Those of us who have been guiltily spending our Monday evenings watching a 36-year-old man woo women with wrestling matches and dog shows on the Bachelor will recognize Bekah M., a contestant who's quickly become a fan favourite. You might remember watching her suffer through this cringe-worthy mess a few episodes back:
Photo via the State of California Department of Justice
It wasn't until the North Coast Journal ran a story about the 35 people currently missing from the county that a Bachelor viewer wrote in to say the woman, Rebekah Helena Martinez, might not actually be missing, but just competing for love on the show alongside a bunch of other women.
After the paper notified the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office, a public information officer was able to confirm that Martinez and Bachelor contestant Bekah M. were in fact the same person. The officer, Samantha Karges, told the Coast Journal that Martinez had been reported missing on November 18 by her mother, who said she hadn't heard from her daughter since November 12 after she reportedly went "to Humboldt County to work on a marijuana farm."
"I just got off the phone with Rebekah," Karges said Thursday. "She is in fact the same person. She has been removed from [the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit]."
It's worth pointing out that the show started filming shortly before Martinez was reported missing—September 20, according to Us Weekly—and contestants aren't always given full access to their phones or social media when they're on the show.
But according to People, it sounds like Martinez was actually headed to work on a pot farm in the area, likely after filming the show, and just had bad cell service. When a deputy wasn't able to contact her after her mother reported her missing, she remained on the Missing Persons list.
"All of these farms are out in the hills, so they’re in a place where there’s no cell service. Oftentimes people will come up here and they won’t come back," Karges told People. "It’s actually a huge problem here, so I’m sure that her mother had a legitimate concern."
Whatever the case, it looks like Martinez is alive and well—if just slightly horrified by the whole situation.
Taking care of a developing human being that depends on you to feed it, bathe it, and clean up every time it craps its pants is enough of a full time job, but young couples are finding new ways to balance their career and parenthood. From freelancers who navigate a world without maternity leave to mothers who are taking chances on their art, we meet the people who aren’t letting a little thing like a kid slow them down.
But there are at least three people on this Earth you can be sure won't be tuning into the game this Sunday—or maybe will, but only to learn a thing or two. Their names are Ryan, Sara, and Justin, and as they proved on Thursday night's episode of Jeopardy!, they couldn't care less about the sport.
They'd all religiously avoided the "Talkin' Football" category until there was nothing left on the board, at which point one of them reluctantly agreed to try out the $200 clue. All three went dead silent when it came time to answer, eliciting a snarky "I can tell you guys are big football fans" from Alex Trebek. And boy was he right: The contestants made it all the way down the board without even trying to answer a single question about the sport.
After a clue about coach Tom Landry yielded nothing but crickets, Trebek started to pick up on just how little the contestants knew about the ol' hut hut.
"You think we should go to commercial?" he asked, leaving the audience howling.
Next up was a question about a fair catch—essentially, what a punt returner does when he doesn't want this to happen. Again, the buzzer sounded without a word. Pretty soon, the $800 clue had come and gone.
"Let's look at the $1,000 clue, just for the fun of it," Trebek said. "If you guys ring in and get this one, I will die."
Needless to say, they didn't. While the audience lost it and that weird, jazz-fusion Jeopardy! theme played Trebek out, he brought the round to a close.
"We're gonna take a break," he said. "I have to talk to them."
Perhaps the most significant assertion in the memo is that the applications against Page—which were ultimately approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court—cited an article by journalist Michael Isikoff, as well as the dossier itself, which was prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. The memo rightly notes the Isikoff article in question “is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News,” though it presents no evidence to support the insinuation that Isikoff did not do additional reporting. Moreover, the memo complains that an attorney at law firm Perkins Coie, who had been retained by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, knew Steele shared the information with Isikoff, but presents no evidence that anyone investigating Page was aware of that fact. In other words, even the most potentially damning insinuation in the memo—that the feds were leaning on a news story they knew was derived from a partisan source—doesn’t hold up.
That flimsiness extends to the rest of the document, the release of which FBI officials and Democrats have been furiously lobbying against for days, in part because it amounts to ammunition Trump and his allies can use to try to shut down the Russia investigation. Even on first reading, the most striking part of the memo is what it leaves out.
Among other things, the memo obfuscates one hugely important detail. While it complains that the FISA applications did not reveal the source of Christopher Steele’s funding—and thus did not concede his potentially partisan bent—it never says (much less proves) that the feds knew specifically who provided that funding. Rather, it vaguely describes “the political origins” of the dossier and asserts that “it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier.” Somehow, Republicans fail to explicitly answer a huge question central to their case for some kind of witch-hunt against Trump: Did the people making the FISA application actually know it was the Democratic Party that paid for the dossier, rather than Fusion, which had a history of clients that included both Republican and Democratic “political actors”?
Similarly, the memo ignores key details about Carter Page’s own political activities. When Congressman Devin Nunes defended releasing his memo in spite of FBI complaints earlier this week, he claimed “top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” suggesting (as President Trump has) that feds were going after the campaign itself. The memo is really dodgy on just this point.
What the memo indicates is that the Justice Department submitted a FISA application against Page on October 21, 2016, at the height of the fall campaign. The same paragraph says Page “served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign,” but the memo nowhere acknowledges that, starting about a month earlier, the campaign had loudly distanced itself from Page, in part because of public questions raised about his ties to Russia. Campaign communications director Jason Miller told the Hill on or before September 24 that Page ”is not an advisor and has made no contribution to the campaign.” When asked if Page was still part of the Trump campaign a day later, Kellyanne Conway stated flatly, “No, he's not,” adding, “He's certainly not part of the campaign that I'm running.” Page himself even said he was taking a leave of absence.
Which is to say the memo fails to account for the fact that Page was no longer on Team Trump when the feds went after him in 2016.
Likewise, the memo does not explicitly acknowledge a previous FISA application that’s been reported against Page as far back as 2014, possibly set up because he was being actively recruited by Russian spies who subsequently were expelled or imprisoned. What the memo suggests is simply that the feds submitted reauthorization applications around January 20, 2017, in April 2017, and July of 2017. With each reauthorization, as the memo alludes, the Justice Department would have had to show that it continued to obtain foreign intelligence from the surveillance. That also means the FISA Court approved three reauthorizations after the Steele dossier became public—and the Trump team itself started debunking it.
So Page continued to look like a spy—or someone being recruited as one—to FBI counterintelligence agents well into the Trump presidency. And FISA judges continued to buy that assessment.
Meanwhile, the memo is silent about other potential pieces of intelligence that supported a wiretap on Carter Page. According to a transcript, a memo contextualizing this one, written by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, has 36 footnotes, suggesting there’s far more than the dossier in play here. Even the GOP memo’s claim that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe—who retired this week—testified that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information” is incomplete; by providing such a claim out of context, McCabe’s meaning remains unclear. By “information,” did McCabe mean the accumulating evidence that Russia had attempted to compromise the Trump campaign? Or did he mean the specific allegation that a trip Page took to Russia in July 2016 involved some kind of payoff for help shaping American policy, as the Steele dossier suggested?
The memo doesn’t tell us.
And in spite of the memo’s title and the heated claims Republicans have been making for weeks, much of the memo actually doesn’t pertain to Page’s FISA application at all. It reveals then-Deputy Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr appropriately noted Steele’s apparent hope to ensure Trump not become President. But even there, the memo doesn’t explain whether that primarily stemmed from concerns about Russia or more personal political animus, which is particularly relevant given that Steele is not an American voter. The memo also reveals that after Steele’s communications with the press became known, his informant status was properly terminated. It further describes Trump’s being briefed on the dossier without explaining why: because the Intelligence Community thought it important for Trump to know the rumors being spread about him.
For a much-hyped document promising to explain how the feds abused their power, this memo is best understood for what it, itself, leaves out. That means we should have the same questions about Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that they have about federal law enforcement. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
On Friday, the long-awaited, much-hyped memo from Republican congressman Devin Nunes was released to the public over the objections of Democrats and the FBI and with the approval of Donald Trump. This four-page document purports to show what it describes as "a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect American people from abuses related to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] process." The basic idea is that the FBI relied on shaky information from a dossier funded by Democrats to get a warrant to spy on former Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page, and during that process concealed the document's partisan origins from a secret surveillance court.
