As disturbing as that might be, it still means TSA catches 20 percent of the people trying to bring hidden swords or whatever onto planes—so it's probably not a good idea to try to sneak fake bomb supplies in your luggage to prove the TSA's incompetence—something a TV film crew at Newark Airport apparently tried and failed to do Thursday.
According to the New Jersey Star-Ledger, TSA agents arrested at least seven people trying to smuggle a fake bomb through airport security, reportedly as part of a story for CNBC. The fake explosive was hidden inside a suitcase and apparently looked like a pipe bomb, with fake wires sticking out of it, a source told the Star-Ledger.
The film crew "attempted to intentionally carry through the security checkpoint an item in a carry-on bag that had all of the makings of an improvised explosive device," TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein wrote in a press release following the arrest. "At the same time, others in the group covertly filmed the encounter."
Though a bomb specialist determined that the device was not actually dangerous, the entire group was taken into custody and may now face charges related to conspiracy and creating a false alarm, along with fines up to $13,000 per security violation.
The crew was allegedly part of production company Endemol Shine, which has previously produced shows like Big Brother, MasterChef, and Morgan Spurlock's documentary series 30 Days. In a statement to the Star-Ledger, Endemol Shine wrote that the company is currently "looking into the details of what happened" and it "sincerely apologize[s] for any disruption caused."
Let this be another lesson to everyone out there to leave the fake bombs and phony hand grenades at home before boarding a flight—though if you want to bring a massive lobster with you in your carry-on, that's still totally cool.
“For me writing is like breathing,” the poet Pablo Neruda told the Paris Review in 1971. “I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.” For me, writing is less like breathing and more like flatulence. It comes in bursts and adheres to no schedule, and if I try to force it, bad things come about.
Neruda’s quote has always made me envious to the point of agita. I am cursed with a far different disposition. If my respiratory system worked with the zeal and commitment to which I approach writing, I would have suffocated long ago.
Thankfully, I am not alone. For every Pablo Neruda, there are dozens of farters like me. This is purely anecdotal, but all the writers I know express similar frustrations. Writing is not an autonomic function of the subconscious brain. When the time comes to put words on the page, it is work.
If you go to any Q&A with an author, someone is bound to ask, “What’s your work routine like?” The question is desperate and hopeful—I should know, because I’ve asked it before. Imagine that you’ve spent years trying to build a cabinet with no success. One day, you go see a woman who has built a great cabinet give a speech. Of course you’re going to ask her how she managed to build that damn cabinet afterward.
Writers are obsessed with routines. With the exception of religion and perhaps grooming, no pursuit is as closely joined to the idea of the Holy Routine as much as writing is. It’s why writers’ routines have become an entire genre of web content. Frustrated scribes can easily find hundreds of lists online detailing the various schedules of their successful and productive counterparts, all laid out neatly like an instruction manual. The subtext of these compilations is always the same: You need a routine, so why not try one of these?
Recently, I found a work routine that looked similar to my own. It wasn’t in any of those aforementioned lists. No, it was published by the politics website Axios, in the form of a scoop about Donald Trump’s “shrinking schedule.” The president, according to the report, “has ‘Executive Time’ in the Oval Office every day from 8 AM to 11 AM, but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.”
I too indulge in “Executive Time.” Upon waking, I putz around the internet, gab with friends on GChat, and put off writing until the last possible moment. It’s not much of a routine, and, in this regard, I am no better than the large, angry septuagenarian in the White House. Given that this realization coincided with the new year, it resonated. Severely.
I have attempted to fix my routine before, but nothing has ever stuck. To remedy this, I had to try something different. For one week, I would spend each day following a different writer’s routine. Now, I know that in changing it up every day I would no longer be participating in a routine, per se, but my rationalization was that this would be akin to a workout schedule, where you do different exercises each day—getting a little stronger, faster, and more flexible with each session. Even if none of these became my permanent routine, I’d still have a solid week’s worth of writing to show for it.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Day 1: Haruki Murakami
According to those aforementioned lists of writers’ routines, the vast majority of successful writers wake up early and work first thing in the morning. This only makes me more self-conscious about my slow starts in the morning—my shameful Executive Time.
By starting this experiment with the routine of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, I intended to attack the issue head-on. Here’s how he has described his schedule to the Paris Review:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 AM and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 PM.
I wanted to carpe diem and all that, but 4 AM is early. I’m even daunted by 7 Am wake-ps, for which I have to set staggered alarms—one at 6:30, one at 6:45, etc. My wife (understandably) despises the escalating movements of my iPhone’s morning orchestra, and she would certainly murder me (again, understandably) if I set a series of alarms that started at 3:30 in the morning. I had to make by with just one attempt.
When I awoke, the sun was shining. I don’t remember silencing my phone at 4 AM, but my nocturnal self must have quickly nipped that minor interruption in the bud. It was ten ’til 8, meaning I was already four hours behind Mr. Murakami’s schedule. At this rate I’d never write my Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
I tried to write, but given I was more or less on my normal routine, I kept falling into the same traps of scrolling through Twitter and watching basketball highlights on YouTube. With little to show for the five hours I had spent posted at my laptop, I went for a ten-kilometer run.
I, on the other hand, know exactly what I think about when I’m running: I think about how great it’d be if I stopped running. Still, I forced myself to complete the ten kilometers, which felt pretty good. Sadly, this elevated mood was only temporary. When I returned home, I reviewed the fruits of my work from earlier in the morning. It wasn’t much.
WORDS WRITTEN: 286
BASKETBALL HIGHLIGHT VIDEOS WATCHED: 8
Day 2: Franz Kafka
If I’m allergic to mornings, would I benefit from taking the opposite tack? Franz Kafka was an exception to the rule that writers work early in the day, but this wasn’t by choice. Because he had a full-time job at an insurance company, Kafka couldn’t start writing until around 11 PM. He would then work "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning."
I managed to get a full night’s sleep after my failed Murakami routine and, knowing I wouldn’t be writing again until late the next evening, didn’t set an alarm. I was able to enjoy my “Executive Time” guilt-free, and, in trying to keep up with insurance adjuster Franz Kafka, I made sure that my day was dull and uneventful. It was a joy.
When 11 PM rolled around, however, I was already spent. The psychic toll of just being awake had worn me down, and staring at the white expanse of an empty screen lulled me into a yawning stupor. Unable to write more than a handful of sentences (many of which didn’t even have verbs), I gave up and went to bed a little after midnight. Were I to awake the next morning transformed into a gigantic insect, it would be a fate richly deserved.
WORDS WRITTEN: 95
The author and poet Maya Angelou poses for a portrait in Washington, DC, on December 15, 1992. Photo by Dudley M. Brooks/the Washington Post via Getty Images
Day 3: Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou kept a strict schedule, but what I found most intriguing was how she created an environment conducive to the work of writing:
I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there… I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I don’t want anything in there. I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended.
It doesn’t make sense to be constantly paying for hotel rooms on a freelance writer’s salary. Of the motels near me, only one offered a daily rate below $90. Before calling to inquire, I consulted its Yelp page. “Meth, Mayhem, and Murder,” the lone review read. “They have a manager who will turn a blind eye to anything and everything... even a woman being stabbed to death!”
While this motel would surely provide me with lots of exciting material, I instead opted to recreate Maya Angelou’s hotel experience in my own home. It wasn’t hard finding a room that closely recreates the one she describes; a place where nothing is on the walls and my beliefs can be suspended. That sounds a lot like a bathroom to me.
I was able to write for a solid three hours while sitting on the toilet. The location was convenient for obvious reasons, and I would have happily kept plucking along had my legs not fallen asleep. My dog is prone to bouts of paranoia and suspicion whenever I spend considerable time in the bathroom, and her whining proved to be a distraction. However, this was easily rectified by leaving the door open a crack.
Finally, some success.
WORDS WRITTEN: 1,015
Day 4: Honoré de Balzac
Balzac was a grade-A weirdo. He would go to bed around 6 PM, “like the chickens,” and awake at 1 in the morning to start writing. Given my trouble adhering to Franz Kafka’s schedule, I wouldn’t be following Balzac’s to a T. Instead, I was more interested by his caffeine habit. According to legend, Balzac drank some 50 cups of coffee a day.
It makes sense then that Balzac is known for the quantity of his work rather than its quality. But, as Stalin would say, quantity has a quality all its own. After three days of middling output, I was eager to get juiced to the gills and vomit out a shitload of words, even if it meant I might die of caffeine poisoning (as Balzac was rumoured to have perished).
I woke up and immediately chugged two shots of Nespresso. I then downed the contents of a French press and headed to a cafe that provides free mug refills. I was able to dive right into my work, thanks to the ethically traded and locally roasted crank coursing through my system.
Coffee’s other effects soon took hold, however, and my leg’s involuntary and violent shaking earned the attention of my neighbors at the cafe (as well as some nearby seismologists, I’m sure). This, combined with my frequent trips to the restroom, made me a disruptive presence.
Paranoid that someone would steal my laptop, I toted it with me for every visit to the bathroom. My clunker of a computer takes a long time to reboot, even if it’s just in sleep mode, and the repeated excursions to the toilet slowed both it and me down. I wanted to scream.
By this time I had already drunk three cups of coffee (not including my morning Nespresso and French press) and was teetering on an almighty edge. To cool myself off I walked around the block, and when I returned found a man had taken my seat. Who the hell does this asshole think he is? As I plotted the details of the “caffeine defense” I would use during my upcoming murder trial, I calmed down and convinced myself I could work just as effectively at home.
Naturally I crashed as soon as I walked through the front door. I spent the rest of the day whimpering in bed with the shades drawn. Balzac was a real psycho.
WORDS WRITTEN: 1,230 (of which only 300 or so made sense)
COFFEE DRUNK: Five cups, two espressos
Day 5: Don DeLillo
I think Don DeLillo is America’s greatest living novelist, but I wasn’t overly inspired by his routine:
I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent—you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes… A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of [Jorge Luis] Borges.
I don’t own a typewriter. To make up for this, I wrote on my computer and made sure not to delete anything I had typed, no matter how tempting. Hitting the backspace key is more muscle memory than anything else, and the restraint required to avoid doing it drove me mad. When I got stuck, which I did almost immediately, I stared at a picture of Borges. Nothing happened. I searched for other photos of him. Still nothing. This sent me down a rabbit hole in which I was consumed for hours, and I somehow ended up on the IMDb goofs section for Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise.
Following DeLillo’s schedule didn’t help me write, but I did learn something. "When the Trilambs have been forced to strip to their underwear by the Alpha Betas, Lewis is seen wearing a pair of white Y-Front briefs, yet when they arrive back at the Hotel Coral Essex after hitchhiking for five hours, he is now wearing longer and less revealing shorts, with no explanation for the change.”
WORDS WRITTEN: 410
Day 6: Natalie Goldberg
The author Natalie Goldberg has written extensively about the act of writing, and her books are full of neat tricks and tips. In Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg suggests using a prop to send your consciousness to a foreign state:
”[O]ne small prop can often tip your mind into another place. When I sit down to write, often I have a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. If I'm in a cafe that has a 'No Smoking' sign, then my cigarette is unlit. I don't actually smoke anyway, so it doesn't matter. The cigarette is a prop to help me dream into another world. It wouldn't work so well if I ordinarily smoked. You need to do something you don't usually do."
I live in California where cigarettes cost approximately three hundred dollars, so I was hesitant to buy an entire pack just to test out Goldberg’s trick. Instead, I borrowed a friend’s electronic cigarette and let it dangle from my lips at the cafe. I looked like an idiot. When the stress of looking like an idiot got to be too much, I walked outside and huffed on the e-cig until I felt like fainting.
I was not transported to another world. I was not even transported to flavour country. I had to lie down.
