Do you remember ReBoot? That really hard-to-describe Canadian 90s CG show about a Guardian dude named Bob, and his buddies Enzo and Dot Matrix? Do you remember how they lived in that computer system called the Mainframe where they apparently went on grand CGI adventures? Oh, and they occasionally fought off those bad dudes called viruses who had names like Megabyte and Hexadecimal for some reason. Then there was that certain event that would occur in every now and then, where a mysterious “user” would play a computer-game that would impact their world, and if they lost said game as AI (artificial intelligence), everyone in the vicinity would just die...ReBoot, ReBoot?
Sure you do.
Well, Netflix apparently wants to relive the madness with a live-action-ey, 20-episode series reboot of ReBoot called ReBoot: The Guardian Code, and yesterday, they released a trailer for it.
YAY? Well listen...here's the trailer.
Along with something you can call a story, we’re getting that ReBoot logo again...and there's some 3D looking shit in this, so...that's cool. Megabyte is in the movie too. We’re also getting a nice dose of 90s camp which I don’t think was intentional but you know...nice. And the characters share the same names from the original which is great for acCuraZy...and stuff. Can't wait...
After promising to make up for last October's Szechuan Sauce disaster, it looks like McDonald's is staying true to its word: On Thursday, the company announced it's bringing back 20 million packets of the stuff.
That's good news for the army of Rick and Morty fans who demanded a chance to try the tangy goo after Rick sang its praises on an episode of the show, and finally got their wish—then rioted when McD's ran out. Unlike the last time the burger chain brought it back, it looks like fans won't have to wait in a long-ass line to try it: Starting February 26, a boatload of it will be available for purchase at every McDonald's in the US.
To explain exactly how and why they fucked up the first go-round, the international corporation also released a podcast about the sauce fiasco—which host Catherine LeClaire describes as a show "all about what happens when the best of intentions go wrong."
On the first episode, LeClaire explains that McDonald's didn't understand just how much demand there would be for an obscure, decades-old dip. She interviews McDonald's employees—like the social media face of the company, Chef Mike—along with Rick and Morty fans like Deadmau5 and sauce lotto winner David Wozman, who describes what it's like to actually try the stuff.
"I absolutely remember it from way back in 1998," Wozman says. "Initially you get a taste of the soy, and then it leads into the sesame and a lot of the other spices.”
The strange world of branded podcasts aside, some Rick and Morty superfans are flipping out at the chance to finally taste a culinary product their hero called his "one-armed man," with folks who have actually tried the sauce dominating the show's subreddit. Already, a picture of an open packet and a box of chicken tenders has garnered almost 1,000 comments.
Others have deemed Szechuan Sauce a tired meme or "the new bitcoin." One user posted a beleaguered request for an end to all the sauce posts. "Been looking for discussion of the upcoming season 4 and just see the same sauce packets over and over again," wrote steveberry05.
There's no way to know if demand will rise to the fever pitch of October 7, 2017, but given what happened last time, things could get pretty wild. Anyone who decides to hit up Mickey D's next week should probably bring a helmet.
Danai Gurira, who plays Okoye in Black Panther, is a “strong” black woman. To most, this can sound like progress, but when repeated enough times, “a strong black woman” starts to ring hollow.
Sure, she could be brilliant, whimsical, vulnerable, and introspective, but “strong” just feels easier—like that re-gifted thing you give to the new girl at a house-party. It’s cheap, faux-empowering, and really just points to the lack of agency that follows most black women.
We know from endless studies that women in film, particularly women of colour, get less dialogue and character development than their white and male counterparts. If you’ve ever watched the 46-second supercut of every line delivered by a person of colour in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or looked up how many superhero movies fail the Bechdel test, you probably have an idea of how one-dimensional black women characters can be. And these stereotypes have consequences in the real world.
On a good day, black women can be framed as happy, nurturing or strong. On a bad day, they’ll be “angry” or an object of sexual conquest. The women in Black Panther are so refreshing compared to these clichés. As a man watching this flick, one of the greatest insights I took away was the normalization of black agency and black women. And it’s strange to say, because up until now, I can’t recall any other film managing to do the same.
When I spoke to Danai Guirira about this, she pretty much supported up my feelings on the matter, but also made me reflect on my own blind spots. “The idea with Black Panther was to have femininity and ferocity as this thing that was so completely covered and so totally normal,” said Danai during our in-person interview in Toronto. “It wasn’t something you had to choose, one or the other, it was the embodiment that all women can be, which was really on the page from the get-go.”
Now I felt what she was saying completely, but even when the Zimbabwean-raised, Iowa-born actress sat in front of me—hands clasped, posture straight, face measured, being her regular damn self—the word “strong” still held my attention. I don’t “know” Danai Gurira, but in that press space of white folks with cameras, lights, and a director standing to our side, this word just stood there. Critics and social media commentators default to these terms like clockwork (strong, powerful, blah blah), like none of it is assumed for the woman as it often is for us men.
Danai Gurira being her regular damn self. | Image courtesy of author.
The mother who raised me stands as the perfect example of a black women that I “know.” She’s “strong” by default because she was my strength and nurturer. I don’t narrow in on this this side of her as if strength was this shocking thing. She’s also a person of quirkiness, silliness, curiosity and kindness. Unfortunately though, for the longest time, the black woman that we “don’t know” in television and film have been the persons portrayed on a more superficial shtick. The fewer their numbers, the more they’ve had to live up to an ideal or token “something.” In the case of Hidden Figures, The Help, The Colour Purple among others, there was a responsibility to showcase “strength” that rose out of struggle. Our memories of characters like Celie Johnson, Katherine G. Johnson, and Aibileen Clark revolved around the same word because of what they damn well had to be (strong) and what they couldn’t fully be (everything else). Sexual assault, racism, and dehumanization by white/black men asked for a fortitude that in some ways made them less dynamic. All of it felt extraordinary but linear, in the same way some white chick can look at an NBA player who can dribble, and assume he couldn't be anything beyond that.
Black Panther’s progressive use of black women extends to virtually every frame; from its powerful Dora Milaje warriors, to its enduring queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), and the brilliant Shuri (Letitia Wright), makes the whole idea of the “strong black women” less of a surprise and more of a normalcy that goes without saying.
“The beauty of Black Panther was that our sense of agency was also happening on set as we got to be contributors and collaborators while developing these characters. We were listened to right from the top in terms of our thoughts and that allowed us to feel valued and feel an ownership that shaped them entirely,” Guirira told me.
Blackness and women were every bit a part of this which made this film so special. The intelligence, humour, rigidness, tenderness, so easily afforded to white actresses, served as the whole damn foundation here. No one character felt responsible for maintaining a “specific” presence in a man-made puzzle. There was breathing room for each one with a name to develop into a three-dimensional person like the regular (superhero) folks that they were. So often the opposite is true. The lack of representation instead relegates the represented to quota-filling roles, as if to speak to a version of what a black woman should be.
When someone can only be strong, can only be solid… can only be this one thing—the tough black woman, baby momma, black barbie, gold-digger, take your pick—they lack the agency that makes so many of us diversely human. It’s the kind of thinking that’ll transform the “strong” into the “angry” on a whim; à la the angry black woman; I mean why give a fuck when strength apparently makes one impenetrable.
Instead, black women, despite their willingness to be the bedrock of movements, of people, of men and boys, are also type-casted in this thing we call life. Often fetishised and categorized in a way that diverges into lives beyond film and television scripts. They gotta deal with the same biases that come with their skin, and the shields that are put up around it.
But here in enters this film that so consistently rests on the backs of women with dark skin, natural hair, to an extent that their variety is obvious to the point of being a moot point. If nothing else, I hope for more images like this. I want more black and rich TV stories like Girlfriends and Insecure. I want more films like Girls Trip and Black Panther. And I want content that treats black women as the multi-dimensional persons that they are without tailored responsibilities. Women like Danai Guirira are more than just strong. More than the perceived parts that folks like myself serve up as a compliment. We...I, need to be reminded of that.
Most people assumed that Rebel Media would somehow emerge from the ashes after another tumultuous year of offensive controversies. What most of us didn’t expect is that it would involve a retirement savings plan.
Yes, Canada’s favourite contentious far-right news source has now decided to diversify into the wealth management game, partnering up with an Alberta-based investment firm—Wells Asset Management—to offer an RRSP-eligible retirement savings fund.
It’s of course called the Rebel Freedom Fund, and the only real criteria to stash your money in it is you gotta be an ideologue and have the desire to save for retirement.
“The Rebel Freedom Fund is directed at investors seeking to save for retirement or in retirement that desire modest, regular, steady income. It is intended to be suitable for anyone who wishes to participate in both a financial and ideologically-based investment,” says the fund’s webpage.
You don’t say.
The fund’s key money manager is one Dale Wells, CEO of Wells Asset Management, who professes to be a “strong personal supporter of the Rebel” and saw a way to blend his “professional financial acumen with the moral and ethical values he holds dear as a Canadian.”
When contacted by VICE about Rebel Freedom Fund, Wells reiterated his ideological commitment to the media company. “I’m a Western Canadian boy and it sits well with my personal agenda. There’s a strong right-leaning market that Rebel represents,” he told VICE.
(Incidentally, Wells Asset Management also helped fund the 2016 Denzel Washington period film, Fences).
But the real question is, what exactly does Rebel Media get out of launching an RRSP?