Democrats have accused Republicans behind the memo of cherry-picking information and trying to discredit the entire Russia investigation by casting aspersions on a single warrant. And there are certainly a number of ways to attack the memo's credibility. It's not clear if the information the FBI had from the dossier was wrong (the memo doesn't make any claims about that). Bias on behalf of the dossier's author may not have mattered in a court setting. It's unclear how important that dossier info was relative to other factors, though the memo states that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said the FBI wouldn't have sought a warrant without information from the dossier. (The Daily Beast has sources that dispute that bit.) The memo itself admits basically concedes that larger Russia investigation began because of information spilled to an Australian official by another Trump associate, not Page. The monitoring of Page began after he had left the Trump campaign under a cloud of suspicion regarding his Russia connections, so any claims that that surveillance him was an attempt to target Trump seem off. After all, the FBI was aware of Page's (rather blundering) contact with Russian spies back in 2013 and monitored that contact in 2014. At the very least, it's impossible to judge the memo's claims (or the claims of the not-yet-released memo from the Democrats attacking the Nunes memo) without knowing more about the FISA warrant application—which is extremely classified information.
But the purpose of the memo was never to increase transparency around the Russia investigation, as many on the right—and in the White House—have asserted. (If transparency was the goal, why not release the Democrats' dueling memo as well, or even a redacted version of the warrant application itself?) Obviously the idea behind releasing the memo is to focus attention on the idea that the Russia investigation is tainted, a deep state production designed to bring down Trump. And as flimsy as the thing may look, it could serve Trump with all the justification he needs to make some very big moves.
Unsurprisingly, the memo is leading every political news site in the country, and the right-wing press is setting itself on fire. "Revealed: FBI, DOJ Lied to FISA Court, Withheld Key Info" declared a Breitbart homepage headline. (The article headline toned it down somewhat.) "THE MEMO DROPS: Bombshell doc says British spy’s dossier, paid for by Clinton campaign, key to Trump snooping warrant," is what the Fox News website went with. And on the Drudge Report, a link to a middle-of-the-road CBS story was adorned with an FBI logo and "DISGRACE" in massive letters.
Trump is a president uniquely keyed into and influenced by right-wing media, and he's been his usual hyperbolic self around the memo. In the hours before it dropped, he tweeted, "The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans" and quoted a conservative activist who accused the Obama administration of convincing "a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team." The release of memo, and the accompanying conservative response, suggests the anti-FBI rhetoric peddled by Republicans in recent days is going to get even more aggressive.
Current speculation is centered on whether Trump will fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (who oversees the Russia investigation since Jeff Sessions recused himself), then appoint someone more sycophantic who might can Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Reporters asked Trump if he was thinking about firing Rosenstein on Friday, and he replied, "You figure that one out."
The playbook here is fairly obvious. Under normal circumstances, Trump's dismissal of Rosenstein—who he appointed in the first place—and Mueller, who was praised by Republicans and Democrats less than nine months ago, would be a sign that his administration was spinning out of control. But with all this confusion and doubt in the air, Trump could have enough cover to do whatever he wants. There would be protests, the Democrats would denounce him—but there are always protests, and the Democrats are always denouncing Trump. If a Democratic memo says one thing and a Republican memo says another, is America's media ecosystem capable of sussing out the facts at this point? Who even knows which parts of that notorious dossier were corroborated by the FBI and which parts weren't?
The doubt spread by a balkanized and partisan press was Trump's friend in 2016: Maybe Trump seems corrupt and racist, maybe he's hiding something in those tax returns he won't release, maybe he lies a lot, but isn't Hillary Clinton corrupt, too? Isn't she hiding emails, or something? That same kind of doubt is serving him as president. The memo and the accompanying stories don't need to prove that the FBI is actually out to get Trump. They just need to plant enough of a hint in enough people's minds that something is going on there—to convince them that who knows, maybe Trump is right to clean house.
It’s Saturday night, the lights are dim, the music loud, and the restaurant is packed. I’m making my way through the crowd with a tray of martinis, full to the brim with sloppy pink liquid. The tray slips out of my hands and falls to the ground. The thin-stemmed martini glasses shatter into thousands of shards. I lose my balance and fall, face-first, into the pile of strawberry sludge-covered glass. One shard pierces through my neck and slices into my jugular, blood is squirting through my fingers and pouring onto the floor.
I laugh to myself and the thought leaves my mind. Extreme hypotheticals are always running through my head if I’m doing something that involves sharp, heavy, or elevated objects. For someone with thanatophobia, AKA extreme death anxiety, the mind is a wild place to be.
It’s no surprise that worrying about death is relatively common, which is why thanatophobia isn’t a clinically recognized condition. But for many people, thinking about death is more than just curiosity. It’s a constant set of horror scenes that leave you too scared to eat a grape without images of choking to your death looping through your mind.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been scared of death, although I’ve never been properly diagnosed with thanatophobia. Not just the process of dying, but ceasing to exist. Whether I’ll be six-feet under, sprinkled into the sea, or eaten for Sunday dinner ancient Amazonian style, I’ll be gone forever and that’s not an easy thought to confront.
Katie Miotła, 29, is a new mom who lives in the Toronto-area who suffers from thanatophobia. Miotła says her death anxiety isn’t about the thought of her own death, but the death of her mother. She first discovered her death anxiety after her mother made a series of trips to the hospital for unknown reasons. “The first time she went to the hospital I immediately went to visit her there,” she says. “I remember standing beside her bed and feeling nauseous, my face turned white and later on I woke up in a hospital bed.” Miotła had fainted due to the overload of stress the thought of her mother’s death brought. “A couple months later, my mother and I were getting ready for a road trip when she came down the stairs and said she needed to go to the hospital. I started to sweat and got dizzy again,” she says. “It was the same thing I had experienced at the hospital.” That was the moment when Miotła realized her mother was the trigger to her death anxiety.
Fears exist on a spectrum and affect people differently depending on underlying factors. Some specialists argue that death anxiety often comes coupled with other mental health disorders such as PTSD, depression, and general anxiety disorder. A recent study also showed that women in their 20s are more likely to experience death anxiety with a second spike in their 50s.
While there is no definitive answer to curb my curiosity, there is some relief in understanding how my fear developed.
For Andrew Gentile, co-owner of Toronto Hypnotherapy, treating clients with death anxiety is just a part of his days’ work. Using therapy in hypnosis, Gentile says he guides clients through a 45-minute “magic carpet ride” to rid them of their deepest fears. He dims the office lights, leaving just enough light to see his clients’ faces. They lay back, reclined, covered by a blanket. He watches them breathe, monitoring the rise and fall of the chest until just the right moment. The jaw starts to slack as relaxation sets in, the shape of their eyes shift from right to left underneath their eyelids. He waits for the body to start twitching, signaling a deep sleep before he takes them on a journey through the imagination realm.
“I have them imagine a beautiful place to create the tone of safety and calm their system,” says Gentile. “Once they feel like they’re in a good place, we can approach the difficult memories.”
Gentile’s philosophy is that phobias and anxiety are generally a result of one of three things: lived trauma, religious dogma, or a fear of the unknown. Gentile customizes his approach with clients by evaluating the source of the problem. “Fears are learned and can be traced back,” he says. In hypnotherapy sessions, he is able to take his clients back to where it all began and reframe the childhood interpretation of the event that later manifested into a major fear or anxiety.
As someone who grew up non-religious and extremely curious, my anxiety toward death stemmed from having no available theory as to what’s after life. While there is no definitive answer to curb my curiosity, there is some relief in understanding how my fear developed. For someone whose anxiety is based off of fearing the unknown, resolution requires a different approach than those with trauma from lived experiences or religious dogma.
“You can’t have anxiety about the past. You can have trauma, regret, and shame which can all lead to depression, but anxiety is only about the future,” says Gentile. The future is always unknown, and many people associate the unknown with danger or being out of control, he says. The subconscious mind is always trying to protect us from danger so we imagine the worst-case scenario.
Luckily for me, my anxiety around death isn’t debilitating. Aside from some spooky thoughts, it hasn’t affected my life in any way. I still eat grapes like a champ and confidently weave through Toronto traffic like a Nascar driver while slabbing on mascara. People like Miotła, who has fainted twice because of her death anxiety, are not so lucky.
