Sometimes when director Alex Ross Perry speaks, you’re uncertain whether it’s Perry talking or a character from one of his films. After years of varying conversations, I’m starting to think the distinction is irrelevant. Perhaps it’s most fascinating when the art and the artist are inextricably linked, bound together not just by creation, but spirit.

Rest assured, Perry’s neurotic, self-flagellating ethos lives on in Golden Exits, his latest foray into what Don DeLillo called “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard” fiction. Most of the film unfolds inside brownstones and basements, where the entrance of Naomi, a confident, foreign college student played by Emily Browning, causes unrest for those around her. The finished product is something of an amalgamation of inspirations: Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, a little bit Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. It’s also just, you know, Alex Ross Perry.

When I spoke with the Brooklyn-based indie staple by telephone, we discussed the “social realism” in his cinema, his advice for anyone trying to make in 2018, and why his best work is still ahead of him.

VICE: The film nearly opens with the line, “People don’t ever make films about ordinary people who don’t really do anything.” And then you attempt to do just that.
Alex Ross Perry: I think of the line in Carol where they’re watching some movie on TV and one of the characters says something like, “I’m keeping track of all the times somebody says something that they don’t feel,” which obviously underscores what’s happening in that movie. I liked that line about “ordinary people” and thought it was a big risk to put a line like that in. But I just wanted to do that early enough so we can say to people, “This is the movie that you’re watching. This is the deal. Hopefully you’re OK with how it’s calling itself out, getting one step ahead of what you might already be thinking, letting you know that that’s over and done with, and now we can just move on and watch this.”

Do you think it worked?
I think it worked perfectly, and the fact that it appears in both praise and condemnation of the film lets me know that whether you like it or not, everybody seems to notice that line. What more can you hope for than to put lines in that for better or worse you know everybody’s going to notice.

In the larger context of your filmography, aren’t you often making movies about fairly ordinary people? I’m thinking about The Color Wheel and Listen Up Philip in particular…
I guess that depends on what you think of as an extraordinary person. Do we have any firemen kicking down a burning door to save a child in any of these movies? Certainly not. No, that’s a more extraordinary person than anybody by most measures, but do I have a direct in to the mechanics of that person’s dramatic struggle? Well, not clearly enough that that movie gets written, although someday I think it should, by me. These movies all live in the realm of social realism, to reappropriate a dismissive term of Don Delillo describing a certain type of American fiction. He calls it “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard” fiction. He uses that to discuss something he doesn’t like, although I like books like that and I like movies like that and this is certainly an “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard” kind of movie.

And social realism was designed to be a pejorative term?
He’s using it to describe a certain lack of, I think, complexity in writing. This quote of his could be 25 years old. I don’t know where it’s from, I just love it and it made a huge impression on me. Queen of Earth isn’t necessarily around-the-house-and-in-the-yard, neither is The Color Wheel, but you know, Listen Up Philip and Golden Exits take place in a world that I think people recognize because a lot of them live in or in an approximate to a world not dissimilar to what these movies are showing.

When you were starting out with Impolex and then The Color Wheel, what’s something you wish you knew then that you know now about the act of making?
It’s so hard to say because I do feel like those are basically as good as they could have been considering they were being made by a 23- and a 25-year-old. In terms of the writing, which is the area where I feel I’ve learned the most lessons: don’t think that it’s good enough. Don’t stop writing because you’ve printed ten copies of the script and given it to ten people. Don’t think that there’s any reason to stop writing. I wish I could just go back and say like, “How much longer can I spend working on this script?” or “How much more can I ask myself about this?” It’s corny because it’s obvious screenwriting stuff, but it’s just, does this element make sense? Does anything in here logically build to something, even in a movie like Impolex that’s just devoid of logic? Just be more attentive to stuff because it’s fun making these sloppy, ramshackle movies when you’re young, and I stand by them and I’m glad that they were made the way they are, but I think it would be neat to make them from the perspective of the writer that I am or even just the visual tricks that we’ve learned to play with and execute.

Do you think the writing is getting stronger?
That would be the hope. It’s just spending time writing and not shooting a movie because you’re ready to shoot it, but shooting a movie because it’s ready to be shot. You’ll never think, God, enough with this, can we just get in there? You’ll always think, Thank God I’m still sitting here taking notes from actors in the movie, producers, myself.

Is there a point where you think it’s just too much rewriting—too much tinkering?
I used to think yes, and now experiences I’ve had and the way certain projects have played out, my answer is no. Not just because I think it’s fun to write and I like sitting at home and doing it and thinking and being alone with my thoughts in that way, and I don’t ever want that to end, but because it’s not how the pros do it. Nobody working at the top of the top says, “This thing is done, let’s lock it in and let’s just make it later.” Anybody at the top, anybody at a studio level or any of our all-time heroes, they’re perfectionists in their own way, whatever that means, and they’re tinkering as long as they can until somebody takes the material out of their hands. Getting to that point for myself feels like a lesson I want to learn, where it’s not that there’s some objective standard of excellence that I’m trying to reach, but I’m just letting myself say, you know, every single draft until the one that’s written five days before the shoot is a rough draft. Let’s just stick with that and see where that gets us.

Before we go, I wanted to know: Are you happy with where you are at today?
I can look myself in the mirror if that’s what you’re asking. It’s a relative term. Obviously that sort of happiness or satisfaction or lack thereof with your own career choices is entirely what Golden Exits is about, so it’s on my mind. Do I look at the films and think, I’ve done my best work? Absolutely not. There’s no doubt that I have not yet done what I’m fully capable of. But at the same time, I’m working at a level that’s very enviable and very supported by people that I’m deeply indebted to and have been able for several years now to make a living doing this. That makes me happy because that’s very rare and very unique and I’ve done it without compromising anything. My ideals, the kind of work I want to do, the kind of movies I want to make, how I want my own movies to feel. So, that makes me happy.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Elizabeth Newark thought they were fireworks. Then the screaming started. Then the secretary saw a man walking down the hall, looking directly toward her and holding a gun. “His eyes went over me, my boss screamed for me to get out, and I ran,” Newark later recounted to a reporter.