Last year, VICE News attempted to track the funding mechanisms tied to Rebel, to determine just how much money the company makes. The site, according to VICE News, “pulls in $1 million per year from subscriptions alone, which works out to more than 10,000 subscribers,” not nearly enough to fund its downtown Toronto operation.
Sure, you also have donations from rich conservatives—Rebel has reportedly received grant money from the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank tied to the Koch brothers that frequently promotes anti-Muslim views, and the David Horowitz Freedom Centre, another right-wing institution allied with Steve Bannon and members of the Trump presidency. But Rebel, at the end of the day, is a media company whose profits depend on the whims of an audience and rich ideological allies.
Simply put, the RRSP venture is just another way for Rebel to raise money.
According to an information sheet on the fund’s website, you would need a minimum of $5,000 to invest in the fund. The target rate of return is four percent, which is actually slightly below average compared to a standard investment in any kind of popular ETF or index fund.
Your $5,000 goes into a big pool of money which is then invested in “asset-backed debt obligations,” which is just another way of describing the infamous “collateralized debt obligation” or CDO, a structured financial product that partially led to the collapse of the global economy in 2009.
“The Fund does not yet have a track record so the risk level cannot be directly ascertained,” says a disclaimer on the information sheet.
Now, here’s the real tie to Rebel: whatever money the Fund makes will be invested in “projects and opportunities that are, in whole, or in part, directly or indirectly associated with Rebel Media Holdings Inc.” So essentially, your $5,000 is being invested in financial products by Wells Asset Management, the proceeds of which are then used to fund Rebel projects.
All this, of course, will set you up nicely for retirement and just maybe help the Rebel with any of its financial troubles.
When three-year-old Courtney Smith and was raped and murdered in Mississippi in 1990, cops arrested Justin Johnson as a suspect in the heinous crimes. Two years later, Christine Jackson, also a three-year-old child in the same county, was sexually assaulted and killed in a similar manner. Johnson was a suspect in that case too, thanks in part to a documented history of sex crime. But he didn’t get charged for either of the two girls' savage deaths.
Instead, Levon Brooks—a former boyfriend of Courtney Smith’s mother, and Kennedy Brewer—who dated Christine Jackson’s mother—were arrested and convicted in the two cases despite paltry evidence against them. Prosecutors in Noxubee County, however, had the help of two professional expert witnesses: Steven Hayne, a medical examiner, and his partner, Michael West, a forensic dentist. Together, the duo used the aura of scientific inquiry—and especially allegations that the suspects' bite marks were found on the murdered children—to condemn the men (Brooks to life in prison, Brewer to death row). The so-called experts were known for crisscrossing the state, supplying valuable and even decisive testimony on call and for a price.
In their forthcoming bookThe Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, journalist Radley Balko of the Washington Post and Innocence Project lawyer and Ole Miss law professor Tucker Carrington show how the duo peddled junk science in courtrooms across the state. The book documents how law enforcement used the pair to bolster cases with flawed forensic testimony, specifically honing in on the saga of Brooks and Brewer, who were finally released in 2008 after doing decades in prison.
VICE talked to the authors by phone to find out why America's criminal justice system has a long history of relying so heavily on professional testifiers, how Brooks and Brewer finally got out, and why President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are doubling down on harsh sentences right now. Here's what they had to say.
VICE: How do wrongful convictions like this (still) happen so often, and do they strike you as peculiarly American? Tucker Carrington: The reason it happens is because there’s insufficient attention and resources applied to the criminal justice system. You have an architecture of structural racism and classism already in place and then you fail to adequately fund important posts like medical examiner in a state or a municipality. [With the] crackdown on crime [and] aggressive prosecutions both at the state level and the federal level, all those things create a perfect storm for something like this to happen. I think people are horrified by these stories of innocent folks being locked up. [But] we can’t just be horrified about it, we actually have to work to rectify it.
Radley Balko: I would say that it sort of represents America to the extent that this is not a problem that’s limited to Mississippi. We’ve seen forensic scandals all over the country. We’re seeing crime lab scandals, the product of bad incentives and an inattentive, overfed system.
What does it say about the country's criminal justice system that these people—professional expert witnesses—play such decisive roles in the first place? Balko: I don’t think there’s anything wrong having people whose job is to be a crime lab analysis or a medical examiner. I think the problems come when they’re testifying to those areas of expertise that there’s no scientific research to support. For example, the essential tenants of bite mark evidence are that all humans are unique and we all can be identified by our bite. [Experts claim] the human skin is capable of recording bites in a way that sort of preserves that uniqueness [and] that can be used to identify people, [but] there’s zero scientific research to back up those claims. None.
The problem is it sounds cool and scientific and judges have allowed this stuff in. There’s not enough oversight [and this type of testimony isn’t] scrutinized carefully enough. And even within the fields that are sort of legitimate, like forensic pathology, there can still be a fair amount of subjectivity, particularly [since different] medical examiners interpret wounds differently. There are certainly some bad actors in Mississippi, but when you have a system that’s designed that way, if it wasn’t Hayne [and West] it would’ve been somebody else.
Carrington: When I was practicing [law] in DC I would always go down to the medical examiner’s office by the DC jail. My experience there was terrific. They were objective medical professionals. You’d set up a time to meet with them, you’d bring in the autopsy report, you’d go into their office with your investigator, and you’d have a professional conversation. They were professionals, in the objective independent sense, that they had no axe to grind to either side. I think those professionals are critical to have for everybody. Professional witnesses with incentives [are] a different ball of wax.
How much was this story about race—black men being targeted for law enforcement in the Deep South? Carrington: Look at these trials and there isn’t anything that jumps out at you harkening back to the Jim Crow post-Reconstruction era, 20th Century lynchings, [and] overt racism. There’s African American attorneys, there’s African American law enforcement, there’s African American juror participation. But in essence at the end of the day what happened to Brooks and Brewer is no different then what happened all those years ago.
What’s worse is it happened within the criminal justice system with its blessing, both at the trial level and [when] the appeals court [affirmed] the conviction. [It] doesn’t look as bad as a lynching from the turn of the century, but by the same token the difference between what happened in the lynching and what happened to Levon and Kennedy, at some level is just a question of semantics.
Balko: [The criminal justice system in Mississippi] was designed during the Jim Crow era for a very specific purpose, which was to aid law enforcement in whatever law enforcement needed to do during the Civil Rights [Movement]. That meant covering up the killings of Civil Rights activists, before that [it was] covering up lynching. [The case is] about how that legacy still kind of remains with us today. I think it’s a system that serves people in power. You can’t talk about a system that serves [the] powerful at the extent of the powerless without talking about race.
What do you make of the culpability of Sheriff Ernest Eicholberger, the man who helped lead the investigation into Courtney Smith’s disappearance and murder here? Balko: The first thing he did was basically arrest every young black male in the area who had access to the little girl. Now, part of that is [it's a] black area of Mississippi and every male who had access to the girl happened to be black. [But this] was a mass violation of constitutional Rights and not a particularly an effective way to go about an investigation. He also had every reason to think that Justin Johnson, who actually committed the crime, was a suspect. He’d already been convicted or at least accused of breaking into a woman’s house and attempting to rape her. His car was seen in the area, but instead the sheriff fixated on Levon Brooks.
In his interview with Courtney Smith’s sister, she’d mentioned seeing a quarter in this man’s ear, which—who knows what she was talking about. The sheriff took that as meaning the kidnapper was wearing an earring and Levon Brooks was the only man in the area who wore an earring. That’s why they fixated on him early. The people who did the mental health test evaluation said, "Tthis does not seem like the kind of guy who’d do this." They found none of the red flags that you would normally see, whereas Johnson had a lot of those red flags. It was a case of tunnel vision. Then you’ve got these sort of yes men in West and Hayne who come and give this scientific-sounding veneer to hunches that law enforcement have.
You guys have been on this case for a while, either writing about it or playing a legal role. Can you talk about finally seeing Levon and Kennedy exonerated? Carrington: It was pretty extraordinary. The Innocence Project of New York is responsible for their exoneration. They spent years working on the two cases—in particular a staff attorney up there named Vanessa Potkin. I was there because my office was helping to represent Levon. I don’t want to overstate what it was like, but I think at some level it was historic. It was the first time Mississippi had this type of exoneration, certainly at this level, with publicity of a death case and a life in prison case where the true perpetrator had been identified. It took place in a very isolated part of the state. I know that one of the prosecutors who was involved in the case brought his daughter—she was maybe 12 or 13—to the hearing, because he told me nothing like this had ever happened.
Did the two freed men go to the actual killer's sentencing? Balko: Levon told me that it was kind of a poignant moment and that Kennedy originally wanted the death penalty. Levon talked Kennedy out of that by just saying, “Look at everything we went through.” This guy was clearly sick and untreated. I asked Kennedy about that and he didn’t quite remember it. Levon passed away a couple of weeks ago. I’m sad that he didn’t get to see the book.
Carrington: I think at some level it was probably anti-climactic and [didn’t have] a profound effect on them. They had discussions of whether they should participate in the sentencing hearing, what they should say, and what their feelings were about it, but when all was said and done the prosecutor dropped the death penalty.
Despite so many disturbing pieces of journalism and high-profile exonerations, Trump and Sessions are still all about old-school, tough-on-crime rhetoric and sentencing policies. How do you make sense of that, having been so close to such an ugly episode? Balko: I don’t Sessions or Trump particularly care about people who are victimized by the system. They either know what’s going on and are indifferent to it, or they don’t care enough to actually know. It has to be one of two things. I don’t know which one is worse. Just the fact that Sessions disbanded the forensic sciences commission that was supposed to be looking into these bad, dubious or various forensics [cases] and then basically said they were going to handle it all internally—the idea that the FBI is going to handle assessing the quality of forensics internally is impossible. [Sessions and Trump] don’t have a serious stake yet in proving or seriously administrating the country’s criminal justice system, and that’s a shame.
