When a sex worker from the UK created a hashtag this November after being frustrated at the lack of diversity on her Twitter timeline, she didn’t anticipate how much it would resonate in the industry.

“Let's flood the TL with glorious images & occupy some space,” she tweeted, ”Respond to this thread w/ a [fire emoji] photo, your website or advert & the #WOCW! Then RT other babes & watch the TL flourishhh.”

Amber Ashton, 27, who started the Women of Colour Wednesday (WOCW) movement on Twitter, has been in the industry for nine years. She’s done sex work in a number of forms and has toured the world as an independent escort. Like many sex workers who have a presence on Twitter, Amber gets a number of her bookings (about 30 percent) via the social media platform. By sending off the first WOCW tweet, Amber hoped to elevate other sex workers of colour by getting them exposure that could lead to bookings.

The Women of Colour Wednesday hashtag has been going on for over a month now and has thousands of posts promoting women of colour in sex work. Amber said it has directly led to women of colour in the industry getting booked by clients. VICE reached out to her to discuss what led up to her creating the social media movement and to hear about what her experiences have been in the industry.

VICE: What led up to you creating WOCW (Women of Colour Wednesday)?
Amber Ashton: Some people assume I sat down and planned it. The reality is that I was jet-lagged in the supermarket doing some grocery shopping… I was scrolling through my timeline [on Twitter], and it was like: size eight white chick, size eight white chick, size eight white chick. Then I’d click on the size eight white chicks—excuse my not-so-PC language—but I’d notice that everyone they were tweeting was the same. It really bothered me, and it’s something that I often talk about and think about: the fact that women of colour, especially within this industry, especially black women, I feel like we have to almost work twice as hard to get the same amount of exposure.

In general, it leads back to society’s beauty standards. It’s no surprise to anyone: You open up magazines, and the bodies are primarily white and slim, cisgender white women. I was like, I don’t want to see this constant branding I always see from the same cookie-cutter sex workers—I want to see more diversity! So, I’m like, I’m going to tweet this thing.

It also came from the fact that being a woman of colour, being a black sex worker, I do think it’s been harder for me in this industry. However, within this industry, I do also recognize my own privileges: I am British, I speak English, I speak many languages, I am degree-educated. I’ve had these privileges that have meant that I have a good following on Twitter, that have meant that I’m fairly consistent with work… It was a matter of helping other people get that reach.

Ultimately, I just wanted to see a less white, Eurocentric timeline and uplift the other workers of colour who put in the work, who are gorgeous, who are intelligent, who are such savvy business women—but, for so many reasons, get overlooked.

What issues do women of colour in the industry face that white sex workers don’t?
My experiences are my own, and I can’t talk for other providers. I know a lot of providers would’ve had it a lot worse than me, but I also know a lot of women of colour who say they haven’t had issues. I started in the sex work industry when I was 18 at an agency.

One of the biggest stand-out things for me that I discussed with other women of colour is being priced different. Our rates in the agency were set rates, and my rate was always less. When I questioned it I was told, “You’re not as desirable; you’re not as in-demand. I can’t charge as much for you because the guys won’t pay it.” This is something that is across the board… Providers of colour, especially black providers, get emails like “$300 for your ‘insert racial slur here’—you’ve got to be crazy.”

It’s this idea that we don’t have the same amount of worth. I think it links into other things, such as classism, this idea of black people being “ghetto” and such. This is why my marketing, and that of others, has to focus on how highly educated I am, the languages I speak, and almost push away from my blackness. It’s interesting in the last couple of years when the idea of being a “thot,” or people like Cardi B have become popular, everyone is hashtagging “bubble butt”—stuff a few years ago, I really avoided that because it meant that I wasn’t as “high-class” as my fellow colleagues.

Can you talk about the trajectory of your career in sex work?
I’ve worked in essentially every form in the industry: I’ve worked for agencies, I’ve worked for brothels, I’ve worked in strip clubs, I’ve freestyled at bars. Now, I’m independent and have been for years. But there isn’t a single aspect of this market that I haven’t noticed being treated differently as a black woman.

When I was freestyling—this is when you would go out to bars to try to pick up clients—I had instances where me and another black girl would be kicked out of a bar, but the other white girls would be allowed to stay because, I’ve been told, “You don’t fit our image.” In the brothels, the last time I worked in one, there’s about 15 workers on shift at one time. The owner was adamant that she could only have one black girl on shift at a time. I was like, “Why?” She was like, “There’s only so much demand for black women. You’re not standard. I also don’t want clients to have this assumption that we’re a black venue, that they’ll only come and find black girls. It’s a high-class venue.”

I looked at the other black girl who turned up: She was six-foot, Sudanese origin, beautiful blue-black skin, size six, cropped hair. I’m five-foot-seven, a size 12, of a lighter complexion. We are completely different. I looked at the white girls in the room, and we had about six size eight blondes. Without being so direct, it felt like she didn’t want to tarnish her establishment with this reputation. I was like, so what if it becomes known as a place where you can find black girls? Surely the best kind of place it could be known as is a place where you’ll find variety.

As a private sex worker, it’s the whole thing of racial fetishization. It’s a really big deal. It’s something I talk about and I think people think I complain about. And I do, because it’s my right to complain about it. I get shit from people because I openly discuss that I openly profit off of it. My reason behind it is, regardless of how I market and label myself, I will always be “ebony.” I will always be “chocolate.” I will always be “caramel.” Those aren’t things that make me particularly jump up and down for joy. However, I know I can turn around and use those in my marketing… It’s almost reclaiming something, because you know it’s going to be done to you, so why not take it and use it and spin it, make it sexy.

Speaking of ads, some sex workers will say in theirs that they don’t see black men or Indian men or Middle Eastern men in their listings. What are your thoughts on that?
It is such a controversial topic… I can’t remember a time when this conversation wasn’t a thing. All I can say is from my personal perspective: I believe that as a sex worker, an independent contractor, as someone who engages in intimate acts, that you are the ultimate decider on what you do with your own body. If you don’t want to see somebody, that is completely your choice. There are also things that are based on trauma… and I’m in no position to discuss that person’s trauma and their decision that comes from it.

But in a general capacity where it’s like “I don’t see African American men because their dicks are too big” or “I don’t see Indian men because they’re rude”—if somebody is completely discriminating against an entire race, to me that is a racist action. People always jump and say “I’m not a racist!”—but I didn’t say you were a racist, I just said that the decision you’re making is a racist decision. It’s ingrained in racism.

They’ll say, “Oh, but I’m just not attracted to ‘insert ethnicity here.’” OK… but are you attracted to the old white men you see? I’m a sex worker, and I find something attractive in anyone and everyone. Even to say “I’m not attracted to this person because they’re black”—the whole idea of being attracted to someone because of race is surrounded by racism. That’s you essentially saying, “I think all black people look the same.” How can you say you’re not attracted to an entire race?

There’s also more complex [situations]: I know some black workers who won’t see black clients, and I think that comes more down to cultural things where they don’t want to bump into someone or don’t want to have to deal with talking in a language to someone… My rules are if you’re polite and well-mannered, I have time for you.

You tour around the world for work. Is there anywhere you’ve found the market has been especially good to you?
Australia has always been very, very good for me. I love the clients there. They’re some of the best gents in the world. Ireland I’ve always done especially well in. I know exactly why this is: When I started in Dublin in 2011, I think there was approximately 250 of us in Dublin, and there four, maybe five, black women (including me). Whilst being a woman of colour in this industry has made it more challenging in certain ways, in other ways, it’s made me more of a rarity. It’s like this unique thing. Especially smaller towns in Ireland, it’s not the most multicultural place. You get the guys who are like, “I’ve never been with a black chick before!” And you’re like, “Cool, bro. Let’s do this!” Sometimes in the back of my head I’m thinking: I’m just like the other chicks, just a bit browner. [laughs] At the end of the day, it’s what works. In Sweden, I always know I will be booked out because the common beauty in Sweden (less so lately with immigration and such) is tall, slim blonde. So when I turn up, and I’m shorter, I’m darker, I’m curvier—people [are interested].

What has the reception been to WOCW?
There’s two sides to it… I never expected it to blow up the way it did. I would’ve turned my notifications off if I knew it would go that crazy. I ended up postponing family plans that day to retweet and keep it going. There was negative backlash as well, which I never expected to happen. It ranged from a specific person on Twitter, quite a high-profile escort, saying that they thought it created more “division.” Like, “We don’t need a Women of Colour Wednesday. Every day should just be sex worker day.” In theory, great—but that’s not how it works.

I was ripped into and told, “This is stupid. This is you making things worse.” It’s much like other arguments when people discuss diversity in any industry. People start kicking up a fuss, like, “Oh, it should be merit-based.”

It’s when feminists talk about how women only make 70 cents to a man’s dollar. Then they forget to discuss the fact that black women are making 60 cents on a man’s dollar, which is less than white women.

Is there anything else you’d like to discuss about Women of Colour Wednesday and elevating women of colour in sex work?
I often find white women asking themselves, “What can I do? I want to be an ally; I want to help other workers.” Then you get things like them offering discounts to men of colour [as clients]. When people ask me, I think the simple answer is: Signal boost women of colour. Like their content, retweet their content, engage with them. People discuss offering duos with them. I’m not saying you have to have at least three people of colour on your duo page—but check the company you’re keeping. If you’re surrounded by fellow white women, if your entire timeline is white women, why is that? Is it that your brain has tricked you into thinking that is what’s aesthetically pleasing based on what you see in the magazines and on the TV? It’s easy to make the effort. One retweet can get someone a booking.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Amber Ashton on Twitter.

This post has been updated to include comments from the victim and her mother.

A man allegedly attacked an 11-year-old Toronto girl on her way to school Friday morning and cut off her hijab, according to police.

Khawlah Noman, a Grade 6 student at Pauline Johnson school, was walking to school with her brother when she was attacked twice in the span of 10 minutes.

“Sadly, someone insulted me by cutting my hijab two times,” Noman told reporters Friday afternoon. “I felt really scared and confused because I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Noman said the man, who was wielding scissors, ran away when she screamed. She said he didn’t say anything but he did smile at her. Her mother said the cut was about 30 centimetres in length.

Police are still looking for the suspect, described as an Asian man in his 20s with a medium build who had a moustache and was wearing glasses and a black hoodie. They are reportedly investigating the attack as a hate crime.

“This is terrible and I do not like it,” Noman said. She said if she could talk to her attacker, she would tell him that what he’s doing is wrong, especially because she’s a kid.

Noman’s mother Saima Samad told the media she wants this attack to be investigated as a hate crime.

“I got a call from the school, and I was just very sad,” she said through tears. “I’m just so happy she’s safe.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented on the attack, saying “I want her and her family and her friends and community to know that that is not what Canada is and that is not who Canadians are." Conservative leader Andrew Scheer described it as “disgusting.”

Toronto District School Board spokesman Ryan Bird said in a statement that the school board is “shocked to learn of this assault.” Bird said the victim’s family was immediately contacted and the the school board is offering them support.

The stereotype of the polite Canadian has been a boon for our country.