It was July 1, 1993, at around three in the afternoon. Newark worked at Pettit and Martin, a corporate law firm that had space in 101 California Street, a 48-story glass spear in San Francisco, a few blocks from the Oakland Bay Bridge. It was the last place in the entire world you would expect to hear gunshots. The shooter—a heavyset man wearing a dark suit and suspenders—was armed with three handguns and had packed ammunition into an attache case he rolled with him. He’d outfitted two of the guns with “Hellfire triggers,” devices that make it possible to fire semi-automatics more quickly. His first shots targeted a glass conference room, killing two people and sending a wounded court reporter scrambling under a chair for cover.

The shooter stalked around the circular hallway as alarm spread, first by shots and cries of “There’s a gunman!” and then by a building-wide intercom announcement: “This is an emergency. Stay in your office. Lock your doors. Do not leave. Do not go on the elevator. Do not go on the stairwell. We’ll get back to you.” The announcement repeated every five minutes as the building’s workers tried to make sense of the chaos around them.

On the 26th floor, employees barricaded the door. On the 40th, they shoved a couch in front of the entrances. Meanwhile, some people kept working. Workers on the 24th, a Merrill Lynch office, were trapped in cubicles with no doors to lock. Emergency services began to converge on the financial district: helicopters, ambulances, a police tactical team. The streets were closed and strangely quiet, at least until crowds began to assemble on corners.

Relatives and friends of victims were talking about what they could do on gun control before the dead were buried.

Inside, the gunman fired into an office, shattering glass and killing a lawyer. He took the stairs down to the 33rd floor, then lower, shooting as he progressed. One lawyer, 28-year-old John Scully, used his body to shield his wife Michelle; he died, while she survived with wounds to her chest and shoulder. The gunman went on to kill a law student, a legal secretary, an executive, and an assistant in another company. In all, eight people were murdered and six were injured.

As police closed in, the gunman paused on the stairwell between the 29th and 30th floors, put a pistol under his chin, and pulled the trigger. Workers began to learn that he was dead around 3:30 PM, but confusion still reigned—the PA announcements continued, and cops evacuated the building slowly, searching it to make sure there were no more shooters.

They found none. The gunman, Gian Luigi Ferri, later revealed to be a 55-year-old with a failing mortgage business who lived in an LA suburb, acted alone. Some people who knew him described Ferri as “strange” and frequently angry when asked about him by reporters, but no one could figure out why he went on what was obviously a carefully-planned rampage. He left a note the New York Times described as “insane ramblings”; it complained about Pettit and Martin, but his contact with the firm had been limited, largely centering on an incident in which its lawyers advised him on an out-of-state real-estate deal more than a decade prior. His note said the firm had “raped” him in that interaction, and bashed attorneys in general before going on to detail a list of “criminals, rapists, racketeeres [ sic], lobbyists.” None of his actual victims were on it.

The California Street shooting seemed uniquely random, but in the wake of every mass killing, there’s always a feeling of senselessness, of people being killed for no reason at all. That feeling has become familiar to anyone who lives in America. Since the October shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas that killed 58, the country has witnessed a cluster of horrors: In November, a man gunned down 26 people (including an unborn child) at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas; in January, a 15-year-old killed two people and wounded at least 18 more at a school shooting in Kentucky; less than a month later, 17 people were killed in another school shooting, this one in Parkland, Florida. (The Texas, Florida, and Vegas shootings all rank among the ten deadliest in modern US history.)

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez reacts during her speech at a rally for gun control at the Broward County Federal Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 17, 2018. (Photo by RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)

The Parkland massacre has stirred public outrage in a way few mass shootings do, with teen survivors calling for gun control on social media and castigating Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio on CNN for failing to act. More than 150 House Democrats support a bill that would ban a wide variety of semiautomatic pistols and rifles. Even Donald Trump, perhaps the most pro-NRA president ever, has made noises indicating he could be open to reforms.

But a look back at the aftermath of the 101 California Street Shooting shows how difficult a project passing gun control legislation actually is. The 1993 tragedy led to a flurry of activism that helped usher in a host of local and state regulations in California, and even important—if limited—federal reforms. Just a few months after the shooting, President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks for gun purchases; the following year, the government placed a ban on a variety of assault weapons as part of larger crime legislation. But since then, the federal government has been largely passive on gun issues, even as hundreds of mass shootings—many of them unremarked upon—strike the US every year. So what made gun control possible then, and why has it become virtually unfathomable now?

One of the first California Street victims was Jack Berman, a well-liked attorney who didn’t even work for Pettit and Martin. His wife, Carol Kingsley, didn’t know what happened to him until six hours after she learned about the shooting. “I had simultaneous radio and TV stations going on,” she told me over the phone from San Francisco. “So I understand the period of watching something unfold on TV not knowing what happened to, in my case, my husband.”

She learned the bad news that evening: She would have to raise the couple’s 15-month-old son alone.

The early 90s were, in retrospect, a watershed moment in the history of the gun control movement—or the point at which a wave of advocacy crested, broke, and receded.

Grief turned into advocacy “immediately,” Kingsley told me. In the early morning hours after the shooting, Steve Sposato, whose 30-year-old wife, Jody, was among the victims, wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton condemning the weapons Ferri used. Relatives and friends of victims were talking about what they could do on gun control before the dead were buried—the rabbi conducting Berman’s service even asked Kingsley if he could address the subject in his remarks.

Guns and the damage they are capable of inflicting had been on many Americans’ minds for a while by then. The early 90s were, in retrospect, a watershed moment in the history of the gun control movement—or the point at which a wave of advocacy crested, broke, and receded. In 1989, a horrific shooting at a Stockton, California, school left five children dead and sparked such outrage that the state passed a ban on assault weapons—the country’s first—months later. The bill defined “assault weapons” by listing specific models of guns, including Colt AR-15s and Intratec TEC-9s, the type of semiautomatic pistol Ferri used in San Francisco four years later. (He bought his guns in Nevada.)