Learn more about the duo's book, out February 27, here.
We’ve received some truly idiotic words of "wisdom" in our lives; wack career tips, cringeworthy romantic pointers, terrible financial recommendations, asinine health suggestions and all-around, ill-informed bullshitery. Even the best guidance counselors, parents, friends, bosses, and well-intentioned strangers can relay some absolute stinkers about things both tiny (how to cure a hangover) or huge (your entire career!).
Most of the time we’ve been astute enough to not take the bad suggestions to heart, but it really stings when you do take the advice offered and it fucks your life up. We asked friends and co-workers about the most jaw-droppingly ridiculous/tone-deaf/harmful/awful advice they’ve ever received. Here’s what they said.
"Wear suit to your VICE interview." - Peter, 23
“Don't be depressed. Just be happy.” - Kari, 22
"Just pray your brain tumor away.” - Nik, 32
"College is totally worth the expense." - Jennifer, 24
"Unpaid internships = foot in the door." - Noah, 23
"Let's get tattoos together! So fun!" - Monica, 27
"Graduate school will pay for itself." - Chris, 28
"Forget your ex. Fuck someone else." - Terry, 25
“Don’t accept that graduate school offer.” - Mary, 36
“Archaeology isn't a field for girls.” - Karin, 63
"You'd look so great with bangs." - Wanda, 21
“Anything said in a romantic comedy.” - Gia, 32
“Male manager: 'Talk less in meetings.'” - Anna, 27
“Sick husband? Leave him. Save yourself.” - Jen, 34
“Hungover? You should drink more booze.” - Zack, 36
“Take cortisone; dance through the pain.” - Alex, 34
“Have the baby! I’ll be there.” - Tosh, 46
“Tinder dates: Don't chat, just meet.” - Allie, 25
“Pulling out during sex = no pregnancy.” - Debbie, 37
“Avoid working in the computer field.” - Justin, 33
“Your husband will cheat. Stay vigilant.” - Becca, 34
“Can't get diseases from blow jobs.” - Liz, 34
“Bathrobes are a waste of money.” - Lauren, 32
“Get married and join the military.” - Marc, 41
“Life peaks during high school years.” - Ashley, 39
"Have a kid. Money’ll sort itself.” - Fran, 35
“It's OK to try heroin once.” - C.J., 25
“Your wedding is all about YOU.” - Miriam, 33
“Take out student loans. Worst mistake.” - Jenelle, 37
“Grandpa told me to avoid college.” - Roberto, 32
“Max out all your credit cards.” - Joanna, 34
“Stay a virgin until you’re married.” - Bryan, 39
“Undergoing IVF: Just relax. It’ll happen.” - Mandy, 33
This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia
The night before Aan* tried to take his own life, the skies above Yogyakarta briefly glowed red. It's unknown if Aan saw the meteor streak across the sky himself, but plenty of others in his rural coastal district of Gunung Kidul had. And they all knew what it meant—someone was about to die.
The next day Aan, 18, was pale and listless. He walked into the kitchen, took a short knife his grandmother used to peel the skin from fruits, and wandered out to the backyard. His grandmother Marni understood what was about to happen. She ran outside and tried to wrestle the knife away from her grandson, but she was too weak. She fell backwards as Aan plunged the knife deep into his own chest. He then pulled the blade out and threw it toward the oak trees behind his family's home.
Blood spurted from the wound in his chest. Marni screamed.
The neighbors took Aan to the hospital. He survived the ordeal, but his mother, overcome with stress, fainted and fell into a coma.
“She was unconscious for five days," Marni told VICE. "She didn’t eat or drink at all."
It was December 26, 2017. The local newspapers carried the same headline: pulung gantung nearly took another life.
Pulung gantung is an urban legend with deep roots in Jogja's poorer neighborhoods. The myth, which some say is hundreds of years old, claims that a fireball, or meteor, streaking across the sky is a harbinger of suicide. "Pulung" means fate in the local Javanese dialect. "Gantung," means a hanging in Bahasa Indonesia. That's because hanging is the most-common way to commit suicide in Indonesia. But it's not the only way.
In Gunung Kidul, people have drowned themselves, drank cough syrup mixed with laundry detergent, and leaped to their deaths into an underground cave. In 2017, 34 people tried to kill themselves in the rural district of 700,000 people. Thirty of them succeed.
It was a slight decline from 2016, when 33 people committed suicide. One of them had drowned in a well, but most had hanged themselves. It was just another year in Indonesia's suicide capital—a place where suicide is seen as an unavoidable fact of life.
But why are so many people killing themselves in Gunung Kidul? Indonesia is a deeply superstitious place, one where 69 percent of Indonesian Muslims reportedly believe in witchcraft, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. This mysticism is even stronger in Jogja and the rural heartlands of Central Java, places where old Javanese folk religions like kejawen still thrive.
Belief can be a powerful thing. But can it kill? I traveled to Aan's village, a small place called Ngelo about 30 kilometers inland from the southern coast of Java, to find out. Aan's wound had healed by the time I arrived, but his injury had lasting effects. Today, he suffers from heart issues and nerve damage that requires him to regularly take medication.
Everyone I met in the town knew about pulung gantung. One man, a guy named Darmo Supoyo, described it as a comet-like fireball that streaked across the sky. Wherever the fireball fell, the people on the ground would feel confused and disoriented. Later, some of them would try to kill themselves, he explained.
"The elders paid attention to the pulung," said Darmo, now an old man himself. "The pulung is very powerful."
Darmo saw the pulung gantung himself back when he was a young man. He was about 20 when a reddish-white ball of light lit up the sky above his village, a place called Ngringin in the same subdistrict as Aan's hometown. His eyes fixated on the pulung gantung. It moved in a smooth, wave-like pattern as it traveled from the Karangmojo subdistrict to nearby Wonosari. Darmo told me that he watched the fireball travel across the sky and he understood that it meant someone was about to die.
Another older villager, a man named Siswanto, told me that he saw it too, way back when he was in junior high school. “It shaped like a comet,” he recalled.
Spend enough time in Gunung Kidul and two things become clear: a lot of older residents really believe in the power of the pulung gantung. And while the myth is slowly fading away among younger generations, the suicides, for some reason, have remained.
Ida Rochmawati, a psychiatrist in Rumah Sakit Umum Daerah Wonosari, has spent the last 17 years trying to figure out why. She doesn't believe in the myth herself, but she knows first-hand how it has affected the people of Gunung Kidul. Ida recalled a time when she was working at a local police station and got called to the scene of a suicide.
"I was surprised because the family treated the suicide as a fact of life," Ida told me.
Suicide was so common in some villages that she once met a young child who nearly hanged himself because he was trying to replicate what he had seen. He was young and didn't understand these people were dead, Ida explained. He thought hanging yourself was just a game people played.
The story was so disturbing that Ida felt like she had to get to the bottom of what was going on. She met with some local journalists who went through the archives of the newspaper. The suicides, about 20 to 30 a year, went back for years, she said.
"It's so tragic," Ida told me. "It means that suicidal thoughts have been passed down from generation to generation."
Local mental health activists say the myth is little more than an attempt to rationalize the actions of those suffering from depression and mental illness. Jaka Yanuwidiasta, the chairman of the suicide prevention nonprofit Yayasan Inti Mata Jiwa (Imaji), told me that he's trying to put an end to the myth, but, so far, it's been impossible. Whenever Jaka attends a funeral, the conversation inevitably shifts to pulung gantung. He thinks this obsession with the myth is actually causing people to ignore avenues for help and commit suicide instead of discussing their issues with a doctor or counselor.
"The stories about pulung gantung are mostly justifications that cannot be proven," Jaka said.
I wanted to speak with someone else who had tried to commit suicide to see if they felt pressured at all by the myth. That's how I met Sugeng, a man who tried, and failed, to hang himself in early 2016—a period he told me was one of the darkest chapters in his life. He suffers from epilepsy and, at the time, he was struggling to get his seizures under control. Sugeng had resigned from his job at a stationary store after have one too many epileptic attacks and ended up unemployed and living at home with his mother—a poor farmer.
Sugeng told me that one day he took a length of rope and tied it to a lamp post in his room, looping the end through a wooden hook hanging from his ceiling. He then draped the noose around his neck and tried to hang himself.
The hook broke. His body hit the floor with a thud and he lost conciseness. His mother, with the help of her neighbors, broke down the door and found Sugeng unconscious with rope burns around his neck. They took him to the nearest hospital.
"I was grateful to get a second chance to live," he told me.
He underwent treatment at Rumah Sakit Gunung Kidul and later moved to a second hospital, where he stayed for ten days. Doctors there prescribed sedatives in such large quantities that Sugeng was worried they would damage his liver.
It took six months for Sugeng to recover from his suicide attempt. He eventually felt better and worked up the nerve to apply for a job with the local village administration office. Last month, he started out as the head of the welfare division of Bejiharjo village. It was enough to convince him that life was worth living, no matter what the fireball in the sky has to say.
"No matter how bad my past was, I deserve to have a better future," Sugeng told me.
* Aan asked us to change his name because of the sensitive nature of his story.
