely, most of the experts I've spoken to agree, that anything more than some extra border security funding will make it into Dreamer-related legislation. Even some nativist lawmakers seem to accept this limitation.
Trump's rhetoric in the wake of this attack will do nothing to change that timeline. And by the time a post-Dreamers fix 2018 vote on comprehensive immigration reform rolls around, if it does, it's possible this rhetoric won't factor in much. "The outrage over the diversity visa" program, said Nowratesh, "is going to fade fairly rapidly. It has a short half-life."
The administration has more juice when it comes to cranking up immigrant vetting, though, and has shown in recent weeks that it can and will act unilaterally on this issue. Notably, in late September, Trump expanded baseline vetting standards for green card applicants. Nowrasteh speculates that he could impose the same level of scrutiny refugees face on all immigrants, "which would be an onerous and expensive process that would not turn up many terrorists" and would drastically cut immigration.
But no one in the administration has been able to say what Trump is specifically considering. "I don't know that he knows," said Brown. "My guess is that he put out a tweet and now a lot of people in the White House and" the Department of Homeland Security "are scrambling to figure out what he did mean. 'What does he want? What more can we do? Let's put some options on the president's desk and see what happens.'"
All of which is to say that Trump's reaction to this attack has been so much sound and fury signifying nothing. It'll score him some nativist cred, and it allows him to return to a campaign favourite issue that has been out of the spotlight for a while. But there's not much, practically, that the administration can do to act on Trump's shrill and knee-jerk reaction to this tragedy.
A man in Bretten, Germany, called police in a panic Thursday to report something disturbing he'd found in his backyard. It was oblong, matte black, and a little more than a foot long; from what he could gather, it looked like a bomb. The cops showed up and managed to diffuse the situation pretty quickly—turns out that instead of phoning in an explosive, the man had actually alerted them to the presence of a monstrously large zucchini.
According to the Associated Press, undetonated explosives left over from World War II turn up all over Deutschland, so you can't blame the guy for freaking out. But it is worth noting that a WWII-era bomb looks like this:
Or their oblong counterpart, the eggplant, which in its versatile emoji rendering, looks like this:
Anyway, the zucchini in question was apparently no ordinary vegetable. It was black, not green, 16 inches long, and weighed a whopping 11 pounds—about as heavy as a bowling ball, or perhaps an overfed raccoon. According to police, the thing "really did look like a bomb."
Unlike a regular zucchini that would have spent two months growing on a vine in full view, the zucch nuke reportedly just miraculously appeared in the guy's backyard one day, causing more concern.
Police told Deutsche Welle that they suspect "an unknown person—concerned with independently disposing of the product—might have thrown the zucchini over the garden hedge," and into the man's yard. It doesn't appear they're too concerned with tracking down the culprit.
While this was a false alarm, World War II–era bombs do have a way of winding up in pretty strange places, like a backyard shed in western Idaho. And though the German who reported his gargantuan zucchini might be the only person to mistake a vegetable for a bomb, he's certainly not the first to confuse an explosive with something totally innocuous.
When it comes to being "in" or "out of" the closet at work, things aren't as black and white as you may think.
Earlier this year, Kathy Tu and Tobin Low, hosts of the podcast Nancy, asked listeners to share their experiences of being out at work. After nearly 3,000 people responded, Tu and Low visited listeners at work and recorded their findings. They found that while 52 percent of respondents said they were out, 13 percent remain closeted. The most surprising result, they said, came in the significant chunk who said they were "somewhat out" at work—35 percent. In an episode released earlier this week, Tu and Low analyzed the results and spoke to a diverse slate of working queer people to figure out what it takes to be out at work today, and what may be holding some of us back.
VICE spoke to the bicoastal duo on their most staggering "out at work" anecdotes, what's keeping people in the closet (or halfway out), and the most problematic professions for LGBTQ people, in their eyes.