WORDS WRITTEN: 680
Day 7: William Gibson
The sci-fi novelist William Gibson’s schedule is so sensible, it doesn’t really feel like much of a routine:
When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my email and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
I’ve never done pilates before, but I signed up for an “Abs and Booty Burn” class at a nearby studio. The instructor wore a wireless microphone like she was giving a TED Talk, even though there were only five of us working out in close quarters. The reformer machine was a complex tangle of cords, ropes, wheels, and handles—I can see why a science-fiction writer would like it.
I was able to get some work done afterward, even though my booty was burning mightily.
WORDS WRITTEN: 1,228
Day 8: Hunter S. Thompson
When the time came to end my week of following others’ routines, I didn’t think I could do it. By imitating these writers, I didn’t feel responsible for my own failures. Haruki Murakami was to blame, not me. In an effort to extend this projection, I found one more writer’s schedule to ape.
Hunter S. Thompson is responsible for perhaps the most infamous (if embellished) routine in history. According to his biographer E. Jean Carroll, Thompson’s day started at 3 PM with a glass of Chivas Regal, and he kept things going with nonstop cocaine use and a little acid thrown in for good measure:
I chose this one on purpose because I knew it would be impossible to follow. Hell, there’s no way he followed it, either. Even so, his routine did teach me something. No matter how much cocaine he snorted or how many hot tub Dove bars he ate, Hunter Thompson always found time to write. I know that much is true, because the work is out there to be read.
Rather than indulge in a bender, I decided to follow whatever routine I wanted, so long as it gave me time to write. That’s why I scheduled another pilates class and readied my bathroom for an intense post-butt-burn writing session.
So, here’s the thing. The federal government has announced that the funding it is making available for community service work through the Canada Summer Jobs Program (as well as the forthcoming Youth Service Corps) will not be given to any group that doesn’t check a box saying they recognize women’s reproductive rights, in particular the right to “safe and legal abortions.”
These are pretty explosive accusations, even in the context of the perpetual outrage machine that is politics in 2018. So it might be worth unpacking both the issue at hand, and the larger context of abortion law in Canada.
Minister of Labour Patty Hadju has justified the provision by claiming that there is nothing preventing churches or other religious groups who may be opposed to abortion from applying for funding. The stipulation is just that none of the money can be used for anti-abortion activities. Whether or not that decision is actually meaningful for the groups involved is questionable; unlike the prime minister and some of his closest colleagues in Cabinet, religious institutions tend to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard than “who cares, just get the money.”
Trudeau himself, meanwhile, asserted a more sweeping defence of the policy in an interview with the Canadian Press on Monday: “An organization that has as its stated goal to remove rights from Canadians, to remove the right that women have fought for to determine what happens to their own bodies, is not in line with where the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] is or where the government of Canada is. Certainly there is no obligation by the government of Canada to fund organizations that are determined to remove rights that have been so long fought for by women.”
Sounds good, right? Well, there’s a catch: reproductive rights, at least in the context of abortion access, is not a right guaranteed by the Charter. There is also no way to know “where the government of Canada is” on the issue outside of ruling party preference, because Canada has no law on the books regulating abortion.
Like all political speech, Trudeau’s insistence that abortion is already a settled issue of Charter rights contains some truth but is largely a rhetorical sleight of hand. In the R v. Morgentaler case of 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the country’s 1969 abortion law—requiring women seeking the procedure to first justify its medical necessity to a hospital’s three-doctor “therapeutic abortion committee”—was unconstitutional. Specifically, they ruled that it violated Section 7 of the Charter, which states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person, and the right not to be deprived thereof, except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”
It is important to note that the ruling did not recognize s.7 as providing a fundamental Charter right to abortion access; they merely ruled that the law on the books at the time was insufficient. A further SCC ruling in 1989 ( Tremblay v. Daigle) established that only the woman involved can make the decision to terminate a pregnancy or carry it to completion, and that the fetus has no legal standing as a person.
Through these rulings, the SCC set the boundaries of how abortion could and could not be regulated in Canada. The job of actually regulating it, however, falls to Parliament. Following the landmark Morgentaler ruling, the Mulroney government tried twice to bring in new legislation. The first attempt would have ensured easy access to early-term abortions and criminalized late-term procedures, but it was defeated by both pro-life MPs (who thought any access was too much) and pro-choice MPs (who thought any restriction was too much).
A second bill in 1989 that would have banned all abortion save those deemed medically necessary by a doctor passed in the House of Commons by nine votes. But it failed in the Senate after a tie in 1990, and the death of 20-year old Yvonne Jurewicz of Toronto
from a self-induced abortion meant there was little appetite for a third attempt. Since then, no government in Canada regardless of ideological stripe has attempted the formidable task of bringing in a new abortion law. This leaves us as one of the few jurisdictions on Earth with no legal restrictions on the procedure. (Non-legal restrictions, such as service availability in rural areas, remain.) This is just as well, as a number of opinion polls conducted over the years have shown that the Canadian public is either largely pro-choice or at least comfortable with the idea of abortion being treated as an medical procedure between a woman and her doctor.
Anyway—all this is to say that when Justin Trudeau implies women’s reproductive rights are effectively enshrined in the Charter, it’s not quite true. The courts have established the boundaries of the playing field—women’s bodily autonomy is guaranteed—but not the rules of the game. Abortion remains an unresolved political issue, albeit one that most Canadians are content to leave alone. Not that the Liberals are the only ones playing fast and loose with the language of rights here: Conservatives framing this as a form of totalitarian thought-control are also overstating their case.
But can the government actually withhold funds from pro-life groups that would use the Summer Jobs Program for pro-life work? The verdict isn’t back on this one yet, although it is worth acknowledging that both pro-life and pro-choice groups have received Summer Jobs funding from the Trudeau government in the past.
The Toronto Right to Life Association announced last week that it would be taking the Trudeau government to court over the new policy, arguing that its Charter rights to freedom of religion and speech are being violated. The federal government has already settled with the group (along with two other pro-life organizations) in November 2017 after they brought a similar challenge last year. (Those lawsuits did not involve any Charter challenges.)
The crux of the matter boils down to whether or not the anti-abortion proviso in this particular government grant actually does violate a religious group’s fundamental freedoms. There are no laws preventing anti-abortion groups from doing anti-abortion work—they just can’t do it with Summer Jobs Program money. This is less of a problem for a pro-life evangelical church looking to hire students to mow their lawn than it is for a pro-life evangelical church looking to picket an abortion clinic. This distinction is important and anyone trying to flatten it is being more than a little disingenuous.
It all turns on the distinction between positive and negative freedom. Obviously you are allowed to believe whatever you want, and to act on those beliefs as non-intrusively as you please. But do you have the right to demand a share of public money to do so? Does the government retain some capacity to refuse funds for activities it believes undermine other individual rights? Are your rights to free expression stifled if you are refused a subsidy? How long it will take the court system to figure this question out?
Meanwhile, Trudeau has given the Conservative party a gift that both their paleoconservative and libertarian wings can enjoy. Thanksgiving for the whole transnationally outraged right-wing family.
The relative use of abortion as a wedge issue in Canadian politics is arguable. Sure, it may be that Trudeau, drunk on his own hubris/incompetence/corruption/etc is trying to drag this country into Liberal totalitarianism. That our tyrannical Cuck-in-Chief is persecuting Christians and throwing them to the genderqueer jihadi lions or whatever. This is the barely-concealed subtext of every anti-abortion piece in this country right now.
It’s not clear how many people put it high on their list, though—and the prevailing electoral mood is much more likely pro-choice. There is also a chance that Trudeau is doing this as a deliberate provocation. That our feminist prime minister is setting a trap for the Tories by goading them into championing the criminalization of abortion—a.k.a. rolling back women’s reproductive rights—and then incinerating them with it in the next election. Publicly taking the unhinged heat of anti-feminists across Canada and the world would also definitely factor into the inevitable effort to rebrand Trudeau’s Liberals as still “more progressive” than Jagmeet Singh’s NDP—whatever that means.
Without a political solution—ie. an abortion law—we will have this fight about abortion every so many years. Establishing a genuinely progressive abortion law in Canada would require tremendous courage, an expansive vision, and an iron political will to wage a very bitter fight.
In other words, don’t expect this to happen anytime soon in Canada, and definitely not from this government. That’s what the court system is for.
On Wednesday, a former assistant who reportedly worked for a Goldman Sachs exec was accused of swindling hundreds of bottles of wine from his boss to the tune of $1.2 million, Bloomberg reports.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Nicolas De-Meyer worked for Goldman co-president David Solomon, a wine connoisseur who makes $1.85 million a year, between 2014 and the fall of 2016. De-Meyer, 40, was tasked with moving shipments of his boss's rare, expensive wine from his apartment in Manhattan to his cellar in the Hamptons.
Instead, De-Meyer allegedly sold some of the wine to a dealer in North Carolina, including seven bottles from France's Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that his boss bought for $133,650—nearly $20,000 a bottle. According to the indictment, De-Meyer stole hundreds of bottles from Solomon over a two-year period that were "among the best, most expensive, and rarest wines in the world."
The alleged scheme went unnoticed for years before Solomon discovered hundreds of bottles had gone missing in the fall of 2016, the Journal reports. De-Meyer was reportedly fired around the same time, before leaving the country.
Now De-Meyer has been charged with interstate transportation of stolen property and is scheduled to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on Wednesday. His alleged $1.2 million haul proves that you don't always have to pull an Ocean's Eleven–level heist to steal a shit-ton of expensive wine.
Even if you still haven't seen The Last Jedi, it's no secret that it's become one of the most divisive Star Wars films ever made. Now, after weeks of fans going back and forth online, arguing about what kind of force abilities Luke Skywalker can and can't use in the Star Wars universe, director Rian Johnson finally decided to weigh in.
Johnson's tweet storm shuts down any haters who argue that Luke's "force projection" power at the climax of the film is bullshit. According to the 2010 book, Star Wars: The Jedi Path, that whole meditating doppelgänger trick Luke pulls at the end of the film, helping the Resistance escape, is right there in the Jedi texts.
It turns out Johnson was staying true to the Expanded Universe his superfan critics hold so dear all along, and it seems to have worked! Cue the Mr. Supa Hot Fire GIFs.
Tell Beckett Mufson how you really feel on Twitter .
A lot of questions come to mind when you’re high. Am I high right now? Wait, how did I get this high? What should I watch? More importantly, what should I eat? I wonder what my grade-school crush is doing with their life right now. I wonder what I’m doing with my life right now. Why is the “p” in pterodactyl silent? Is water wet itself, or does it just make things wet? What really happened to the lost colony of Roanoke?
We can’t really help with the vast majority of those questions, but we do have some answers for what you should watch while you’re high. We’ve compiled the best movies to watch on Netflix when you’re stoned. Enjoy, where it's legal to do so, of course.
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a paranoid sex drama filled with as many strange symbols and interpretations as a Hieronymus Bosch painting—but that’s not why it’s on this list. In all likelihood, you’ll never get a chance to smoke a joint with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. This is as close as it gets to doing that.
Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese conceptual artist who paints using exploding fireworks. Sky Ladder is a mesmerizing documentary about his bombastic creations, focusing primarily on his quest to build a thousand-foot floating ladder of gunpowder and light it on fire. Burn one and let your head explode as the artist attempts to build his enormous stairway to heaven.
John Dies at the End is a scuzzy sci-fi drug trip dealio that has “future cult classic” written all over it. It’s a twisted, unpredictable watch, perfect for riding out a bad high.
As Motherboard noted earlier this month, Slow TV hasn’t really caught on in the US yet, but it’s about time you added it to your stoned viewing queue. It’s basically just movie-length recordings of Norwegians doing mundane things like knitting, chopping wood, or riding the train. Though undoubtedly tedious, it’ll pleasantly lower your heart rate while you’re completely doinked out of your damn mind.