Lady Bird—Greta Gerwig's Oscar-nominated coming-of-age story starring Saoirse Ronan—may technically be a "period piece," since the thing is set in 2002 or whatever, but that's not exactly what the phrase calls to mind. True period films are full of elaborate sets and meticulous costume design, not just flip phones and some puka-shell necklaces. Saoirse Ronan made a name for herself starring in that kind of period movie, first in 2007's adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement and then in 2015's Brooklyn. Now, it looks like she's headed back to the genre again.
On Thursday, Bleecker Street released the first trailer for Ronan's new film, On Chesil Beach, and the thing looks beautiful, delicate, and nothing like Lady Bird.
On Chesil Beach is adapted from an Ian McEwan book, just like Atonement, but this time, McEwan's plot centers on a pair of buttoned-up, British newlyweds in 1962—played by Ronan and Dunkirk's Billy Howle—struggling with their new marriage and narrow-minded, mid-century views on sex.
The trailer focuses on the couple's honeymoon and Ronan's struggle to consummate their marriage, eventually turning to a sex manual for advice, but not finding much. "Have you actually forgotten that we were married today?" Howle's character shouts as his wife falls into tears in one scene. "We’re man and wife, that’s what you promised."
Varietyheaped praise on On Chesil Beach after it premiered at TIFF last September, calling it "a lyrical and rapturous film" and comparing it to the brilliant, Oscar-nominated romance Call Me by Your Name. The review also praised the direction from first-time director Dominic Cooke, writing that the film "marks one of the most impressive debuts of a director since Tom Ford made A Single Man."
On Chesil Beach is set to hit theaters May 18, and if it's really anything like Saoirse Ronan's Call Me by Your Name, we're here for it. Give the trailer a watch above.
The number of folks applying to law school shot up after the 2016 election, leading to speculation about a "Trump bump": The idea was that the president's shocking win inspired a wave of young people to study law, whether they wanted to fight his agenda or further it. According to a new survey from Kaplan Test Prep, that theory was right.
Of the 500 prospective law students Kaplan asked, 32 percent said the election motivated them to pursue a JD, with respondents citing issues like Trump's immigration policies and a deepening divide in America as reasons they're going into law.
"I work with refugees and new government policies have directly impacted and impeded my ability to do my job," one pre-law student told Kaplan. "I am interested in a law degree in order to have a new way to fight for human rights and defend those in need.”
As of October 2017, there was a 21.4 percent rise in the number of people signed up for the LSAT compared to a year before. And the number of law school applications submitted last month was 10.6 percent higher than at the same time last year, the American Bar Association Journal reports.
The Flamin' Hot Cheetos origin story is actually pretty incredible. Back in 1976, Montanez was working as a janitor in a California Frito-Lay factory when he decided to smuggle a few unseasoned Cheetos puffs home and experiment with some spices of his own.
"I see the corn man adding butter, cheese, and chile to the corn," Montanez recalled in a 2012 interview with FOX News, "and thought, what if I add chile to a Cheeto?"
His friends and family all loved his homemade spicy Cheetos recipe, so Montanez decided to bring the idea all the way to the top. He scored a sit-down with the Frito-Lay president and spent two weeks crafting a pitch, even designing his own prototype packaging, according to his interview with FOX News. Frito-Lay's top brass fell in love with the spicy snack, and the rest is history.
The new biopic, called Flamin' Hot, will be written by Lewis Colick (October Sky) and will likely follow Montanez's Horatio Alger–style rise from janitor to spicy snack genius to top exec at PepsiCo, where he works today. FOX Searchlight will produce, alongside DeVon Franklin, who reportedly developed the idea for the film with Colick and Montanez himself.
The movie's still in the very early stages of development, so there's no telling who will sign on to star, but hopefully Oscar Isaac will at least get a chance to sneak in for a cameo—the guy is a well-known Flamin' Hot Cheetos fanboy.
A version of this story first appeared on J-Source.
“And when they ask, ‘Is that your relative?’ I will say, ‘Yes.’” —Sarah Rain, friend and relative
I remember the day Colten Boushie died. It was a hot summer day in Regina, Saskatchewan and I had enjoyed a leisurely summer, free of journalism work. I had decided to take a year off from reporting after my mother and sister died. I couldn’t cover the violence of our people without seeing my mother and sister in each story I did. But hearing the details of a young Indigenous man being shot by a farmer seemed too bad to be true. I felt urgency run through my body.
VICE assigned me to cover Colten’s death. I rose out of my self-inflicted journalism slumber and went to the press conference.
Sitting with the other reporters, I noticed I was the only Indigenous reporter there. All the other reporters talked and laughed together waiting for the news conference to start. I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at a moment like that. It’s not their fault though. We come from different worlds. In my culture, we view and treat each other as relatives. Colten wasn’t some faraway person whom I felt no connection to in that moment. He could have easily been my 18-year-old brother. As relatives, we pray for each other and we end each prayer by saying: “All my relations.” We mean that.
In that press room no one talked to me. I asked questions. I wrote the story and made my deadline.
But Colten stayed with me. Like other Indigenous stories I’ve covered over the years, many people stay with me. Their stories make me proud. Some haunt me and I often wonder how they are doing, or if they felt justice. But most of all, I wonder if they found peace, and I hope I made a difference in their lives by sharing their story with the world.
A few weeks later I moved away from the Prairies and attempted to live in Vancouver for grad school. Like many times before, I left my homelands in search of “something better.”
Ever since I was a little girl, around 11 years old, I wanted to leave Saskatchewan. I wanted to find a place where I wasn’t called a “dirty little Indian” or “a squaw” as a young child, and have white men try to grope me too many times to count in broad daylight.
So I left the racism of the Prairies behind, along with the hard looks from strangers who think the worst of my people—now more than ever after Gerald Stanley’s trial.
I returned almost immediately. I came back to wide open blue skies, my relatives, and the reserve the Canadian government forced my chapan (great-great grandfather) onto. I came back to the snickering, the racial profiling in stores, and drunk settler women asking me if it was “family allowance or Treaty Day” in the washroom of my favorite restaurant—because it was a Friday night, and how else would I have money to be in a nice place like that?
I deserve to be educated, raise a family, and live prosperously in my homelands, free of hate, racism, sexism and stigma. But those four things occured to me almost daily since I returned. What also returned were the thoughts of Colten and his killer. Would his family get justice? Would they find peace?
As a Nehiyaw Iskwew journalist, it hurts my heart to see the injustices my people have to go through. As an Indigenous woman, I’ve been hunted and preyed upon since I was 12 years old. Growing up in an inner city neighbourhood on the Prairies as a young Indigenous girl meant I’d get accosted by old settler men in expensive vehicles asking if I wanted a ride. “C’mon, don’t be scared. Just jump in.” “Wanna make a quick $50?”
Walking home from elementary school, I’d clench my backpack when they’d ask these questions and run as fast as a I could until the car was gone and I could no longer feel that stranger’s eyes all over my body. It was then that I knew: I had to become a warrior.
My weapons are my words and my writing along with my healing and storytelling abilities. I became a journalist to create change in my community.
From a young age, I wanted to know why my people weren’t on the news unless they were dying, drunk or being accused of criminal activities. I wanted to write about all the things I witnessed in my young life, and expose the systemic racism that plagues our education, health, and justice systems.
Covering the Colten Boushie case changed me as a journalist. I can’t sit here and act like I’m not hurt, angry and scared for the future of this province. Saskatchewan is so different from the rest of Canada. You can feel the racism towards Indigenous people and it manifests itself insidiously in our workplaces, schools and on our streets. You can witness a fraction of it on social media on a daily basis. Hundreds of everyday people comment and tell people of colour that Colten’s death (and his killer’s acquittal) was not a race issue when they haven’t experienced any form of racism a day of their lives.
These comments scare me, and in Saskatchewan at least they largely go unchallenged. I want to raise a family here. My chapan Chief Piapot signed an adhesion to Treaty 4 with the spirit and intent that his grandchildren and their grandchildren could learn the “cunning of the white man” and not simply survive and get by in this world, but thrive and be able to live a good life. The lives and futures of Indigenous youth like Colten matter deeply, but that’s not reflected in local or national conversations.
I know that media can do better, to make up for the failures that led us here. When there are call-in radio programs, we should hear as many Indigenous callers as we do non-Indigenous callers. News producers need to make a conscious decision to seek out positive stories about Indigenous peoples, and include more Indigenous voices in the negative ones. We can't wait even one more day on this, as the cycle of hate and backlash has already begun again in the wake of another not guilty verdict—this time for the death of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine.
My friend got a tattoo of Colten on her arm. She said it will be a reminder, an opportunity to educate people about what happened to him (and us) when they see it. She told me: “Some people get warchiefs on their bodies to tell a story. I chose this warrior to tell a story. I want every person to know who he was and how the system dishonored him. We are Colten Boushie.” I couldn’t agree more.
The games were thrown into harsh relief when a flurry hit New York City last weekend, plunging the boroughs into slippery street chaos. Watching a bobsled team zip down an ice slide isn't as thrilling when you've just slipped and luged down a Brooklyn slope on your ass. Surviving winter in New York is an Olympic feat in and of itself, and many of us have to figure it out through messy trial and error. There's no coach for navigating frozen subway tunnels.
Below, cartoonist Brian Blomerth visualizes the trials and tribulations of New York at its frostiest, imagining a world where New Yorkers get the recognition they deserve for their own icy achievements.
This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.