VICE: The "Out at Work" episode of Nancy included this major survey of queer people. What were your findings? Tobin Low: Overall, it's not a "yes or no" question, something like "Are you in or are you out?" I just heard myself say that—it's very Heidi Klum Project Runway. Anyway, I think what we found, and we were hoping it would go this way, was just how nuanced everyone's stories were. There was this spread of people who were either very out or not out at all, but in between were so many variations on, "There's a couple of people I feel out to," or, "I'm comfortable being out about my gender identity but not my sexuality," or "I've come out at some jobs but not at others." It's very nuanced, how people think about it.
Kathy Tu: There are also people that can't help but be out, like certain trans folks that, as they transition, they're just out. Sometimes it's not even an option.
What's keeping people in the closet at work? Low: [We found that a lot of people] felt like they couldn't be out, especially if they felt their gender identity wouldn't be accepted in the workplace. We heard from a lot of teachers who were really trying to figure out what the right way was, if at all, to talk about it with their students, and a lot of them were deciding not to have that conversation, because a lot of them didn't want to enter the fray. It can be a very fraught territory.
Tu: There are plenty of reasons not to come out because sometimes laws don't protect you. There are certain people who don't think it pertains to their work. There's no one good reason why someone is not out. It's such a personal decision.
Did anything in your findings point to the effect being closeted at work has on one's mental health or quality of life? Low: There were certainly stories of discrimination and how difficult it was to get a job, especially from a lot of trans folks we heard from. We also heard from people who were just trying to figure out how to share their pronouns at work and the terrible experience with telling a boss or a HR person, and all of a sudden there's an email blast, and the thing they were trying to manage on a private level is suddenly the knowledge of everyone at the company. They're stories where you are trying to navigate this very personal thing, and suddenly the company culture isn't there to support you. We've also gotten stories of bisexual folks who would love to be out at the workplace and be vocal about it, but couldn't, either because they felt the stigma against bisexual people was so strong or they were in opposite-sex relationships where coming out would force them to be very vocal about it. That clearly weighed on them a lot—this complicated thing, like, "well I'm not obviously out and there is not a reason for me to be, but I have a lot of guilt about that."
What were some of the more surprising anecdotes you've heard? Tu: I spent a little time in Brookline, which is near Boston with a man named, Asa Sevelius and he's definitely one of the first trans principals to be out. He made the announcement to his school, and it's a very liberal place where everyone is very accepting. The teachers have been great, the students have been great, his bosses are great, but it was still a big decision to transition publicly because he has to lead this entire school. The student's parents and the community are learning his pronouns and watching him transition—because the physical changes are going to happen to him as we go through the school year. He's still very nervous about it, but he's still gonna do it. I am super proud of him. Everything he does is a great example to his kids.
In what professional area did people feel the most unsafe to come out? Low: It felt like education was maybe the most fraught in trying to find the right way to handle it in the workplace, because of the kids to consider. We heard from one listener who said how retail was particularly hard for them to navigate being a trans person and not having an HR department to go to.
What advice would you give to those who are frightened to come out at work? Low: It doesn't have to feel like it's just you during this process. If you find the right people who are your allies at work, and can really activate them as ambassadors, then you're among a set of people who are setting the tone for how you want to be out at work.
Tu: People should come out if they feel safe doing so. You should feel no pressure. Until then, you've got to feel out what's good for you. I don't think there's a need to push yourself to do something that could put you in a dangerous situation. You have to listen to your gut on this.
It's a brisk Friday morning in October and I'm on Canvey Island looking for a revolution. If the streets are about to erupt into flames of violence, the tinder sparks are well hidden: a handful of shoppers traverse the pavements at a leisurely pace, a middle-aged woman browses an estate agent's window with a bored-looking boxer dog standing at her feet.
Martin Carroll, a 59-year-old forklift driver, is standing outside Boots. I ask him if he thinks it's going to kick off any time soon. He looks at me doubtfully.