Nationally, things moved a lot more slowly. The Brady Bill, named for the White House press secretary wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, was first introduced in 1987. It proposed background checks on gun purchasers and a five-day waiting period for buyers. But it stalled in Congress, even as shootings piled up in the headlines. In 1991, a deranged man killed 23 people, then himself, at a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, the deadliest mass shooting in US history to that point. In January 1993, a AK-47-wielding nut killed two CIA employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Still, Congress didn’t act.

The arguments for gun control then were the same ones you hear now: Making it harder for unstable people to get guns—especially certain types of semiautomatic rifles or weapons outfitted with high-capacity magazines—wouldn’t eliminate gun violence, advocates said, but it would, over time, reduce it. “Drastically curbing gun availability will not be a cure-all; a knife or a club is still a legal weapon,” read a Los Angeles Times editorial published two days after the California Street shooting. “But knives do not kill eight people at a clip; semiautomatic weapons do.”

Then, as now, that argument wasn’t enough to persuade people who believed restrictions on gun ownership would be both ineffective when it came to reducing violence and an infringement of the Second Amendment. But America at the time was gripped by a fear of lawlessness more broadly. “1993 was the high point of a crime wave in America,” Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York College at Cortland who has published numerous books on gun control, told me. “Crime rates were high—murder rates and violent crime were both up. That was part of what alarmed Americans.”

The October after the shooting, the Washington Post published a story headlined “Urban Violence Is Changing the Politics of Gun Control.” It cited Republican strategists who predicted that with “crime, drugs, and gang violence” as top issues for voters, the GOP would need to shift toward less hardline pro-gun stances. “There is a sense that the times have changed and that the logic of this issue has changed,” a Democratic pollster told the Post. William Weld, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, called for a state assault weapons ban. Six states adopted bans on minors possessing guns in 1993, and a federal ban went into effect the next year.

That political climate, of course, mattered less to the victims’ families than the fresh fact of their trauma. “I was a partner in a law firm. So I had to attend to clients and work and I had a 15-month-old baby,” Kingsley told me. Still, she found time to speak at rallies, or when there were reporters who wanted a quote. “I would speak, basically, when we were trying to get measures passed,” she said.

Those affected by the California Street shooting created a group called the Legal Community Against Violence (LCAV) immediately after the tragedy. Initially it was something of an ad hoc affair, a collection of lawyers and law-firm support staff who felt moved to activism by being “hit close to home,” as Kingsley put it. They met at the Bar Association of San Francisco and shared their first executive director with the already-formed Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. For a time, some of them worked out of 101 California Street itself.

Today, after a couple of name changes and a merger with another organization, the LCAV is known as the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit legal advocacy group named after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the victim of a 2011 assassination attempt by a man armed with handgun. Initially, the LCAV was “single-minded” in its pursuit of an assault weapons ban, Robyn Thomas, the current executive director of the Giffords Center, told me. “Some of their own were hit, they could identify with a law firm because most of them were from large law firms,” she said.

“It hit a community that really was predisposed to wanting sensible gun control to pass and they had skills and the tools to do it,” Kingsley said. “And they did it.”

Like the California Street families, the teen survivors of the Parkland shooting became activists overnight. They’ve since made passionate speeches in favor of gun control, they’ve confronted politicians all the way up to President Trump, and they’re planning a march on Washington. Advocates need to strike an emotional chord that breaks through the clutter. But as the gun debate of the 90s shows, the legislative process lags behind emotional appeals, and passing laws requires a great deal of grunt work and argument.

The most contentious policy being pushed by activists back then was a ban on the sorts of guns Ferri used, weapons with high-capacity magazines and military-esque features that didn’t seem to serve any practical purpose. “Can any of you advise me how to tell a ten-month-old that mommy’s dead?” Steve Sposato asked the Senate Judiciary Committee during an August 1993 hearing, his daughter in a baby carrier on his back as he spoke. “Perhaps the manufacturer of the Intratec TEC-DC9 assault weapon should publish this information with the instruction manual for its murderous weapon.”

President Bill Clinton looks on as Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco Director John Magaw holds a AK-47 submachine gun at the White House in Washington on Monday, May 2, 1994. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)

At the time, support for the Brady Bill was already building and overcoming traditional partisanship: Ronald Reagan had publicly endorsed it in 1991, and in July 1993, the FBI, which rarely involves itself in policy debates, backed a series of measures including handgun licensing and training requirements, a waiting period on gun purchases, and a ban on high-capacity semi-automatic weapons. Senator Barbara Boxer, whose son’s friend was among the victims at California Street, was among those calling for a ban.

The Brady Bill passed in November, first in the House and then in the Senate after intense opposition and a filibuster from the Republican minority. (For the final Senate vote, which took place during the Thanksgiving break, only three senators were present, an indication of a less dogmatic Republican Party having caved in the face of overwhelming public support.) But a federal assault weapons ban was seen as a much heavier lift. As Patrick Griffin, one of Clinton’s legislative aides, recounted later for an oral history, many Democrats in the White House and Congress saw a ban as politically risky and didn’t want to go for it. But after California US Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Clinton about assault weapons at a Senate retreat, the president decided it needed to happen. “What would people think of me if I did not follow through on the assault weapon ban?” Griffin remembered him saying.

Though Democrats had majorities in both the House and Senate, there were still plenty of pro-gun Democrats in Congress—the party was way more Southern and conservative then—and gun control seemed like a long shot. It probably would not have happened without Feinstein, herself a former firearm owner whose relationship with gun violence was personal. She was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors with Harvey Milk when he and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978; she was the one who found their bodies, and has recalled how her finger slipped into a bullet hole on Milk’s body when she tried to find a pulse. Feinstein, who succeeded Moscone as mayor, became an early ally of the California Street families and the driving force behind the subsequent legislation. “She took it straight on,” Kingsley said.