I can picture Kia now at the defense table, slumped down, doodling on a pad. I was reading his body language, and he just didn’t seem to care about what was going on. I thought, if he doesn’t care, why should we? His attitude seemed to say: Yeah, I did it.
It was my first time on a jury. I was 31, balancing two jobs while going to graduate school. It was 2009, New Orleans was infested with crime, and I remember feeling like I wanted to be part of justice. During jury selection, the prosecutors asked if I could convict someone based on the testimony of a single eyewitness, and I said, in theory, I could.
It was a very short trial. The victim’s name was Bryant Craig, and a friend of his got on the stand. Four years earlier, they had been driving and almost hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian ended up shooting Craig, and the friend seemed confident it was 17-year-old Kia Stewart. The friend’s story never changed. He didn’t stutter. I thought: If I’d seen my friend murdered, I would remember who I saw do it.
The defense was an embarrassment. It was a group of law students and their professor. The students did their best, but they just did not have much evidence to present. They had the 911 tape, and pointed out that it included no mention of Stewart. Their argument wasn’t compelling. I thought: Is this a joke?
Two of the jurors were lawyers, and as we deliberated they asked us what we all thought. I remember feeling that, if the prosecution made some mistake, surely those attorneys would have pointed it out. I don’t usually jump on the bandwagon, but they seemed to know what they were doing, and they thought he was guilty.
There was an African-American woman who just could not be swayed to vote for guilt. She didn’t feel like the prosecution proved its case. She was older, and at the time I wondered if she was thinking, What if it was my child? But her lack of support didn’t matter, because in most cases you only need 10 out of 12 jurors to agree on guilt to convict in Louisiana.
After it was done, I thought I’d given a family justice—had done my part to fight crime. But I was also unsatisfied: I had wanted to see the justice system working at the highest level, with impressive prosecutors and defenders battling it out. I felt like I was robbed of that experience.
I was a little afraid, too, since I had to walk by Stewart’s family on the way out.
One day in 2014, I was at my home in the Houston area—where I moved a couple of years after the trial—when I heard a knock at the door. I looked out the window and saw a man and woman. They seemed out of place, and I hid from them. Then my cousin called and said they’d come by earlier trying to track me down. They wanted to talk about my jury service.
I let them in, and they explained they were researchers from Innocence Project New Orleans. There was a problem with Stewart’s conviction, they told me. He was likely innocent.
I had a sunken feeling. They had found other witnesses who had not been presented at trial. The new evidence said Stewart was sleeping at the time of the crime, and a man named Antonio Barnes was the real culprit. (He was later killed while attempting a robbery.) The researchers said my assumptions about the reliability of eyewitnesses were incorrect. When you’re traumatized, like many people who witness a crime, you don’t remember as vividly, they said. And then, when you’re hungry for justice, you think your memory is clearer than it really is.
I started seeing my memories of the trial in a new light. Perhaps the eyewitness was only confident on the stand because he’d rehearsed his lines. And Kia’s body language looked different now. It wasn’t that he didn’t care—he probably felt like he had no chance. He must have felt defeated, thinking, I’m going to lose.
I signed an affidavit saying that I wouldn't have voted to convict if I'd known about this other evidence. And then I didn't hear anything until last September, when I learned Kia had been freed. He'd been behind bars for nearly 10 years. I was overwhelmed, and sad for Kia. I’m angry, too: I’ve read a lot about the criminal justice system, and I can’t believe our government allows such bad legal representation in such high-stakes trials. These are people’s lives.
I’m older now, and I see the world through different eyes. I have two sons, and I fear for them. I moved to the Houston area because I didn’t want them to be exposed to the crime that’s common in New Orleans. Raising two little black boys, I see how people make assumptions about them, and how sometimes that can turn into something tragic, like it did with Kia Stewart. We try to put them in environments that will help, but you just never know.
I want to sit down with Kia and say I’m sorry, and that I did what I had to do given what I was given. I’m sure it was such a weight on him, to sit in jail for all those years. The prime of his life was taken from him. I hope he’s recuperating. If I had my own business, I would offer him a job.
I hope I never have to be in that situation again.
D’Shean Kennedy was one of ten jurors who voted to convict Kia Stewart.
Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states that allow people to be convicted by non-unanimous juries. Such laws can be traced to historical efforts to exclude the opinions of minorities and are currently the subject of public debates in both states. It is impossible to know if requiring that all 12 jurors agree would have spared Stewart or anyone else from being sent to prison, but prior to Stewart’s exoneration, Innocence Project New Orleans found ten cases in which a non-unanimous jury convicted someone who was later freed. Stewart, who was freed in 2015, was the 11th.
It’s hard to describe the feeling one has while stepping over a bloody footprint greeting you at the front door of an apartment where someone had been murdered just hours earlier. I never want to do it again; once was more than enough.
I still don’t know to whom the footprint belonged. It was nothing like I expected, nothing like what Hollywood routinely conjures up. It was small, easy to miss if you didn’t know the aftermath of murder lingered in the air. It wasn’t clear if it had been imprinted on the concrete by a sneaker, boot, or bare foot. Maybe a paramedic had left that trace of the drive-by shooting behind. Maybe it was my youngest brother, the target of the shooting. Maybe it was the mother of one of my nieces, the woman whose body the bullets found instead of my brother. Or maybe it was left behind by one of the kids under the age of five who had also been in that apartment when the bullets began flying, a few of which left holes in the wall just above the bunkbeds where they slept.
I never wanted to go back to that apartment again, and never have. As a journalist, I’ve documented the final several weeks of an elderly woman dying from ovarian cancer, watched her waste away into nothingness as her family mourned her pending death until she was no more. I was there when a woman barely in her 20s succumbed to a rare form of cancer; I spoke to her mother as she struggled over whether to take her only daughter off life support. I’ve attended funerals for aunts and uncles and a father and father-in-law who were felled by chronic and acute medical conditions. None of them haunt me the way my brother’s girlfriend’s death haunts me.
That’s why I know what students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are feeling as they grieve the loss of 17 people gunned down in America's latest high-profile mass shooting. I know their pain. I know their horror. I know their fear. I know their anger. I know their confusion, their emotional hurt and the psychic scars that will remain with them a long time, maybe forever. That’s why I’m glad they are being heard.
I’m moved that their impassioned pleas might be the catalyst to finally force real change in our all-too-static gun debate. It is heartening to see their presence on the national stage force the gun lobby and those holding onto an unrealistic and dangerous view of the Second Amendment to play defense for a change. There have been mass walkouts and cancelled gun shows and a pro-NRA president grasping for a way to control a narrative. That’s why conspiracist theorists have shown up once again, this time to try to stop a movement that seems to be gaining steam, to shame those grieving students into silence. I’ll be the first to tip my cap if these kids can do what legislators in DC and the images of angelic-looking white children after the Sandy Hook massacre couldn’t. I’m cheering them on.
I’m also wondering why they are being heard when black families like mine weren’t, particularly given the kind of gun violence we face is more prevalent and robs earth of more lives than what happened in Parkland. Mass shootings have been increasing in recent years but remain “a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths,” according to the Washington Post. Such shootings supposedly get more attention because of their public nature, the high body count and, as the Post notes, “they occur without warning in the most mundane places.”
For families like mine, deaths from drive-by shootings into apartment buildings also occur without warning and leave a high body count of one. A single loved one taken by a bullet feels like a million. You’d have to trust me on that, for I hope you never get to experience it for yourself.
For families like mine, whether in small towns like St. Stephen, South Carolina, or major cities like Chicago—where the presence of black and brown death is rarely mourned by the public and routinely used as a way to deflect conversations about ill-advised police shootings and brutality—such deaths are never a small thing, even when we know some of those involved hadn’t been living upright lives.
Families like mine have also been screaming to high heaven about the danger of guns, about how we’ve been tired of seeing too many of our young taken too soon, about the need to do something. But we’ve largely gone unheard.
The kids in Parkland face bizarre accusations they are actors employed to force the government to take people's guns away. That’s horrific. But the kinds of barbs we’ve long faced—a wondering aloud if murder is in black people’s DNA—can cut just as deep. It’s why an opioid crisis that has largely had a white face has been met with sympathy and empathy for those struggling while the crack epidemic’s black face conjured up only outrage, stereotypes, and harsher drug laws.
For families like mine, all the times we’ve marched in the streets and held candlelight vigils and launched mentorship programs and gathered in prayer circles have largely gone ignored by the public at large. That’s why we’ll be cheering the kids from Parkland on as they try to command attention on social media and plan marches backed by celebrities, but we’ll find it hard not to lament that the daily deaths we face have long been deemed less important than those in Parkland.
We know guns aren’t the cause of all the carnage, but we know they make carnage more likely, more deadly. We know much-discussed but long-delayed gun control measures won’t stop all unnecessary killing but will make it harder for bad actors to do as much harm, whether at a country music concert in Las Vegas or on a back road in rural South Carolina. We know that even if you ban so-called assault rifles, the kinds of weapons that are more likely to take our lives (like handguns) will still be in wide circulation. We also know we must start somewhere.
It hurts that our pain, our suffering, has become background noise to elected officials who don’t even pretend to listen anymore. But if it takes an army of angry, grieving white kids in Florida to wake America up to this country’s dangerous obsession with guns, we can live with that. It’s maybe our best hope of ensuring more of our kids have longer lives.
We are in the midst of a cultural shift. Men are confused. "How are we supposed to know what’s OK if you don’t tell us?" they wail, tearing their shirts and bellowing at the moon. Here’s a solution: just ask! Send me your questions about romance, relationships and sex. I’m a woman, ask me anything.