In my lifetime, it’s unlikely that I’ll have all the answers about death that I’m looking for. Gentile suggests having a creative outlet as another way to neutralize anxiety and curb triggers. Personally, I’ve managed to hone in on my anxious thoughts about death by aggressively ticking things off my bucket list—I’m currently writing my first book. And when all else fails, YOLO?
Nodding to recent headlines about the president's alleged infidelity, Cecily Strong's Trump asked Kennedy how to be the first lady when "Donald makes it so hard." Portman's Jackie reminded Trump that she's far from the the only first lady to deal with cheating.
But that didn't make Trump feel much better and so a bevy of other former first ladies appeared to help Melania summon the courage to attend the SOTU and "stand there and clap."
Ruth Simmons, 25, and Tobi Adebajo, 24, are two queer black women who started Femmes of Colour, the UK collective that offers a “healing and affirming space to celebrate people of colour of all genders who are also femme.” It all started with a brunch that Adebajo hosted with her partner in 2016 because she wanted “to be in a room of femmes.” Over 30 people turned up to the gathering at Common House, including Simmons. When it became clear that the brunch was a success, Simmons asked Adebajo to help expand the effort of uniting femmes of colour.
Femmes of Colour is situated underneath the umbrella of the Purple Rain Collective, a group that works to support queer people of colour in the UK. Both Simmons and Adebajo have done work within Purple Rain. But Femmes of Colour is a positive force in its own right. The group functions both as a gathering space and a support system. And in just one year’s time, it has blossomed into a community of more than 300 members of varying gender identities, experiences, and walks of life.
Designed for collaboration, organization, and networking, Femmes of Colour has gone from crammed brunches at Adebajo’s home to a bi-monthly event at Them Downstairs, a queer-centric venue in Kentish Town. The group’s most recent event was an open mic and art display-turned-dance party that lasted until 3 AM. I caught up with Simmons and Adebajo to discuss the work they've been doing and what they've got planned for the future.
Photo by Adae
VICE: Why was it important to create Femmes of Colour? Ruth Simmons: Well, where else does it exist? Who else is going to do it? I think it’s needed because we need each other, we need systems of support and networking. Tobi Adebajo: We know, as black women, that if we’re not doing this shit, then no one is going to. So we decided to do the shit, and it's been great! Why shouldn’t we focus on the feminine side of things? Why is that seen as something that is weak and othered? Within Femmes of Colour, there is an overarching front that is against everything that is toxic about masculinity.
How do you define “femme?” We have this conversation very regularly, because it means different things to different people, especially when you think about it historically. Femme has been used a lot by lesbians within the LGBTQ community, and sometimes with strict binaries. But I think the word has evolved over time. For me, "femme" is an intersection of my sexuality and gender and the way it positions me within society. When I think of femme, I think about people who don’t ascribe to masculinity in conventional ways.
Can you tell me about one of the most rewarding moments to come out of Femmes of Colour? Simmons: This may sound a bit dumb, but it was the first time I saw someone cry in public. I’m an emotional person and never really felt comfortable crying in a public space, but someone at one of our events felt comfortable enough to cry. That was the first moment for me to say, OK, wow. This is really doing something. People are finding something here that they maybe don’t have elsewhere. Adebajo: I would say the feeling of collectivity. There is shared effort in setup, clean up, things like that. I never feel tired after a Femmes of Colour event. I may be physically exhausted from dancing, but never emotionally tired.
Photo by Adae
Describe the atmosphere at a Femmes of Colour event. My face always ends up hurting from laughing and smiling. Simmons: “Warm” is the first thing that comes to mind. We try to make a space as inviting and loving as it can be before people even step into it. So we will get cushions, blankets, fairy lights, materials to make art with, zines if people want to read them, things like that.
How do you build community in a city like London? London is definitely a tough place to organize in. While I was born and raised here, it can be difficult to find places [to organize in] because so many people, especially queer people of color, are being priced out of neighborhoods and costs are rising everywhere. And spaces being accessible in terms of wheelchair access, cost, and comfort, are hard to find as well. But we’ve just tried to prioritize accessibility and having digital methods of meeting and conversing as well. Adebajo: The thing I’ve learned the most from organizing everyday is, you can never be a perfect organizer. You’re always going to need to be open to hearing the people around you, the people you are creating space for. That's helped us contribute to community and also be reflective.
What is the importance of intersectionality in both of your lives and work? Both: Liiifeeee! Adebajo: Shout out to all the black feminists and womanists! Shoutout to Kimberlé Crenshaw! Simmons: Intersectionality is great because no one is saying that anyone’s life is easy. No one is saying that your life is a walk in the park. All it's saying is that, in this small way, in this systematic way, your life is slightly easier than someone who does not have that privilege. I’ve struggled with acknowledging privilege. Like with the body-positive movement, even though I am someone who is not completely comfortable with their body, I’m aware that I am a thin person. It's not saying, “Oh I don't experience struggle with my body,” but it’s in a systematic way. I’m not denied healthcare or given discriminatory looks on the street. And it can be hard, but it needs to be done.
How did you find your voices as black women with various identities? Adebajo: It’s kind of out of necessity, you know? It’s a survival thing. Especially after having my daughter, the need to be more involved with activism became more urgent. This place is not made for us, so by definition, you have to find ways to survive within the UK. Simmons: I agree, definitely out of necessity. When you’re at the intersection of so many overlapping identities—queer, black, femme, disabled, poor—there’s no other way you can survive if you’re not trying to be aware, looking out for yourself and others, and healing. I can’t see myself as uninvolved, because the work is too important and it has to be done. And it's usually femmes doing it. Adebajo: Say it again for the people in the back!
This story is a part of VICE's ongoing effort to highlight the contributions of black women around the globe who are making a difference. To read more stories about strong black women making history today, go here. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Your "friend" has been on a few dates and they’re feeling pretty Frank Ocean about their new someone. They get starry-eyed and think this one might be the one that gives them reason to disable their OKCupid account. Then they get the dreaded text message stating “a connection is missing” or some other bit of breakup polite-speak.
Your friend is devastated and not ready to move onto their next Tinder match. They keep checking their former fling's Twitter and Instagram accounts, wondering what went wrong. It feels worse than a breakup with a long-term partner, for which friends are understanding and there are well-known stages of grief. Months later, “your friend” is still hung up on this thing and wondering if they’re developing into a stalker or a weirdo or at least a sad sack.
The Reality
Unrequited love has a long, romanticized history in song and literature—from Dante’s poems about Beatrice to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and from George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” There are few subjects more dramatic than a passion that burns mercilessly against all external forces, even the beloved’s rejection, and in spite of the distress it causes the bearer.
Being bypassed by someone who could have been your one and only may seem like a rare, gut-wrenching tragedy worthy of a novel or epic poem. Psychologists say it’s quite common.
Roy Baumeister and Sara Wotman, then of Case Western Reserve University, authored one of the definitive studies on unrequited love, published in 1993. In their sample of 155 men and women, more than 98 percent said they had given or received intense romantic passion that went unreciprocated at some point in their lives.
The reason for the commonality of this phenomenon is a harsh truth: “Most of us think of ourselves as more desirable than others actually see us,” Baumeister told The New York Times. “So people we think of as of equal desirability may not see it the same way.” That’s "science" for: We don’t know when someone is out of our league.
Clinical psychologists say it’s normal to feel initial shock and pain at rejection from someone you’re into. “It is not weird if a person continues to think about a short-term partner well after the end of a relationship,” says Shani Graves, a licensed mental health counselor in New York City. “It actually happens more often than people care to admit.” Graves adds, “At times, we place ‘all of our eggs in one basket’ with hopes of the person being something truly significant in our lives.” This can give us a distorted view of how wonderful it’s going during the brief courtship and “limits us from truly getting to know the person,” Graves says. “So when thing don't work out, we're left confused and hurt.”
Tanisha M. Ranger, a clinical psychologist in Henderson, Nevada, adds that “human beings have this thing with unfinished business. We remember things that are incomplete much more so than completed ones.” Ranger noted the Zeigarnik effect, a cognitive bias by which people are more likely to remember or find significant tasks that are left undone, could be applied to larger emotional tasks, like maintaining the interest of a potential romantic partner.
Also, new relationships literally alter your brain chemistry. Serotine starts flowing and the mind rides a wave. “When something is hot and heavy, even if brief, it has made changes in your brain chemicals that your brain likes, and it's not a fan of having them taken away,” Ranger says. “When that drops, it creates feelings of loneliness and longing.”