“I met with senators for months, listening to their concerns and figuring out what it would take to get them to ‘yes,’” Feinstein told me through a spokesperson. In many cases, that meant making sure specific hunting rifles wouldn’t be affected by the ban. She also lobbied individual House members, sending them information about crimes that had been committed in their districts using the sorts of guns the ban would affect. That effort bore fruit in April 1994, when Henry Hyde, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, switched sides and supported it. (Hyde had also been a sponsor of the Brady Bill.)

At the same time, Clinton was making public appeals for the ban. “This is a lay-down, no-brainer. And Congress must not walk away from it,” he said in a May speech delivered next to a display of rifles. Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Reagan signed a letter backing the ban around the same time.

On May 5, 1994, the House voted to pass the ban by a single vote when Andrew Jacobs, an Indiana Democrat who usually opposed gun control, decided to switch his vote and support it. (The Senate had by then voted for a similar ban.) The measure was folded into a massive, omnibus crime bill that also built new prisons, hired more police officers, and imposed harsher penalties on criminals, among other things.

The insertion of the ban in the larger bill was seen as a victory for Clinton, who declared it a “sea change in the crime debate.” But in his memoir, the president would blame the ban for the Democrats losing 54 House seats in the 1994 midterms, writing he “pushed the Congress, the country, and the administration too hard.” (Spitzer, the gun control expert, called that assessment overblown, saying that though the ban was a factor in the Democratic loses, “it was not the main reason.”)

Then-Congressman Chuck Schumer of New York raising linked hands with US Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Illinois Congressman Mel Reynolds after the House passed the assault-weapons ban in May 1994. Photo by Terry Ashe/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

Even today, the assault weapons ban is controversial, and gun-control advocates concede it was flawed. “It grandfathered in a lot of weapons in existence and that made it hard to enforce,” said Thomas, the Giffords Center Director. Another problem was that to get it through Congress the ban backers had to agree to let it expire after a decade. That “encouraged gun manufacturers and others to wait out the ten years and find workarounds,” said Spitzer. The ban was also criticized for using purely cosmetic features like pistol grips to define “assault weapon,” and manufacturers were able to modify the guns they made to get around it. Finally, the sorts of weapons the ban dealt with were much less likely to be used in crimes than handguns, which were unaffected by the law.

Still, Spitzer pointed out that the most reliable analysis of the law’s effects, by the criminologist Christopher Koper, found a “limited positive effect.” Now that the ban has expired, these weapons are being used more frequently in crimes, according to one study, which found that high-capacity magazines were especially likely to be used in attacks on cops. Other research has shown mass shootings were less frequent and less deadly while the ban was in place.

The ban was celebrated after passage by activists like Kingsley, who told me she saw it as a “logical, good first step.” Still, it’s impossible to ignore that even such a limited reform took almost a perfect storm of factors to achieve. The public was spooked about legitimately high crime rates in general; Democrats controlled the federal government; there were a couple of extremely dedicated politicians, in Clinton and Feinstein, who demanded action; and DC was less partisan than it is now. “The Senate was a different place 25 years ago,” Feinstein said. “There wasn’t this crippling fear of the NRA, and there were more senators in the center of the political spectrum. There was more room for compromise and debate.”

The California Street shooting also directly factored in the ban’s passage by galvanizing politicians adjacent to Feinstein and creating a group of deeply determined—and knowledgable—activists. “Having this group of lawyers who had lost colleagues, siblings, friends and family who knew how to work the system and knew how to get to Washington, use their voices, be present, was really important as well,” Thomas told me. “It was a confluence of the right things coming together.”

Could the right things come together again? After Parkland, some Republicans, including Trump, indicated they might support raising the minimum age to buy firearms to 21. Brian Mast, a Republican congressman from Florida who is also a veteran, wrote in the New York Times that he would support an assault weapons ban, though, he conceded, “The exact definition of assault weapon will need to be determined.” A crop of relatively new gun control groups have appeared on the scene since the horrific 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and many expert-backed gun reforms have widespread public approval.

Still, the gun lobby remains incredibly powerful, and it was able to block even relatively mild legislation after Newtown. “I still can’t believe we did nothing after 20 first graders were slaughtered in their classroom,” said Feinstein, who has remained a strong voice for gun control in the Senate even as her standing in her party has waned. “Congress has refused to stand up to the NRA. That’s the bottom line.”

Because of that dynamic, to really see the lasting impact of the California Street shooting, you have to look not at Congress but at the state of California. That’s where activists have spent years passing small reforms, often initially in progressive cities. “We passed regulations in dozens and dozens of cities first, which made it far easier to get that done at the state level,” Thomas recalled. Today, California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and while correlation is not causation, the state’s total annual firearm deaths have fallen even as the population has grown; though the gun death rate has dropped across the country in the last 20 years, it’s dropped more steeply in California.

But another lesson from California Street is that public tragedies can create ripples and echoes that linger for decades.

“One law isn’t going to fix gun violence,” Thomas told me. Instead, she envisioned something like the safety regime that has grown up around cars. “We’re going to have to have [the equivalent of] better seat-belts, speed limits, speed bumps, banked curbs.” For an example of a modern regulation, she pointed to one recently enacted California state law restricting the sale of ammunition and requiring ammo purchasers to undergo background checks; it followed an earlier local law in Sacramento that let police track ammunition sales to find and arrest people who had guns despite being prohibited from owning them.

Some states have gone the other way on guns, however, passing "Stand Your Ground” laws that broaden the situations where shooting someone in “self-defense” is legally permissible. Conservative lawmakers in many places have also expanded concealed-carry regulations—last year in Arkansas, the legislature made it legal to carry guns on college campuses even though students and faculty at the University of Arkansas opposed the measure. Federal gun laws remain lax. Today, it’s legal to buy the sort of gun Ferri used in his killing spree 25 years ago. You can buy a Hellfire trigger, too. (Many Republicans, including Trump, say they now support banning “bump stocks,” devices that perform a similar function and were used by the Vegas shooter.)