We’ve used it to manipulate the hell out of the world. People look at our nice little frozen tundra and think about how we’re helping each other dig cars (or snowmobiles) out of snow and, like, serving each other hot beef barley soup or something. We all know the cliche of American tourists sewing Canadian flags on backpacks so they are harassed less abroad.

However, we Canadians harbour a dirty little secret. We can be just as big of assholes as the rest of the chuds populating the globe and the polite-as-can-be cliche tends to act as a smokescreen for the racism and violence that exists here. We’re not here to talk about that though, we’re here to talk about what some of us did to our southern neighbours’ favourite historical shed.

Earlier this week, a couple proud but frozen dickheads took some chainsaws and sledgehammers to the US historic site after it washed up on the shores of New Brunswick. The exact motives are unclear—it could be for revenge, or maybe it was to source materials for a sick gazebo hut, perfect for listening to Kim Mitchell’s “Patio Lanterns.”

No matter what the reason behind it, at the end of the day we chainsawed the living hell out of that shed. (Here is a suggested song to soundtrack what you’re about to read.)

As chronicled by the CBC’s Julia Wright, after a massive storm slammed into Maine, a very popular old shed outside of Lubec—beloved for being the last standing herring smokehouse in the country, built in 1907—got into a little bit of trouble. Historic value offers no protection from the cruel reality of mother nature, so when the storm hit it collapsed off its pilings into the water and took a nice little float towards Canada.

After reaching Canada’s most forgettable province, New Brunswick, the not-so-good people of Campobello Island went to town on it.

"It was a very bad scene," Rachel Rubeor, president of Lubec Landmarks, told the CBC. "Many of of the people were very hostile to her. They had chainsaws. They were sawing up the peak of the building, they were dismantling the chimney, which was intact, we have a picture of a car loaded with wood and bricks driving away."

The Americans still want to save the shed by dismantling it and bringing it back home, but the New Brunswick looters have already done a number to apparently get their hands on that sweet, sweet historical brine shed wood.

Pictured above: A couple of good ol’ Canadian boys training for this moment.

You might say, “well, Mack, this is just a couple assholes, how can you possibly use this incredibly specific situation to generalize about Canadians as a whole?” Well, to you, my fair reader, I would answer with, “look at how quick we were to rip apart Maine's favourite shed.”

Simply put, next time you try to write off Canadians as being being polite little guys you can fuck with, I want you to remember what we did to that shed. Make no qualms about it, Americans, if your home floats into Canada we won’t think twice about taking a sledgehammer to your walls and stealing all of your copper pipes.

We burned down your god-dang White House before, we’re good at this shit.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

On Friday, HBO released the first teaser trailer for its upcoming Fahrenheit 451 remake, and the thing is fire—as in, it's mostly just footage of books burning.

The teaser, unfortunately, doesn't feature either of the film's stars, Shape of Water's Michael Shannon and Creed's Michael B. Jordan, though some recent Fahrenheit 451 press photos of the duo heroically torching up literature give a nice taste of what's to come.

Michael B. Jordan. Photo by Michael Gibson/HBO.

This is far from the first adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel about "firemen" who burn illegal literature in a dystopian, totalitarian regime. The story has been retold on stage and screen, most famously in a 1966 film by Francois Truffaut, and even on the radio, but HBO is planning a fresh, modernized take on Bradbury's original vision.

Fahrenheit 451's director and co-writer, Ramin Bahrani, told the Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview that, although the plot of the new film strays from its source material, it stays "true to the themes" of the original book.

Michael Shannon. Photo by Michael Gibson/HBO.

"Bradbury's novel was set in the future where he was predicting having screens on the wall that you could interact with," Bahrani told the Reporter. "Social media and supercomputers like my phone are real now... There was no reason to put [Fahrenheit 451] in the future; it's just [set in] a strange tomorrow."

In the new adaptation, Jordan plays Montag—a fireman who begins to question his job and his loyalty to the government. Shannon stars alongside him as Montag's mentor and fire captain, Beatty. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film also features Sofia Boutella as "an informant caught between the competing interests" of Jordan and Shannon's characters.

Sofia Boutella. Photo by Michael Gibson/HBO

HBO has not revealed a release date for Fahrenheit 451, but the upcoming film is expected to drop sometime this spring. In the meantime, watch a sophomore year syllabus'-worth of literature go up in flames in the teaser above.

I don’t know if you knew this, but 2 Chainz has a song called “Netflix.” It’s from his 2013 album “B.O.A.T.S. II #MeTime,” and features Fergie. “I smoked a blunt for dinner, another blunt for breakfast,” he raps, “2 Chainz, got 'em staring at my necklace. Let's make a sex tape and put it on Netflix. Let's make a sex tape and put it on Netflix.”

In my opinion, this is great life advice (the smoking-and-watching-Netflix part, not the smoking-and-uploading-homemade-porn-to-Netflix part). If you’re reading this article, chances are you too agree with the sentiment expressed in “Netflix” and are ready to blaze (in a location where it is legal to do so) and stream some good-ass TV.

Instead of just watching Planet Earth for the hundredth time, here are some of the best Netflix shows to watch while you’re stoned, from dramas to cooking shows to nature shit.

Round Planet

Round Planet is basically Planet Earth if Planet Earth were written by a bunch of yucksters. Comedian Matt Lucas hosts the show, narrating nature clips as a parody of Richard Attenborough named Armstrong Wedgewood. Round Planet isn’t just a bunch of cheap laughs; you still get to enjoy the BBC’s spectacular archive of nature footage while laughing your ass off.

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories is a cozy, poignant show that focuses on the lives of the customers who frequent a late-night diner in Tokyo. Episodes focus on strangers bonding, often over a particular dish. It’s beautiful, and will make you feel something real even after taking the strongest edible.

Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby

My coworker Katie told me that this show has “an episode about a hotel in the middle of Kenya where giraffes literally eat guests' breakfast off the table.” What more do you people want?

The Great British Baking Show

More often than not, cooking competition shows are way too loud and aggressive to make for a solid stoned viewing experience. Chopped, Iron Chef, and even Cupcake Wars use the same quick cuts and over-dramatic music to keep the audience in suspense, effectively pissing into an already-overflowing sink of clattering, overwrought TV slop. Enter The Great British Baking Show, a calming, cordial, alternative competitive cooking show where a bunch of Brits make pastries in a meadow.

The Joy of Painting

There are dozens of episodes on Netflix from beloved TV painter Bob Ross’s iconic The Joy of Painting, split into two shows for some reason (Bob Ross: Beauty is Everywhere and Chill with Bob Ross) Prep your paints and joints, and then it’s just happy trees, dude. Happy trees.

Animal Fight Night

There are only 3 episodes of Animal Fight Night on Netflix, and they’re all genius. Walrus fights, giraffe scraps, meerkats jawing each other— you name it, this show’s got it.

Baby Animals in the Wild

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

The Crown

Netflix’s big-budget original series The Crown is absolutely not what you should watch while high—which is exactly why you should watch it while high. It’s a dark, dreary, historical drama where nothing really happens—in other words, a perfect choice to lull you to sleep after smoking an enormous blunt.

Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin is a great watch sober or high, but the show’s moments of magical realism particularly pop when you’ve taken too many dabs and start wondering if you’re alive or dead.

Ken Burns Presents: The West

Though it’s not actually directed by Ken Burns, Ken Burns Presents: The West feels like Ken Burns at his Ken Burns-iest. The nine-part documentary is a slow-burning epic packed with folksy stories told by some dude with a really soothing voice. So come on down to the campfire, burn one, and learn how the West was won (spoiler alert: categorically stolen from indigenous peoples).

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Netflix doesn’t have the OG Cosmos with Carl Sagan, so the Neil Degrasse Tyson reboot will have to do. In ten episodes, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey explores topics from the most miniscule molecules to the deepest depths of our universe. There’s also an episode called “A Sky Full of Ghosts.” Dawg.

Already watched everything on this list? I’m impressed. Check out more of VICE’s TV coverage right here.

One of the most impressive things about Saturday Church, a vibrant queer coming-of-age film opening in NY and LA theaters and VOD today, is that it’s the first feature from filmmaker Damon Cardasis. With bold musical numbers and bits of magical realism, Variety has described the movie as something like Moonlight meets La La Land, and the film represents a promising first step for Cardasis, as well as perfect timing for audiences seeking a new kind of coming-out film.

Saturday Church tells the story of 14-year-old Ulysses (exciting newcomer Luka Kain) as he wrestles with his gender identity and is ultimately thrown out of his Bronx home by his conservative aunt (Regina Taylor). Ulysses finds a new kind of family with queer youth on New York City’s Christopher Street Pier, who invite him along to “Saturday Church”—a weekly sanctuary where they eat, hang out, and practice voguing for upcoming balls. The film traces his ensuing queer self-actualization, as well as the love, mentorship and support Ulysses finds among his chosen family.

Cardasis was inspired to make Saturday Church while volunteering with the outreach program Arts & Acceptance at the Church of St. Luke’s in the Field in New York’s West Village. On Saturday nights, volunteers serve food, offer social services, clothes, emergency assistance, and provide homeless queer youth space to dance, perform, and channel their creative energy. St. Luke’s hosted a special advance screening of Saturday Church last week for its community of volunteers, administrators, and the youth who inspired the film (some even make cameos). VICE spoke with Cardasis a few days after the screening about his experience working on the film and sharing it with the people who inspired it.

It was moving to see a screening of the film at St. Luke’s in the Field. Tell me about your experience volunteering with the Arts & Acceptance program.
I found out about the program through my mother, who’s an Episcopal priest in the Bronx. I’m not very religious, but I’ve never felt ostracized or beaten down by religion because my priest is my mother and she’s a freedom fighter. I know that’s not the case with a lot of the LGBTQ community. I thought it was fascinating that these kids—many of whom have been thrown out on the streets due to their parents’ religion—are now being taken in by a church. It’s like two sides of a religious coin.

I met with the kids over the course of a couple months and listened to their stories. I also did the volunteer work of serving the kids food and cleaning up—anything that needed to be done. These kids have gone through tragic, horrible things at such young ages—abuse, having to live on the streets, everything they have to do to survive—and yet they were still finding community, strength, and joy where they could while caring for one another. I found that really inspiring.

How did it feel returning to St. Luke’s to screen the movie?
Surreal—I feel like I haven’t processed it. I remember going in and trying to say, "Oh, I want to make a movie." You have to convince people you’re not some creep. So to go back and screen it for them feels like a dream.

I'd given the script to the social worker who runs the program for her feedback, and she burst into tears the first time she saw it and said, "Oh my god, this movie validated the last 10 years of my life." That’s a testament to her work. It was amazing to watch her see it again, and to hear the kids who were part of the program be like, "You need to make a movie about me!" To have people proud to see themselves in a movie or feel like their story was told—that’s everything.

How did you decide to make this a musical?
I knew I wanted there to be magical realism and elements of fantasy. I liked the idea of Ulysses escaping his harsh reality through everyday beauty. The character is loosely based on myself as a kid; I was very quiet, I’d always daydream, and I was very in my head all the time. When someone's in difficult circumstances, what do they latch onto to get them through it?