The battle for self-rule in Catalonia continues to generate headlines in the UK, but I've travelled to the east coast of England to find out about a radical independence movement closer to home. Canvey Island, home to nearly 40,000 people and separated from Essex by a narrow creek, seems like an unlikely place for a separatist movement. But this is no ordinary claim for secession.
While Scotland, Catalonia and Kurdistan have called for independent statehood, Canvey's residents are quite happy as part of the UK. The island's beef is not with Westminster but with Castle Point Borough Council, the local authority based on the mainland. In recent months, rows over plans for housing development and the feared demolition of community facilities have reached such a level that there is now talk about an independence referendum to show whether people want the island breaking away from council control.
Canvey Island Seafront
Despite the rising tension, for the time being the high street seems peaceful. But this calm facade belies the real resentment felt by many Canvey islanders. When I ask Martin about the movement for independence, he recites a list of grievances against Castle Point council. He's lived on Canvey since 1970, four years before the island's local authority was merged with the council on the mainland, and he can remember the way things used to be.
"The streets were always clean, the town was always clean," he says. "I know times change and everyone's making cutbacks, but I still think we've been neglected." While he's sceptical about the chances of Canvey separatists taking to the streets, he says calls for independence are gathering momentum. "It's a massive movement, it really is," he says. "Come the local elections and it's virtually a clean sweep for the independence party, year-in, year-out."
With little sign of civil unrest breaking out, I head off to meet the men seeking independence through political means. I take a seat with Dave Blackwell and John Anderson in a corner of the Bay Cafe, a small family-run business set back a short distance from Canvey Island's seafront. Dave and John have been fighting for independence for well over a decade. You could think of them like the Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Essex, without the paramilitary connections. This year, John became Canvey's town mayor. But, as he's quick to point out: "Dave kicked the whole thing off – it's his fault!"
Dave wasn't always a revolutionary. He used to manage garden centres and host a Friday morning gardening show on Essex Radio. Then, in 1995, he stood for Labour in the local elections and gained a seat on Castle Point council. He soon became disillusioned. "I was being told constantly, 'You can't do that, it's against Labour party policy.'" In early 2004, he left Labour and formed the Canvey Island Independent Party.
At first, he was the party's only elected official. "When I started we got ridiculed as a protest group," he says. When local elections were held later that year, John was one of five candidates to stand after answering an advert placed by Dave in the local paper. "We went into the elections, five seats available on the island, and we won all five," he says. "And the Conservatives couldn't believe it." In 2006, "We put up another five and we won all five again. And we just kept carrying on."
Nearly 14 years after Dave defected from Labour, the Canvey Island Independent Party now holds all but two of the island's 17 seats on Castle Point Borough Council. It holds nine of the town council's 11 seats. This year, the party won both the island's seats on Essex County Council. It's an electoral record that might be looked at enviably by Mao Zedong. And it's given rise to increasing speculation about the role that Castle Point should play on the island. As Dave says: "How can anybody ignore a community which is ruled by one particular party but they haven't got a say on anything that happens?"
The political landscape in Castle Point means that, even if Dave's party held every seat on Canvey Island, it still wouldn't have a say on decisions made in the wider borough. Canvey has 17 seats up for grabs out of a total of 41 at Castle Point, meaning councillors from the island can never hold a majority. "Canvey people have suffered for 40 years. They've never had anybody but the two main parties to represent them," says Dave. "And now they've got all of us representing them. They feel just as frustrated as we do that they voted us in but we don't help make decisions to map out their future."
Councillor Colin Maclean lives on Canvey Island, but he represents the Tories on the mainland. When I call and ask him about the independence movement, he tells me: "I can see little rhyme nor reason other than to increase the political ego of the Canvey Island Independent Party." According to Maclean, the idea that Canvey is neglected is a misconception. "Our budget as a council is being cut and cut and cut, and we have to be much more creative in finding funds. But that's happening across the whole borough. It's the same situation everywhere. All this plan would actually do is increase costs for Canvey islanders."