The activism born from the California Street shooting did not succeed in getting rid of the weapons that make mass shootings especially deadly, at least not permanently. One of the hard lessons from that episode, and from Newtown, is that passionate advocacy is often not enough to force meaningful change on a national level.

But another lesson from California Street is that public tragedies can create ripples and echoes that linger for decades—a quarter-century later, it remains a touchstone for many California gun-control activists. “Maybe it’s 98 percent horrible when [certain] events happen,” said Kingsley, “but there is that 2 percent of positive. And the positive with this increased frequency of these horrific shootings is it keeps the conversation going. It keeps it in the front of people’s minds.”

Every summer, around the anniversary of the shooting, the Giffords Law Center holds a gala in San Francisco. Thomas told me that even though the venue tends to be a relatively small one, the event attracts hundreds of guests. “I think a big reason for that is the 101 California Street shooting still matters to people here. They haven’t forgotten. And they know we came out of that,” she said. “Even though I know a lot of people outside of California may not remember it or it may not be that big of a deal, here it still really matters to people. Most people who’ve been in this city a long time still tell me they walk by the building and think of it.”

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A whole lot can change in a year, and filmmaker Attiya Khan knows this well. As a survivor of horrific abuse at the hands of her first boyfriend, she’s had to turn her own world upside down before. And through much of her career working in Canadian women’s shelters, she’s helped countless other women going through the same harrowing life transformations.

Last April, when Khan first put her documentary A Better Man into the world, this kind of violence was still seen almost entirely as a women’s issue. Until major newspapers reporting sexual assault allegations made it their problem, the Harvey Weinsteins and Louis CKs of the world weren’t required to reckon with the impacts of their actions. Even then, those reports left plenty of room for plausible deniability.

Khan couldn’t have anticipated the global conversation about sexual assault and the hundreds of public allegations that followed. But she did anticipate a big conundrum that comes with a #MeToo movement in full swing. Accused men can’t just disappear of the face of the planet, so we have to figure out what accountability and restorative justice could look like.

Khan’s on-camera confrontation of her abusive ex presents an alternative outcome where instead of denying or discrediting his victim, an abuser listens to a full accounting of the damage he caused. Though it’s far from a silver bullet solution, the doc lays out a roadmap for how accused men could more fully take responsibility for their actions.

A Better Man will be screening at several International Women’s Day events across the country, including local discussions in Vancouver, Peace River and Toronto. VICE caught up with Khan over email to talk about healing, unhelpful “nice guy” or “monster” labels, and the importance of face-to-face conversation.

VICE: So much has happened since A Better Man first premiered at Hot Docs. Can you tell me about your journey over the last year? Did you expect to see sexual and violent abuse against women become such a mainstream issue?
Attiya Khan: For the last year since the film has been released, I have been touring with the film to festivals, conferences, workplaces, and other community spaces, in Canada, the US, and Europe. The response has been overwhelming, and we’ve had interest in the film from countries around the world. It’s clear to me that people want to talk about this issue, but it’s very difficult to talk about and many people don’t know how to talk about it. The film really gets people talking. And it also has people thinking of what they can do to advance real progress on this issue.

I am surprised that violence against women has become such a mainstream issue. Advocates have pushed for decades to try and get this on the radar. To me, it felt like no one was listening. I am not surprised though by the number of people coming forward. As a counselor who used to work directly with women who have experienced domestic violence, I heard non-stop stories of abuse. I used to get frustrated that people didn’t believe how common abuse is. Social media has helped to raise the awareness not just about how many people have experienced violence, but also the many forms of violence that take place and violence in the workplace.

Attiya and Steve. Image via NFB

Having confronted your abuser publicly, do you feel you got the outcome you wanted? Did your intentions change in process? As a filmmaker did you worry about a "satisfying ending"?
By sitting down with Steve on camera and talking about our past relationship, I was hoping to capture a conversation that we don’t get to hear in the hopes that it could help others. What I did not expect was the more we talked, the more I healed. The process of being able to tell Steve exactly what he had done to me was very satisfying. Often, survivors are not believed or the abuse they experienced is minimized. To have Steve listen to me and start to remember some of the incidents without minimizing what he did or blame me for his past abusive behaviors has really helped me to heal. I did not worry about a satisfying ending where everything is resolved. It was important to me to show the process honestly and watch it unfold. I wanted audiences to see and to feel how hard it is to have conversation like the one Steve and I have in the film.

Seeing so many different kinds of abuse being confronted in so many different ways, do you have any reflections on what you think works, or what risks going off the rails?
Our responses to abuse need to focus on the needs and wants of people who have experienced abuse. We need to listen to them much more deeply, and tailor our responses around what they/we are saying. Different women will want different things. Therefore we need a system that creates different options, different paths to justice.

We also need to focus on prevention. This means focusing on the people who use violence, better understanding why they use it, and the kinds of supports and interventions that can be successful at preventing violence. Through making the film, I have learned about programs like this that have a strong track record, such as Bridges in Nova Scotia and Changing Ways in London, Ontario. We should learn from these programs and find ways to scale them up.

Watching the film I'm struck by the incomplete memories, and by Steve's very "normal, nice guy" outward appearance. Can you talk a bit about that?
The first time I sat down with Steve on camera, he did not remember very much. At the time I was frustrated. But it makes sense that he wanted to push the memories of harming me deep down. Steve carried a lot of shame. It became quite clear to me that Steve had never talked about his past abuse against me.

Many people have told me that they are shocked at how “normal” and “nice” Steve appears. The truth is, people who choose to use violence are people we know, they are our friends, our family members, co-workers and perhaps ourselves. People who use violence are capable of love and tenderness. They can be nice. I personally don’t think we should label people by their past abusive actions. In our society we tend to label people who use violence as “monsters.” This label allows people to distance themselves from people who use violence. This creates an “us versus them” mentality, which is never helpful.