What’s the problem?
A question sent to me on Curious Cat: "Is it prejudiced of me to not want to sleep with a trans person? Even if I fancy them before I find out they're trans?"
What am I not getting?
First things first: My position is that you never, ever have to have any kind of sex with any kind of person you don't want to, OBVIOUSLY.
I want to highlight this because so much of popular discourse around dating and sleeping with trans people often comes down to someone yelling, "So, what, you're saying I HAVE to have sex with someone I’m not attracted to?" There’s a disturbing and dangerous trope which posits that trans women force lesbians to have sex with them by calling them bigots if they don’t. Of course, the much more likely everyday reality for trans women is that they are at enormous risk of violence when disclosing their status to a potential sexual partner. To give just one example, last year Dwayne Hickerson was sentenced to 40 years in prison after murdering trans woman Dee Whigham when she told him she was trans during a sexual encounter.
So: if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Frankly, if you don’t want to, it’s better for everyone involved if you don’t. Trans people aren’t objects of pity for you to work out your political anxiety with, or experiments for you to test yourself with. The majority of good, moral people – trans or otherwise – would prefer not to sleep with someone who is privately gritting their teeth instead of wanting it to happen.
But let’s explore your question a little. Saying you shouldn’t feel obliged to have sex with anyone doesn't mean you shouldn’t think about it any further, that there isn’t something unpleasant and worth interrogating here. If you told me you didn’t want to sleep with, say, non-white people or disabled people I wouldn’t be ordering you to sleep with them anyway, but I would be asking you to try really hard to break down why you’ve arrived at this internal status quo you’re reluctant to disrupt.
Assuming you would not like having sex with a trans person who you initially found attractive is, I think, based largely in fear. It assumes that you know what they want to do in bed, what their body is like, how you would feel being with that body. It also assumes you have nothing new to learn about sex, that you have already experienced all the types of intimacy you may enjoy. The dominance of PIV (penis in vagina penetrative sex) as the default sexual mode is partly responsible for not allowing most people to imagine the countless other ways there are to be intimate and hot with another person.
When I first had sex with a trans non-binary person, I didn’t go into it knowing already how they felt about their genitals or breasts. I had no idea if it was OK to touch them in those areas, or what to expect if I did. I didn't act great at first – I was too shy and awkward to explicitly ask, which led to some fumbling and gentle rebuffing, and eventually, thankfully, a conversation, during which it became clear that a conversation was all that was needed in the first place.
It comes down to what I think about a lot of sex whether that’s hetero PIV or any number of other ways of doing it: just ask. Ask what they like, what they’re comfortable with, what feels good, what they don’t want. This doesn’t involve setting out a contract in advance of getting into bed, but being open to and initiating a gentle exchange of desires and inclinations which would benefit any sexual experience.
Is it prejudiced of you to not want to sleep with trans people who you find otherwise attractive? Yes, I think it is, but I don’t say so to denounce you. Prejudice of varying sorts informs who we like to sleep with. I'll never sleep with a posh, tall, muscle-bound Irish man, for instance, because so many of them annoyed and intimidated me during my formative sexual years. It’s totally normal to have prejudices built into your sexuality, and I'm not suggesting you beat yourself up about it. The point is, in sex and in life outside of it, to notice your prejudices as diligently as you can, and question them. You’ve already done that here, which is more than many people ever will.
I hope that you continue to pick this apart, and try to see people as the attractive and immense individuals they are, instead of just through the prism of their genitalia. I hope this for your own sake rather than for the trans people you meet, who deserve to have sex with someone who fancies them rotten, no holds barred, whether that ends up being you or not.
What do I really need to know?
You don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to have sex with, but it would benefit you to spend time considering the limits of your sexual desires and why they exist.
Looking back on exes can be like looking back on dodged bullets, least of all because your ex's family lived on a different planet, and your only thought around them was “I need to leave.” Thankfully, these people did.
Names have been changed to protect lives.
Mick, 27 My ex-girlfriend’s dad was a real asshole, but my ex lauded him. He once arrived at an afterparty she had organised and told us stories about going to Thailand to sleep with hookers, and cumming on his friend’s bed while his friend was out. I couldn't sleep after that.
Jo-Anne, 25 My shit of an ex and I were at a party, and I was smoking a tailor cigarette. By accident the wind blew the smoke into his face, and he spat on me and slapped me. The next day I told his mum, and she said: “Well, you disappointed him.”
Emily, 30 My ex-boyfriend’s family was Brazilian. If I had a story, the dad or sister would always have a tale that was better, but their punchline was always in Portugese so I was never part of the joke.
Jemima, 27 My ex-boyfriend was breastfed until he was four, and his mum used to play with the dog’s red rocket. Needless to say the relationship didn’t work out.
Kim, 25 My ex-boyfriend’s highly religious mum believed in no sex before marriage, then walked in on us fucking one day. I think she did it deliberately to confirm her suspicions. She teared up while looking at us FOR AN ENTIRE MINUTE before she closed the door again.
Stefan, 29 My ex’s family never cooked a single meal in the house. I’d be invited over for dinner but then I’d be given money to drive and pick up pizza, Fasta Pasta, or Hungry Jacks for everyone. There were four kids and not everyone wanted the same thing so I’d honestly be gone for hours.
Jack, 24 I dated a girl in high school whose sister never tried new foods. It drove me insane. I think she sees a therapist now though.
Phoebe, 29 His mother would always ask me if I played netball. I didn’t and she knew that, but it was like the truth was impenetrable through her inflexible blonde bob.
Jess, 23 I’m Eurasian, and one of my ex’s families was racist as fuck: it’d always be shit about how Asians can’t drive or how they’re inferior. I’d call them out and be like, “Hey, that’s not OK,” and get a comment back like, “I don’t mean you, I mean the other orientals.”
Pragya, 23 His family loved to get involved. So involved they began interfering in the tiniest of our quarrels, and called to tell me not to fight with him.
Anna, 23 I hated that I was never fully sure if my ex's boyfriends parents were his parents or his grandparents. Whenever I came over his dad would be sitting in front of the TV wearing a khaki bucket hat and aviator glasses, and you had to yell at him to have a conversation. He never remembered who I was.
Adam, 31 Her mum’s food was always praised, but on two separate occasions I found a bandaid and a beetle in meals she'd cooked.
Courtney, 26 My ex-boyfriend’s mum hung a big portrait of Jesus Christ in my living room. I took it down. She put it back up. She said I wasn’t allowed to touch it again.
This week, I, like the rest of the Olympics-watching world, had gotten caught up in the delirious furor over the idea that Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue are not, despite all signs apparently pointing to the contrary, fucking. Around midday on Wednesday—which is to say: around half past Moir-Virtue Ice Sex Time and just prior to Moir-Drunkenly-Heckles-Hockey-Refs-O’Clock—I sent my boyfriend of seven years a link to the Twitter account @nearlight, which is basically just a greatest-hits feed of suggestive Moir-Virtue gifs and memes. It’s steamy, in exactly the same way that many centuries-old forms of ballroom dancing have been purposefully steamy since time immemorial and why on earth did it take putting two Canadian millennials on skates for everyone to realize this.
But I digress.
“This account is making me feel jello,” my boyfriend, also a millennial (see: “jello”), replied, “of their special relationship.”
His sentiment was and is not interesting—again, most of the internet this week has been going absolutely batshit over the idea that an expertly pas de deux is not a type of foreplay—so much as it echoed a particular sort of anguish that I myself have been feeling this week. Scott and Tessa’s relationship is very real; this isn’t like watching a rom-com and losing sleep over whether or not someone will ever run through an airport departures gate to win you back. But they aren’t dating. They’ve never dated. They (probably) aren’t even sleeping together. They have the perfect fairytale romance without all of the bullshit that comes with actual romance, because it’s not real. Except it is. But not in the way we think it is. But it might as well be, for how perfect it is. Except it isn’t perfect, because it isn’t real. But isn’t it? No. No?
It’s driving me insane.
I’m certainly not alone. All the memes and jokes and dedicated Twitter accounts aside, the positioning of Scott and Tessa as #relationshipgoals is not without a whisper of anxious veracity. As Katherine Laidlaw wrote in the National Post last weekend: “We see the crackling moments of cinematic chemistry between them, but this isn’t the movies—it’s better. And every four years when they blaze across our screens, they give us something to hope for: that this kind of intimacy is not only real, but that it can last. That this kind of synchronicity, intimacy, understanding between two humans is not only possible, but gorgeously achievable.”
That Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue are real people with a real human relationship who happen to embody—or at least happen to have projected upon them—every unrealistic trope of Hollywood romance muddies the water considerably for the rest of us, who occasionally found solace in the widely accepted fact that Hollywood romance doesn’t exist in real life. The only solace here is that they’re not a real couple. But then again, it feels kind of shitty to think that, watching them, you may have never invested as much of yourself into a real relationship as Scott Moir and Tessa have invested in, essentially, getting along as coworkers.
The type of intimacy Scott and Tessa embody—or, at least, the type that we’re all project onto Scott and Tessa—does, certainly, exist in real life. But as anyone who has been romantically involved with someone for more than, let’s say, six months to a year will tell you, that type of intimacy—when it’s real—has a shelf life. (Or, if it doesn’t seem to be waning, it’s turned into the type of rabid, urgent passion that portends life-ruining, hot-blooded, window-smashing, cop-calling catastrophe.)