Whatever the truth, there are plenty of people on Canvey who share Dave and John's suspicion that the islanders are being shafted. Half a mile down the seafront from the Bay Cafe, I sit down next to a middle-aged man and woman drinking coffee. The man declines to give his name (presumably fearing reprisals from unionists), but tells me: "I've always taken the view that Castle Point has been run for a long time by a small clique of Conservative councillors, for the benefit of a small clique of Conservative councillors."
Back on the high street, I meet James Paddison in a Turkish barbers. Now 27, he's lived on Canvey since he first started school. "I don't want to be rude, but Castle Point is shit," he says. He tells me the island was promised there would be regeneration, but it never arrived. "We were meant to get a revamp here," he says. "Where's the money gone? They went back on their word." So how would he vote in the event of a referendum? "I would say yes. I think the Canvey people should have their own voice and be heard."
Speaking to islanders, there is an overwhelming sense that the council on the mainland just doesn't care. Several people mention the recent efforts to improve the seafront – work that was all done by volunteers, not the local authority. But there are also those who doubt that Canvey would thrive in different circumstances. George, Blaine and Katy are three teenagers who live on the island. When I ask if they think Canvey should declare independence from the mainland, they all answer no in quick succession. "I feel like we rely on them," says Katy. "Where are we getting all our funding from?"
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Leaving Canvey, I drive across one of the two bridges that span a narrow creek that separates the island from the mainland – a small geographical division but an expansive psychological divide. I think about the ways in which the hopes and worries of the islanders mirror those of other separatist movements; the desire to make their own decisions, to look out for themselves, but fears that maybe Canvey isn't large enough to stand on its own.
Later, I call Dr James Ker-Lindsay, a senior research fellow at St. Mary's University and an expert in regions seeking independence. I ask him why these arguments seem to be gaining ground in recent years. He says the Scottish referendum may have been a tipping point. "A lot of separatist movements have looked at that and said, 'Britain allowed Scotland to have a vote, it became an open, free debate, and why shouldn't we have that?'"
Ker-Lindsay's work focuses on regions seeking to become fully-fledged nations. But he offers some thoughts on the situation in Canvey. "It does come down to this sense of identity and people wanting to have that degree of control in local hands," he says. "It's recognising that in our lives, and in our political lives, there's all sorts of things that have got to be decided and let's make these decisions at an appropriate level."
But how feasible would it be for Canvey to strike out on its own? When I call the Local Government Boundary Commission for England, communications director Marcus Bowell tells me he can't recall a council splitting – at least not since 1974, the last major reorganisation of local government and the year in which Canvey lost its independence. In theory, he says, "that is a possibility". However, "before we consider starting a review we look for the consent of all the local authorities that might be involved". Given Castle Point's view of the independence movement, that seems an unlikely scenario. Even then, it would be up to the government to offer a verdict. "The secretary of state would be the ultimate decision maker," says Bowell.
A call to the Department of Communities and Local Government reveals that a boundary change proposal would be considered "if it takes into account improving local government, has significant local support and being of a coherent geography". The case could be argued for all these criteria on Canvey. But there's a catch. The secretary of state will only consider proposals which come from a district or county authority. Once again, the power lies with Castle Point.
When I think back to my meeting with Dave and John, I don't suppose they're much troubled by this obstacle. Dave had outlined plans for a petition demanding greater autonomy and, if that didn't work, a full-blown referendum. "I'm a firm believer that you ignore people at your peril," he'd said. "People power on Canvey has won through on many occasions."
While Canvey might not gain independence this year, or even next, he believed he'd set in motion something that can't be stopped. "What we'd like to think with our legacy, because we ain't going to be here forever, is that we started a movement that gave Canvey more say in its future," he'd told me. "And I think that will come."