Long-term relationships usually peter out and deflate over a period of months. So their end, though painful, usually comes as a gradual process. The end of a new relationship, and the shutoff of all the euphoria and energy that comes with it, is like the abrupt cutoff of a drug. And with that comes withdrawal.
The Worst That Can Happen
First, keep in mind that it’s usually the shunners who feel worse in these situations than the shunned, a surprise finding of the Case Western study above.
One reason is that the rejected person gets so much encouragement from culture. “The aspiring lover has many guidelines for pursuit—what to say, how to let them know you like them, and why to keep going despite an initial cold reaction,” Baumeister told the Times. “There must be a thousand B-movies where at first the girl rejects the hero, who persists and wins her in the end. So the would-be lovers just keep trying, like in all those movies. While the pursuer has all these tactics to try, over and over people who were being pursued told us, ‘I didn't know what to say, I never hurt anyone before.’”
While the idea of the scorned lover who refuses to extinguish their passion may have seemed chivalrous in the ages of Dante, Goethe, and Dickens, a refusal to accept no for an answer is, to put it mildly, problematic for the 21st century.
Negative impulses can also arise if the rejected person doesn’t have adequate resiliency. “The hurt, if not healed, is left to linger and fester,” Graves says, “causing social media stalking, wanting answers, and to know if the person has moved on as well.”
This distress can be a manifestation of deeper issues. “Pathological attachment rooted in relational trauma can manifest as obsessive preoccupation with someone one dated briefly,” says Sheri Heller, a licensed clinical social worker in New York City. She says “love addiction” is “a terribly painful disorder fueled by traumatic loneliness and an absence of secure bonding and mirroring throughout one’s lifespan.”
Those afflicted see a new relationship as a “fix” and reel when it’s over. After rejection, “the love addict goes into severe debilitating withdrawal,” Heller says. “During withdrawal, abandonment panic is interspersed with unresolved traumatic memory and self-loathing.”
What Will Probably Happen
Most people get over it. That was Baumeister’s finding. The rejected “think they can never be happy again,” he said in a piece in the Chicago Tribune. “More often than not, they’re wrong.”
“There's no set length of time in which one must heal, especially when feelings are involved,” says Racine R. Henry, founder of Sankofa Marriage and Family Therapy in New York City. But your friend can reduce behaviors that will prolong the pain. “Delete their contact info,” Henry says, “remove pictures from your phone, unfollow and perhaps even block them from social media. Let your friends know that person is no longer a topic of conversation. You can't possibly erase them from your memory but you can put some space between yourself and that other person.”
Several mental health professionals interviewed for this story recommend a period of self-care and support from friends. After a while (even a stretch of time that may seem disproportionate to the length of the affair), your friend should feel normal and ready to date again.
What to Tell Your Friend: You’re not a weirdo and, unless you’ve already crossed some lines, you’re not a creep or stalker. You are also not Dante Alighieri or Cyrano de fucking Bergerac. You just felt hope and a chemical rush as a natural response to a promising new relationship and it’s normal to feel distressed when it’s over. Understand it wasn’t easy for the other person either. Take whatever time you need, but if this continues to tear you up inside, you might have underlining loneliness and attachment issues to address with a professional.
Moments after the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots, winning their first ever Super Bowl, mobs of people started to fill the city's streets.
Philadelphia Police had prepared for the night by greasing various light poles with hydraulic fluid to keep fans from climbing up them after the chaos that ensued when the Eagles won the NFC Championship game in January.
But even with a heavy police presence and well lubricated poles, the good people of Philadelphia managed to go completely nuts, celebrating the surprise win the only way they know how.
Some people celebrated in various states of undress.
Others climbed up to the awning of the Ritz-Carlton to fully embrace the City of Brotherly Love.
Until it collapsed.
With the light poles greased, some took to scaling the gates of city hall instead—keg in hand.
Then things started to take a turn into The Purge territory. Fires were started:
Cars were flipped:
And this guy celebrated by kneeling on the ground to take a giant bite of horse shit:
The premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story may be less than four months away, but information about the movie has been troublingly sparse. We haven't had anything to judge the movie by except for some director troubles, rumours, and a vague plot synopsis. But on Sunday night, Disney debuted a short teaser for Solo during the Super Bowl and quickly followed it up Monday morning with an honest-to-God trailer—and the thing was worth the wait.
Sunday's 40-second teaser was short, hopping through a few disconnected action scenes and Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian in a glorious fur coat before ending with a quick shot of Alden Ehrenreich's Han Solo looking furtively through the shadows of space Venetian blinds like he's Tracer Bullet. But Monday's two-minute trailer, which premiered on Good Morning America, gives us our first in-depth look at Solo.
There are plenty of old Star Wars standbys, like Chewie, the Millennium Falcon, and Lando, but the trailer also introduces some of Solo's new characters, like Emilia Clarke's Qi'Ra and Beckett, played by Woody Harrelson, who convinces Han to join his crew. But the most interesting piece of the trailer isn't the cast—it's the tone of the thing. Solo looks like nothing we've seen from a Star Wars movie yet. It might actually look... kind of good?
There's none of The Force Awakens candy-coloured action or the flat, gritty feel of Rogue One. This Solo footage is like stylized space noir, sharing more in common with Ridley Scott's original Blade Runner than anything from the Star Wars franchise. It's unclear how much of these aesthetic choices were initially decided by the film's original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, or how much new director Ron Howard tweaked things, but ultimately, we can probably thank the film's DP—Bradford Young, the cinematography wizard who shot Arrival—for the success of its look.
The verdict is still out on Alden Ehrenreich's Han Solo, though. Harrison Ford would be a tough act to follow for any actor, and Ehrenreich was rumoured to have needed acting lessons to get through Solo production. Ehrenreich doesn't get much screen time in either the teaser or the trailer, which is a little odd, seeing as how he's the titular character and all. What bits we do get of Ehrenreich are mostly in voiceover or for a quick punchline, so it's hard to judge his acting chops.
We'll have to wait until Solo's Memorial Day release to see if Ehrenreich can pull it off or if Solo will be the bomb Disney is rumored to be gearing up for it to be. In any case, at least it'll be a well-shot bomb. Give the Solo teaser and full trailer a watch above.
On the ground floor of an old hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Paul Scibak recounted what it's like waking up with an addiction to heroin. It’s a crippling shot of anxiety the second you open your eyes, he told VICE.
“You literally feel like you’re being ripped apart. Your skin’s peeling, you bones are breaking, your muscles are cramping.... Waking up and not having your dose there, that’s a painful experience."
For three decades, Scibak said that nearly every morning, he rushed to get dressed, raced out the door, and did whatever he had to for his first fix of the day. He committed crimes and went to jail more than once. There were always hassles with dealers.
“The average addict is using anywhere from $20 to $100 a day. That’s baseline for their heroin addiction. And that’s a lot of money to come up with,” Scibak continued. “So you’re breaking into cars, you’re stealing from stores, you’re mugging people, you’re doing whatever it takes to get that cash. And so you’re constantly under pressure from police.”
Then fentanyl arrived and things got worse. Scibak’s addiction became “a game of Russian roulette.”
Until last month, when his life changed entirely in less than a week.
One morning, Scibak opened his eyes and the anxiety was gone. Instead of rushing out for drugs, he blinked sleepily a few times, remained in bed for a minute, and then took a lazy start to the day. Scibak made a cup of coffee and read the news online for a little bit. Simple pleasures that he once regarded as luxuries impossibly beyond his reach.
Scibak is still addicted to opioids. But instead of buying from a dealer on the corner, he visits a small clinic that was recently integrated into the social-housing complex where he lives in the Downtown Eastside. There, twice a day, Scibak receives a calculated dose of pharmaceutical hydromorphone, a semi-synthetic opioid similar to heroin.
“On the fourth day, I stopped feeling anxiety,” he said. “Then I think it was the seventh day when I started to think, ‘What am I going to do with my time?’ I had all of this spare time because I wasn’t hunting dope.”
Scibak got a job.
“Three weeks ago, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do every morning for my next fix,” he said. “Now I’m working. And I hadn’t worked in 10 years.”