When I saw the juxtaposition between the cafeteria conversations and some of the awful things these kids have been through, and then walked into the gymnasium where those same kids would perform and dance and vogue—there was a freedom and empowerment there, and for a moment they were the kings and queens of the ball. Just seeing that, I knew it needed to be a musical.

Did the musical aspect feel integral in constructing a queer narrative?
The first time I volunteered, I walked into the auditorium and saw one of the girls in the movie, Sasha Washington, doing full-on Beyoncé performances into her hairbrush—there was an arena she was performing to. There's a power through music that a lot of queer people feel—a strength, a fierceness, a "fuck you" attitude. And who doesn’t love a good musical?

The cast includes several trans actors—including Mj Rodriguez and Indya Moore, who are going on to star in Ryan Murphy’s Pose, about the ball scene in 80s New York—and it’s almost entirely people of color. Was that important to you in telling this story?
It was important in the sense that I wanted it to be accurate, and that’s the reality. The majority of homeless youth are LGBTQ, and the majority of LGBTQ homeless youth are people of color. To whitewash it for whatever bizarre reason would've been fucked up.

Have there been any reactions to the movie that surprised you?
One of the trans actresses in the film reunited with her mother, who had never fully accepted her. She said her mother told her she was proud of her for the first time after seeing the movie. That was pretty amazing. I’ve been getting a lot of texts and messages on social media with people saying, “I finally see myself on screen,” and I always said that if somebody could see themselves on screen and feel proud, it would all be worth it Someone in the UK wrote me about how they'd always picked on their brother and realized how wrong they were. One person wrote that he’s angry this film didn’t exist when he was younger, and that he felt proud to be himself. That means a lot.

What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
I want the community to feel proud, and to feel they’ve been given a voice. I want people who aren't so exposed to the community to become more aware, open-minded, and supportive. I also want people to enjoy the movie—it is obviously a queer movie, but in some ways I also feel like it’s very universal. I always say it’s a human story first and foremost; anyone who’s been bullied or felt isolated and alone or remembers falling in love for the first time, and you can relate to what he’s going through.

It’s important to feel that everybody is connected, whatever your race, gender identity, seuality, whatever. Within the LGBTQ community, white gay men have it a lot better than trans people of colour. If we’re all part of the same LGBTQ family, we have to fight for each other’s causes—we can’t just ignore what someone else is going through. It’s important that the trans community is respected and seen as individuals—not as the butt of jokes or clichéd characters. They’re talented, smart, creative human beings just like everybody else. I also wanted to show parents dealing with kids who are struggling with gender identity that all you have to do is really love them for who they are—it’s that simple.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter.

Accused sexual predator Bill Cosby stepped out for some Italian food with friends on Wednesday, and for some reason, he decided to invite a bunch of reporters along. In what the Philadelphia Inquirer called "a decidedly odd affair," the disgraced star told jokes over penne, claimed he was "ready" for his upcoming retrial, and waded into the current #MeToo movement.

"Please don't put me on #MeToo," Cosby told a female reporter. "I just shook your hand like a man."

It was a strange moment at an already bizarre PR stunt, which saw Cosby, his publicists, and an old friend ham it up while reporters swirled around the disgraced star. A friend of Cosby's even recorded him at his table while he cracked a few jokes on camera.

It's not clear if Cosby really doesn't understand the #MeToo movement, or was just making a tasteless attempt at humour, but it's not a surprising comment coming from a guy who was brazen enough to suggest a speaking tour aimed at "young athletes" and adolescent men to warn them that "anything at this point can be considered sexual assault."

Cosby has since walked back on the idea, but it's just one of the ways he's stayed busy after his mistrial last June. After more than 50 women came forward accusing the 80-year-old comedian of drugging and assaulting them, Cosby was charged with three counts of sexual assault stemming from an incident with Andrea Constand in 2004. The jury grew deadlocked—and apparently argued about Constand's "bare midriff"—ultimately leading a judge to declare a mistrial.

Cosby will head back to court in April and faces a maximum ten-year prison sentence—though it doesn't seem like he has any plans to give up his old life.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Growing a beard is like a superpower—a way to take the face your parents gave you and totally transform it. A beard can impart its wearer with an academic’s seriousness or a beach bum’s casual cool; it can make you look like a wounded loner or a goofy father figure; and it can say whatever you want it to say—but above all, a beard says “I chose to look this way.” Even though having a beard is no longer cool, men who sport them can be seen as more desirable and virile. Beards have become shorthand for possessing masculinity. And I can’t grow one.

After a few days of not shaving, all I get are a few crunchy wisps, mostly on my neck. My facial hair is somehow both gnarled and pathetically thin, so I look like a cross between a wizard and a depressed teen. I don’t like the way beards look, but I hate that I can’t grow one! Why can’t I make the same transformational follicular choice so many others make effortlessly?

So I decided to stop shaving until I had grown a full beard. No matter how long it took. (I lasted just over a month.) Here's how it went...

DAY 3

There’s no other way to say it—my face looks bad. Instead of a sexy stubble, I grow a few strands of wiry black hair that stick out of my face at haphazard angles. It’s definitely a “look,” in that it looks like I gave up on myself.

DAY 4

You wouldn’t leave the house with a big obvious stain on your clothes, but that’s how my face feels. I’m too embarrassed to see other people so I stay inside all day and go to bed at 6 pm.

DAY 5

I stay inside all day again, and go to bed at 7.

The author, day six. Photo by Sam Weiner.

DAY 6

I stay inside all day again again, and go to bed at 5.

DAY 7

I am no longer afraid to go outside. The beard finally doesn’t look like a mistake. It looks like something very ugly that I’ve done on purpose. The usual word to describe beards like mine at this point would be “patchy,” but that implies there are patches with hair. Not in my case. My left cheek is like a pristine, white sand beach dotted by a dozen palm trees that’ve been struck by lightning.

DAY 11

I am/I have a neckbeard.

Photo of the author, by the author, day 11.

Again, my non-beard leads to a pathetic cycle of desperation that I can blame on no one but myself. Dishes and dust pile up. Instead of going to the grocery store, I try to survive on bottles of chocolate Ensure that I already had on hand. This, of course, makes me feel even worse. I don’t read or watch TV. I just lay in bed, staring at my phone for hours and hours, reloading the same apps over and over again every few seconds.

DAY 14

Day 14. Photo by the author.

DAY 15

Every day I wake up and think, “Thank goodness I’m slightly itchier than yesterday!” I didn’t even realize that itching was a thing beards do! I thought it would be soft! Instead, my face feels like someone crushed up a box of Triscuits and glued them to my neck while I was asleep. But I’m getting there. I delete all the apps from my phone and push myself out of the house. I’m back on track!

DAY 20

The beard and mustache parts still don’t connect. My cheeks are dotted with maybe 36 coarse hairs between them. The whole thing appears to have completely stopped growing. It’s like my hormones knew I was aiming for Hairiness Level: Mountain Man but stopped out of spite at Hairiness Level: Decaying Pig.

I start every conversation with a self-deprecating explanation of why I have such a lame face situation, but no one really seems to notice or care.

DAY 22

Truthfully, I expected weird looks from waiters, people on the subway, acquaintances, etc. I wanted to write hilarious, self-deprecating stories about cute girls at bars who loved my urbane banter but hated my disgusting facial hair. But the truth is, that didn’t happen. It’s almost as if the world doesn’t care about my dumb bullshit at all! Can’t strangers see I’m not the type of person who would grow a shitty beard? Or that I’m at least the type of person who would know he was growing a shitty beard and so was clearly growing it for hilarious reasons? The answer is clearly NO. My beard is shit and I hate myself.

DAY 23

It’s painful to catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think, “This is the worst I have ever looked.” I wonder if the hairs that won’t come out of my face are instead growing up into my head, creeping up like vines between the folds of my brain, then wrapping their way around my eyeballs that will eventually leave me a blind zombie, screaming vainly in hopes of attracting a kind neighbor to kill me.

We're at the end now. This is as good as it will get." Photo by Carlos Jaramillo.

DAY 24

Why am I even doing this? How do I talk myself into these kinds of things? Why was I interested in trying to grow a beard in the first place? Was it a masculinity thing? Truthfully, I don’t think so. There are an infinite number of minor and made-up problems that can give a person a lifetime of anxiety and luckily for me, my manliness or lack thereof isn’t an issue I think about. I worry about silly things, like how often I should wear my bolo tie or whether life is worth living in a meaningless universe where cruelty is rewarded. I have worried zero times about how manly I am, probably because the answer is “Extremely Not.” Honestly, worrying about manliness seems like an outdated problem.

Still, my inability to grow anything even remotely resembling a beard has left me in a mental state that can best be described as frazzled. The experiment has worn me down. I’m torturing myself and I can’t think of a single good reason why.

DAY 25

Christmas!

Different angles of the bad beard, day 26.

DAY 31

I walk outside. The breeze tickles the handful of whisker-like hairs of my cheeks. “Ooh, this must be how a dog feels,” I think. It’s the best I have felt in weeks.

DAY 34

The hair is twice as thick on my right cheek as it is on my left cheek. And yet on neither side does it really count as a beard. My friend hits me with a devastating truth: “If you robbed a bank right now, in broad daylight, with no mask, witnesses would not describe the suspect as bearded.”

DAY 35

A full day of peace. Yes, the beard looks terrible and makes me feel even worse. But I’m glad I have given growing one in earnest a try! I’m glad I’m writing about it! Isn’t the very purpose of written language to convey the breadth of human experience? Maybe the beard and I can get along.

DAY 36

Nope, fuck this thing. I tug at my chin hair waiting for a movie to start and am overcome with nausea. The hair feels like a malign invader, its filthy black tendrils bursting from my flesh. Time for it to go.

DAY 37

I visit Gasper Como, Brooklyn’s favourite wise Italian barber, for a straight-razor shave. In ten minutes, I’m back to my spritely, fresh-faced self. I feel better immediately.

T

The experiment is officially over. Photo by Carolos Jaramillo.

Bad beard goes bye bye. Photo by Carlos Jaramillo.

And I learned…nothing. I won’t BS you. I was hoping, maybe even planning, to discover that how you look is less important than how you feel, or something else vaguely platitudinal. But thinking about how I looked played a key role in how I felt over this last five weeks. As a result, I just sat around and felt sorry for myself the entire time. The bad feelings started because I looked bad. But by the end, it was because I wanted to accomplish something seemingly simple that I couldn't. And you could literally see the failure all over my face. I couldn't escape it.

But I’m still happy I tried. I'm better for it—more aware of what I am and am not capable of. Follically, at least. It was, by far, the longest 36 and a half days of my life, and I'm glad its over. It's nice to be able to look people in the eye again.

Badly bearded or freshly shaven? You be the judge. Photo by Carlos Jaramillo.

Follow Sam Weiner on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Quebec.

We live in an age where nothing is really private. Even when your door is closed and your curtains are drawn, metadata sees everything. Which means porn sites can paint a fairly accurate picture of what motivates us women to, uh, polish the jewels or whatever.