This visually-stunning “dieselpunk” fantasia watches like Sin City and The Iron Giant got caught in the industrial shredder at the stupid-factory. Still, Sky Captain is worth a watch just to see Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie struggle to keep straight faces as they save the world from an army of giant children’s toys. Tall, dark, and way too expensive for its own good, this is one you’ll remember fuzzily but fondly after watching with a head full of gas.
The 2012 Indian action/fantasy film Makkhi is a classic tale of boy-meets-girl, billionaire guy-gets-jealous, billionaire guy-kills-boy, and boy-is-reborn-as-a-housefly-who-seeks-revenge-on-billionaire-guy. It’s got several sequences of melodramatic action movie cliches acted out by a CG insect—in other words, a good pick for a blazed viewing.
I could listen to Werner Herzog read soup labels for an hour and a half and probably still be extremely entertained. (Actually, that would be great to watch while high.) Until my genius idea gets made, however, the silver-tongued German director’s chronicle of the history of the internet is a pretty trippy substitute.
The Tribe is a Ukrainian film set in a boarding school for the deaf. The story is told exclusively through sign language without subtitles. It’s a brutal but gracefully shot movie, and, as Michael Nordine wrote for VICE in 2015, ”an exercise in both watching and listening to a movie in a new way.”
The premise of this movie is basically “You ever get high and feel like the whole world is watching you?” starring Ed Harris as your buzzkill dad and Jim Carrey as you.
Netflix has a slew of great food documentaries to watch while blazed (The Birth of Sake, Todo Sobre El Asado, Somm, and Barbeque to name just a few), but the critically acclaimed Jiro Dreams of Sushi is still probably the best option to watch while baked. It’s a poignant, thoughtful documentary, and there’s just no denying the appeal of watching the plating of glimmering sushi rolls scored to Philip Glass.
Few films so gently evoke the tender wonderment of having a childhood hero. Most people—including Wes Anderson fans—have a problem with The Life Aquatic’s stilted off-comedy and pretentiousness. Well, I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong. The joke no one appreciates is that Bill Murray is high as a helicopter the whole damn time. What this classic lacks in bombast and spectacle it makes up for with a soundtrack of Portuguese David Bowie by Seu Jorge and a climax that is downright magical. Just have a lot of weed on hand, because you won’t fully enjoy it unless you can sink into its ebbing, flowing pace.
If Andy Warhol embraced his inner Lana Del Rey, got high, and went to the beach with a 16 mm camera, you’d have The Endless Summer. Laid-back, effortlessly beautiful, and ever-so-slightly-homoerotic, this one’s a must-watch if you’re interested in surfing, the sea, the history of counterculture—or if you just want to watch something toasty while you’re getting toasted.
The Google description for this movie is “In 2092 the last mortal human (Jared Leto) on Earth reflects on his long past and thinks about the lives he might have led.” Now replace Jared Leto with yourself and reflect on all the brain cells you could’ve saved before the doinkpacolypse.
Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino really raked it in after his time on The Jersey Shore, earning nearly $9 million after the show's six seasons. But on Friday, the reality star admitted he hadn't paid taxes on that money, pleading guilty to one count of federal tax evasion, NJ.com reports.
Sorrentino and his brother, Marc (who also pleaded guilty Friday), were first charged in 2014, when prosecutors accused them of falsifying their tax returns. Now that the reality star has copped to the charge, he could face up to five years in prison—but not before he goes to film the upcoming Jersey Shore reunion.
On Friday, a Newark judge gave Sorrentino the OK to fly to Florida so he could film the Jersey Shore Family Vacation alongside almost everyone from the original cast, before he faces sentencing on April 25. According to his lawyer, the Situation "has grown up as a human being," so this time around he'll likely end up having a measured dialogue with Vinny about climate change, rather than engaging in another smackdown of neck-brace level proportions.
"Typically, a defendant who has this type of plea agreement does not go to prison," attorney Henry Klingeman told reporters Friday, "and we're hoping Mike is not an exception to that."
Still, Sorrentino didn't manage to totally avoid a grenade here. He promised to pay $123,000 in restitution to make up for the money he withheld, which ostensibly went toward spray tans, laundromats, and gym memberships or whatever.
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.
The president announced on January 2 that he'd be holding some kind of awards' ceremony for fake news later that week on January 5. He proved that he was BIASED and a LIAR shortly thereafter by moving the event to January 17, and further demonstrated his DISHONESTY by not giving awards of any kind, and instead just posting a listicle on GOP.com.
OK, yes, it's unfair for me to jump all over Trump for changing the date of his "awards" and then under-delivering. But if you look at the articles targeted by the president's clap-back-at-the-haters blog post, most of them were minor errors and fudges of the sort that Trump committed while talking about his awards.
For instance, among the 11 examples of "unrelenting bias, unfair news coverage, and even downright fake news,” are a gloomy and ultimately wrong prediction about the stock market from Paul Krugman of the New York Times written on election night. Krugman tossed out the idea that the stock market might "never" recover from the plunge it took when Trump's win was announced—but Krugman rescinded his prediction three days later. (The markets, as Trump loves to remind us, have been hitting record highs.) Then there was a self-acknowledged "bad tweet” that the Washington Post's Dave Weigel posted about a sensitive issue for Trump: crowd size. Shortly after the tweet kicked up a minor firestorm (because it made a Trump rally look deserted when it actually wasn't), Weigel deleted it, and said calling him out for it was "very fair."
Trump did out some truly atrocious reporting errors, some of which I've covered in this column, like CNN and ABC News botching timelines in stories about the Trump-Russia scandal. But generally speaking, the publications that Trump criticized this week had already apologized for the errors long ago. And while these were indeed bad examples of journalism, it seems like (shocker!) Trump may have overlooked a few similarly flawed stories.
For instance, why didn't Fox News's reporting of the Seth Rich hoax, which terrorized a grieving family, get an award? What about that network's attempts to falsely smear one of the accusers of Senate hopeful Roy Moore? Or Breitbart's false reporting about climate change? Or the outrageous failed attempt by Project Veritas to trick the Washington Post into publishing false allegations against Moore? Weirdly, I just noticed that these publications tend to support Trump, and their false stories all flatter Trump's beliefs and political positions. But since our president is just an unbiased media watchdog, he must have made a mistake by not giving these folks fake news awards. Oh well, I'm sure he'll get it right next time.
Speaking of which: For your consideration, here are some new candidates for Trump's 2019 awards. Let's keep our fingers crossed that they don't get forgotten just because they came out in January.
The flu vaccine can kill you
Last week, I praised Your News Wire (LA's answer to InfoWars) for being funny. That was fake news, and I apologize. Your News Wire is still a drag, and they proved that this week by creating a viral hoax about people being killed by the flu vaccine. The downright reckless headline they went with is "CDC Doctor: ‘Disastrous’ Flu Shot Is Causing Deadly Flu Outbreak," and boy is it ever bad.
The story provides a dubious quote from an anonymous doctor at the Centers for Disease Control who supposedly said, "Some of the patients I’ve administered the flu shot to this year have died"—thus apparently blaming the deaths on the vaccine. After that, the post becomes an old fashioned conspiracy blog about the dangers of vaccines—the sort of thing that's catnip to a certain kind of well-meaning but misinformed parent.
There is no truth to the central thrust of Your News Wire's story. It is true that the flu this year is a somewhat nasty one, and has killed people who received flu shots, but the vaccine itself hasn't killed anyone. This Your News Wire post, on the other hand, might kill people if it discourages them from getting vaccinated. As Media Matters pointed out to me in an email, the article got more than 150,000 Facebook engagements.
The flu shot is a miracle, but an imperfect one. If you're skeptical, you should read up on how it works, and how it doesn't. But generally speaking, no matter who you are, you should get it. It might save your life, and it's definitely not going to kill you.
If you RT a tweet, a lottery winner will give you money
Shane Missler, a 20-year-old from Port Richey, Florida, won a $451 million Mega Millions jackpot. Good for that guy. He's rich now, and while he claims he's going to do good deeds with his money, he is never going to give you, the reader of this post, a fucking dime.
But you can win a jackpot in internet points! All you have to do is create a fake Shane Missler account on Twitter (now deleted) or a fake screengrab from Oprah's Instagram claiming that people who like share and follow will be getting a $5,000 cut of Missler's winnings. As you probably noticed, someone did this on Monday, and it was extremely annoying.
A gun-wielding dognapper is on the loose in Chicago
On Thursday morning, a shelter dog named Polly was set to be adopted by a shelter employee, but first she was loaded into a van with several other dogs and taken to be spayed. When the driver got back, he said some fiend had gone to great lengths to steal Polly. The criminal had supposedly tied a dog a street sign as bait, waited for the van to stop, aimed a gun at the driver, and made off with Polly. The shelter was horrified, and created a Facebook post that attracted thousands of shares, and hundreds of supportive comments.
This all turned out to be bullshit. The driver later confessed to making up the whole thing so he could keep the dog. Polly is now back with the shelter employee who is adopting her.
It's a pretty minor story, but I'm mentioning it here because lately I've been trying to convince my girlfriend to let our dog into our yard unsupervised, and that has involved persuading her that dog-stealing maniacs aren't nearly as common as she thinks they are. I hope she reads this.
“Why don’t you come to my double mastectomy?” my friend Caitlin Wilterdink asked me.
It was her annual fall Friendsgiving last October; I was up to my elbows in mashed potatoes, stirring butter and salt into the creamy pot of carbs. My jaw slacked and the wooden spoon nearly fell from my hands into the sink.
“Your what?”
In August 2016, at 31, Caitlin tested positive for a mutation in her BRCA2 gene. According to Dr. Eric Mou, an Oncology Fellow Physician at Stanford Medicine, BRCA2 normally cuts down on genetic irregularities that make cells more prone to behaving abnormally. But for those who carry a mutated gene, cells can accumulate DNA damage and additional genetic mutations, which puts them at risk for having abnormal genetic function and growing into cells like those that make up cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, approximately 45 percent of women who have the BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer by the time they are 70 years old.
It’s a gene Caitlin inherited from her mother, who passed away from breast cancer at 54, when Caitlin was 14. Her mother’s breast cancer was first diagnosed at 34. She had a single mastectomy at the time and went into remission, but the cancer returned in her other breast seven years later, and she battled the disease for a total of 15 years. Caitlin remembers watching her mother go through multiple surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy, knowing even at seven years old that one day she might have to do the same. Her premonition was correct: a child whose parent has a BRCA2 mutation has a 50 percent chance of receiving it.
After Caitlin’s positive test for the BRCA2 mutation, she spent the next year and a half in doctor’s appointments, mammograms, MRIs and surgeries. A 2016 mammogram revealed atypical ductal hyperplasia, an abnormal pattern of cell growth that has some features of pre-cancer and can turn into it if left untreated. Caitlin had the breast tissue containing the cells removed and it tested negative for cancer. The next year, she had a guided MRI biopsy that uncovered a second diagnosis of atypical ductal hyperplasia. She began to wonder how long this series of mammograms, MRIs, biopsies and removal would continue. That year and a half of appointments, she said, led to missing “something like two or three weeks of work,” and from everything she could see, they would only get more onerous.
At that point, her doctors told her she had three options: have another small surgery, more MRIs, and the possibility of more surgeries in the future; begin taking the drug Tamoxifen, which inhibits breast cancer growth and would likely force her body into early menopause; or have a preventative double mastectomy, removing her breasts—and the tissue that could be genetically predisposed to kill her—along with them.