Paul Scibak credits a prescription-opioid program with returning stability to his life. Today Scibak holds a steady job working three shifts a week at a clinic in the Downtown Eastside. | Photo by Travis Lupick.
In December 2017, a proposal for Vancouver to distribute prescription opioids via vending machines attracted headlines acrossCanada and the United States. The novel delivery method distracted from the real story: with or without vending machines, it’s a radical harm-reduction initiative that will move entrenched addicts out of the alleys and into Canada's health-care system.
Canada’s opioid crisis has hit British Columbia harder than anywhere else. Last year, 1,422 people across the province died after taking drugs. That compares to an average of 204 deaths for the years 2001 to 2010 and accounts for more than a third of all overdose deaths in Canada in 2017. The epidemic has B.C. health officials desperate for new ideas to bring the numbers back under control. And so, last December, the BC Centre for Disease Control said it plans to distribute hydromorphone (brand name Dilaudid) as a clean alternative to street drugs contaminated with fentanyl.
Controversial though it might be, the idea is not entirely new. In Vancouver, the nonprofit Portland Hotel Society (PHS) quietly launched the hydromorphone program of which Scibak is a patient more than a year ago, in September 2016.
At PHS headquarters on East Hastings Street, the program’s founder, Dr. Christy Sutherland , recounted its caution beginning.
As the resident physician for PHS, a nonprofit organization with more than a dozen social-housing projects in the Downtown Eastside, Sutherland has a lot of patients who struggle with severe addiction issues. As overdose deaths soared through late-2016, she grew increasingly concerned for one woman in particular.
“I was worried she was going to die, because of the overdose crisis,” Sutherland recalled.
Just down the street, at a facility called Crosstown Clinic, doctors had a small number of entrenched addicts on diacetylmorphine, the medical term for prescription heroin.
Sutherland had observed how Crosstown patients’ lives improved after they transitioned from street drugs to diacetylmorphine. But she doubted she could duplicate what they were doing there. In Canada, there’s no domestic producer for diacetylmorphine. The drug has to be imported from Europe and its storage and distribution in Canada comes with arduous and expensive security requirements. Alternatively, hydromorphone is similar to heroin and is readily available as a prescription painkiller widely used by doctors across Canada. Sutherland decided she would apply for permission to use the pain medication in an off-label capacity for the management of an opioid addiction.
To her surprise, Health Canada had actually anticipated such a request. “We were waiting for a doctor to apply, and you’re the first one,” an official told her. “You’re approved.”
The program began without additional funding and Sutherland proceeded slowly. For the first five months, there was just one patient and Sutherland oversaw her care personally. In January 2017, she took on a second, another tenant at one of PHS’s social-housing sites. Finally, in May 2017, Sutherland decided it was time to expand.
PHS operates a clinic just off East Hastings called the Columbia Street Community Clinic. They integrated a small supervised-injection site there where each new patient was given a prescribed dose of liquid hydromorphone that they then injected under a nurse's supervision.
Sutherland described an average patient’s profile before enrolling in the program: most had spent more than ten years addicted to heroin and had repeatedly failed with traditional treatments such as methadone. Then she recounted the rapid progress she witnessed most patients make in just over their first week receiving injectable hydromorphone.
“We called it the hipster effect,” Sutherland said with a laugh. “Someone would come in so ill with their opioid-use disorder, and then we would do their titration [calculating an appropriate dose], and on day-three, they would come in wearing a collared shirt, cuffed jeans, and looking like a million bucks.”
Just as obvious were improvements in patients’ mental health, Sutherland said.
In February 2017 protesters marched through Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, calling on the government to make clean opioids available as an alternative to street drugs contaminated by fentanyl. | Photo by Travis Lupick.
“Heroin only lasts eight hours. So imagine using heroin and then realizing, ‘Okay, I have an eight-hour window until I need to get more heroin.’ Over and over,” she said. “When we start someone on injectables, suddenly, they’re free from that. They have time and they have money. It’s like, ‘What do you want to do now?’ They reunite with family, buy a computer, start going to the library. They reconnect with their life.”
The same month that Sutherland moved the program into the Columbia Street Community Clinic, she partnered with another pharmacy two blocks away, called Pier Health Resource Centre. In a telephone interview, Pier’s director, Bobby Milroy, said he’s similarly observed drastic improvements in both patients’ physical and mental health. Then he noted a third benefit: “It’s preventing deaths, without question,” Milroy said.
He emphasized the potential for other neighbourhoods affected by the fentanyl crisis, noting how relatively easy it was to make injectable hydromorphone available as an alternative treatment for an entrenched addiction to opioids.
“This is, essentially, a completely new program that did not require any additional legislation,” he explained. “We’re not violating any rules, not requiring any exemptions [from drug laws], and the medication is readily available.”
Sutherland cautioned that injectable hydromorphone does not work for everyone. Some patients experience side effects and many say they would prefer diacetylmorphine. "It works really well when it does, but it doesn't work every time," she said.
Today Sutherland and Milroy have 68 clients on injectable hydromorphone. Nineteen are administered the drug in three PHS hotels and 49 receive it at Pier Health Resource Centre.
Other jurisdictions have taken note. Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton are establishing small injectable-hydromorphone programs of their own. And now Vancouver is preparing to expand access with the BC Centre of Disease Control (BCCDC) proposal to distribute an oral form of the drug via vending machines.
In September 2016, Dr. Christy Sutherland began transitioning patients using street drugs to injectable hydromorphone, a prescription painkiller similar to heroin. | Photo by Travis Lupick.
Dr. Mark Tyndall is the BCCDC’s executive director and the man who first floated the vending machine idea, which is expected to launch in the spring. In a telephone interview, he praised Sutherland’s work and said the goal now is to reduce barriers and enroll larger numbers of patients to remove them from the risks posed by BC’s contaminated street drugs.
“There are a lot of people who are not interested in going in two or three times a day to be observed [while injecting],” Tyndall said. “About 80 percent of people who have died of overdoses [in BC] are using alone and many of them are just not interested in that kind of medicalized model.”
He described his vision for the vending-machine program: Distribution points will more-closely resemble secure ATMs (as opposed to vending machines). Each patient will have met with a doctor and received a prescription for a specific number of hydromorphone pills, likely between three and nine each day. Then they’ll use a digital membership card to access the pills via the vending machines.
“We really trained people, with criminalization and prohibition, to stay out of sight, as much as possible,” Tyndall said. “The one thing that I’m hoping to show with a low-barrier pill program is that we can draw some people out who currently aren’t engaged in care.”
At PHS’s Molson Hotel, Paul Scibak prepared for his shift working at the clinic that's integrated into the ground floor there. He said that in addition to stability, receiving a clean supply of opioids via the health-care system has had another effect he never anticipated: for the first time in years, it’s let him begin to think about getting off of drugs.
“With the anxiety of always needing, it occupies so much time and energy that you can’t think about a lot of things that are going on in your life,” Scibak explained. “I’m starting to get clarity. Not like an epiphany, but clarity. Now I’m thinking about where I’m at, what I’m doing, and where I’m going with this. Do I want to stay down here? Do I want to be involved with the people who I’m involved with? Do I still want to use?”