Pornhub recently posted a bizarre compilation of pornographic trends from the past year, and, unchallenged for three years, lesbian porn has ignited the passions of the most users in 2017.

Interestingly, the term is at the top of the most popular searches, but when looking at the stats broken down by gender, we see that women are proportionally much more attracted to lesbian porn than men (a gap of 197 percent).

According to Pornhub, just over a quarter of visitors to the site are actually women. Let's take a look at what else interests these ladies:

We see that women really turn women on. "Lesbian," "lesbians scissoring," "lesbian threesome," "cheerleader," and "squirting" respectively rank first, second, 10th, 11th and 15th in the list of the most popular search terms. And among pornstars, Kim Kardashian apparently seduces the most women.

Psychologist Laurie Betito, a sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center, puts these results into perspective by pointing out that, "for women who have a slight fantasy or curiosity, lesbian porn can safely explore this part of their sexuality. And of course, for lesbian and lesbian women, it's the obvious choice."

Besides lesbian porn, we note that women are particularly fond of videos of threesomes, hentai, Japanese porn, rough sex and gang bangs, in that order.

Men, on the other hand, are more fascinated by what is directly or indirectly related to the family, with the MILFs, stepmothers, mothers and half-sisters in fist, second, fifth and eighth places in the men's search list.

For what is particularly trendy this year, we see that searches for cheerleaders have made a huge jump of 1019 percent among women, while the popularity of women's porn has risen by 350 percent.

Meanwhile, men appear to a passion for fidget spinners porn. 2017 was an interesting year.

Pornhub gets 800 searches every second. The site likes to create funny parallels to show how much the world is masturbating thanks to its platform. This is how we come to the conclusion that the amount of porn data seen in 2017 would be enough to fill the memory of all the iPhones in use on the planet.

And end to end, the whole world looked at the equivalent of 68 years of porn in 2017. That's almost how old Peter Mansbridge is—something to meditate on in 2018.

Justine de l'Église is on Twitter.

“It’s feel good, it’s sexy, and it’s just the right amount of political,” declared Kat in a recent episode of The Bold Type to a room full of old, white men. A lead character on the Freeform network’s latest hit, the promising young social media editor was describing a story she wanted published—but the dialogue doubles as a list of reasons why The Bold Type is so exciting. As a queer woman of color, Kat is an all-too-rare character in television aimed at young adults today. If and when we see a queer female protagonist in a teen-oriented TV show, she’s almost always white, and it’s been that way since the dawn of the teen TV drama.

The past few years have seen a number of phenomenal, progressive and diverse queer female characters on TV writ large, from Orange is the New Black to Black Mirror. But when it comes to teen television, queer women of color are often hard to find in leading roles; when we do see queer women of color in dramas geared toward a younger audience, they’re secondary or tertiary characters, or even killed off the show (following the infamous “Bury Your Gays” trope). Compared to regular, mainstream programming—in which representation for queer women of color still has a ways to go—teen TV has a lot of catching up to do.

Granted, it’s hard to explicitly define what constitutes “teen television,” because it’s not a genre delineated by hard and fast lines. Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein, the editors of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, argue it’s more of a cultural category defined by content, demographics, and reception. The WB (now The CW) emerged as a prominent purveyor of such shows, with hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek, which gave way to waves of 2000s teen dramas, like Veronica Mars, The O.C., and Gilmore Girls. And since the genre’s rise, its shows have almost always at least touched on a prevalent struggle amongst adolescents: sexuality.

One of TV’s most famous queer female protagonists was born as the genre came into its own; Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave us Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), Buffy’s queer ginger sidekick, a character who singlehandedly shifted the landscape of queer women on TV. The O.C. lead Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton) started dating a girl on the show in 2004—the first time many queer millennials saw a prominent on-screen lesbian storyline. The CW’s rebooted 90210 saw Adriana dive into a queer relationship, and in 2009, Emily of Skins (the British version) came out as gay.

But after these major storylines, all driven by white characters, things didn’t get better for queer women of color on teen shows. In fact, over the last decade, the category has been overwhelmingly defined by whiteness. The CW’s The 100 featured a nuanced relationship between protagonist Clarke and her star-crossed lover Lexa (but was scandalized for abruptly killing Lexa off). Chasing Life (2014) on ABC Family (now Freeform) featured Brenna, a white teenager grappling with her sexuality. FOX’s Scream Queens (2015) featured Billie Lourd as Chanel #3, a sorority sister who has a dalliance with a lesbian pledge. While the pledge was played by Asian actress Jeanna Han, she was promptly killed off. In MTV’s caustic dramedy Faking It (2014), Rita Volk plays Amy, the show’s embattled queer (white) protagonist. In 2016, Syfy’s supernatural drama Wynonna Earp revealed two of their white female leads to be queer. And last year, Netflix’s breakout show 13 Reasons Why painted its white lead Hannah Baker as queer. She had a brief fling with Courtney, who was a groundbreaking queer Asian character, even though she wasn’t top-billed.

Most recently, Marvel’s Runaways, a teen show on Hulu, gave us Karolina Dean, a lesbian superhero who falls for her friend Nico. According to the comics, Nico rejects Karolina, but in the season finale of the Hulu series, which aired earlier this week, Nico changed things up and pursued Karolina back—a trailblazing moment which made Nico the first queer female Asian lead in a teen show.

And there are other exceptions to the rule, of course. In 2011, Naya Rivera’s character came out as queer on FOX’s flagship show Glee. Along with Heather Morris, the Latina actress was one of Glee’s two queer female leads. Hulu’s recently cancelled East Los High featured Camila, a Latinx queer woman. Pretty Little Liars, the long-running teen drama which shares a network with The Bold Type, featured Filipino actress Shay Mitchell as Emily, a lesbian protagonist. But these represent anomalies against the tidal wave of queer whiteness that has overwhelmed teen TV.

Watch as Broadly searches for America's last lesbian bars:

But things may be slowly changing, as seen in shows like The Bold Type and Runaways. Freeform especially has taken strides to adequately represent a breadth of diverse female characters in their programming, with GLAAD reporting that the network remains the most LGBTQ-inclusive on cable, with 25 regular and recurring queer characters this season.

“Our job is to be reflective of our audience,” said Karey Burke, Freeform’s executive vice president of programming and development. “We need to represent their stories.” Burke joined the network three years ago and has been an influential and propulsive force behind Freeform’s diverse storytelling. She said she’s very proud of The Bold Type and considers it to be a trailblazer in representation. Elizabeth Boykewich, senior vice president of casting and talent at the network, agreed. Boykewich cast Aisha Dee as Kat and Nikohl Boosheri as Adena, a Muslim lesbian character and Kat’s love interest. “On Sex and the City, there was Mr. Big. For us, what feels actually modern, more interesting, and more empowered is this,” said Boykewich. “This is our Mr. Big relationship.”

Boykewich believes that writers often write what they know, which is why—until now—queer characters in young adult shows have often been white. As writers’ rooms diversify, though, the hope is that change will soon come. Faith Choyce, a queer woman of color, comedian and writer at Autostraddle, agrees. “People create the worlds they’re familiar with, so diversity in front of the camera can only come from diversity at every step of the production process, from the writers and directors to the showrunners,” she said. “So many writers’ rooms are still exclusively or mostly white, even if they’re not exclusively male, which is how you end up with the ridiculous and inaccurate portrayals of characters of color.” TV critic Ira Madison III echoed her assessment: “I think most TV writing jobs belong to white people, and sadly, when diversity extends to queer people, it’s still white queer voices," he told me in an email.

Now more than ever, representation matters, and queer women of color need more visibility on television today, especially TV geared towards teens and young women. For many young queer people of color, seeing themselves and their stories represented on TV could be life changing—an assurance that you’re not alone in this world. And that extends far beyond bi and lesbian representation; so far, transgender women of color have yet to be top-billed on a major teen show. This needs to change, and these shows should reflect the fraught nature of teenage gender identity, especially now that more young people than ever identify as queer.

“Queer women of color haven’t been presented with the same opportunities to tell their stories on a platform like network or cable TV as white lesbians who fit Western ideals of conventional attractiveness,” said Choyce. But she’s optimistic about the future, and I am, too. As a queer woman who grew up with a general lack of queer female storylines on TV, I’m happy to see that young adult television is portraying these stories at all. Let’s just hope things get better from here.

Follow Jill Gutowitz on Twitter.

Quentin Tarantino has reportedly been hunting for big names for his upcoming movie about the Manson murders, and it looks like he finally locked one down: According to Deadline Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star.

He'll be playing an aging, washed-up actor, his first role since nabbing his first Oscar. Though no other actors are officially signed on to the project, Variety reports it's an ensemble film akin to Pulp Fiction, with a number of stars interested in coming onboard. Tarantino is reportedly looking to tap Margot Robbie to play actress Sharon Tate, and eyeing Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Al Pacino for major roles.

Details are scant on the film's plot, but it's reportedly going to be set in 1969, when Tate and six other people were killed at Charles Manson's behest. The massacre, along with Manson's trial and sentencing, captivated the country and inspired documentaries, gave Manson a few pen pals, and sparked a bizarre fight over his body following his death in November.

According to Tarantino, the film won't be a biopic—"It's not Charles Manson, it's 1969," he said recently—and given that DiCaprio's character doesn't fit clearly into Manson's real-life saga, you have to wonder what other ground the movie is going to cover, seeing as the year also saw Richard Nixon sworn in as president, The Beatles' last public show, and a spate of Zodiac killings.

Still, it'll likely hew closely to Manson's story: The movie is set to drop on August 9, 2019, 50 years to the day of the LaBianca murders. Looks like DiCaprio will have to take a break from doing his best Teddy Roosevelt impression to find time to film the grisly saga.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

You might not know "Sandstorm" by name, but you've definitely heard it. Darude's EDM song has been a hit at clubs across the globe for years, spawned a legendary meme, and served as a backing track for countless YouTube gems. The track is so ubiquitous, it's easy to forget its origin story is just as wild as the song itself.

On this VICE Special, we take a deep dive into "Sandstorm" with the man who wrote it, Ville Virtanen, AKA Darude. In the late 90s, the Finn was just an average clubgoer with a passion for mixing—but when he released "Sandstorm," he rocketed to the top of the charts, nabbing high-profile DJ gigs at clubs he'd only dreamed of playing. Virtanen tells VICE how he came up with the song and introduces the producers and DJs who helped make it a banger. Then, we follow him to his set at a massive EDM festival in Finland, where—16 years after it came out—"Sandstorm" is still a hit.

Hours after reportedly calling a whole host of nations "shithole countries," President Trump decided to cancel his upcoming trip to London due to the "bad deal" that resulted in a new location for the US embassy.

Luckily, Trump's wax figurine was able to step in at the last minute. According to the Washington Post, Madam Tussauds in London decided to temporarily move Trump's statue from the museum and out to the new embassy to make up for the president's absence.

"Just like the rest of the country, we woke up to the news of Trump having canceled his visit," Claire Treacy, a spokeswoman for the museum, told the Post. "We thought: Wouldn’t it be fun [to move] our own President Trump there, instead?"