At that point, she said, her breasts felt like ticking time bombs. “Let’s just do it,” she said to her doctor, and scheduled a double mastectomy with a breast reconstruction for December 11, 2017, four days after her 33rd birthday.
According to Dr. Mou, many studies clearly show that a patient who has a BRCA2 mutation can reduce their risk of developing cancer by over 90 percent with a prophylactic mastectomy. Those are good odds, and it’s not uncommon for someone around Caitlin’s age with mutations of BRCA2 and/or BRCA1 (a gene similar to BRCA2) to undergo the procedure, either: a 2010 study found that 14.7 percent of women aged 25 to 35 who were diagnosed with the mutations chose to have mastectomies.
It’s a difficult choice for women in Caitlin’s shoes: undergo an invasive surgery that will radically alter one’s relationship with their own body, with cascading effects on everything from one’s dating life and future health to the subtle, daily bodily movements most of us take for granted, or face the risks of breast cancer, an onslaught of invasive medical interventions, and possible death. As a young single woman living in New York City and a prolific marathon runner, a mastectomy might profoundly affect Caitlin’s love life, and would impact one of her great passions. But if you’re young and an invasive surgery now would greatly reduce your chance of having cancer later on, why not take it?
“I feel like doing this is a way to pay my mother back for everything she went through,” Caitlin wrote on Instagram before the procedure. “So cheers Momma, this one’s for you.”
You may have heard of BRCA before, from Angelina Jolie. In 2013, at 37 years old, the actress and director penned an op-ed for the New York Times about her decision to have a prophylactic double mastectomy after discovering she had the BRCA1 mutation that could lead to breast cancer, which caused her mother to pass away at 56.
But most people are not Angelina Jolie. It’s likely Jolie didn’t have to spend hours on the phone each time she got a medical bill like Caitlin does, first calling the doctor’s office and then the insurance company, often having to explain that yes, she is under 36 but she does qualify for insurance coverage for a mastectomy because of her high risk factors and genetic testing. Jolie also probably did not have to climb the stairs post-surgery in a fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn, or worry about the impact of her medical procedures on her finances. Jolie may not have had to fret over the cost of taking taxis and cars while she recovered, for fear of strangers on the subway bumping into her still-healing chest, or the prospect of losing her job after having taken too many days off.
Caitlin in the waiting room at NYU Langone's Tisch Hospital before her surgery
“We got here early,” Caitlin texts me. It’s 5:14 AM on December 11.
I arrive shortly thereafter. Caitlin is in the surgical patient waiting area on the 10th floor of NYU Langone’s Tisch Hospital, eyes barely open. Sitting across from her are her dad and her best friend Casey. Caitlin has had nothing to eat or drink since 8 PM last night; she’s been awake since 4 AM for a surgery scheduled at 7 AM. A nurse soon appears and whisks her behind a dark wooden door.
Not long after, we’re invited behind the door ourselves to see Caitlin before surgery. In a tiny, fluorescent-lit room, she wears a thin hospital gown and a light blue hairnet. Casey offers up a stuffed narwhal she bought, reciting ocean creature facts and the plot of Moby Dick to distract Caitlin from her surgery, now minutes away. She manages a smile and rests her head on her dad’s shoulder.
Caitlin has a moment with her father before surgery
A nurse in green scrubs enters and it’s time. The room goes quiet and Caitlin leans against the doorway hugging her father. Her eyes pinch closed, small tears gently falling from each. She hugs Casey then disappears behind another dark wooden door with the nurse.
The surgical oncologist will remove the breast tissue, then the plastic surgeon will do the reconstruction with implants Caitlin picked out. She will keep her nipples, which tested negative for cancer. She’ll have stitches from the surgery and an incision in each breast will connect to a drain that will remove blood and pus, sparing her from an infection. She’ll have to empty the drains twice a day. If there is breast cancer at any point moving forward, it’ll be easily noticeable—cancer in a regular breast is more difficult to feel.
Her life as an incredibly self-sufficient and active woman is about to change drastically, and she will have to learn how to ask for help, something she told me she’s not used to doing. For a week after surgery, Caitlin will only be able to sponge-bathe herself and can’t wash her hair. She also won’t be able to run or exercise beyond walking, or lift anything heavy until she heals. It will take 4-6 weeks for her to regain her strength and escape a feeling of exhaustion.
Caitlin after surgery, seen with the pumps draining blood and pus from her chest
When Caitlin’s surgery finishes, the surgical oncologist and plastic surgeon tell her father that it was a success. “She looks beautiful,” they said. They looked at the pathology of the breast tissue and, luckily, everything was clear: no cancer lurking anywhere. His eyes well up and he pulls a rumpled tissue from his pocket to wipe away unsprung tears.
When Caitlin finally reemerges, she’s lying on her back on a gurney, hooked up to all manner of machines. “I am on a lot of drugs,” she told us, smiling.
Caitlin walks down a hospital hallway the day after her surgery
A week later, Caitlin’s drains are removed and she’s finally allowed to shower. She said that between dating and running, she’s more worried about the latter.
Caitlin's mother had a single mastectomy the first time, and she lost her nipple. Caitlin's father later told her that another man said he was "pretty surprised" he stuck with it, which, needless to say, infuriated him. But she knows that future partners might not all react charitably. “Some guys are probably gonna be okay with it, some are gonna be freaked out,” she said. “I don’t really know when the best time to tell people’s gonna be. I don’t really know what my comfort level with intimacy’s gonna be, whether that’s gonna change. I have to start feeling comfortable in my own skin.
“I think my biggest concern is getting myself back in running shape,” she said. And with three marathons planned for 2018, it’s easy to see why.
She’s been stretching her legs, doing arm and abdominal exercises, going for long walks, practicing deep breathing so she can exchange oxygen properly. She’ll have Paris’s marathon in April, then Berlin’s in September and Chicago’s in October. Caitlin knows it’s an ambitious goal, but she’s a headstrong woman: she already has her ideal race times in mind..
A month after her surgery, Caitlin is hosting a bar trivia night in Brooklyn. She’s dyed her hair blonde, has finally been allowed to start jogging, and is back at work. She’s doing her best to develop a sense of normalcy, but finds it frustrating that her body doesn’t yet move quite like it used to, especially when she’s running.
“This is a life-changing procedure—not only physically but also emotionally,” said Dr. Mou. Patients like Caitlin have to spend time relearning their bodies, dealing with what it means to lose a portion of themselves both literally and figuratively. Body image dissatisfaction, depression, and anxiety are real issues for recipients of mastectomies.
As Caitlin navigates her body, trains for marathons, and seeks to understand her post-mastectomy future, the hope is that the results of the surgery, while difficult to handle at the moment, will spare her the suffering her mother endured as well as the anxiety of a future with uncertain health. For now, she's just trying to get through each day.
Dr. Mou recommends mastectomy patients like Caitlin seek support groups or counseling, but Caitlin isn’t ready for that yet. “There’s an aspect of wanting to get my life back, and that’s still in process, but there’s also unmet subconscious questions around what these feelings are actually about,” she said. “I just want to look normal and live my life.”
This article is part of a weeklong series looking back at the first year of Donald Trump's presidency.
Of the 57 executive orders and 92 presidential memoranda Donald Trump has issued since his inauguration one year ago, a shocking number have been banal or inconsequential. Many pretend to tackle some pressing issue, like the opioid crisis, but actually just instruct his advisors to go figure out something he can do about it later. Many more just continue old programs, at times making them seem new so he can slap his brand on them, as with his June order relating to an apprenticeship program. And many just shift routine governing duties off of Trump’s desk.
Yet amid all this fluff and puffery, Trump has issued a few orders that have had or will soon have a substantive effect on the country. Just days ago, he got the ball rolling on policies that will widen access to suicide prevention services for veterans. In August, he removed restrictions that will make it easier for local law enforcement officers to purchase military-grade surplus gear from the Pentagon. Last January, he set out restrictive guidelines for federal rulemaking that may already be gumming up the flow of regulations, even vital or legally mandated ones.
It’s difficult to pin down which of Trump’s executive actions has had the greatest impact. But after a year of monitoring Trump’s actions and speaking to dozens of experts on their effects, I’d say that this honor goes to a linked pair of orders he issued on January 25, the third and fourth of his presidency. These orders, “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” and “Enabling Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” have already had dire effects on the nation, and will continue to do so for years.
Most coverage of these orders last January focused on a few headline-grabbing elements. The former officially called for the creation of Trump’s southern border wall, kicking off ongoing legislative battles over its funding, and also called on Border Patrol to hire 5,000 more agents and build more detention centers. The latter called on federal officials to find ways to punish “sanctuary cities,” and on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire 10,000 new agents.
None of these topline items have come to fruition. Congress has not been eager to fund a full border wall, or to pony up the massive appropriations that would be needed to drastically increase staffing for Border Patrol and ICE. And the court system has largely held up the administration’s attempts to crack down on sanctuary cities. Looking at those elements alone, this order seems like just another set of blustery but ultimately impotent proposals from Trump.
But the orders also initiated numerous policies ratcheting up immigration enforcement across the nation. Past administrations exercised broad discretion and prioritization about which unauthorized immigrants to focus on, honing in on the most egregious criminal offenders first. Trump's orders widen the categories for prioritization so drastically that, as immigration law experts have told me, they basically theoretically encompass all undocumented individuals.
They also increase opportunities for local law enforcement officers to take on immigration arrest and deportation duties under a program widely criticized for increasing racial profiling and constitutional abuses in participating towns. Relatedly, they increase requirements that local authorities cooperate with federal agents tracking down undocumented immigrants. And they call for the expansion of expedited removal proceedings, currently used on or near the border to quickly turn around recently arrived immigrants, to wider categories of undocumented individuals across the country, among several other policy tweaks and proposals.
It’s possible to read this and the enforcement shifts that have followed as simply a return to the draconian immigration policies of the late George W. Bush or early Barack Obama eras, and an ineffective return at that. While arrests of undocumented immigrants increased by about 42 percent over 2017, according to recent Department of Homeland Security data, those figures still pale in comparison to Bush and Obama’s harshest years of immigration enforcement. Deportations actually decreased by about 6 percent in 2017, and despite Trump’s desire to detain more people longer, limited resources and a backlog of deportation cases has forced his administration to release many individuals it’s apprehended back into their communities.
“It would be hard to get back to early Obama or late Bush numbers,” said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. “A lot of the people who were low-hanging fruit for deportation were deported already under the previous administration.” States and cities also have not complied as readily with federal requests for cooperation as they did under Bush or Obama, Nowrasteh added. “It would be very hard to even get back to those numbers without a significant and sustained increase in” resources, he concluded.
Trump’s deportation numbers are also low because most removals under his predecessors occurred near the border and therefore targeted recent arrivals. But the number of people crossing the border is decreasing. Some of this may be tied to a fear of Trump’s proposed deportation crackdowns, as federal agents have asserted. But it also reflects a long trend tied to improving economic conditions in Mexico, demographic shifts in émigré nations, and pre-Trump improvements in border security and deterrence. In any case, there are just fewer people for Trump to deport.
Numbers aside, though, Trump’s orders have still led to the rollout of new and grim enforcement strategies. A closer look at Trump’s first-year immigration numbers shows that, true to his expansion of prioritization categories, he’s drastically increased arrests for non-criminal undocumented immigrants and focused more enforcement on the interior of the country. His administration has also used more aggressive tactics to track down undocumented immigrants in these communities, which range “from conducting warrantless raids... to policing the halls of courthouses and arresting individuals who are there to seek justice,” according to Alejandra Lopez of the Immigrant Defense Project.