This film will be screened at International Women's Day events across the country. What value do you see in these smaller community-oriented screenings, particularly in this climate of frequent #MeToo headlines?
There is huge value in screening the film in smaller community settings. It’s so important to have conversations about preventing violence against women and intervention. A lot of the community screenings that have been happening have been organizing panels after the film so people can unpack what they just viewed. The best and most impactful conversations happen in person, not online. To help unpack the film, my team has created excellent discussion guides and you can find them on our website.

The women’s movement has been using these in-person conversations for years as a way to organize for change. A hashtag can raise awareness, but we need much more in-depth conversations, organizing, and solutions if we want the momentum of #MeToo to translate into a meaningful decrease in abuse and violence.

When women who have been abused reach out to you, is there a message you try to convey to them?
I do hear from lots of women who are experiencing or have experienced abuse. I always thank people for sharing their experiences of violence. It takes tremendous courage and it’s important to acknowledge that. I encourage people to find someone they trust—a friend or a therapist—to continue talking about their experiences. So many of us hold such horrific stories in our bodies and we need to release the pain and trauma and talking about it is an important and great start.

One of the film takeaways is that abuse is not just a private thing. I'm wondering if you still encounter people who disagree, or if that's changed in the last year.
I definitely hear from audience members all the time who say they cannot talk about this in their own families or communities. That is why it is imperative that we create spaces outside of people’s homes to have these conversations. Many people still believe abuse is a private matter. It’s seen as none of their business. People think “well, if it was that bad, she’d leave.” We need to work on challenging people’s assumptions about abuse and the way we do this is by breaking the silence.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.

From Sherlock Holmes to Ian Rankin’s seemingly never-ending output of cookie-cutter detective novels, it feels like the popularity of crime fiction never went away. But it's true crime that has enjoyed a real resurgence in recent years. After the world was gripped by Adnan Syed’s potentially false conviction via the podcast Serial, along came a spate of Netflix documentaries combing over evidence in old murder cases (the Amanda Knox doc and The Life and Death of Marsha P Johnson are two worth watching). While some of these focus on murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who targeted gay men, others highlight the serial killer trope of women getting murdered simply for being women, like David Fincher's Mindhunter, a veritable psychosexual headfuck.

Emma Hardy and Grace Harrison noticed this trend of podcasts and TV series after they first met while working for a magazine publisher in London. There, they began to discuss the lack of a good true crime magazine – one that didn’t fetishise serial killers' inherent misogyny and obsession with murdering women. They quickly came up with Foul Play, a respectful take on the true crime genre offering both reviews and features on all the true crime TV shows, podcasts and films currently flooding the market, as well as their own shot at serialised true crime content, including a regular column by a relative of one of serial killer Harold Shipman's many victims – a clever look at how much of an effect one evil person can have on a town and a community.

The first issue of Foul Play came out in January and will now come out quarterly. Ahead of issue two, we talked to Emma and Grace about what to expect from the magazine and what it means to be women who are utterly obsessed with true crime.

VICE: Hi guys. So, to start with, where do your individual interests in true crime come from?
Emma: I was obsessed with ghost stories as a kid, and watched a lot of thrillers and horror films as a teenager. When I started reading about true crime it felt similar, except you knew they had actually happened. I’m a big worrier and I like to try to mentally prepare for every eventuality, so reading about these experiences other people had fascinated me, because I would try and think about how I would have handled that situation. As I’ve gotten older it’s less about that, though, and more about feeling like the relationship our society has with crime and criminals needs some work; we’re going about trying to reduce it all wrong. There are a lot of reasons for that, and that's something I’m really keen for us to explore in the magazine.
Grace: It’s something I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with. It always seemed like a marginal, morbid and seedy thing to be into, but now it feels there must’ve always been a lot of people who share the same fascination [as] it’s finally becoming a bit more mainstream and acceptable. I’ve always particularly loved true crime literature. I remember reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote as a teenager, and Happy Like Murderers [by Gordon Burn]. I’ve always found crime fiction does it less for me, for some reason. The truth is normally far scarier.

How did the idea for the magazine come about, and how did you set to making it a reality?
Emma: We’d been sharing true crime podcast, book and film recommendations with each other every week when I came into work, and then one day, at an after-work drink thing, I realised there weren’t any true crime magazines that weren’t super gross and sensationalist. I blurted out to Grace that we should make a magazine about true crime and she just ran with it. She came up with the name almost immediately and we got super excited. Once we realised we were both being 100 percent serious about wanting to start it, we met up – sober, this time – and got things going.
Grace: We roped in help from a really experienced and talented magazine editor called Morgan, who acted as an advisor and helped us create flat-plans and production grids. We also decided early on to try and fund the print-run for issue one through pre-orders rather than crowd-funding. I think this was probably still the best route for us, but it involved hounding everyone I’ve ever met and making them buy copies in good faith.

Talk me through the design.
Emma: From a design perspective, we wanted something that was clean and concise, the polar opposite of the splashy, assaulting tabloid-style treatment of true crime, which meant no serial-killer pictures, a limited colour palette, straightforward typography. Some of the subjects we touch upon, and the non-sensational approach we take, can make imagery a challenge: we didn't want to illustrate a piece about Harold Shipman with the same picture of him that's been used by media the world over, or any picture of him, really. So we often take a more conceptual or tangential approach with imagery, and we spent a lot of time sourcing strong visuals. We unearthed amazing shots from a prison-break in Sweden in the 1970s, and have two fascinating visual-led stories – a photography tour of Jack the Ripper murder locations and a series of envelopes decorated by a prisoner in exchange for commissary.

Why did you decide to dedicate a section to podcasts?
Grace: It felt like a natural thing to do, especially as this is how we first discovered our mutual love of the subject – and podcasts are quite a big part to thank for why there has been a shift to the mainstream. Some of the true crime podcasts, like Making a Murderer, Serial and S-Town, have given the genre some real credibility, so it felt wrong not to include them.