Unlike the more unfortunate waxwork nightmares, Trump's double is a pretty lifelike stand-in. According to the Post, his blond mop is made up of yak and squirrel hair, and he dons a suit and a signature red tie. Treacy said that some people even made a double take to make sure it wasn't the real thing.

"We were only at the embassy for about 25 minutes, but there were some immediate reactions," she told the Post. "Workers came out to take selfies, and I guess some people checked twice whether this is really just a waxwork."

The reaction to Trump's waxy doppelganger was much more positive than what some Londoners had planned upon the president's arrival. London mayor Sadiq Khan slammed the upcoming trip and activists said they would stage mass protests should Trump end up visiting the city.

But on Friday, Londoners seemed generally excited to see his stand-in at the embassy—even if the British version might be more anatomically forgiving than its US counterpart.

Disgraced televangelist, ex-con, and soup salesman Jim Bakker paints a bleak portrait for the near future: North Korea will release a series of electromagnetic pulse bombs above the Earth’s atmosphere, completely disabling all US electronic technology. Counter-attacks will leave the planet in ruin. 95 percent of humanity will die in the first six months. “Woe to those who are pregnant or nursing babies in those days!” he says, quoting the Bible as he hosts The Jim Bakker Show.

But, thankfully, you are prepared. You have purchased your Tasty Pantry Deluxe Food Buckets, guaranteeing you over ten thousand servings of pizza, mac and cheese, and chocolate pudding while you wait out the apocalypse. You have purchased your solar generator with compatible microwave and electric blanket, “so you don’t freeze to death,” says Bakker. You have your collection of “end times” literature with titles like The Islamic Antichrist and The Trump Prophecies, which will guide you through the bloody tribulations to come.

I’ve only just begun my 24 hour binge of the newly revived Praise the Lord (PTL) network, Bakker's apocalypse-themed Christian home shopping channel. As a child I marinated in doomsday prophecies like these, as my parents (and those of my poverty-stricken friends) gave ten percent of our yearly income to conmen like Bakker—about as much as I’ve spent on therapists attempting to treat the PTSD caused by spending 20 years waiting for the world to end.

From their website, it's difficult to work out exactly what the new PTL is (and the network didn't respond to my requests for clarification). It could best be described as a sad buffet of conspiracy theorists, bigots, doomsday prophets, and old school religious hucksters—all of whom have something to sell. It seems to be exclusively broadcast online, but syndicates some of its content for broadcast by other networks.

The contents of one of Jim Bakker's buckets. Screencap via Super Deluxe on YouTube

It's a far cry from the operation Bakker had in the 80s, when he and his then-wife Tammy Faye Bakker were the most powerful couple in televangelism, and PTL was the biggest name in the industry.

“In about thirteen years they went from absolutely nothing to this empire that included a $129 million a year budget, the first satellite TV network—a year before ESPN—which reached 14 million homes, and an amusement park that was the third most-visited attraction in the country,” explains John Wigger, author of the recently published PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire.

Jim and Tammy Faye’s wholesome family life was regularly on display on The Jim and Tammy Show, and millions of Christians around the globe sent their ministry generous donations based on their moral exhibitionism. But behind the scenes Tammy Faye was chomping down Ativan, their son Jay was on his way to alcoholism at age 11, and Jim Bakker was running a ponzi scheme and allegedly having sex with men.

This was all kept secret until church secretary Jessica Hahn went public with claims that the pastor drugged and raped her in Florida hotel. He admitted having sex with her, but said it was consensual—yet the accusation set off a domino effect of public revelations about Bakker’s sexual proclivities and white collar crimes, leading to him being stripped of his company, publicly humiliated, and eventually sentenced to 45 years in prison (he served five) for a series of profoundly shady fundraising tactics used to bankroll his lifestyle and pay off Hahn.

Bakker has been attempting to kick his career back into motion ever since he got out of prison, and restarting PTL as some kind of online, round the clock infomercial for apocalypse survival supplies is a particularly depressing thing to watch for 24 hours.

“Today his ministry is much smaller,” says Wigger. “He’s trying to recreate the glory days. Many of the buildings on his new set outside of Branson, Missouri look just like the old ones. But he has no comparable way to raise money the way he did when he got in on the ground floor of satellite television.”

Despite the sunny day, I’ve drawn the curtains and am hours-deep into my ill-advised Bakker-binge, my skin already crawling from the cheap scare tactics, broadcast to susceptible geriatrics the world over. It’s never exactly clear what I’m watching. The broadcast drifts from sermons to a talk show to an announcement that they’ve, yet again, lowered the price on a bucket of 19 years worth of enchiladas (a clip I will see around once every ninety minutes during this marathon).

There are also “news” segments that are so poorly produced they make Infowars look like the BBC. They inform me that Jews are fleeing Europe for Israel (due to a Muslim invasion) and that there is an unprecedented rise in floods and hurricanes (which are due to Biblical prophecy, not climate change). They seem to mostly exist to stoke fear and sell products. The Jim Bakker Show co-hosts (his new wife, Lori, and two of his children) make valiant attempts to keep the energy high, but 78-year-old Bakker is so slow and chaotic in his storytelling, they just end up nodding vigorously with wide eyes that seem to plead "tell me this is going somewhere."

With a white beard and shiny bald head, Bakker is nearly unrecognizable from his glory days as the adorably twee preacher he was in the 70s and 80s, whose round dimpled cheeks and soft-brown eyes melted the hearts of little old ladies the world over.

Around five hours in to my marathon, the network plays “Classic PTL,” airing a vintage episode of The Jim and Tammy Show, featuring Bakker in a powder-blue leisure suit and Lego man hair, chatting with puppets operated by Tammy Faye. The thousands-strong audience stands in stark contrast to the only handful of retirement-age guests attending his show today. I could see how airing this would make viewers sentimental for a more wholesome era (#MAGA!) and possibly loosen up their wallets to place an order of food buckets, but to me the move felt reminiscent of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, a washed-up hack obsessively watching her old movies, unable to let go of the past, delusionally thinking she’s as relevant today as she ever was.

Watching this makes me feel both nostalgic and triggered, reminding me of days spent in my pastor’s rumpus room, watching PTL on satellite TV, wondering if I was righteous enough to be saved from the carnage about to befall the earth in Armageddon.

Throughout my childhood, I thought about the coming apocalypse and eternal torment in Hell around once every ten minutes. Today, as I enter hour ten of my Bakker-bender (which has just switched back to a modern day sermon about the Book of Revelation, which segues into a pitch for vitamin supplements), I am still familiar with terms he uses like “Mark of the Beast,” “The Tribulation,” and “Lake of Fire,” and can easily visualize the carnage he warns his audience is coming. As a kid, I was repeatedly told that one day we would have to live off the grid of society, hiding from the Antichrist army that was hunting down and exterminating all Christians.

Hours of this stuff as an adult is making me nauseous and paranoid. While I’ve long-since abandoned my Christian identity and fear of the rapture, it isn’t difficult to find evidence of a coming societal collapse in today’s headlines. That same electric buzz in my stomach, the anxiety of possible famine, violence, and worldwide plague, can be easily roused by all this bomb-shelter hyperbole. For comfort I hold my dog close and gobble a THC cookie.

Outside of The Jim Bakker Show, the newly revived PTL network streams a dozen or so low-budget shows that feature similar end-times rhetoric, peppered with classic conservative tidbits like “how to convert your Muslim neighbor” and “why the spirit of Jezebel thrives in PC culture.” Despite their conspiracy-theorist-in-a-basement production style, the hosts of these programs at least have plenty of focus and momentum, unlike Bakker, who pinballs incoherently between ISIS, the Baltimore riots, and free shipping on Spanish rice all in the same sentence. By midnight, I’m thinking of recommending this experiment to the CIA as a disorientation tactic for terrorist interrogations.

Still, I have to admit, there’s something therapeutic about seeing all this doomsday hot air—which used to torment me on an hourly basis as a child—now couched in such a limp and pathetic format.

Throughout the 24 hours Bakker is constantly lowering the prices on his products, offering free shipping and extra gifts. At points he claims his accountant doesn’t want him to drop prices, that they've been losing a lot of money lately, “but that’s OK, because we’re investing in people’s survival,” he explains. It's almost certainly a sales tactic, but it feels sad nonetheless.

He’s like the rusted-out robots in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, ancient relics of another time, still speaking and walking around yet barely functioning as they move through a world that has “moved on.” I begin to imagine what current evangelical superstars like Joel Osteen, Robert Jeffress, and Paula White will be like if they’re still on TV when they're Bakker's age. If they'll have been robbed of their intellect, respect of their peers and source of income—yet still wheeled in front of a camera to try and frighten America’s wallets open.

Around dawn, as Bakker talks about how kids today like to cut themselves and 9/11 was a warning from God, I begin to feel sorry for him. He’s like Ted Haggard, the Colorado megachurch pastor who once had the ear of President George W. Bush on a weekly basis, but lost everything because of a male prostitute and a bag of meth. Like Haggard, it wasn’t any end times rhetoric or prosperity gospel hucksterism that lost Bakker his ministry, it was that he had the audacity to succumb to his sexual urges that made Christians turn away from him.

Still, I’m grateful when my experiment is up and I can finally turn off the TV, my ears ringing after a full 24 hours of Judgement Day hysteria. Did I learn anything from this journey? Other than a slowing of the earth’s rotation is causing earthquakes and A.I. collective-conscious technology is attempting to replace God, I suppose I learned that things which seem confusing and irrational to you when you’re a child sometimes only appear more so as an adult—and when that happens, you should give yourself permission to declare them what they are: the tools of cheap conmen desperate to get their sweaty hands in your pocket.

Follow Josiah Hesse on Twitter.

Sometime in the 1980s, skateboarders began a creative collaboration with the multileveled environment of Philadelphia's John F. Kennedy Plaza, known for its iconic Robert Indiana sculpture as LOVE Park. Grinding, jumping, and sliding through its architecture for the decades since, street skateboarding evolved at the legendary spot until the city began renovations in February 2016. These were marked by the demolitions, in particular, of areas that were skated most, effectively destroying the aspects of the city center that drew skateboarders to it. It was the lead-up to the destruction of such a landmark that led photographer Jonathan Rentschler to his first photo book, LOVE, released last year with Paradigm Publishing.

The book conveys that "there was some really gritty shit there, and you missed seeing what was happening," said literature-loving pro skateboarder Mark Suciu, who wrote the book's foreword. From earlier eras defined by the crisp East Coast aesthetic of Ricky Oyola and the Sub Zero crew to later technical wizardry from the likes of Stevie Williams and Josh Kalis to a period in the 2000s where skateboarding was banned from the park entirely, the journey to LOVE’s demise was as meandering as it was tragic. Within the last five years, a new generation of skaters found their way back to the park, and it was during this resurgence that Rentschler made his documentary record—demolition included. We spoke to the photographer about what made capturing the essence and the end of LOVE Park so special.