In gross numbers, Bush and Obama arrested more undocumented immigrants without criminal records and people in the interior than Trump at the height of their immigration crackdowns. But, immigration law expert Pratheepan Gulasekaram pointed out, they at least tried to be discreet about or explain these arrests, and at times backed off on deporting those individuals. They were also sensitive to the optics of raids near, say, schools. By comparison, Trump’s orders have led to much more aggressive and clearly indiscriminate enforcement.
“Haphazard enforcement is the policy,” said immigration law expert Shoba Wadhia. “Being targeted because you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time is the policy. That may have occurred in some cases in earlier administrations, but that at least was not the stated goal or policy of the administration.”
Likewise, while Trump’s administration may only be conducting a comparable number of workplace raids or audits to his predecessors, they’ve been much more showy about it. Case in point, ICE has leaked details of upcoming raids in California, and it seems clear that these will be punishments for sanctuary practices in the state. Nowrasteh believes this spin on raids is meant “to put the fear of god in people,” and reflects a greater degree of motivating animus.
“Your next best option with the resources you have, I think,” said Gulasekarsm of the tactics flowing from Trump’s immigration orders, “is making a show of random hyper-enforcement with the hope that people do in fact live in fear of removal proceedings, and then perhaps self-deport because they don’t want to live under the psychological stress of this.”
As a result of these new enforcement tactics, said Wadhia, “a larger cross-section of the immigrant community feels vulnerable… There’s vulnerability even among those with the most compelling reasons to be here.”
The experts I’ve spoken to note that harsh immigration crackdowns under Bush and Obama led to fear as well, but today’s concerns seems more pervasive and enduring. Although there’s no hard data on this yet, anecdotes suggest that many undocumented immigrants are going off the radar, meaning that among other things they won’t be cooperating with police to report serious crimes.
This strategic and tactical shift may only be the first wave of Trump’s orders’ effects. Gulasekaram suspects that in the near future we could see more local law enforcement agencies taking up the orders’ offers to take on immigration enforcement duties. “In the absence of more funding, the only way you can increase your enforcement power is to tap into the manpower and information that local law enforcement agencies already have,” he said. He also suspects the administration will make more headway in expanding expedited removals, which will allow Trump to goose his removal numbers without more funds, but will also erode due process and may risk harm to asylum seekers.
It’s also worth acknowledging that even the stalled elements of these orders are having major effects on the nation. The administration is still looking for new ways to punish sanctuary cities, including possibly filing charges against their elected officials. Gulasekaram worries that this sustained pressure will eventually force some smaller areas with fewer resources to back down and increase their compliance with Trump’s emerging immigration policies. And of course Trump’s dedication to scoring border all funding is a big part of what’s jamming up Congress these days.
These elements of Trump’s early orders have not received as much attention as high-profile actions, like his travel bans , which were issued around the same time. But they set the stage for one of the most aggressive, hateful, and indiscriminate immigration crackdowns in modern history, stories of which have been trickling in piecemeal all year. Their effects will likely linger and expand as long as Trump remains in office, and maybe longer.
Donald Trump's short presidency has seen a barrage of scandals, firings, resignations, and gaffes that would long ago have toppled other administrations. The fact that he's endured this long begs the question of just what, exactly, matters anymore?
Saturday Night Live tackled that question in a sketch last night that felt like something out of Black Mirror with Jessica Chastain playing the host of an existential game show titled What Even Matters Anymore?
Chastain asked the contestants whether Trump's recent blunders would have any negative impact on the president. The "shithole" comments? "Zero consequences and everyone just moves on." The alleged affair with a porn star? Not even his evangelical base cares. "They say, 'He’s just repented' and they forgive him," Chastain said. "And Mike Pence is like, 'This is my dude.'"
In the final round, Chastain had the contestants write down fictional controversies they believed would matter. It soon became apparent that nothing—even a sex tape featuring Trump and Don Jr.—would result in actual consequences for Trump, prompting Chastain to swig wine straight from the bottle and break the fourth wall.
Overall it was a pretty nihilistic episode of SNL, which seems about right given the way things are going so far in 2018.
Looking back, I realise that I was raised in a very strange world. At the centre of that world was my mother, who was single, addicted to heroin, and – at least to me – the best mum in the world.
Every day, there would be a moment where she'd tell me, "I’ll be there in a second, mousey," before disappearing into her bedroom with a few of her friends and locking the door. As a seven-year-old, I would stand by that locked door for ages, trying to imagine what was happening on the other side.
It took me years to finally figure out what they were doing in there. For a long time, I assumed the adults were having some sort of power nap – they emerged from that room so quiet, so relaxed and so cheerful. I felt like I was missing out, because even after nights that I'd had a full night's sleep, I was still tired. I wanted to be an explorer when I grew up, which I knew would require lots of energy.
The author with his mother, Helga.
My mother had an enormous amount of love to give, and most of it went to me. We'd play together every day – for hours, we would dream up adventures together. I was Link, she was Zelda, and our mission was to defeat the evil demon Ganondorf, who lived around the corner from our home in Liefering, a suburb of Salzburg in western Austria.
First, we had to secure a map and a compass, so we could locate Ganondorf and destroy him. If my mother became too tired for our mission, she had to drink a potion made from poppy pods, to regain her strength.
My mum usually had a bunch of her friends over at her place – like Werner, who told me that he drew his energy from nature and trees. Bertl always reminisced about the glory days of SV Austria Salzburg, while my mother’s boyfriend, Günter, taught me to play chess when I was six years old. He'd learned to play during a stint in prison.
Watch: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask An Undercover Drugs Cop
Probably the only straight-faced lie my mother ever told me was that my dad had died in a car accident before I was born. Only years later, when she and Günter were clean, did they explain that my biological father had died of a heroin overdose. After a few months in prison for possession, he had taken his usual dose – but his tolerance had fallen while he was inside, and it proved to be too much.
In her grief, my pregnant mother considered suicide, but a book she read about Hinduism convinced her that she would be reincarnated as the lowest form of life if she did, so she decided not to.
At school, I was a bit of a problem child – cheeky and badly behaved, though that was basically the norm where I grew up. We lived in a big, green, ground floor flat in an apartment block. We didn't trust anyone who bothered knocking on the main door, since only the police or the postman did so – for me, they were the same thing. Everyone else just clambered over the balcony and walked directly into our living room.
A frequent visitor was my mother's dealer, who we called "The Greek". Once, while mum was in her bedroom, "The Greek" forced me to drink a shot of vodka with him – I was only seven at the time. When my mother found out, she kicked him out of the house. But, as she would later explain to me, everyone deserves a second chance – so she eventually let him come back.
The author's home was always filled with his mother's friends.
In the summer of 1999, when I was eight, my mother was really struggling with her drug use. Günter seemed near death after 23 years of addiction, and I was slowly beginning to understand what was going on around me. My mother had convinced herself that it was fine to take drugs until I was old enough to figure out what she was doing, but, obviously, the truth was that she couldn’t stop.
One day that same year, her old friend Bedda came to visit. He had been in prison with Günter for smuggling. It was like he was a completely different person – he wasn’t tired, dizzy or nervous. He radiated a joy and peace that immediately made my mother cry. Bedda comforted her, and spoke about how Jesus had healed him and set him free.
His presence alone lit up our dark flat – it was like someone was shining a torch in a pitch-black cave. Günter kicked him out of the apartment, before smashing up some furniture and screaming that he didn’t want anything to do with religion. But Bedda came back to explain again how God had freed him from addiction.
Some time after that, my mum and Günter came to see Bedda's new life as a good thing, and the realisation helped them both. Dozens of attempts to get clean had previously failed, after doctors, psychologists and social workers had insisted that the strength to get off drugs had to come from within – a strength that neither of them believed they had. But now their friend Bedda had made it out thanks to his faith in Jesus, and that motivated Günter and my mother to do the same.
My stepfather got clean after more than two decades as an addict, while my mother beat a deep depression that had taken her to the verge of suicide on several occasions. They had felt emptiness, sadness and despair, but now, they were filled with love and security. Unfortunately, not everyone around them was as lucky – many of their friends died as a result of their addiction.
At just 39 years old, my mother died of cancer on the 4th of July, 2012. Throughout her life, she defeated monsters and demons, all the while showing the people close to her an unbelievable amount of love. In the middle of the drug swamp in the Salzburg suburbs I grew up in, I had a beautiful and fulfilling childhood – and for that I have her alone to thank.
Adrian Goiginger’s film Die Beste Aller Welten [The Best in the World] is based on his own childhood and dedicated to his mother, Helga Wachter. It's out now in cinemas across Germany and Austria.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
Senate Still Debating How to Reopen the Government Senators were set to vote on a short-term government funding bill around midday after a late Sunday vote was pushed. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised to introduce legislation to “address” Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—a key sticking point for Democrats—by February 8 if legislators can't compromise on immigration to reach a deal on the budget. GOP senators Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake said they would back the latest incarnation of the funding bill.—NBC News
Lindsey Graham Condemns Stephen Miller The GOP senator attacked President Trump’s senior policy adviser Sunday, blaming him for preventing an agreement between the White House and Congress over immigration. “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration we are going nowhere,” Graham said. The senator claimed Trump’s “heart is right” for a compromise, but he has been “yanked back by staff members.”—CBS News
Congress Sees More Texts from Ousted FBI Agent The Department of Justice has presented lawmakers with unreleased text messages involving Peter Strzok, the FBI agent removed from Robert Mueller’s team for making disparaging remarks about President Trump. Some texts, covering a five-month period in 2016, could not be provided after being lost, however.—AP
Improvised Explosive Devices Detonated at Florida Mall The Eagle Ridge Mall in Florida’s Lake Wales was evacuated Sunday after two improvised explosive devices blew up in a service corridor. Police were searching for a middle-aged white man wearing a gray shirt. The deputy police chief, Troy Schulze, said there was nothing yet “to indicate this act was terrorism,” adding: “We don’t know what the person was trying to achieve.”—CNN
International News
Turkish Military Pushes into Northern Syria Military forces from Turkey moved into northern Syria’s Afrin region and seized territory from the Kurdish militia group YPG, according to state media. The YPG, however, appeared to have retaken two of the besieged villages. The UN Security Council was set to hold a session at least partly focused on the matter Monday. “We’ll work this out,” US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said.—BBC News
Bombing in Southern Thailand Kills Three Three people were killed and at least 22 more injured when a bomb on a motorcycle exploded in a busy market in Yala Province early Monday. No group had yet claimed responsibility for the bombing, but the region has seen repeated attacks by ethnic Malay Islamist militants. The bomb was apparently left next to a stand selling pork.—Reuters
French Prison Workers Ramp Up Strike Two major guards' unions have called for a “total blockage” of prisons in France, where a dispute over safety measures just entered its second week. Strikes began last week following a series of attacks on prison workers by inmates. President Emmanuel Macron has promised a plan to reform his country’s jails by the end of next month.—AFP
Duterte Says He Should Be Shot if He Holds Power Too Long The president of the Philippines insisted he has no intention of becoming a dictator, despite speculation lawmakers want to change the Constitution to allow him to stay in office beyond 2022. “If I overstay and wanted to become a dictator, shoot me, I am not joking,” Duterte told troops during a speech at an army base.—Reuters
Everything Else
Halsey Shares Experience of Sexual Assault at Women’s March In a poem she read at the 2018 Women’s March rally in New York City, the singer revealed she was sexually abused as a child. Entitled “A Story Like Mine,” the poem also detailed Halsey’s more recent experiences of assault and harassment.—Noisey
‘Three Billboards’ Triumphs at SAG Awards Martin McDonagh’s film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won best ensemble movie cast at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Frances McDormand was chosen as best actress and Sam Rockwell as best supporting actor.—Los Angeles Times
Camila Cabello Album Goes Straight to No.1 The former Fifth Harmony member’s first LP Camila debuted at the top of the Billboard 200, doing 119,000 in equivalent album sales. Cabello is the first female solo artist to achieve the feat since Meghan Trainor in January 2015.—Billboard
‘Transformers’ Up for a Slew of Raspberry Awards The latest movie in the Michael Bay series, Transformers: The Last Knight, has been nominated for nine prizes at the Golden Raspberry Awards for the worst films of the year. It edged out Fifty Shades Darker, which earned eight nominations.—USA Today
Fredo Santana Dead at 27 The death of the Chicago rapper was confirmed by his family and the Los Angeles County coroner over the weekend. Santana, who reportedly suffered a seizure at home Friday night, had been in the hospital with liver and kidney failure in October.—Noisey
The National Get Political in New Video The indie rockers released visuals for their new single “Walk It Back.” Director Casey Reas said the clip, featuring CSPAN footage of Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, aims to capture the “spectacle of governance.”—Noisey
Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re looking at an initiative to put some of the country’s most progressive female candidates on the 2018 ballot.