Frankly, the fact that Scott and Tessa still seem to be so desperately INTO each other after two decades—that he still can’t hold back from burying his face in her neck whenever it’s visible to him; that the look they shoot each other when one finishes the other’s sentence is affection and not agitation—is practically proof positive that they aren’t monogamously, romantically involved. The type of pure, whole, electric synchronicity required to pull off that Moulin Rouge routine is entirely predicated on no one ever having resented the other for forgetting to take out the recycling. And leaving the seat up. And clogging the sink with their hair. Again.
Or could it? In my current relationship, I don’t have the luxury of sending an entire country of overnight ice-dancing fans into a tizzy through coy non-denial denials that my partner and I are dating, because you can tell we’re dating. Like Scott and Tessa, we also display a physical and mental synchronicity, but it’s the kind that comes with slogging through the years of emotional and physical labour of being in love, not training for world championships. We don’t gaze into each other’s eyes so much as we roll our eyes at each other; we don’t breathe in sync before taking on a difficult task so much as we ensure we’ve delegated according to what we know the other person is incapable of doing; when one of us kisses the other without warning, we give them shit for their bad breath. You know we’re a couple because we’re obviously so fucking tired of each other all the time, and our literal careers don’t depend on pretending otherwise.
Couples get to know each other as people, not as teammates whose success is contingent on athletic compatibility. The most difficult part of settling into a relationship is exactly that: settling. Not in the sense of accepting less, but the way houses settle into their foundation: creaking, shifting, and sinking into a stillness that’s a little less dynamic, but a lot more solid. And athletes—which, to be clear, is what Scott and Tessa are—don’t settle! They’ll forever be daring each other to twizzle a bit twizzlier and gaze a bit deeper, because if they don’t, their whole act—which, to be clear, is what it is—falls apart.
Though I tell myself all this—and we will all tell ourselves all this, all the time, long after we’re done shipping Scott and Tessa—and I still find myself wishing there would be something sexy about it if I hurled myself crotch-first into my boyfriend’s face.
Crouching in the darkness, cupping cigarettes in their hands to avoid being seen by snipers, Robert Daw and Rae Lewis-Ayling waited for the signal to run. Everything was going to plan.
The razor wire was no more than 100 metres ahead – an easy dash for two fit 20-somethings in workman's boots. Up in the distance, they could just about make out the glow of a sentry post and the silhouettes of two guards smoking behind a window. "For you it's OK," whispered one of the heavily-accented Kurdish revolutionaries who'd agreed to smuggle them into Syria in the dead of night. "If guards come, they put you in jail. Us, they kill."
It was the 1st of August, 2017, and the two young Brits were as close as they’d ever been to realising their dream. They were finally being smuggled into Rojava, the Kurdish region of northern Syria where the People’s Protection Units (YPG) had been waging war with Isis since 2011. They had waited nine days in Iraq for the dark moon to rise – giving them the safest possible passage across the border. And now, finally, they were there. Almost.
Without warning, a shout in a language they didn't understand tore through the velvet darkness. The click-clacks of cocking weapons immediately followed, and a group of 30-odd Peshmerga border police materialised, all yelling at them to lie on the ground. "In that moment, I realised the dream was over," says Rae.
He had no idea of the nightmare that was about to begin.
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Rae, 25, is a railway worker from North Wales. Rob, 21, is a security guard from Preston. Both are dyed-red socialists, having met at a Labour Party members' gathering in their teens, and best friends. I meet them in a pub in London's New Cross in early September, 2017. Neither are particularly tall or tough-looking. Actually, they're scrawny and pale, with patchy facial hair and bitten fingernails: certainly not, by the looks of them, the sorts to take up arms on the most violent and lawless battleground on Earth. "We're not – that’s not why we went," says Rob. "We went to help the revolution."
Northern Syria is in the midst of radical transformation. Inspired by the ideology of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey, and triggered by the "Arab Spring" of 2011, people are organising themselves into grassroots assemblies and co-operatives, declaring their autonomy from the state and their wish for real democracy. Anti-capitalist, Marxist and feminist ideas are flourishing, including a system of co-presidentship whereby a man and a woman share power at every level. In the YPG, officers are elected by troops, and men and women fight side-by-side.
The experiment has proved seductive to leftists across the world. Inspired by the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, dozens of far-left Westerners have flocked to Rojava since a first wave formed the International Freedom Battalion (IBF) in June of 2015 in response to what they called a "bloodbath" in the Middle East. "Ultimately, [Syria’s Kurds] want to destroy the patriarchal structure that they say oppresses women, and rebuild an equal society where everyone has a say, regardless of race or gender," says Rob. "All that in the heart of the Middle East! From the moment I heard about Rojava, I had to be a part of it."
Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, however, don't exactly see eye-to-eye. "The US-influenced Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq is a capitalist authority and at odds with what is happening in Syria," says Rae. "Woe betide anyone caught trying to cross."
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"You Isis," the soldiers yelled. "We kill Isis." They handcuffed and blindfolded the two men and held guns to their heads, threatening to pull the trigger. "My legs were shaking with fear," says Rob. "I honestly thought we were going to die. But in that moment, what could we do? I just closed my eyes and waited for it."
They didn’t shoot. In hindsight, Rob and Rae say these were barely soldiers at all, but low-ranking, overexcited teenage border guards.
Over the next two days the two young men were bounced between various rural police stations for questioning. They say, in that time, they were not once offered a lawyer, let alone a phone call. "We told them the truth," says Rob. "We said we were humanitarian workers, not there to fight but to help Syria's Kurds build a better society."
Then, on the 3rd of August, they arrived in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where they were frogmarched into a holding cell in the city’s General Security Directorate – an imposing American-built compound where Iraqi Kurdistan’s worst criminals are held. "Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at us," says Rae. "We didn’t know if we should just go and sit in a corner and hope for the best, or attack the biggest guy in the cell, like we’d read you're supposed to do in prison."
They did neither. Because, at that moment, a Spaniard, a Brazilian and a Frenchman approached them, shook their hands warmly and told them, if they stuck with them, they’d live. It was then that the Brazilian whispered, "Welcome to Hell."
They say the cell was 5m x 13m and occupied by 100 men. At night, the only way to sleep was on their sides, squished together like sardines. "They never once turned off the halogen lights," says Rae. "We didn't see darkness for more than a month. That’s what fucked with everyone’s minds the most."
Inmates ranged from rapists and drug dealers to Kurdish revolutionaries and a handful of other Westerners who’d fought with Rojava’s YPG until they were arrested trying to get home. Order inside the cell was kept not by the guards, but by an inmate named Zrian, a stocky ex-Peshmerga soldier and chief snitch. "Every single thing that happened, he would tell the guards," says Rae. "He was mates with the rapists and the most powerful man in the cell. Like, at 1PM every day he would make everyone take a nap for two hours. It was a power thing."
Robert in Kurdistan
Days coalesced into weeks, and Rae and Rob began to wonder if they’d ever get home. "We had no idea if our families even knew we were alive, let alone where we were," says Rae. "And this was not a place we wanted to stay."
The guards, they say, were violent and sadistic, dishing out beatings for transgressions as small as laughing in their presence. Not Rae or Rob, though. "I later learned they’d been told to leave us alone because we were classed as political prisoners, not fighters," says Rae. "The others weren’t so lucky."
The constant light, fear of beatings and boredom caused some men to lose their minds. "There was so little to do that there were fights over who’d mop the floor," says Rob. "That said, it did mean the cell was always spotless."
Two weeks in, two Spaniards – more captured YPG fighters – were dragged in, bloodied and beaten. One was in such bad shape he seemed, essentially, in a coma, possibly after a stroke. "He was so dehydrated that when you pinched his skin it didn’t snap back like yours or mine would," says Rae.
They implored the guards to take him to hospital, but were told it wasn't their problem. "The only reason the Spaniard is still alive is because a Kurdish inmate called Omut – the guy had completely lost his mind – attacked him out of nowhere with a kettle, smashing open his skull," says Rob. "This made him the guards' problem, because the injury happened on their watch." They took the man for medical treatment.
On another occasion, they say they awoke to the chilling sound of a 14-year-old boy being gang-raped. "I later learned he was only in for possessing cannabis," says Rae. "But what could we do? The rapists were Zrian's mates. If we’d stepped in they’d have turned on us."
Inmates were allowed one hour a day to walk about in a small yard with a roof, and to use cubicle toilets with actual toilet paper (the one in the corner of the cell had no such luxury). In that time, three men tried to commit suicide by tearing strips of blanket with which to ligature themselves. "I had to save one of them by climbing over a toilet door after he’d locked himself in and started screaming," says Rob. "I guess he’d decided he didn’t want to do it after all."
The food, surprisingly, was good: mostly bread, yoghurt, goat or chicken, plus rice or boiled potatoes cut into soggy fingers. There were moments of levity, too. Like the chain-smoking 70-year-old former Mujahideen-turned-Taliban-fighter-turned-Al-Qaeda-operative who constantly gave out cigarettes and taught Rae how to play chess.
Then there were the revolutionary Kurds who would sit in circles and sing old Kurdish songs. "In the end, we joined in teaching them old British socialist songs, like 'The Internationale' and Billy Bragg, and they loved it," laughs Rob. "'The Power of the Union' was a banger for us."
Rob even had his 21st birthday in the cell, and some of the other European inmates managed to get a cake smuggled in. "I've no idea how they did it, but it was one of the most touching moments of my life," says Rob.