VICE: In your photos, I see people from different races and different classes skating, filming, and hanging out together. What does the end of LOVE Park mean for Philly?
Jonathan Rentschler: It was really unique in that there’s a lot of shit going on in the United States and all over the world as far as race, but at LOVE nobody cared about that kind of stuff. We were all there together, and it was a real community and a brotherhood. I think that the city getting rid of that plaza and that type of atmosphere... They never realized how important that place was. It’s a real shame, especially for a lot of the kids that were there. They were real city kids. A lot of them come from broken homes, and skateboarding is an outlet for them to stay away from bad stuff, and the city didn’t realize the potential of that place.

What kinds of people came to LOVE Park?
I mean, it was such a variety. Of course the skateboarders were there everyday throughout the day. Homeless people were there all the time. Tourists were always coming through because of the sign. Police would come through. During the week, there were two police officers that were stationed there, so they were always there. School kids were always coming through. Also, because of its central location, there were a lot of business people coming by eating lunch there and walking through on their way home from work or whatever. It was such a mixture of people.

Since the skaters were a constant, were they always trying to figure out a way to skate through all the other people there?
I would say that the majority of the other groups that were coming through LOVE weren’t spending the time that the skateboarders were. As long as the police weren’t there, we would be there all day, all night, whenever. I feel like most of the other groups, like tourists, would come for a couple minutes, take their photos in front of the [LOVE] sign, and continue onto the parkway. Business people would eat their lunch there, and they would leave. The only other group who was there like we were were the homeless people, and that’s why we clicked with a lot of them and made friends. We would see them every day.

Were there a lot of fights?
Fights were a common occurrence at LOVE. They were mostly between the homeless, and I can only guess they were over drugs, territory, or just because they were intoxicated. Fights involving skaters were mostly over shit-talking or a board shooting out and hitting someone. One time, a super intoxicated wedding party of bros came to LOVE to take pictures in front of the LOVE sign. I’m not sure what set it off, but basically a riot broke out between all the skaters and the entire wedding party. It was a wild sight.

Can you tell me about the day-to-day of the drug dealers who frequented LOVE Park?
Most of the drug dealers there were selling the hard stuff and preying on the homeless. Sure there were some around selling just weed, but for the most part they were dangerous people. The police completely disregarded them since they were more interested in chasing skaters. In all the time I spent there, I never saw any of the dealers get busted. They sort of faded out a bit when K2 came on the scene. Since K2 was cheap and legal, it became a popular drug with the homeless. I never saw so many people lose their minds and overdose. It was an everyday thing.

When you started documenting LOVE Park, how did people respond?
I mean, I was there for so long, and I’m a little bit older than most of the people that were hanging out there, so people expected me to be there and have my camera on me. It was completely normal; they almost didn’t even realize I was taking photos half the time, unless something really wild was going on. But after a few years, people started to be curious as to what I was going to do with the images, like, “Oh, you’re going to make a blog or something like that?” or “What are you going to do?” They couldn’t see the bigger picture, that this stuff is really important. I think they think it is, too. To make a book, that’s the holy grail of being a photographer—to get something printed and bound in an old school and traditional way.

Over time, did you notice yourself growing as a photographer?
I only started really getting into photography in early 2013. By the end of the year, I was already shooting at LOVE pretty often. So the first year or so, you can tell the difference between the most recent stuff of LOVE, and then in the technical aspects of how to use film camera—how to expose properly, focus, and all that stuff. Then, I taught myself about photography and the legends of documentary photography. As I learned more and had a broader view of it, I think it changed my view and my ability to shoot photographs. There's definitely a progression through the book. I think you can see a progression in style, and having a more thorough voice.

Compositionally, were there choices you made to distinguish a skate photo from a documentary shot?
When I would take a skate photo, it wouldn't be like somebody hitting me up, being like "Yo, I want to shoot this photo of this trick." But for me it would be more or less, OK, this trick is happening right now, this person is doing this trick, and there's a lot of other stuff going on around it. I always thought it was interesting because LOVE was a big plaza with a lot of different things going on in small areas. With the photos in the book, I wanted to show what else was going on, besides the tricks.

Tell me about the influence of outsiders like Ishod Wair and Mark Suciu giving attention to Philly.
Well, Ishod's from New Jersey, but not far outside of Philadelphia, so as his career took off, he eventually did move to Philly, and then was just kind of skating LOVE because he was a local. Definitely in the progression of his career, and him coming into the spotlight, it helped put more of a shine back onto LOVE. Not that footage wasn't already being seen there, but it definitely helped push it to another level. Then, Mark coming to Philadelphia definitely helped with exposure. But at the end of the day, there was skating going on there all the time, and it really comes down to the locals—especially the Sabotage crew, Brian Panebianco, Ryan Higgins, and all those dudes making LOVE skateable and showing these other people, "Yeah we're still skating this place, and it's still possible. Let's remove these wooden benches that are in front of all the ledges. Let's move a fucking planter out of the way. Let's bondo ledges. Let's move a cracked tile out of the way and put it somewhere else where it's not going to be in the way of skating." So they worked together. It was almost like a collaborative push to get LOVE back on the map like that.

What can you say about Edmund Bacon and Vincent Kling, the planner and the architect, respectively, involved in creating LOVE Park?
It was initially Edmund Bacon’s idea to put a park at the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, adjacent to City Hall. It wasn’t until he became the city planner for Philadelphia that he was able to make this a reality. Vincent Kling was the architect who designed LOVE Park. Kling also designed Dilworth Plaza, a.k.a., "City Hall," and Thomas Paine Plaza, a.k.a., "Muni." These three plazas were, without a doubt, some of the best skate spots in the entire country for a long time, and they were all within a one block distance of each other, making Philadelphia one of the best places in the world for skateboarding. A trifecta.

Over the years, as these plazas became world famous for skating, Bacon and Kling, in their old age, became pro-skating. They were able to understand how important their work was to youth culture, and how skating made it transcend beyond anything they could have ever imagined when originally designing it—something city council could never understand. The city council’s action to outlaw skating and renovate LOVE pushed Bacon to protest by skating through LOVE in the presence of police. He was in his 90s when he did this, so it is clear he was passionate about the cause. With LOVE and Dilworth now renovated and gone, Muni is the only original Kling plaza left, but I’m sure it’s next on the list for the city to bulldoze.

Your photos of the park's demolition still feature a bunch of skaters sitting together in the cold. After everything went down, what do you think made people still gravitate toward LOVE Park?
LOVE was such an important part of our lives that when they did start closing sections of the park, and then eventually closing the entire park, nobody wanted to let go of it. Nobody wanted to leave. In the end, people found ways to skate it until it was completely finished—until it was literally dirt. That's why the Sabotage video is called Till It's Dirt: because we literally skated it until there was nothing left. I think that shows the dedication of the skateboarding community to this place, and how important it was to us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jonathan Rentschler lives in Philadelphia and posts to his Instagram account @eurojon.

This article first appeared at VICE Indonesia

Take a walk through the pre-fab flats of IKEA and you're bound to fine more than a few young couples in love. The Swedish furniture store has been one of the city's most popular spots for a date since it opened its doors in the suburbs of Jakarta four years ago.

That's right, IKEA, the site of countless breakups in the United States, is a place for young Indonesian couples to go and feel closer together. That's got a lot to do with what the store represents. IKEA is like a perfect daydream for young couples, a place where they can pretend to build a future together that's filled with Ektorp sofas and little ones playing in Småland. It's basically a place to dream about being married, and we all know how much Indonesians love the idea of getting married, right?

I wandered through the IKEA in Alam Sutra and stared at all the minimalist apartment layouts, which are, honestly, unlike anything you would ever find in an Indonesian home, and eventually came across a woman who worked there named "Bela." Why are so many young couples choosing IKEA for date night?

"Maybe our showroom offers them a different vibe than malls or cafes," Bela told me. "It's not only couples. A lot of families spend time here too."

She had no idea how many people in the store were on a date vs. actually there to shop, but, judging by the amount of couples I saw just hanging out during my three hours in the store, I would have to guess the answer is A LOT.

I decided to stop a few and figure out what brought them to IKEA on a date. Some said they were there for the food, others to buy stuff as simple as a coat hanger. Whatever their reason, these lovers better enjoy IKEA dates before the company decides to ban them altogether.

SELSI AND PANDU

Photo by Ardila Ramadan

VICE: So, IKEA huh? How often do you two come here on a date?
Selsi: About 3-4 times a month. Usually we come here when we don’t have a class.

What do you like about IKEA?
The displays. Everything is neat. It’s just nice. But I only shop when I need to. I usually buy knick-knacks or cute stuff like dolls or flower pots.

DIDIT AND RAISA

Photo by Regan Reuben

VICE: Is this like your regular date spot?
Raisa: We don't come here all that often. But back when we were still living in Australia, we went to IKEA a lot. Like, maybe five times a year.

But why IKEA?
Back in Australia, we would get these food vouchers, so why not? But here, I think we only came here because we get bored of the malls.

Do these dates make you think about the future a lot?
Yeah, a bit. Like, ‘Oh this will look nice for my future home.’

Do you ever get in a fight here?
Nope. Why would we?

BIAN AND NATASHA

Photo by Ardila Ramadan

VICE: So would you ever make IKEA your regular Saturday night date?
Bian: I mean, if there was no other place to go, sure why not. But I think I would get bored if I came here too often.

How much time do you usually spend here?
Around three or four hours. We don’t really come here that often.

There's this belief that couples who go to IKEA end up breaking up. Do you think this is true?
Couples mostly break up because of infidelity. As long as it’s just hanging out at IKEA, and you haven't just gotten into a fights or argument right before, then it's fine.

FARAH AND NATA

Photo by Regan Reuben

VICE: What do you usually do at IKEA?
Fara: First we eat at the cafe, and then we walk around.

What do you like about coming here? Does it make you want to get your own place?
It’s not boring here. There’s a lot to see. But no, we don’t think about getting our own place. We just like to check out the furniture.

Are you just browsing or do you buy stuff too?
We don’t really shop all that often. We would probably buy some knick-knacks. It's just window shopping, mostly.

ADIT AND CINDY

Not Adit and Cindy, they didn't want us to take their photo. Photo by Regan Reuben

VICE: What brings you here?
Adit: Usually we go to Ikea for lunch. And that counts as a date. But we rarely shop when we’re on a date. So we just look around and envision what our future will be like when we have our own place… about all the kinds of furniture we will fill our future home with.

Do you ever get in a fight when you're here?
Ugh, of course not. That’s pathetic, who would fight at IKEA when there are all people these looking at you.

Does being here make you want to get married?
Not really. We just want to get our own place ASAP.

Welcome back to Can't Handle the Truth, our Saturday column looking at the past seven days of fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.

I woke up Saturday morning to a horrifying voicemail from my mom, who is currently in Hawaii. The beginning of what she's saying got cut off, so it starts like this: "...there's a ballistic missile headed to Hawaii. So everybody's kind of alarmed and waiting to see if it's true or not." I tried to call her back, but couldn't get through (My dad thinks the cell towers in Hawaii were jammed up with people trying to call their loved ones.) For the next minute or so I googled around, trying to see what was going on, and all I found were a bunch of screengrabs of the emergency alert that had gone to everyone's phone in Hawaii. It said a missile was on its way, and ended with "THIS IS NOT A DRILL."