In June 2017, Facebook announced it had passed the 2 billion users mark. It is by far the biggest social network, although Twitter, with 300 million users. and Instagram, with 800 million, still have a considerable slice of the world's population.
We may not like giving away our private details to social media sites, yet clearly, we do it anyway. We agree to terms and conditions blindly in order access what we desire. To Byung-Chul Han, the author of a newly translated book about digital communication, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, this is voluntarily relinquishing our freedom. Han considers the privacy and the private world to be vital to our freedom. He sees us, “of our own free will, [putting] any and all conceivable information about ourselves on the internet, without having the slightest idea who knows what, when or on what occasion… the very idea of protecting privacy is becoming obsolete.”
I share photos of books I buy. I announce some of my political opinions and talk about work on Twitter. I give out more information on social media than I would dream of in a government census or corporate survey. Freedom is the ability to exercise free will. However, if I want a Facebook account, so I can keep up with friends, events, and family who live overseas, I must give up my privacy to Facebook’s Big Data capture. To what extent am I then exercising free will?
Han argues that this is the genius of the digital realm, to make us dependent on it, and render us unable to choose not to use it. “Free choice” he says, “is eliminated to make way for a free selection from the items on offer.”
Han conceives of the digital world as a prison (a “digital panopticon”), in which you are an isolated inmate, sat there staring at your phone, but can be monitored by a whole host of prison guards, such as Google, Facebook, Acxiom and such like. Unlike solitary confinement in normal prisons, the digital prison allows you to communicate with other inmates. Communication is positively encouraged. In fact, you must communicate, voice your opinion, like, share, retweet, join in. We willingly expose our private thoughts, our private data to the guards, “Digital Big Brother, outsources operations to inmates.”
For Han, the internet is an all-seeing god, able to record and recall our sins. Facebook is modern church, a space to come together under one watchful eye. He claims that smartphones are “devotional” objects: “The smartphone works like a rosary”, you scroll the screen like you would thumb through beads; you confess, share, worship via the smartphone interface. “ Like,” Han says later, “is the digital Amen”. Certainly, since Twitter changed the “favourite” emblem (a star) to the “like” (a heart), its function changed. The “favourite” was initially used to bookmark Tweets (often links to articles or videos). Now “like” is used to show agreement, or approval of a post, operating exactly as an “amen”.
When governments take a census they ask for demographic data, meaning data related to the physical realm, where you live, your age, race, gender, job, etc. (the only exception is to ask your religion). The information Big Data collects goes far beyond this. We hand over our personal desires, consumer habits, fears, and relationships voluntarily. Han says a regular prison “has no access to inner thoughts or needs… no access to the psychic realm,” and that, “ demography is not the same thing as psychography [i.e the data of thoughts.]” This means old school statistics and Big Data are miles apart. Traditional opinion polling can only get you so far, Big Data is unlimited. Han claims, “Big Data provides the means for establishing not just an individual but a collective psychogram.” That is, a map of our collective desires and fears. You’ve got to have a lot of faith in democracy, capitalism and benevolent corporations to not worry about this.
Watch:
Consumer society in the West operates almost entirely through emotion. Brands and advertising exploit emotion to sell products. Television utilises emotion to keep you watching. The social media sphere is no different. There is an immediate dopamine release when you use digital media. You post something and it takes off – shares rack up, replies fly in. Sometimes good things come from this, but it can also be destructive.
Han claims we are heading towards a “dictatorship of emotion”. Han says that, “accelerated communication promotes emotionalization. Rationality is slower than emotion, it has no speed.” I don’t think “rationality” is the greatest thing necessarily; prejudice and psychopathy can hide behind supposedly “rational” thinking.
In this Guardianinterview, meme factory “Social Chain” employee Hannah Anderson says, “Low-arousal emotions such as contentment and relaxation are useless in the viral economy”. She says to get real engagement you need to make people feel frustrated, angry or awestruck. Facebook is leading to arms war of emotion, where only the most intense and instantaneous human response will do.
I’m not about to give up Twitter. I’ve learned good things from the people I follow that I might not have picked up on in real life – particularly to do with identity, gender, literature and music. However, Han is out there, with no digital profile whatsoever, sharply assessing how we live our digital life, and forcing me to look a little deeper. There are things going on to help promote online privacy such as the “right to be forgotten” in the Data Protection bill, and Me2B movement to get us to own our own data. But these things aren’t immediate solutions. Reading Pscyhopolitics has made me more aware of my social media output and the philosophical problems my online habits induce. It may well do that for you too.
After my grandmother Cecile died, she began appearing in my grandfather Leonard’s dreams. They were the only two people on a gorgeous tropical island. She had died of a stroke in a hospital bed at the age of 84, yet on the white sand beach, they were young again. She was radiant, like the first day they met.
"Let’s not tell anyone about this place," Leonard would say to Cecile as they walked along the shore. "Otherwise, it will be overrun with tourists."
Only when he reached out to her would Leonard realize it was a dream. There was always an invisible barrier between them. Just as he was about to touch her, his hand would collide with it. They were separated by something like an unbreakable wall of glass.
Years later, when I began collecting dreams from around the globe for my World Dream Atlas project, the themes of my grandfather's dream would emerge again and again. Confronted with the incomprehensibility of death, the mind seems driven to construct metaphors. The departed are frequently encountered in isolated and idealized places, seemingly subconscious visions of heaven. They are often vibrant and youthful, no longer subject to the ravages of time or illness. Finally, the deceased are almost always inaccessible. They cannot be touched for a myriad of reasons and are perpetually on the verge of disappearing.
Below is an assembly of dreams about the dead—11 dreamers all attempting to comprehend their loved ones in the hereafter.
"I was a musician in America once: New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Several years ago they deported me, and now I live in this park. The bench is my living room. Behind the statue is my bedroom. I can sleep well here, unless the children throw rocks at me. Mostly, I dream about my past, my family. My father—rest in peace—was my best friend. I was 18 when he died. He tried to escape Cuba on a raft in 1968, and he drowned in the sea. I dreamed once that I was with him when the raft began to sink. He tried to save me. We died together." —Havana, Cuba
"After my husband died, I saw him in a dream. He said, 'Come with me.' I said, 'You never took me anywhere when you were alive, why are you taking me somewhere now?' He said, 'Why are you talking so much? Come with me.' I was so happy. I told myself not to open my eyes. I wanted to always stay in that dream." —Mumbai, India
"My mom died several years ago. Since then, she has occasionally appeared in my dreams. In one dream, she left me a manual. It was a book that held the secret to everything, she said. It contained all the answers that I had always been looking for in my life. She made me promise not to read it right away. The instructions were to read one page a year. But, after she left, I read the whole thing immediately. When I finished the book, I was so disappointed. There was nothing in it. Nothing answered any of my questions. None of it was profound. It was just strange and mundane things. Then, I realized, that I had completely missed the point. The point was that the unread part was more important than the part that I had read. It was about how the unknown is frightening, but also necessary for hope to exist. Hope lives in what is unknown. She gave me the book to give me hope." —Montague, USA
"My husband died a year ago of kidney failure. He worked too hard. He drank too much. After his death, I couldn't raise our daughter on my waitress salary, so I became a prostitute. It's so hard to be alone. Sometimes, though, my husband returns to me in dreams. He looks good—strong and healthy again, like when we first met. He is always talking, but as hard as I try, I can't understand what he is saying. It is just a long sequence of words with no meaning." —Pattaya, Thailand
"In Afghanistan, one of my friends was killed by his best friend. It was an accidental discharge. Many months later, back in the States, I dreamed that the doorbell rang. My friend was standing there, lit up and happy, with an overnight bag. He had a 48-hour pass from heaven. We spent the entire weekend together—bar hopping, having discussions, and taking my dog, Roxy, to the park. We saw my friend’s best friend there. He embraced him and said, 'You will always be my brother. I don’t want you to feel guilt in your heart for what happened.' Then, I saw my friend holding his neck with blood gushing out. Then, he appeared in his casket wearing his dress uniform, deader than a doornail. I was sweating profusely, and started to tear up. I awoke to Roxy licking my face." —Columbus, USA
"My mother, who died many years ago, often appears in dreams to guide me. 'You love animals,' she said once. 'So, you should be kind to them. It is better to hear birds sing than it is to eat them.' From that day forward, I never touched meat again." —Aït Benhaddou, Morocco
"They had to drag me from his coffin. The next day, I was googling how to kill myself in the most efficient way. I feel guilty for his death. Maybe if I had been more awake that morning I could have told him that it was raining, so be extra careful. The first thing the doctor said was that he hit a truck. He broke his neck. OK. At least he wasn’t shredded. I see my husband’s face in dreams. He’s always in his uniform. He’s come back from somewhere. I feel so relieved. It’s like a normal morning again. I try to say something, but I just can’t. I begin to feel weak, and I know that I’m dying. I’m dying instead of him, and I’m so happy that the last thing I see is his face." —Tokyo, Japan
"I was sleeping when I heard my dead friend’s voice, but I did not see him. 'Babu, Babu,' he said, 'I am so thirsty. Give me something to drink.' Suddenly, I became very thirsty myself. I walked to the lake and began to drink. I drank the entire lake, but still I was thirsty.” —Devpur, India
"My grandmother passed away, and she really could have avoided it if she had gone to a doctor. It broke my heart when it happened, and I was just so mad at her for leaving me. Right after she died, I had three dreams, three nights in a row. She came and tried to hug me, and I said, 'No! You fucking died, and you shouldn’t have! Get away from me!' Since then, I’ve begged her to come back, but she never did. I’ve always regretted it." —New York, USA
"The day that my father passed away, I dreamed of him. He was floating on a river, and I was pushing his body—guiding it. We came to a temple, and I watched his body leave my hands. It wove around the temple in a maze-like fashion before eventually passing through the entrance and falling down into a hole in the floor. When I woke up, I felt sad, but I also had some relief that I had been able to help him pass into the next world." —Jerusalem
"My mom passed away seven years ago. After that, I dreamed about her a lot. It sounds silly, but I felt like she would visit me in my dreams to come check up on me. I had this one really vivid dream about it. I had just heard about a study that ranked the happiest and most depressing cities in the US. The most depressing place to live was Detroit, and the happiest was Boulder, Colorado. Anyway, a few nights later, I had a dream that I was skyping with my mom. I was crying because I hadn’t seen her in forever. I said, 'Where have you been? I've missed you! I've been worried sick!' And, she looked at me, and she goes, 'I’m in Boulder, Colorado.'" —New York, USA
Along with praising Kate McKinnon's impressions of her on SNL, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg weighed in on the ongoing #MeToo movement during a talk at Sundance, revealing one of her "many" experiences with sexual harassment that occurred decades before the term had even been coined, the Washington Post reports.