By about the middle of August, rumours began circulating that a new inmate from Germany was to join them. "We were quite excited to meet a new Westerner," says Rae. "Someone who hopefully spoke English."
But the man who lumbered into the cell was not what they expected. Thick-set with muscles as bristling as the beard engulfing his face, this man – it was quite obvious – could only have come from one place: The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Still, Rae, who speaks a little German, introduced himself. The man responded in a way neither could have imagined.
"Sup, nigga?" he grinned in near-perfect English, before shaking their hands like an LA street gangster. "He was clearly nervous," says Rae, "but he seemed to warm to us immediately because we were British. I mean, he spoke like a fucking weirdo, but at least he did it in a language we could understand."
The man's name was Deniz, a Turkish-German national from Frankfurt. The 25-year-old had been seized, he would later reveal, trying to flee the jihadi life with his favourite wife. "He was one of the few men who spoke fluent English as well as Arabic, and translated for us with the guards," says Rob. "You could see behind his mask that he was a fucking awful human being: he kept slaves, had more than one wife and would boast about how he tortured Kurdish civilians for fun. But surreally, in the moments we forgot about all that, he was likeable. I remember one night when Deniz woke me and Rae up by singing 'Where Is the Love' by the Black-Eyed Peas at the top of his voice."
Deniz (whose surname we have omitted, as he is currently on trial in northern Iraq) wasn't what they imagined an Isis radical to be like. He had the Capricorn star sign tattooed on his neck and would talk excitedly about his love of Mars bars and his favourite movies, Inception and 2 Fast 2 Furious.
"He was like two people," says Rob. "Almost in the same breath he’d tell us how wonderful it was that the only instrument permitted in the Islamic caliphate is a drum during certain verses of the Qur'an, before going on to say how much he loved American gangster rap. He was obsessed with DMX and 50 Cent. Deniz was one very confused dude."
Within a few days, Deniz began spilling his life story. He claimed he'd spent much of his twenties running a muscle gym in Frankfurt, where he'd become addicted to steroids, until he fell in with a Mexican street gang in the city and discovered cocaine. "Then, one day, he decided to convert to Islam, marry a Muslim woman and travel to Iraq to join Islamic State," says Rob.
Yet, of all the chats they had with Deniz, there was one that stood out in particular. "I don't know much about Islam, and wanted to find out more about his version of it," says Rob.
The conversation went like this:
Rob: Deniz, do you read the Qur'an literally, then?
Deniz: No, we take the word of scholars on YouTube.
Rob: Where are these scholars based?
Deniz: The UK. All of the videos on YouTube we watch in IS are from Islamic scholars living in the UK. All of them.
"I was like, 'Jesus, fuck,'" says Rob. "It blew my mind. I think he was a very lost and lonely guy searching for an identity – something with which to say, 'This is me.' He very briefly found that in Islamic State. Then he got scared."
At first, Deniz said he'd fled after becoming disillusioned with the war crimes he'd seen. But as weeks passed, he began to admit committing such crimes himself. "In the end, he said he'd left because he didn't want to die," says Rae. "He was scared of drones. Dying, he said, wasn't really his thing."
VICE contacted Deniz's father to verify Rob and Rae's claims. In a phone conversation he wouldn't comment on the allegation that his son had joined IS, citing his ongoing trial, but did confirm that Deniz and his wife had surrendered to Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq. He also denied that Deniz had taken steroids or cocaine; that he was involved with gangs; that he once liked rap music; and that he has a Capricorn tattoo.
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Soon after Deniz arrived, Rae and Rob were finally allowed a phone call. So they rang the only number they knew by heart: Rae's mum. "She was our lifeline," says Rae. "She rang the British Foreign Office, who sent the British Consul General from the consulate in Erbil to see us. He told us to hang on a couple more weeks while he worked on our release."
After 30 days, they were allowed to use the phone again. "Rae's mum told us we’d been pardoned but would have to wait another ten days, until the end of Eid."
Those days passed like all the others until, on the 10th of September, the Consul General returned. "He said the KDP weren’t renewing our visas, so technically we were in the country illegally. He said we’d have to pay $340 in visa fines, get our stamps and get out."
Twenty-four hours later, they were on a plane to Heathrow.
A spokesperson from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office would not comment on the details of Rob and Rae's case, but said: "We provided consular assistance to two British nationals detained in Iraq from August to September. Both of the individuals have now returned to the UK."
The pair never found out what happened to their guides after the arrest on the 1st of August. "I think they’re probably dead," says Rob. "But we'll never know."
Now safely home, Rae and Rob have found jobs – Rob on the railways and Rae in construction. They have moved into a flat together in London, and Rae is engaged.
They still think of the chess-playing Mujahedeen and the Western YPG fighters. Every now and then, even Deniz enters their minds.
Do they feel traumatised by the ordeal? "I do still wake up some nights and think I’m still in that cell," says Rob. "I get a shudder every time I hear someone jangling their keys," adds Rae. But, on the whole, the pair seem surprisingly chipper given the experience.
When I ask if they regret what they did, Rob’s eyes flash with defiance. "Not for a fucking second. If I could go again, I would. My only regret is not getting into Rojava. I know we could have done good things over there. Even if I just helped build a house, someone who needed it would have got that house for free. That would’ve been enough for me."
Rae chips in: "If anything, it's taught me how scared the reactionary forces in that region are of the Rojava revolution. They’re willing to lock up socialists like us in a prison where we very well could have died."
What if they had died? Rob laughs. "Many people have died in the name of socialism before. I certainly don’t want to die, but if you're going to kill me then the flag stays red. Do you know 'The Red Flag', the Labour Party anthem?"
"Maybe not all the lyrics," I mumble.
He takes a sip of his pint, looks at Rae and grins. Then, in unison, they break into song: "Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the red flag flying here."
Back in December, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand called for Trump to resign, citing the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct against him. In response, the president lashed out at Gillibrand with a 5AM tweet and a new nickname.
But on Thursday's episode of Desus and Mero, the senator told the VICELAND hosts Trump's tweet didn't offend her at all. It only amplified her voice.
"It was clearly just a sexist smear," she told Desus and Mero on Thursday's episode. "It was intended to shut me up. It was intended to silence me, silence all these women who had just done a big press conference with the day before who told about the horrible stories about him harassing them and assaulting them."
The senator also talked about what it was like to try to fill Hillary Clinton's shoes, how her 14-year-old son wants to take over her social media accounts, and how Desus could jump start his political career as state comptroller.
You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
Of course, as you would expect, the cynics were wrong: the photo ops were actually quite terrible. Trudeau apparently insisted on saving all his actual state-level discussions for the end of his trip, which sparked rumours among the international press that the Canadian prime minister was being “snubbed” by the Indian government. Then, the Trudeaus were dragged on Indian (and Canadian) social media because the whole family kept showing up everywhere dressed in elaborate Indian formal wear. Try imagining Indian PM Narendra Modi hanging out in Ottawa for a week alternately dressed like a cowboy or a Mountie or a French-Canadian biker, and you have some idea of how obnoxious it was to watch Justin Trudeau traipse around the subcontinent playing ethnic dress-up.
And then, somehow, things really came off the rails. Convicted attempted murderer and former Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal showed up in several photos with Sophie Trudeau and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi at a function in Mumbai. When it further turned out that Atwal had received a formal invitation to the Canadian High Commission dinner in Delhi, the Indian press exploded. If the prime minister actually was on that side of the globe to demonstrate how serious the Canadian government takes Sikh separatism, this is a Curb Your Enthusiasm-level trainwreck.
(One government source told CBC that Atwal’s invitation to dinner with Trudeau was part of a planned effort by “rogue political elements in India” to “make the Canadian government appear sympathetic to Sikh extremism.” This would explain how Atwal was able to get into the country in the first place; recall NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s inability to get an Indian visa on account of his work with the Sikh community. It would not, however, explain Surrey Liberal MP Randeep Sarai’s decision to invite Atwal in the first place.)
But Trudeau finally got his meeting with Modi on Friday, and there were no obvious hard feelings about the prime minister tripping through an ethnonationalist minefield. They hugged it out and stressed that their countries are good friends and that Canada and India can’t wait to hang out again in the future and maybe get a couple projects on the go, you know, eventually, when everything calms down and they have the time to get around to it. Trudeau’s homecoming on Saturday will no doubt be bittersweet: his nightmarish Indian adventure will finally be over, but he also won’t be able to justify wearing his extensive sari collection outside the house anymore, which is clearly something the man really, really likes to do.
In light of just how poorly this whole thing went, it might be a good time to consider whether Trudeau has flown too close to the sun on the wings of his own celebrity star-power. The prime minister has a bad habit of being glib and aloof, which is charming the first time you see it on the campaign hustings against Stephen “I Do Math Homework For Fun” Harper or when it’s played on the news alongside Donald Trump’s latest musings about America’s ideal guns-to-child-murder ratio. But even a good schtick gets old if that’s all you’ve got, and not everything plays to the same audience. This would be good to keep in mind when you take your show on the road to a place like India, a single state trying to balance the collective demands of one-sixth of the world’s population. They could give a shit about Justin Trudeau™—and that was before his string of international incidents.
Given that his bad week in India comes not long after “peoplekind” made the rounds in the world media, it may not be a bad idea for Trudeau to take time out from the globetrotting glamour thing and, I don’t know, do some governing. That’s the thing about style—the novelty wears out very quickly and you are forced to reckon with substance. And I’m not sure how much self-awareness is part of the Trudeau brand.