Philadelphia Celebrates Surprise Super Bowl Victory Eagles fans took over their city's streets Sunday night following the team's first-ever Super Bowl triumph—a 41–33 win over the New England Patriots. Cops reported the looting of a gas station and "several acts of vandalism," among other, stranger, offenses.—VICE / The New York Times
Democrats Push to Release Their Own FBI Memo Following the release of the so-called Nunes Memo alleging surveillance abuses at the FBI at the expense of the Trump campaign and its associates, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee were doing everything they could to publish their own memo detailing a different version of events. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged President Trump to approve the disclosure.—VICE News / ABC News
Two People Killed in Amtrak Crash Another 116 people were injured when an Amtrak train hit a stopped freight train in South Carolina early Sunday. According to the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the collision occurred after the Miami-bound Amtrak train switched over to a line where the freight train was stationary. The Amtrak train's conductor and engineer were both killed.—AP
Senators to Launch Bipartisan Immigration Bill Republican John McCain and Democrat Christopher Coons were advancing legislation in the Senate that would review border security and give all DACA recipients who have lived in the US since 2013 a path to citizenship. The McCain-Coons bill would reportedly legalize the status of more DREAMers than the plan proposed by the White House, which would cover just 1.8 million immigrants.—The Wall Street Journal
International News
Maldives Political Crisis Deepens The country's military surrounded the Maldives parliament building Sunday in the latest palpable display of political chaos there. The attorney general said he'd been told there would be an impeachment attempt on incumbent president Abdulla Yameen. This after a dispute between Yameen and the Supreme Court over judges' order that the government release imprisoned members of the opposition and restore ousted lawmakers to parliament.—Al Jazeera
South Korea Accuses North Korea of Stealing Bitcoin Authorities in Seoul claimed North Korean operatives were hacking cryptocurrency exchanges, swiping bitcoin and other digital currencies worth billions of South Korean won. Lawmaker Kim Byung-kee from the South's parliamentary intelligence committee said the North Koreans were still at it despite efforts to bolster security.—VICE News
Ecuador to End Unlimited Presidential Terms An early tally suggested nearly two-thirds of Ecuadorians voted to impose strict two-term limits on the presidency. The referendum was called by President Lenin Moreno, and the result was likely to prevent his rival and former president Rafael Correa from standing again in the 2021 presidential race.—BBC News
Everything Else
Justin Timberlake's Halftime Prince Tribute Catches Flak The singer performed Prince's "I Would Die 4 U" while video showed the late star playing the song live. Although it stopped short of a total hologram, fans pointed out Prince’s stated dislike of any "situation where you could jam with any artist from the past."—USA Today
Ram Super Bowl Ad Condemned for Using MLK Speech The truck company was subjected to a barrage of online criticism after Sunday night’s "Built to Serve" ad used part of a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr. The company said it had received approval from the civil rights leader's estate.—Slate
Migos Album Debuts at No.1 The Atlanta superstars earned their second consecutive No.1 LP as Culture II seized the top spot on the Billboard 200, shifting 199,000 copies in equivalent sales. Migos become only the fifth hip-hop group to have two or more No.1 albums.—Billboard
Man Arrested for Alleged Plan to Kidnap Lana Del Rey Florida police released a statement over the weekend explaining 43-year-old Michael Hunt had been arrested after they received a tip he posed a "credible" kidnapping threat to the singer. Officers reportedly found Hunt with a knife and Lana Del Rey concert tickets.—Noisey
Lady Gaga Cancels European Tour The star announced she will not be able to play the final ten European dates due to her fibromyalgia. A statement released over the weekend explained Gaga is "suffering from severe pain that has materially impacted her ability to perform live."—Noisey
New 'Crocodile Dundee' Movie Is Actually Just a Tourism Ad Tourism Australia was behind a clip recently released as a trailer for a full-length reboot of the Crocodile Dundee franchise. The ad, starring Chris Hemsworth and Danny McBride, aired during the Super Bowl.—VICE
TVO is investigating TV host Steve Paikin after allegations of sexual harassment were levied against him by former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson.
Thomson, who ran unsuccessful but headline grabbing campaigns for mayor in 2010 and 2014, made the allegations in a blind post on her website, Women’s Post on Friday. Thomson—while not naming Paikin directly—says that the incident happened during her candidacy in 2010 and took place during a business lunch between Paikin, herself, and her assistant in regards to possible appearance on Paikin’s show, The Agenda.
“Not five minutes into the lunch the host asked me if I would sleep with him. My assistant almost spit his drink all over the table. I politely told the host that I loved my husband and would never do that. I then excused myself, went to the washroom and called my campaign manager,” reads her account.
Steve Paikin is the host of the popular current affairs show, The Agenda, and will not be suspended during the investigation. Lisa de Wilde, TVO’s CEO, confirmed they will be investigating the claims in a statement released to their website. She said they first became aware of the allegations on February 3 after Paikin forwarded an email he received from Thomson to the company.
“We believe it is important that allegations be fully heard and investigated. Therefore, TVO is appointing an independent third party to investigate Ms. Thomson’s allegation,” reads de Wilde’s statement. “However, based on the evidence to date, TVO sees no reason to remove Mr. Paikin from his role as Host for The Agenda pending the outcome of the investigation.”
TVO states that “stories related to this subject matter” will be reported on by other journalists employed by the company. In her story, Thomson writes that in the years following the incident Paikin has approached her “several times, usually at political functions, to suggest we 'sleep together' and he always laughs about it.”
Thomson also famously raised allegations against then-mayor Rob Ford in 2013, prior to the first reports of the so-called crack video. Thomson stated that Ford, while drunk, groped her at a party by “grabbing her ass” and “suggested I should have been in Florida with him last week because his wife wasn't there.”
In 1949, LIFE ran a photo essay about ranching in the American West that featured a cowboy named Clarence Hailey Long. Pictured in a ten-gallon Stetson hat with a pouch of tobacco hanging out of his front pocket, the 39-year-old Texan was the post-war ideal of masculinity. When Chicago advertising executive Leo Burnett saw the photo essay, he also saw a way to market filtered cigarettes—at the time considered feminine—to men. Starting in 1954, Long served as the inspiration for a series of smoking, smoldering Marlboro Men, the stars of a revolutionary campaign that made the previously obscure brand's sales jump more than 3,000 percent in one year.
Cigarette ads have been banned from television since 1971, and as a condition of a class action settlement against major tobacco companies in the late 90s, mascots like the Marlboro Man were out, too. Meanwhile, young people today watch two and a half times more internet content than TV. That means they'd be more likely to hear about a new product on YouTube than television. And while YouTube does run more traditional ads before user-created videos, brands also pay YouTube stars to review their products. One creator currently profiting off this arrangement is Donny Karle, who reviews vaping products under the handle DonnySmokes.
Although he's far from rugged looking, with his penchant for colorful tank tops and wiry frame, you might call Karle the Marlboro Man of the digital era. The 21-year-old's first hit off a vape came as a college freshman when a friend passed him an e-cigarette en route to class. Soon after, he was carrying a heavy rig that weighed down his pants, leaked nicotine juice everywhere, and caused his boss to yell at him when he blew thick clouds at work. So on May 4, 2017, he purchased a much slimmer and inconspicuous e-cigarette called the JUUL. He also decided to film an unboxing video—his first-ever foray into the medium—and share six minutes' worth of thoughts.
"My goal is to stop vaping, because I really don't wanna vape," he says in the review. "I just want something that's cheaper that I can hit less." However, that plan was apparently foiled when the unboxing video racked up an impressive 52,000 views, which caused Karle to keep creating more vaping content under the handle. In less than a year, he's racked up almost 120,000 subscribers on his channel, where he posts videos multiple times per week. Although his original plan was to quit vaping, smoking on camera has become his full-time job.
It all became more of a business than a hobby when Karle reached about 1,000 followers. That's when he was able to leverage his platform to get free swag from certain vape companies. But comped nicotine juice is not the main draw here. DonnySmokes gets about three million views per month, which he says translates to an income of about $1,200 from YouTube. But much more lucrative is the fact that he also charges any company that wants a review a flat fee. According to Karle, he gets between four and six emails a day from people seeking reviews, and the money he makes from the companies whose products he reviews amounts to more than he'd make if he'd gotten a more traditional job in business. And although he got his start posting "sesh" and troubleshooting videos focusing on one particular product, Karle says his profile is such that he'll no longer work for free.
"I know for a fact that JUUL is way too cheap to pay what I charge for a review," he bragged to me over the phone, audibly exhaling from a vape. "I don’t like to get into the specifics of [money], especially when I’m being recorded. But I’m not doing bad at all, so don’t think these companies are getting the best of me."
Whether he knows it or not, the fact that Karle gets paid for any of his videos puts him in the middle of a debate that much older media professionals have been trying to settle for years. Even if you don't know the term "native advertising," you know the concept. Think sponsored posts that appear on your Twitter or Facebook feeds, which are integrated seamlessly into the stream, and only read as product plugs if you're paying close attention. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has had a difficult time regulating the practice, because they haven't come up with a clear set of guidelines that media companies should follow, according to a 2015 academic journal article written by Brandon Einstein called "Reading Between the Lines." Basically, he argues, the marketing strategy's effectiveness comes from inadvertent "deception," or the fact that consumers who think they are news savvy actually have a difficult time telling the difference between, say, a music review and an advertisement for Buick. YouTube told me in a statement that content creators are responsible for policing themselves, which means verbally acknowledging that they're engaging in paid promotion. However, the idea of all the rule-breakers getting caught is laughable, given the sheer amount of content being generated by the site.