While she was studying at Cornell in the 1950s, Ginsburg said her chemistry professor offered to give her a practice test after she told him she could use some help getting comfortable with the material on an upcoming exam. When she sat down for the bonafide test, she realized it was identical to the "practice" quiz he'd given her the day before.
"And I knew exactly what he wanted in return," Ginsburg said. "I went to his office and I said, 'How dare you? How dare you do this?' And that was the end of that."
"I deliberately made two mistakes," she added.
She shared the story during a conversation with NPR's Nina Totenberg about her life and career, which she's spent winning landmark battles for women's rights as an attorney and presiding over major gender equality cases as a judge.
"I think it’s about time," Ginsburg said of the #MeToo movement. "For so long women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could do about it. But now the law is on the side of women or men who encounter harassment, and that’s a good thing."
Ginsburg trekked to the film festival in Park City, Utah, for the premiere of a new documentary about her, appropriately titled RBG. The film takes a sweeping look at Ginsburg's life and career and features interviews with Ginsburg's family, friends, and colleagues, including Totenberg, Gloria Steinem, and Bill Clinton. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the justice was pretty taken with the final product.
"I knew it was going to be good," Ginsburg said after a screening on Sunday. "But I haven’t got words for how marvelous it was."
Warning: This story contains graphic details about the investigation.
As the public awaits the results of a Toronto police investigation into the deaths of Toronto billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, the Toronto Star is reporting on a private investigation that concluded the couple was likely murdered by contract killers.
The Shermans, known for their philanthropy work, were found dead in their North York mansion on December 15. Barry Sherman, 75, founded pharmaceutical giant Apotex Inc., and the couple was reportedly worth close to $5 billion. According to police, Barry and Honey, 70, died of “ligature neck compression.
Early media reports said the couple was found hanging by the indoor swimming pool and that police were investigating their deaths as a murder-suicide, however their family described that speculation as “irresponsible.” At the time, police said they were not seeking any suspects and there were no signs of forced entry into the home.
On Friday, the Star published a story based on sources with knowledge of the Sherman family’s private investigation into the deaths. The private investigation team included David Chiasson, the former chief forensic pathologist for Ontario, who conducted a second autopsy, and former homicide detectives. That investigation concluded the couple was murdered, likely by a professional killer or killers.
According to the Star’s sources, the Shermans weren’t hanged but rather were found sitting down by the side of their pool, legs facing away from the pool, with men’s leather belts pulled tightly around their necks. The other end of the belts were tied to a pool railing, ensuring the Shermans would stay upright. The paper also reported that the Shermans’ were likely tied together by their wrists at some point and that there was no sign of drugs in their bodies that could explain their deaths.
Toronto police told VICE Monday that it would not be commenting on the Star’s report.
According to media reports, police were investigating in the couple’s neighbourhood over the weekend. They have classified the deaths as suspicious.
“It is appalling that certain news organizations are promoting the claims of a few private detectives who haven't even seen the crime scene. The cops should be allowed to do their jobs without this kind of manipulation,” tweeted lawyer and pundit Warren Kinsella. But others argue the public has a right to know if police are adequately investigating the Sherman’s deaths.
Kid Rock's Senate bid may not have been serious, but the money he made from fake campaign merchandise was. The musician, born Robert Ritchie, apparently took in more than $100,000 slinging "Kid Rock for Senate" shirts and hats on his website—and all the proceeds have now ended up at a conservative voter registration fund, Detroit Newsreports.
According to Ritchie's publicist, the musician donated around $122,000 to CRNC Action, an off-shoot of College Republicans who helped run voter registration booths at Kid Rock concerts last year. Ritchie earned the money after announcing last year he would no longer be a devil without a cause and instead run for a seat in the US Senate. He launched a website, got himself a campaign slogan—"Pimp of the Nation"—and started selling a steady stream of campaign gear, drumming up accusations that he was violating campaign finance laws.
The hypothetical Senate run certainly smelled like a publicity stunt, especially since Ritchie never got around to filing the official FEC paperwork, but he wrote in an impassioned blog post that the whole thing was "not a hoax" before admitting to Howard Stern that, well, yeah, it was.
"Fuck no, I'm not running for Senate. Are you fucking kidding me?" Ritchie said during an interview on the Howard Stern Show back in October. "Who couldn't figure that out? I'm releasing a new album. I'm going on tour, too. Are you fucking shitting me?"
It's unclear if the hordes of Kid Rock fans scooping up "Kid Rock for Senate" swag knew the whole thing was a fake, but regardless, the merchandise money rolled in, and now it looks like that money rolled right back out—to CRNC Action. CRNC's president, Ted Dooley, confirmed the donation to Detroit News, telling the paper that it received "around $100k" from the musician at the end of last year.
"All of the money raised from the political merchandise was sent directly to CRNC Action," Dooley said.
Ritchie may have donated all the proceeds from his fake campaign back in December, but most of the "Kid Rock for Senate" items are still for sale on the Warner Bros. site—in case anyone out there is still clinging to the dream of Rock '18.
I'm a fairly simple creature. A typical day of mine goes something like this: wake up, turn the kettle on, have a shower, pour a lukewarm Lemsip and watch Chris Tarrant’s Extreme Railways until I get hungry or think of something to do.
Recently, however, I had a day that deviated from the norm. On Wednesday the 6th December, a story I wrote for VICE about transforming my shed into TripAdvisor’s number one restaurant went viral.
What followed was back-to-back TV appearances, no sleep and being called a "naughty boy" on Britain's biggest morning TV show. Here's a 24-hour timeline of that day.
11:00: I open the door of my shed and step onto the decking. The morning is mud-sullen, so I go back inside and dump myself into bed. My phone vibrates into my head. It’s finally happened. The piece I’ve spent the past seven months plotting – the piece every person in my life is sick of hearing about – has dropped.
11:08: I tweet the article, switch over to the other accounts I have and give it a couple of faves. That way, seven months = two faves, at least.
11:19: Whether it’s in my hand or on the desk, my phone gargles. It hasn’t stopped doing that. Fifteen minutes ago, I had 6,500 followers; I now have 6,600.
WATCH:
11:58: Twitter apparently changes my settings so I only get notifications from people who are verified. The guy who does the wine for Gordon Ramsey is lolling, and Rene Redzepi – owner of "four-time world's best restaurant" Noma – is into it too.
12:23: The Shed’s email account is bulging with tens of requests for dinner reservations. Funny, but there’s one that stops me cold. "Proud of you, really I am," it reads, signed off by Guardian food critic Jay Rayner. My scalp tingles.
12:49: First bit of negative feedback is in. A guy angrily messages me as he’d promised his wife a table at the Shed for their anniversary. I get it: my ruse has outed not only me as a pathological charlatan, but him too.
13:43: The first interview request is in. It’s somebody from METRO. They switch me onto a conference line. This switch, I’ll later realise, will add £20 to my phone bill.
14:31: Back at the shed, Grayson Perry has endorsed my non-existent restaurant; PJ Vogt, host of Reply All, has retweeted it; a Tory MP tweets how he’s discreetly enjoying it in Parliament. Then—
14:32: —The burner phone I bought for The Shed rings. "Hello, The Shed at Dulwich?" I answer, out of habit. There’s a moment of silence, a splutter of laughter, then they hang up. This is the first of the many prank calls I'll receive day and night for the next fortnight. A taste of my own medicine.
15:05: I've just given an interview to The Evening Standard, but they’re not happy with that. They’re insisting on coming over tomorrow to photograph my shed. I tell them no on the basis that I don't want them to.
16:52PM: "David Baddiel follows you"?
READ:
18:21: ITV News ring me and, down to their persistence and the patchy phone signal on the Overground train I'm on, I’m forced to get over my principles: I agree to let them come round my shed the following day.
18:39: Within minutes, the BBC call and convince me to do exactly the same.
19:20: My friend who lives in the house whose garden my shed is in calls me, a bit concerned. One of the customers who ate at the Shed and left thinking it was real has just shown up at my door, furious.
19:49: My phone rings. "You’re going on Good Morning Britain tomorrow," says VICE's PR manager, Emily. "Cab will be at yours for 5AM!"
21:08: Supposed to be at a stand-up show but keep popping in and out to speak with CBC (Canada’s BBC, essentially), NPR and Talksport
05:32: I wake up, heart thumping. The car has been waiting outside for 20 minutes. Fuck. Am I actually going to miss Good Morning Britain? I throw on what I was wearing yesterday and look in the mirror: I’ve got that kind of hungover look where it appears you have sawdust packed under your eyelids.
06:01: In makeup, they paint my prawn cracker complexion the colour of chicken.
06:30: I go on the air.
06:45: I’m in the back of a cab on an absolute high, my mum, great aunt and friends texting me, chatting to my driver about TripAdvisor. My phone rings and it gets even better – Paul Ross! He’s just watched me on TV and wants me on his TalkRadio show. The cab takes me there.
07:30: The interview is decent, and Paul’s co-host asks whether I’d be up for chatting with her. Turns out she’s from The Sun. "No," I say, "I’m a Liverpool fan." Paul Ross scrunches his face in my direction. "This is TalkRadio – you effectively just have, mate."
09:43: Have chatted with my mum and dad, who have convinced themselves I came across "very professional" on GMB. I rattle through some more radio interviews.
10:12: Have a load of Facebook friend requests from people who never spoke to me at high school.
11:21: ITV show up, flustered. The two camera crews awkwardly bend around one another to get the same shots of my rotten decking, the spilt paint and the eggs shells on the floor. Tl;dr: I live in a shit hole.
11:32:The Evening Standard has used a cartoon of my Shed to satirise Brexit.
13:12: ITV News are trying to set up a live broadcast, asking me questions, and I nod.
The coming hours are a haze of phone interviews in which I only half make sense, no eating or sleep, cab rides. It’s hard to capture in words just how vacant I was. Good news the whole thing was captured live on Sky News at 16:45, then.
Every year we come across a TV personality who seems to define it. For many people in 2016, it was Barb (who sucked) in Stranger Things. For me, it was Poussey Washington from Orange is the New Black, whose death by guard mirrored the unarmed fatalities at the hands of cops across North America. In 2017 we got our fair share of “Nancy is the worst” takes of course. And 2017 gave us more of Randall Pearson from This is Us— a black and successful man whose anger within his predominately white world echoes a similar sentiment shared with those in 2017’s Trumpian landscape.
As viewers, we have strong emotions for the characters we watch—love ‘em, hate ‘em, can’t stop watching or reading recaps about them, etc—so much so that an ardent TV watcher like me will create some complicated tournament thingy to prove which character is the best. So here we are, where I survey the television landscape in 2018 and crown the character who I think will best define this year.
The Players | Art by Noel Ransome
Rules:
- All characters selected are from shows that average at least an 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, anyone who doesn’t meet this criteria forfeits the right to be included. - Characters are separated by divisions that are totally subject to whatever the hell I felt like classifying them as. No one character from a division will be seen in another. - Only characters who have survived into 2018 qualify (Sorry Bob Newby) and only shows airing this year (Sorry Game of Thrones, Twin Peaks fans) will be included. - Character rankings are based on popularity and the current conversation; not necessarily based on talent. - There’s so much TV, I’m soooo sorry I’m don’t watch your favourite show. I’m sure it is very good.
‘I love that Guy/Girl’ Division
Issa Dee, Insecure / Mad Sweeney, American Gods / Randall Pearson, This Is Us | Images via YouTube, Hulu.