By the time I called back, my folks were feeling better. They'd gotten confirmation that it was a false alarm, but not before taking shelter at the bottom floor of their hotel, and checking how long it would take an ICBM to get from North Korea to Hawaii (answer: less than 20 minutes).

As of this writing, all we know is that the false alarm was caused by human error. Needless to say, it's kinda fucked up that someone's mistake—reportedly the pressing of a wrong button—sent the entire country into an all-out panic, which Hawaiian Senator Brian Schatz called "inexcusable." Then again, look at Japan's earthquake alarms. Those are pretty well-regarded as a way to save thousands of lives, so we don't tend to dwell on that time in 2016 when a fake magnitude 9 earthquake made everyone in Japan shit their pants. Better to be occasionally freaked out beyond belief than sorry I suppose?

On the other hand, as David Foster Wallace once asked in a 2007 essay about US anti-terrorism measures, "Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?" Eleven years later, and we have our answer. It looks like this is that future, and it kinda sucks.

Anyway, here are some other things that weren't true this week:

A black Starbucks barista was putting shit and blood in people's drinks

For some reason, Starbucks is one of the arenas where unhinged conservatives insist on waging the dumbest battles of their culture war. They (supposedly) make baristas write "Trump MAGA" on their cups, thus forcing them to say "Trump MAGA" out loud (which I guess is a victory for the president for some reason?). They also invent stories about Starbucks hating The Troops, Christmas, and white people. If I had to guess, it's because their notion of this $84.6 billion corporation, with stores in almost every wealthy urban center in the world, got frozen in carbonite 20 years ago after they heard Dennis Miller ranting about coffee shops and nose piercings.

This week, it was the viral, but apparently fake story of Shanell Rivers, a black barista who was supposed to be defiling white people's drinks in disgusting ways. Supposedly, Rivers is a Tyler Durden-esque anarchist who devotes an enormous amount of energy and physical pain to her own private Project Mayhem. According to the myth, not only did Rivers intentionally expose white customers to germs as often as possible, she also painstakingly collected, dried, and pulverized dog shit in order to sprinkle it into a child's hot chocolate, pricked her own thumb to bleed onto someone's bagel, and did it all while scamming customers at the regiter. Then she (again, supposedly) bragged about it all in a private Facebook group. At one Atlanta-area Starbucks, people who had heard the rumor started phoning in so many threats—real threats—that the place had to be temporarily shut down.

Is any of it true? Doesn't look like it. Starbucks denies that any "Shanell Rivers" works anywhere in their corporation. Snopes, meanwhile, sourced Rivers's Facebook avatar to an unrelated Instagram profile and traced the initial viral post back to 4chan. So take this, and any other wild rumor about Starbucks you see on the conservative internet, with a grain of salt, and about three pumps of vanilla.

Katy Perry, Meryl Streep, and Chelsea Clinton are cannibals

Yeah, someone actually wrote this for the fake news site Your News Wire, and judging from the comments, some people believe it. I love this story. It reminds me of the stuff they used to publish in Weekly World News . Keep it up, Your News Wire.

An astronaut had a three-inch growth spurt in space

Astronaut Norishige Kanai must have thought the International Space Station had been bombarded by the sort of cosmic radiation that turned Reed Richards into Mister Fantastic, because shortly after his colleague measured him after three weeks in space, he tweeted that he'd grown "like a plant" in microgravity. He'd apparently shot up nine centimeters, which translates to about three and a half inches. That's enough to turn a puny Seth Green (5'4) into a towering Clare Grant (5' 7, and Green's wife).

Shortly afterward, Kanai's colleague pointed out that growing nive centimeters in three weeks didn't pass a smell test (It kinda seems like it would mess your skeleton to grow that fast, doesn't it?). It turned out, Kanai's body had only stretched an additional two centimeters, and he tweeted a retraction.

The retraction fascinated me most of all, because in it, Kanai called his prior tweet "fake news," but he wrote it in Japanese, which—if you're interested—is written in katakana script like so: "フェイクニュース," and pronounced "feikunyuusu." Yep, one more dumb American term has officially penetrated Japanese culture.

11 ISIS members were arrested in Dearborn, Michigan

It seems like every one of these columns has a story that can be traced back to the network of fake news sites published by "Busta Troll," also known as Christopher Blair, a guy who has seemingly deluded himself into thinking he is writing "satire," but is actually manufacturing far-right propaganda. This week's entry from Reaganwasright.com carries the byline "Flagg Eagleton," which, as Blair has acknowledged, is either his pen name or the pen name of someone whose crappy writing he publishes.

According to "Eagleton," a town outside Dearborn, Michigan, was raided this week, resulting in the arrests of 11 ISIS members, and the confiscation of dozens of suicide vests. In other words, it's still more horseshit about Dearborn—which has a large Muslim population and is arguably the center of Arab-American culture in the US—being a hotbed of terrorism. Do some scary people live in Dearborn? It's a city of 100,000 people, so yes, there is crime. Are they terrorists? Actually, no, though Dearborn can't claim to be completely free of terror-affiliated radicals. But according to the mosque-sleuthing organization known as Clarion Project (itself an anti-Muslim hate group), neither can Boston and New York City.

The point is, Dearborn is a normal, boring American city, but many people apparently can't stop freaking out about the place because a lot of it's citizens are Muslim. Publishing a fake story about Dearborn having ISIS members in it just to trick conservatives into sharing it on Facebook doesn't somehow own them for their gullibility. It just perpetuates a rumor that needs to die.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This article is part of a weeklong series looking back at the first year of Donald Trump's presidency.

To judge Donald Trump’s presidency, we should ask what he’s done that a generic Republican president wouldn’t have. A Marco Rubio, a Jeb Bush, or a Ted Cruz would have almost certainly pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, supported a massive expansion of the defense budget, undermined the Iran nuclear deal, and signed into law a massive corporate tax cut. All of them would have tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. However, it’s unlikely that any other Republican president would have installed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, a decision that will reshape policy and politics over the next decade.

It’s hard to overstate just how radical Sessions’s appointment was. As a senator from Alabama he was firmly on the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party, not just an opponent of illegal immigration but a supporter of reductions to legal immigration, which has been at least mildly taboo in the pre-Trump GOP. Every president leaves their footprint on the party they lead, and Trump’s vision for the Republican Party is to make it more openly white supremacist and authoritarian. While his so-called “populist” initiatives like infrastructure have mostly been left by the wayside, he has been able to use the executive branch to re-shape immigration and criminal justice policy in a way that will set racial justice back decades. And Sessions is the man who is implementing all that.

In just a year, Sessions has worked to relieve police departments of the burden of having to reform, allowing them to commit even more brutality against people of colour. He has worked to re-invigorate the war on drugs and take actions against states legalizing weed. He ended a commission charged with improving forensic science standards and halted a review of closed cases even as these efforts were discovering that faulty forensic evidence was responsible for many wrongful convictions. Sessions has doubled down on civil asset forfeiture, a tyrannical practice used by police departments to systematically strip people of colour of their wealth. He has used his power at the DOJ to attack sanctuary cities and DACA. The cruelty of the DOJ under Sessions knows no bounds: In one case it is attempting to reveal a minor's abortion to a family member who threatened to beat her if she obtained an abortion.

Another core policy goal for Sessions is to weaken the voting power of people of color. During his tenure, he has shifted the DOJ’s position on voter ID laws and voter purges, signaling a renewed commitment in the GOP to maintain electoral power by undermining democracy.

Finally, Sessions has taken a hammer to the First Amendment, targeting anti-racist organizing as “black identity extremists” while letting white nationalists off the hook. He made the comments criticizing “political correctness” on campus in a campus venue from which students were barred from attending while condemning” NFL players protesting racial inequality. The Sessions DOJ spent nearly a year trying to imprison a woman for a brief chuckle during his confirmation hearing.

It bears repeating that these sorts of policies represent a shift in how Republican officials conduct themselves. Though Republicans have always dog-whistled on race and pursued policies that brutalized people of colour, they also attempted to court voters of colour, at least at times. George W. Bush discussed microaggressions at the 2000 Republican National Convention and tried to push forward on immigration reform. In the past, the party’s rising stars (like Rubio) saw immigration reform as the future, but now senators like Tom Cotton openly discuss their desire to limit legal immigration and present legislation—endorsed by Trump—to do so. Sessions once praised the Immigration Act of 1924, a law that also won kudos from Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.

The changes are visible in other areas as well. Openly white supremacist congressman Steve King had been denied a chairmanship by Republican leadership since 2011. But in 2017 he was named chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. In 2002, Senator Trent Lott was forced to step down as majority leader after talking favourably about Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 presidential campaign. Yet in 2018, the Republican House majority whip is a man who once reportedly said he was “David Duke without the baggage” and spoke at a white supremacist gathering (it is plausible he will be speaker of the House by the end of the year).

Lifelong party hack and generic Republican Ed Gillespie ran a blood-and-soil white supremacist campaign in light-blue Virginia (which failed) and Kim Guadagno ran ads in deep-blue New Jersey that make Willie Horton look tame (that failed too). In Florida, Trump ally Ron Desantis is increasingly consolidating support for a bid for governor—in a state one of the largest immigrant populations in the country. In Arizona, Martha McSally launched her bid by defending Trump’s “shithole” comments. And if campus Republican groups are any indication, the next generation of Republican talent will include a disturbing number of neo-Nazis.

The social changes unleashed by Trump have been immense. His name is now a slur hurled at young people of colour. Immigrant communities are increasingly terrified and are not reporting crimes to the police. Newly unleashed immigration enforcement authorities are acting in an increasingly authoritarian manner, with the acting ICE director telling Fox News he wanted to imprison politicians he disagrees with. White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are re-invigorated and openly organizing, and killed nine Americans in 2017.

The good news is that the Republican Party’s embrace of white nationalism will come at an electoral cost. Young voters are more liberal on issues of racial justice, and independents are moving in that direction as well. But another impact is that heightening the racism in the GOP will send a stronger signal to people of colour that the party doesn’t welcome them. If people of colour begin to see their interests as tied up with their identity, they will become more liberal. Among Latinos with a high sense of “linked fate” (believing that things that happen to other Latinos affect them personally “a lot” or “some”), 14 percent supported Trump in an analysis I did of the two-party vote share. Among Latinos with a low sense of linked fate (believing that things that happen to other Latinos affect them “not very much” or “not at all”), 38 percent supported Trump.

The effect of linked fate overwhelms class politics, which is important when it comes to Latinos. According to ANES data, among Latino voters who make less than $60,000 a year, 15 percent supported Trump, but among Latinos making $60,000 or more a year, 32 percent supported Trump. However, the chart below (also using ANES data) shows that high-identity Latinos don’t become more conservative at higher incomes, whereas among low-identity Latinos, high income is associated with more support for Trump. Political science research suggests that more strict immigration laws increases a sense of linked fate among Latinos. And data from political scientist Brian Schaffner shows that levels of linked fate among Latinos increased dramatically after Trump’s election.