Granted, the distinction between a review and a commercial is sometimes a bit murky. You wouldn't consider a positive New York Times movie review an advertisement, for instance, though it's obviously encouraging people to spend money on a movie ticket. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Karle's vape reviews tend to skew on the positive side, he said that the companies sending him free products don't get pre-approval on his videos. Michael Tolmach, the co-founder and CEO of the vape company Eonsmoke, corroborated that claim. "He's incredibly selective and even if you pay him he may not review your products if you are not relevant," he told me. "He also warned us that if the products are garbage, then he will review them as such. No guarantees. Welcome to DonnySmokes." While Karle refused to disclose how much companies pay him for reviewing their products, Tolmach told me Eonsmoke pays $1000 a pop.
The fact that Karle is getting paid by the brands themselves for his reviews—something that he doesn't advertise—constitutes a conflict of interest that overwhelms any overtures he might make toward something like journalistic objectivity. "It depends if you ask what the word 'advertising' means to you and how you think about that," says Anne Tuchman, a marketing professor who studies e-cigarettes at Northwestern University. "I would say this sounds like a classic example of native advertising."
Teens in particular seem to have a shaky handle on the concept of native advertising. When Stanford researchers showed 203 middle schoolers an example of it on Slate.com as part of a 2016 study, a whopping 80 percent of them believed it was just another article despite it being labeled as sponsored content. This is particularly worrying because several of Karle's videos suggest that he's catering to a very young crowd. "How to HIDE & HIT Your JUUL at SCHOOL WITHOUT Getting CAUGHT," for instance, is only useful or interesting to minors. "[A]nybody have any tips on how to order a juul without parents finding out?" reads one comment. (YouTube flagged the video with a warning in January for being "inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.") Another video, which isn't age-gated or flagged, gives tips on how to hide your JUUL from parents.
"There’s not a single chance in the world that somehow all kids in the world are gonna stop vaping or smoking cigarettes," Karle told me. "I’m not trying to say that as a minor, you shouldn’t be doing this, or something like that. I’m here to say ‘Here’s a safer alternative, and I don’t have any opinions on underage vaping or anything like that.’ It’s not something I’m promoting, and it’s not something I’m saying you shouldn’t do. I don’t have an opinion on it at all. People ask me that a lot, what are your opinions on it. My opinion is simply: I don’t have one."
To be sure, there is a difference between a traditional media organization engaging in native advertising and the relatively DIY, small-scale operation Karle is running. But as YouTube and streaming sites take the place of television in terms of reaching young people, it might be worth considering pushing for more clear definitions of what counts as native advertising on platforms like YouTube, as well as whether or not it's responsible for the site's stars to help promote products like vapes in videos aimed at kids.
As dating apps such as Tinder have become standard, some of us who’ve partaken have likely met up with a complete stranger before with little to no screening process. Going on a date with a stranger can be pretty nerve-wracking in terms of safety, which is why when I was using Tinder I’d at least rifle through my suitor’s social media beforehand. Still, I got into some uncomfortable positions on Tinder dates (like this one time when my date wouldn’t stop dry-humping me on a club dancefloor).
Though many of us have probably felt some level of uncomfortable on a date arranged via online dating, there’s the much scarier possibility of becoming the victim of a crime. On January 27, a man who called himself “Dante” online (real name Craig Levy, 31 years old) allegedly sexually assaulted a woman he met up with through online dating in Toronto. Cops have issued a warrant for his arrest; he’s wanted for sexual assault and forcible confinement. Alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who is charged with killing five men in Toronto, was also known to be active on dating sites.
Becoming the victim of a crime is obviously never someone’s fault, but crimes like those listed above are cause for everyone to take a look at how we can be proactive about our safety when online dating.
As it happens, some sex workers have excellent practices on hand for screening people they meet online. So, I talked to one—Jane Way (who uses they/them pronouns)—about what the rest of us can learn from the practices escorts use to screen dates. Way said that, though these tips can translate to many people, it’s important to remember that screening is a privilege not every sex worker is afforded.
Trust your gut. “My gut has never done me wrong,” Way told VICE. “There’s all kinds of red flags, and people will know their red flags specific to their experiences and their traumas around dating.”
Reschedule and measure the potential date’s response. “If I’m having a weird feeling, I’ll ask if we can do 1:30 PM (instead of 1),” Way said. “If he doesn’t give me leeway, he might not give me leeway in the bedroom… He might say no to a condom, he might not listen to my ‘no’s in session.”
Ask to talk on the phone (and don’t accept calls from blocked numbers). “I want to see how willing they are to do things to make me feel comfortable,” Way said. Then, google their phone number. Sometimes a Facebook will even be attached to a phone number.
Location and transportation control. “If some guy is like ‘Hey, I’ll pick you up and we can go to dinner,’ say, ‘No I’ll meet you there.’ If he has a problem with that, that’s a big red flag.”
Ask for personal information. While Way said that johns in Canada are stigmatized because because it’s illegal to buy sex but not illegal to sell it, everyday people going on dates shouldn’t be scared to provide some info about themselves in order to make a potential date feel comfy: where they work, verification of their identity (such as in the form of an ID), social media accounts. “People should be more willing to give up more information in a civilian context,” Way said.
Look at all their social media accounts, including LinkedIn.
Ask for a ‘safe call’ from a friend. “If we’re going to an outcall, we’ll say ‘I’m going to be here for a call between this time and this time. I’ll text you when I get there, and I’ll text you when I leave.’” Way said. “If my friend says ‘I’ll text you at 7:10 when I get there,’ and I don’t hear from her, I get worried.” Having code words or phrases set up with your friend to signal that you’re in danger is best in case a date goes awry.
“Have some excuses in your head,” Way says. Think about excuses you can give to potentially get out of a situation. Have someone call you and make an excuse for why you have to leave, such as saying you have to go watch their pet or child or that there is an emergency.
Put away money and valuables if you’re having someone over to your home.
Documentation. Way recalled their first call ever: “I was dirt poor and basically crashing on couches. It was the middle of the night; I posted an ad on Backpage.” Way said that, as a precaution, they took pictures of their client’s licence plate and checked his ID before driving off with him.
“Whatever you do to feel safe when you’re going on a date with someone and meeting them for the first time, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous it seems to them,” Way said. “If they let you take those steps to feel safe to further the encounter with them, that’s a good sign.”
These days, not much is quiet on the western front. Canada’s only two NDP governments are set to start a trade war against each other over the future of the Trans Mountain pipeline. BC isn’t budging and Alberta is yelling about defending Canada’s honour. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spent a week dancing around questions about how, exactly, he was going to handle his unruly provincial children. It’s the most exciting intergovernmental drama since Saskatchewan and Alberta fought a civil war over license plates.
Roughly 300,000 barrels of bitumen are moved through BC’s ports per day. The Trans Mountain pipeline, which has already been approved for construction by the federal government, is expected to move an additional 590,000 barrels per day from Northern Alberta to the BC coast. The BC government’s sudden decision to convene a science advisory panel (and hold public consultations) has been interpreted by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley as a veto on the pipeline by another means.
Notley’s position is a little conspiratorial, but it’s not an outrageous idea. BC Premier John Horgan campaigned on a pledge to kill Trans Mountain in the 2017 election and now heads a minority NDP government supported by the Greens. Invoking the spectre of Stephen Harper, Notley and her allies have suggested that Horgan is running an unstable coalition government beholden to the ‘radical’ Green party. An outright veto on Trans Mountain would be difficult (even impossible) to defend politically, but allowing the project to die by delay and deferral would be a reasonable backdoor if that was the policy agenda. It would also allow everyone involved on the B.C. end to wash their hands of the final decision, regardless of outcome.
But Rachel Notley is having none of it. Not only is this latest delay an attack on Alberta’s constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of trade, but—because interprovincial infrastructure projects fall under federal jurisdiction—British Columbia is striking at the foundation of Confederation itself. This line of reasoning has been taken for granted by much of the national press.
The federal government, meanwhile, has been emphatic about its commitment to completing the pipeline. While he was in Edmonton as part of his cross-country Town Hall Tour, Trudeau told CHED talk radio that the pipeline is in the national interest and that his government will make sure it gets built. Sure, the provinces have these little spats, but that’s what the federal government is for: to ultimately put any unruly provincial children in their place. Daddy Canada indeed.