I love that scene in Shawshank Redemption when my man Andy Dufresne parades all bare chested in the pouring rain and laughs at that thunder. He finally escaped. If you’ve seen it, you should damn well love it too. It’s just plain lovable. And it makes me happy. Kinda like a good Kanye West rant. The following characters pretty much personify that same feeling. You just can’t hate on ‘em. And we also couldn’t include our lovable Boby Newby ( Stranger Things 2), because we all know what happened to him
Randall Pearson vs Carmen Wade: Randall Pearson Dev vs Titus Andromedon: Dev Mad Sweeney vs The Ghost of Duke Ellington: Mad Sweeney Kimmy Schmidt vs Joe Carmichael: Kimmy Schmidt Bill Tench vs Bill Potts: Bill Tench Jimmy McGill vs Bobby Carmichael: Jimmy McGill Rainbow Johnson vs Toby Damon: Rainbow Johnson Issa Dee vs Denise: Issa Dee
Quarter Finals:
Randall Pearson vs Dev: Randall Pearson Mad Sweeney vs Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Schmidt Bill Tench vs Jimmy Mcgill: Jimmy Mcgill Rainbow Johnson vs Issa Dee: Rainbow Johnson
Semi Finals:
Randall Pearson vs Kimmy Schmidt: Randall Pearson Jimmy McGill vs Rainbow Johnson: Rainbow Johnson
WINNER: Randall Pearson
Randall Pearson (Sterling K. Brown) | Courtesy of NBC
Analysis:
This was a challenge. Rainbow Johnson played by Tracee Ellis Ross is a natural comedic ball bearing of goodness. Her expressiveness goes from mother to maniac on a dime and often within the same frame. And in a lot of ways, the only thing that hurts her in this black family dynamic of a show ( Black-ish) is that she’s regulated to riding shotgun instead of driving the damn bitch.
In the case of Randall, if you don’t already know for some reason, he’s the adopted third within the family of a white father, mother, brother and sister in This Is Us. There’s a whole lot of dialog around yearning for one’s biological roots here. Each episode of This Is Us is forever a new wrinkle and layer to a family dynamic that in some way mirrors our own. Randall himself is the same anxiety-ridden, but so-damn-lovable person that he’s carried on from past seasons. But we get more vulnerabilities here, especially with an incoming death of a family member and these moments that make him so relatable. And despite his inner conflicts, the nurturing he can still give and receive at both ends of the black and white spectrum make him “that guy.”
Best Asshole Division:
The Shadow Monster, Stranger Things 2 / Perry Lenny Busker, Legion / Aunt Lydia, The Handmaid's Tale | Images via YouTube, Netflix.
This could easily be that guy/girl that dresses in dark primary colours, sporting overly dramatic plot reveals, while choosing the ‘rule the world’ option from the one through 23 “ways to be villian” catalogue. You won’t find any tired Negans ( The Walking Dead) of the TV world here. This isn’t for the slow talking, gotta-reveal-everything through diatribes, jockish villain sorts. These characters/things are essential to making their respective heroes, and the ways in which they go about their business are way removed from the traditional. Some are just really assholes though.
The Shadow Monster vs Lawrence: The Shadow Monster Perry Lenny Buster vs Tyrell Wellick: Perry Lenny Busker Billy Russo vs Dylan Maxwell: Dylan Maxwell The Commander vs Rachel Duncan: The Commander Charles McGill vs Vince Lonigan: Charles McGill Renata Klein vs Rick Sanchez: Rick Sanchez Ed Kemper vs Mr World: Ed Kemper Aunt Lydia vs Cardinal Angelo Voiello: Aunt Lydia
Quarter Finals:
The Shadow Monster vs Perry Lenny Busker: Perry Lenny Busker Dylan Maxwell vs The Commander: The Commander Charles McGill vs Rick Sanchez: Charles McGill Ed Kemper vs Aunt Lydia: Aunt Lydia
Semi-Finals:
Perry Lenny Buster vs The Commander: The Commander Charles McGill vs Aunt Lydia: Aunt Lydia
WINNER: Aunt Lydia
Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) | Courtesy of Hulu.
Analysis:
Let’s be honest here, the current times dictate that a character like The Handmaid's Tale’s The Commander is “easy” asshole material right now. He’s the next level upgrade to every sexist, shitty cis-white-male out there. Behind the holier than thou bravado, the bullshit pleasantries, he’s just an ordinary man with ordinary insecurities. All of these characters in same way do what they do for a particular gain on their end; some are just nutso. But then you got folks like Aunt Lydia.
There’s nothing scarier than a believer that so earnestly follows all the wrong kinds of fucked up-ness. Her Bible is the nightly read. And she still appears to have something you can call morals. This is a woman that actively ensures that other women under her wing function in a system whose sole purpose is to shrink them to the point of subserviency. In this dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale, where women's rights are a pipedream, she only exists to keep the status quo going in her very motherly, but disturbing way. The Commander, being the man that he is, goes with the grain. Functions as he should. Aunt Lydia, being a woman, empowers it, and that’s infinitely more disturbing.
Intensity Division:
Eleven, Stranger Things 2 / Frank Castle, The Punisher / Ivar The Boneless, Vikings | Images via Netflix, YouTube.
You know the kind. The wrong ones. The brooding ones. The ones you accidently fuck with, only to get the wig pushed back while having that whole life you once loved taken...kinda ones. These characters aren’t what you’d call inherent killers, but there’s something tough about them that goes beyond just flash—an emotional toughness. Something beyond just a beat-down or kill that can still be easily conveyed.
Eleven vs Michael Burnham: Eleven Ivar The Boneless vs. Claire Fraser: Ivar The Boneless Frank Castle vs Czernobog: Frank Castle Annalise Keating vs Lenny Belardo: Lenny Belardo Joyce Byers vs Molly Carter: Joyce Byers Offred vs Ruth Wilder: Offred Claire Underwood vs MIke Ehrmantraut: Mike Ehrmantraut Daryl Dixon vs David Haller: David Haller
Quarter Finals
Eleven vs Ivar The Boneless: Ivar The Boneless Frank Castle vs Lenny Belardo: Frank Castle Joyce Byers vs Offred: Offred Mike Ehrmantraut vs David Haller: David Haller
Semi-Finals
Ivar The Boneless vs Frank Castle: Frank Castle Offred vs David Haller: Offred
WINNER: Offred
Offred (Elisabeth Moss) Courtesy of Hulu.
Analysis:
Frank Castle is probably the most mentally damaged, physical-pain-resistant anti-hero in the Marvel universe. His family was killed off, and he’s been seeking revenge in the most fatality-rich way possible ever since...because he can. But what constitutes “not to be fucked with” doesn’t have to necessarily include physical abilities. There’s a certain strength in the case of Offred in being turned into some fertile breeding machine for the rich, without looking to off herself in the process. In a dystopian, anti-women world, still having the mindfulness to survive and still hold hope, and an inner rebellion in the face of hopelessness clearly is something not to be fucked with. She survived 2017, and many are looking forward to how she’ll hopefully fuck up the system in 2018.
The New Guy/Girl Division
Laura Moon, American Gods / Eileen "Candy" Merrell, The Deuce / Jughead Jones, Riverdale | Images via YouTube, HBO.
In many ways, this whole tournament is a tournament of new faces, but these were the ones that did amazing things without fitting into any one category. Some were complicated, others were plain funny, and they all qualified as folks we want to see more of in 2018.
Laura Moon vs Catherine: Laura Moon Eileen “Candy” Merrell vs Jughead Jones: Eileen “Candy” Merrell Nola Darling vs Abigail 'Abby' Parker: Nola Darling Micro vs Celeste Wright: Celeste Wright Mr. Kraz vs Darlene: Darlene Madeline Mackenzie vs Grace Marks: Madeline Mackenzie Samantha White vs Cheryl Blossom: Samantha White Debbie Eagan vs Holden Ford: Debbie Eagan
Quarter Finals:
Laura Moon vs Eileen “Candy” Merrell: Eileen “Candy” Merrell Nola Darling vs Celeste Wright: Celeste Wright Darlene vs Madeline Mackenzie: Madeline Mackenzie Samantha White vs Debbie Eagan: Debbie Eagan
Semi-Finals
Eileen “Candy” Merrell vs Celeste Wright: Eileen “Candy” Merrell Madeline Mackenzie vs Debbie Eagan: Madeline Mackenzie
WINNER: Eileen “Candy” Merrell
Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) Courtesy of HBO.
Analysis:
Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) begins her work on a sidewalk. Frizzled hair, curly, blonde and platinum wig; she’s got a beat, she serves the men, makes that money, and answers to no one. In The Deuce, Candy, a sex worker, simultaneously navigates an industry that objectifies her while utilizing it to elevate her circumstances. There’s something to be said for making an enterprise out of anything at all, but in a damn world that aims to use you? That’s intriguing. In Candy, we see the equal parts beauty and ugliness of a 1970s sex industry. Her body is imperfect, exposed and almost worn, and yet, isn’t demonized. Madeline Martha Mackenzie from Big Little Lies may have “the cool,” the one-liners, and all that good anti-hero shit (watch the show), but Candy’s exposed vulnerability and inner-workings of a world we rarely get to see is the kind of “new” and refreshing we want in 2018.
Final Four:
Randall Pearson vs Aunt Lydia: Randall Pearson Offred vs Eileen “Candy” Merrell: Offred
Analysis:
In terms of the pure quality, talent, and value, these characters are just about evenly matched. But when deciding on a final two, there has to be some real-world importance factored in here. You have Randall Pearson, a living rarity; he’s the representation of the much needed idea that black folk aren’t all the same. We’re more than a trope. This role wasn’t a character written as a black man, this was a character written “for” a black man. There’s a difference. One falls in the way of assumptions, and the other recognizes that what makes us black doesn’t come down to a character trait; it is what it is. Aunt Lydia, while terrifying as fuck in her complacency, can’t compare to the necessity for black images that appear more well rounded in today’s age.
And of course there’s Offred; the protagonist of the oppressed world of Handmaid’s. Her world is the shitty abyss that exists in the absence of #metoo movements and sexual allegations. There’s a strength in her ability to defy all in spite of it too. It’s in the subtle ways her imposed silence conveys the rage around her circumstances, and the fact that she’s able to still maintain her sanity, without offering up the satisfaction of breaking down; that image of strength makes her far a more necessary character in 2018, than the still powerful Eileen “Candy Merrell, who operates in a less demanding scenario.
Championship Round
Offred vs. Randall Pearson: Offred
Analysis:
We expect both (and all) of these characters to do great things in 2018. But in terms of necessity—the right now kind of necessity—we gotta give it up to Offred. Not only does she make for a great fictional character to root for, she also represents the many victims in our current day who’ve been forced to stay silent under similar circumstances; her fiction speaks to a truth that needs to be addressed. And her circumstances are a mirror to what can happen if certain problems are in fact not addressed. She’s definitely the championed pick going into 2018.
Bonus Round!
Takeshi Kovacs, Altered Carbon / Brandon, The Chi / Jeff, Kidding | Images via Netflix / YouTube.
Oh wait, you thought we forgot? You thought this was only a list about 2017’s best going into the big 18? Here’s ten new faces—i.e. Characters from shows premiering in 2018— that we think are going to have a big impact on the year.
There are a ton of great selections here, but we're talking about the most influential, and The Chi’s Brandon wins out here.
When Chicago comes to mind, the general assumption is a city defined by black on black death. It’s the same tired talking points you’ve heard from hillbilly racists around cop on black fatalities. And it’s the figurative talking points around the pitfalls of black culture. In the case of The Chi, there’s a more accurate POV here. It attempts to reveal that good people can actually exist within these climates.
Bradon played by Jason Mitchell (proven range) is the same guy like myself who has had friends that have been murdered. We contain the feels without letting it define us. His goal to be successful despite his demons is the sort of “refreshing” that’s specific to the archaic visions of Chicago. Given our so called woke age of dispelling myths and stereotypes, I have no doubt that Brandon is going to be making a major impact in 2018.