So even as Trump turns the Republican Party into a more explicit and crude vehicle for white identity politics—with Sessions as his right-hand man—the country may turn away from these politics. That, at least, is the hope.

Sean McElwee is a researcher and writer based in New York. Follow him on Twitter.

Everyone's favorite dystopian tech-anxiety anthology series Black Mirror has returned with six new episodes. VICE is exploring some of the ideas raised in these episodes with the help of key figures in the show, as well the wider world of science and technology. Read the first one, about the "USS Callister" episode, here; and the second, about the 'Arkangel' episode, here.

It’s a feeling anyone who spends even a moderate amount of time online knows well. You are lost in a sea of tabs, links, posts and photos. You are drifting or even hurtling away from the real world and into the realm of the artificial, and sometimes you might feel as if you can’t get out of it, just click, click, click. When you get too deep, you start to feel like you have become someone else, that there is the you sitting in front of your computer, or with your phone in your hand, and another you, swimming ever deeper into the ocean of the internet.

But what if you really couldn’t get out of it? We all have a different persona online, but what if there was the you who existed in the real world, and a whole other you that existed in some virtual space, a different being that shared your DNA and your memories, but was nevertheless not you?

Over the course of four seasons, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror has returned to one fear more than any other: that digital copies of ourselves could be left for eternity in various states of happiness or distress. As a metaphor for the way we are now, or for the future of the world, it is often very powerful. Characters have been trapped in simulations, their digital existence normally a form of torture, but one that brings a "real" person some sense of comfort: a digital prison ("White Christmas"), a boyfriend brought back to life ("Be Right Back"), revenge on a co-worker ("USS Callister"), a dating simulator ("Hang the DJ") or a distraction from illness ("San Junipero").

The protagonist of "USS Callister" – the first episode of the new series – is Robert Daly, the chief technology officer of a tech-entertainment company. He’s the nerd whose brain powers the whole enterprise, but his slick business partner rips him off and the people who work for him think he’s weird.

Isolated and unhappy, he enacts his revenge by using his colleagues' DNA to create digital clones of them. The clones are forced to live out a purgatorial existence trapped in a virtual reality game that he controls. They are conscious and they have all their own memories from their life before, but they are unable to escape the game. They are being tortured.

"He couldn’t do it from your DNA. That was a bit of a cheat," says Robin Hanson, a research associate of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and the author of The Age of Em. "They show you in the episode that these characters have all their memories up until the time soon before the guy took the DNA. But memories aren’t stored in the DNA. That’s what the brain is for."

For anything commensurate to what happens in "USS Callister", you would need to conduct a brain scan as well as having the DNA of the person you wanted to create a digital clone of.

"The brain scan would have the state of the brain – your personality, your memory, your skills," Hanson told me. "This is a long way off – I’d say about a century – but it’s foreseeable, clearly. The first brain scan would be a very expensive, difficult thing to pull off, though. It’s not going to be something a rogue employee does on his off hours."

"A lot of things are, in principle, possible in the long run," says Professor Johan Storm, of the University of Oslo. We have already cloned animals. The question of cloning humans is not a technical one, but an ethical one. "It is not regarded at the moment as being ethically sound," Storm says, "but that could change in the future. Heart transplants were regarded as ethically dubious many years ago, when people thought the heart was important to the personality, so all these things may change over time."

Professor Storm also works with the Human Brain Project, a flagship European research project that was founded, he says, "both to understand the human brain but also to use principles from brain research to design better technology".

The question of consciousness is at the heart of what he does just as it is at the heart of much science fiction. From the replicants of Blade Runner to the digital clones of Black Mirror, we watch characters who seem to be able to think and feel and comprehend, even though they are not human. The torture experienced by simulated characters in science fiction troubles us particularly when those characters seem conscious.

"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe," Rutger Hauer’s replicant says in his famous dying speech in Blade Runner, and part of what makes the speech so moving is the mixture of what is artificial and what seems to be human, the consciousness of what a life has consisted of and what it has meant, even to a non-human being.

But our understanding of consciousness remains exploratory, and we still do not understand how it arises, even if we feel as though we might be able to recognise it in someone or something else. We can look at an animal – if not a robot – and feel that, surely, it has some level of conscious thought, but we don’t know it for sure.

Once the domain of philosophers, consciousness is now – like many philosophical topics before it – being seriously investigated by scientists. Neuroscientists like Johan Storm take measurements from brains and brain tissue and condense that knowledge into mathematical models that can be run on computers and which can then simulate brain activity at different levels.

Professor Storm points to two particularly influential scientific theories of consciousness: the global workspace theory (GWT) and the integrated information theory (IIT). GWT says, in Storm’s words, that consciousness seems to happen "when you involve a large part of the cerebral cortex, so that there is a sort of recognition process that engages a very large part of the brain, that acts in an integrated manner".

Integrated information theory basically says that if you plop enough data into something, it becomes conscious.

But, Professor Storm says, "Most computers are not built according to principles that would give rise to a high level of consciousness… The size of computers is very different to the size of our brain, and they don’t have that degree of feedback and information that the human brain will have. According to that theory, you would have to specially build computers that have the requirements for high levels of consciousness."

Credit: Netflix

"Maybe consciousness will emerge when our machines get sufficiently complex," Toby Walsh, one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence and the author of Android Dreams, a compelling history of the subject, told me.

Equally, he added, "We may end up finding that machines never have consciousness, that it’s peculiar to biology and that the intelligence we build is what David Chalmers would call a 'zombie intelligence': it’s highly intelligent, but there’s no one there. It can play perfect games of Go, but it doesn’t have that awareness that we feel we have."

At the end of his book, Walsh makes ten predictions for the future of AI. The final prediction is that we will live on after we die in a digital sense, something that has been explored in more than one episode of Black Mirror. "We will be increasingly handing over responsibility to digital assistants, who will sound like us because they will be trained on our human voice, and they will learn all our preferences and they will speak like us, so they will in some sense become indistinguishable from us," he told me.

The Terasem Movement, a research foundation that aims to "transfer human consciousness to computers and robots", is working toward just such a future.

As its director, Bruce Duncan, explained to me, Terasem has thousands of mind files uploaded by individuals who wanted to log their memories, attitudes, values and so on. "Given enough salient information about a human being," Duncan said, "it might someday be possible to make a good enough copy of them, like making a digital recording of a live music performance. We’d be the first to say that it would probably never be anything like the original, but it might have value."

Martine Rothblatt, the founder of Terasem, has had a replica of her wife made. Called Bina48, it is one of the world’s most advanced robots and has even had a conversation with the New York Times. Rothblatt has spoken about her foundation’s technology as being able to capture "people’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, and keep them alive forever in a cyber form, looking forward to the future when their minds might be downloaded back into a regenerated human body".

Bruce Duncan talked to me about how what companies like Terasem were doing could lead to a re-defining of death, that we might come to see death as having many stages and that the final stage would not be biological death, but when all digital traces of you were gone.

However well-intentioned this is, it still seems uncomfortable, the people we love lingering in ever more real forms long after they die. "I remember turning off a relative’s answering phone, thinking it was the last thing we had of them," Toby Walsh told me. "It’s going to be much more difficult when we have these digital selves."

Many of the world’s biggest companies are now tech companies, which means that money, power and political influence are likely to shape the future of artificial intelligence. "I think the default outcome is a worse outcome for most people: concentration of power and wealth into the hands of the few," says Toby Walsh, who is active in trying to use AI – something he refers to as a "morally neutral" technology – for good.

Scientists like Johan Storm and Toby Walsh stress the importance of regulation and democratic control over AI. The nightmarish scenarios we see in Black Mirror still come back to something that has been around forever: the misuse and abuse of power. Even by logging into Facebook we are signing over a part of us, creating an online self that belongs not to us but to a multi-national conglomerate. Even if we are a century away from fully convincing digital clones, the question of our online selves is a clear and pressing one.

"All this new technology," David Berman writes in his poem "Self Portrait at 28", "will eventually give us new feelings / that will never completely displace the old ones / leaving everyone feeling quite nervous / and split in two."

@OscarRickettNow

This Saturday marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration and the beginning of the strangest presidency in living memory. Trump campaigned as a rule-breaker, a right-wing populist who would rebuild America while at the same time kicking out undocumented immigrants and making it harder for foreigners and refugees to legally enter the country. He came into office—after an electoral win that shocked everyone—as the head of a Republican Party that controlled both chambers of Congress and with the opportunity to fill a Supreme Court vacancy (kept open by obstructionist Republican senators after Antonin Scalia's sudden death in February 2016). As Trump and his cabinet of billionaires and generals prepared to take charge of the country, wide-ranging, transformative change was anticipated.

A year later, the same people who feared and hated the prospect of a President Trump are still worried and angry. They point to Trump's mercurial, spur-of-the-moment public statements made over Twitter, his apparent lack of interest in policy, accusations that he sexually harassed women, his reluctance to denounce white supremacists who praise him, his history of racist comments, and allegations he collaborated with Russian intelligence to smear Hillary Clinton and then fired FBI Director James Comey to block an investigation into his campaign. At the same time, many conservatives, though they may dislike Trump personality, have come at least partly around to the way he's operating—after all, he's pursuing an agenda that largely lines up with their priorities, from cutting taxes to striking down as many regulations as possible.

But any assessment of Trump's presidency runs into a problem: There is so much going on all the time. Trump's penchant for stirring up outrage—and the media's eagerness to stoke that outrage—has led to a dynamic where it's difficult to see the forest for the trees. The first week of his administration came with a bizarre controversy over the size of Trump's inauguration crowd, and each week seems to bring a fresh source of conflict between the White House, the media, and Congress. The question is, which of these conflicts truly matter?

In the next week sites across the VICE network will be publishing a series of stories looking back at the last year to take stock and see which controversial moves were the most important. The aim is to cut through the noise and single out several of Trump's most significant, lasting actions.

This package isn't meant to be comprehensive, and the future may prove it wrong on certain fronts. Assessing a presidency after its first year is always an act of guesswork—who knows how we'll look back on Trump in ten, 20, or 100 years? What will his most important legacy wind up being?

Hopefully, these stories will highlight some aspects of Trump's presidency that have been buried in the stream of controversy that was 2017. To that end, we'll steer clear of the much-covered tax bill recently signed into law, for instance. And we'll try to identify things Trump is responsible for rather than long-standing trends that he has fallen in line with, like the wars he inherited or the 240,000 troops stationed across the planet.

Instead, we'll look at things like his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. We'll explore the Justice Department's new look under Jeff Sessions and Trump's response—or lack thereof—to the opioid criss, as well as his full-scale assault on regulations. We'll talk about his handling of North Korea, his toxic rhetoric about immigration, and how he's inspired people to look at the racist attitudes of their friends and relatives. We'll also single out the best piece of legislation he's signed—and yes, we will mention his tweets.

When Trump took office, he had no track record in government to point to, nothing that could help us predict where he would take the country. In the past year we've been finding out what Trumpism means week by week and sometimes hour by hour. Consider these stories a rough sketch of what Trump has already done to America, and what he might still do to it before he's finished.

Take a look at the stories we've published so far here.