As two women, do you think you're always catered for in the world of true crime?
Emma: Our audience is definitely more female than male, but having an interest in true crime is something lots of women still won’t admit to, as it’s not a particularly stereotypically feminine interest, and I think some women worry they’ll be judged negatively for wanting to read about murderers. I think it’s also unusual for a magazine to be started and led by two women, so I feel like we’re breaking through a few walls here.

Grace: I agree. I think, traditionally, there have probably always been as many – if not more – women into this kind of thing as men. However, I do think that a lot of the content hasn’t been geared towards women as much. True crime magazines have historically featured a bound, gagged, busty woman on the front, somehow managing to look both scared and also suggestive. I know I wouldn’t want to buy that. I think it has also never felt like a particularly feminist pursuit, but that’s definitely changing, and the new wave of podcasts – particularly by female creators – has really helped with this shift. One of my favourite podcasts, AllKillaNoFilla, is a great example; it toes the right side of true crime, remaining non-sensational, focusing on the victims, and also features a female friendship at its heart, as well as being hilarious.

The Ann Tornkvist story, about her experience as a reporter writing a book about the Mafia, is great. How did you hear about her story and get her to write for you?
Grace: This was one of my favourite stories from issue one. Ann Törnkvist is a Swedish crime journalist who had just finished writing her debut book about Swedish gang crime, Folj Fucking Order (Follow Fucking Orders), when she started to receive threats from the gangster the book was about. She had to go into hiding, which obviously massively affected her work and life. To make the story more complicated, her publisher then dropped the book. It became a tabloid story in Sweden about the pressure journalists face and how they should be supported when under threat.

The story we ran is a personal account of the fear and paranoia she felt during her time on the run. Ann got in touch with me through our website after feeling like her values in terms of crime reporting matched what we were trying to do. It’s also a really interesting subject for Foul Play, as gang crime in Sweden isn’t something you’d usually think about, especially for us in the UK. As an interesting update to the story, Ann is actually about to start her book tour in Sweden, and is going to have to do it under armed security while in certain locations.

Finally, does the magazine pose ethical questions?
Grace: Yes, I think it definitely does. We’re trying to make the first 100 percent non-sensational true crime publication – to prove that you can have an interest in the subject while also being respectful. There’s definitely a weird side to the true crime community that we aren’t comfortable with. People who wear serial killer T-shirts and share Ted Bundy memes. That’s definitely not us.
Emma: Definitely not. Right from the outset we’ve made it our priority to question everything that goes in. We don’t want it to be sensational, we don’t want there to be victim blaming, we don’t want people to be revelling in the gory details of someone’s demise. Instead, we want to prompt people to think about crime in our society in a thoughtful way, and create a new dialogue that doesn’t necessarily agree with this very firm "victim" and "bad guy" narrative that our society is currently going with. That doesn’t mean we’re not sometimes up for a bit of humour, though; we stuck in the "Anti-crimax" page – where we take funny crime-related news headlines we’ve seen – at the end, to bring some light-hearted relief to what can be a fairly heavy topic.

@MillyAbraham

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Different people take different approaches to sex and relationships. Some go out, get drunk and "graft", others are serial monogamists who bounce from long-term relationship to long-term relationship. There are also people who, much to the bafflement and jealousy of everyone else, have no appetite for sex at all. The other side of that, I guess, is submitting a 7 billion word thesis to men’s rights Reddit hub The Red Pill, titled "HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD".

What we've got here is a "complete guide to picking up 9s and 10s" aimed at straight cis men who, presumably, have never spoken to a woman ever. These 37 (THIRTY SEVEN) rules will apparently arm budding warlords around the world with all the tools necessary to ensure they get "the highest calibre girls from cold approach". If you don’t understand what any of this means, you’re probably doing something right. But it doesn’t take a genius to understand that this magnum opus of sad behaviour – this Da Vinci Code for predators – stems from the internalised belief that masculinity can only exist within the narrow confines of the toxic stereotypes that society has historically enforced on men, while also representing a failure to conceive of a positive role for themselves in modern societies that have progressed in such a direction that those stereotypes are now being rightfully rejected. They are lost and confused, and I can only assume that is why the author of this masterpiece refers to his girlfriend simply as "9".

We won’t go through all of it, because fucking hell (THIRTY SEVEN!! THIRTY SEVEN RULES!), but let’s investigate the key points.

Oh yeah, also, it’s International Women’s Day. That's why we’re doing this.

Also, we've jumped straight in at point 3, because points 1 through 6 all basically say the same thing. To summarise: this guy is obsessed with men’s "frames" and them being large and/or strong. The word "frame" is mentioned no less than 108 times in this manual, making The Red Pill the third most frame-focused institution behind Specsavers and the judges on Strictly Come Dancing.

PART 1: THE ATTRACTION PROCESS

Speaking as someone whose sexual history has less consistency than the Bible, I have to say: this is bollocks. I once had a boyfriend so frail I donated my size 6 Topshop spray-on skinny jeans to him after I recovered from an eating disorder. I also have fantasies about being Eiffel-towered by two of The Rock as he appears in Baywatch. Attraction is a lawless state, and there is nothing in this theory that can't be debunked by the existence of Timothee Chalamet alone, but let’s address the primary falsehood it is based on.

Women can get horny for anything. A good joke, a mutual interest in obscure musical theatre, the smell of a pasta bake in the oven, wrists, not being talked over. It’s often less about one factor and more about a combination of smaller ones. If you ask someone in a healthy, long-term relationship what they like about their partner(s), rarely will you receive the response "their strong frame" and NOTHING ELSE. There are probably many women out there for whom only brick shithouses will do, but if the brick shithouse is, for example, wearing jeans and sheaux or doesn’t get sarcasm, then it’s all fucked isn’t it.

Also, anyone who claims that "physiologically, girls can’t even get wet for a guy who has a weaker frame than they do" clearly didn’t have an emo phase.