Trudeau also wondered about BC’s intention with the panel, as the National Energy Board already did an environmental assessment of Trans Mountain before its own approval. But as (occasional VICE writer and a pal of mine) James Wilt notes in DeSmog, that review contained a number of shortcomings—particularly when it came to its analysis of spill cleanup capacity and a bitumen spill’s impact on the marine environment.
Later, speaking to a town hall in Nanaimo, BC, Trudeau went further and said that the Trans Mountain pipeline was actually part of a planet-friendly package deal. No bitumen pipeline? No Ocean Protection Plan, no carbon price, no way for Canada to meet Paris’ emissions targets. The prime minister did not explain how these are connected, nor did he specify in either case what his government would actually do to get the pipeline built.
Federal natural resources minister Jim Carr was similarly circumspect about what the federal government might do if BC pulls the brakes on bitumen shipping, but much more cavalier than the prime minister. After all, prior to its own approval, the federal government had undertaken its own round of consultations, so as far as Carr is concerned there is no reason to assume outright malice from the B.C. government. But Carr reiterated to Global News that Ottawa would accept no delays on the Trans Mountain file, although, like Trudeau, he did not provide any real details.
As it stands, this is turning into quick-draw duel where no one involved has any bullets. Alberta has suspended talks with BC over purchasing up to $500 million in electricity, but it’s not clear what else Notley can really do. Putting any part of this dispute up for resolution in a courtroom would all but ensure that the Trans Mountain pipeline dies before it starts. Plus, most of the traditional weapons of an interprovincial trade war are no longer at the state’s disposal: it would be difficult for Alberta to directly boycott/tax BC goods or shut off oil shipments to the coast, because both would violate the New West Partnership Agreement and could end up in a courtroom.
Similarly, despite Ottawa’s reassurances, direct federal involvement here is rather limited. Unless the BC NDP backs down on its own—which is unlikely given Horgan’s domestic political situation—the feds will likely be limited to waiting out the results of the advisory panel. Unless they want to take their cues from Notley and launch a court challenge to defend their constitutional authority over the ‘national interest’, in which case they would likely lose and kill the project through delays anyway. (It is worth noting that a number of BC First Nations are already challenging Kinder Morgan and the federal government in court over shortcomings in the National Energy Board approval process. The Northern Gateway pipeline was killed that way and it’s possible—or probable—that Trans Mountain is already DOA.
Alternatively, the federal government may decide that it is in their best interest to stay aloof and let the chips fall where they may. Best case scenario is that everything turns out fine. Worst case scenario for them, the pipeline doesn’t get built through no fault of their own due to an interprovincial squabble in a part of the country where Liberal support is tepid at best. They get to placate (or at least not enrage) East Coast environmentalists and Indigenous activists, while plausibly denying having any direct hand in killing the project. Sowing discord within the federal NDP by encouraging Canada’s only two Dipper governments to wage an ideological/trade war against each other probably doesn’t hurt, either.
Another failed pipeline before the 2019 provincial election would also all but doom the Alberta NDP government. A United Conservative Alberta under Premier Jason Kenney is also guaranteed to be a thorn in Justin Trudeau’s side on any number of progressive causes, particularly the environment. But if the federal Liberals already expect an inevitable Tory restoration in Alberta (which is not unreasonable), then they’re damned whatever happens with Kinder Morgan.
That’s Daddy Canada for you, baby. This isn’t the paternalistic federalism of Poppy Pierre where dad’s going to come out screaming to put the fear of Jesus into you if you’re caught staying up past your bedroom or picking on your little brother. Justin Trudeau is the young cool dad who knows the kids will be easier to put down at bedtime if he just lets them beat the shit out of each other in the backyard all day while he drinks beer on the deck with the b’ys.
What year is it? 2018! Except somehow, also, 1986. Because Tourism Australia have a brand new ad, it just aired during the Superbowl and everything, and the premise iiiiissss… CROCODILE DUNDEE!
What’s more Australian than Crocodile Dundee? You might argue lots of things. However it’s true that much of our international image still rests on stereotypes bred by the likes of Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin. Perhaps understanding this, or wanting to distance themselves from previous campaigns that were too Baz Luhrmann-y or too Lara Bingle-y, Tourism Australia have capitalised on the potent advertising force that is nostalgia and released a profoundly blokey advertisement enticing foreigners to visit this great country.
In an admittedly inspired move, the advertisement stars Chris Hemsworth and Danny McBride—with a cameo from Hoges, who apparently gave the whole thing his blessing during what news.com.au has referred to as a “clandestine meeting” last year.
You might recall a teaser for the ad entered the internet consciousness in January, when many speculated it was a real trailer for a real film. People appeared genuinely excited about this, even though 2001’s unfortunate Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles holds an 11 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating and exists as firm proof that Mick Dundee doesn’t necessarily translate for contemporary audiences.
I’ve watched the superbowl ad a few times now and am increasingly convinced that Chris Hemsworth and Danny McBride could feasibly provide this tragic country with the self-consciously masculine outback adventure comedy it so desperately craves. The NT Times agrees, and has launched a petition to #BringBackDundee which I guess you can sign here, if that feels necessary.
HBO released a new trailer for Westworld during the Super Bowl on Sunday, and it looks like Dolores will lead the human-slaying rampage next season.
"We built this world together... this world where dreams come true," Dolores says, as beautiful images of western landscapes give way to the total mayhem happening behind the scenes. "But this world is a lie. This world deserves to die." Then she gets down to business laying waste to her Delos masters.
The minute-long trailer gives us plenty of glimpses at returning characters—Maeve, Hector, Clementine, and Jeffrey Wright's Bernard, among others—and hints at a massive host rebellion in the new season. But the brief clip leaves us with a lot more questions than answers. Specifically, who's that creepy, Slenderman-looking bot lurking behind Arnold? And why is Dolores dressed up in modern clothes? Does she escape the park to the outside world?
We never got to see the larger world in season one, even though Maeve came dangerously close to venturing outside the park in the finale, so it's likely that we'll get a peek at the larger world this time around. Fans have long-speculated about what is going on outside—or if the show is even set on our world at all. One brief moment in the trailer appears to take place inside a modern apartment, but judging by the way some of the guests freeze like hosts, this might just be set in a previously-unseen portion of the park like a 21st century-inspired Nostalgia World.
It's important to note also that the entire trailer could just be a misdirection by the Westworld creators, because some of the footage was shot exclusively for the Super Bowl spot and won't appear in the season, according toHollywood Reporter. That likely refers to those scenic vista shots, which could be a pretty nice addition to the interactive new Westworld website but feel pretty incongruous with where season two appears to be heading. But who knows? We shouldn't put it past Westworld co-creator Jonah Nolan to shoot a bunch of fake scenes for the trailer just to mess with his audience.
We'll have to wait until the new season premieres on April 22 to know what's really going on. Until then, watch the full trailer above.
Police are investigating teenage parents who broadcast disturbing “discipline” measures taken against their toddler on Snapchat. A series of videos posted over the weekend showed the Melbourne duo waterboarding their young child and putting a bag over his face. They disguised their faces with emojis in order to avoid being identified, but police were quickly able to trace their location.
"We’re not child abusing them, we’re just teaching them discipline," the toddler’s father said in one video. "Making sure that they’re not dead, but then they can’t breathe."
The child can be heard crying as his parents laugh in the background of the videos. In footage of them running water over their toddler’s face, the accompanying caption reads "he is dying tonight for sure". Another video was captioned “I can’t believe he is steal [sic] alive”.
In response to criticism, the teenagers released a final video defending their parenting skills. "If I want to slap my child I’ll slap him as much as I want, if he needs some discipline I’ll continue to slap him," the father says in the video. His face is obscured by a smiley emoji.
After numerous Snapchat users reported the parents, police were able to trace and locate them in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston. According to a media statement from Victorian Police, the toddler was found safe and well. His parents are both being investigated by authorities.
Last year Snapchat introduced new measures designed to make it easier for users to report incidences of abuse. Users are able to report stories that don’t follow community guidelines by pressing and holding the snap, and issuing an alert. In January, a Canadian teen made headlines after being arrested posting a video of her torturing a domestic animal. Earlier this month a Californian teen met a similar fate.