I don't know, man. I’m all for positive mental attitude, but unless you’re reading a news story regarding "the frightening truth about crisps" I can't think of a single scenario in which this constitutes good advice. It mostly seems like a really fast way to involve yourself in an accident. For instance, being decked by a woman because you ignored approximately eight obvious social cues in favour of standing about, nodding intently but emotionlessly, like a cat watching a pigeon through a window.

The first rule of Fight Club for over-16s is throwing your copy out the window and forgetting it exists.

PART 2: INNER GAME

If you ignore all the bits about being a man and testosterone and dicks, this is actually fairly decent advice for everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality. All the "you are enough" and "you don’t have to change anything" stuff is very culture of self-care, very Mantras of a YouTube Yoga Teacher. The core principles of internal value sort of lose all meaning as soon as they become about tricking someone, but if you’re going to take anything away from this whole sordid little handbook, perhaps it should be: you don’t have to "do" anything to attract a girl.

Nah.

You know what: yes. I actually fully agree with the top line here. The world would be a healthier place and stupid porn regulations would not be (forgive the expression) ham-fisted into national legislation if there was a general acknowledgement that we are, one and all, horny scoundrels. But, of course, things go rapidly off course after that. If you forget about context it’s quite sex-positive until the fourth line, when self-loathing kicks back in.

For the record, it’s perfectly understandable to want to fuck someone you’d be ashamed to be seen in public with, but that shame should come from the fact that they’re a YouTuber or the sort of person who corners people at parties to monologue about the naturally occurring properties of DMT, or something. Not their appearance (unless they’re a white person with dreads).

*extremely Dennis Reynolds voice*

PART 3: HOW TO MAKE WOMEN HORNY BY PASSING THEIR TESTS

Frame, frame, bloody frame! It's all about frame with this guy, isn’t it. Have a day off, mate. Same goes for the obsession with wetness. Each to their own, but, for the most part, for women to get wet it usually helps if they’re not being systematically terrified while trying to have a Corona with their mates. You know what gets women wet? Respect for their personal space, acknowledgement that you are not entitled to anything and, for me, Fast and Furious 8.

I have thought about it, and "how the fuck are you going to handle beating a 7ft tall man to death with your bare hands when he and his tribe invade your village and try to gang-rape your girl" is without a shadow of a doubt the most insane sentence I have ever read – and I had to write a paper on If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller at university.

I think my advice here would be to "chill". On a scale of likeliness, I would say that if you don’t have the psychological wherewithal to process a woman saying, "I’m just out with my friends tonight" then you wouldn’t last five fucking seconds in combat with one of those inflatable tube men they have outside car dealerships.

Lots to unpack here. Our scholar seems to follow a logic that women act bitchy so they can… thrive in the desert? If you think of the desert as the vast wastelands of unfulfilled thirst that is modern life for women who sleep with men, just endlessly trekking through an inhospitable climate in the hope that, eventually, they might stumble upon a secure, respectful, pussy eater to tide them over for a while. Then, yeah. Bang on.

THEN THERE IS A REALLY LONG BIT HERE ABOUT "ACTIVE TESTS" AND "PASSIVE TESTS", BUT IT'S ABSOLUTELY MAD SO I THINK IT’S BEST IF WE JUST SKIP IT AND GO STRAIGHT TO THE EXAMPLES SO WE CAN ASSESS WHAT HE'S ON ABOUT

THE 6 MOST COMMON TESTS HOT GIRLS WILL GIVE YOU AND HOW TO PASS THEM IN A WAY THAT BUILDS ATTRACTION

Don’t do this.

Don’t do this, either, unless you’re doing an impression of Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused because she was just telling you about how she really likes Dazed and Confused, especially Matthew McConaughey’s portrayal of sleazy creep David Wooderson, who is famously trapped in an embarrassing yet common period of stunted adolescence and definitely shouldn’t have got the girl in the end – like, what was Linklater thinking?

Do the first three words of this and disregard the rest.

To play MRA advocate for a second, this directly contradicts example #3, which explicitly states that you should re-approach a woman who has walked away from you. If you are to follow rule #4 as well, that basically means all you’re doing is approaching women, being rejected and running around the establishment after them like something out of It Follows. That doesn’t sound like the behaviour of someone of "strong frame" to me!!!!

I mean, be my guest. If this works then I wish you a long and happy life together, and don’t invite me to your weird wedding.

@emmaggarland

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

After 65 years, NME – Britain's longest-running music publication – has announced it will no longer appear in print.

To most, this is sad news; to some, reason to rejoice. For whatever reason, the magazine seemed to take more flak than just about any other publication, particularly in its final years, when it filled its pages with weird features about hair gel and confusing lists of new music that were so heavily sponsored by Microsoft's Cortana they made no sense. But there's a lot more to the NME's recent history than branded content, and it's often the case that the people who hated the title the most were those who never actually read it.

Starting life in the 1950s as the Accordion and Musical Express, with all the hot news on jazz and organ playing, it has since been through a hundred eras and rebrands, at different points a prog, punk, new wave and soul magazine. Over the past two decades it's been criticised for its seemingly endless stream of Oasis and Libertines covers, and for creating an era of "indie landfill", where any bunch of sad-acts with a guitar could get on the cover as long as they were male, pale and looked like Rik Mayall.

But throughout its history the magazine has employed writers that don't subscribe to its indie authoritarianism; who tried to sneak all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff into the magazine. Here, former NME staffers reflect on the history of the magazine beyond the Gallagher covers

Peter Robinson, writer and columnist

Don’t believe the old men – men even older than me – who, over the coming days, will try to tell you NME stopped being worth reading, or writing for, in the 1970s, or the 1980s, or the 1990s, or whenever it was they just so happened to be working there. Don’t believe them for two reasons: firstly, having worked there myself I’ve had full access to the back issues cupboard and, fuck me, in each of those "golden" eras NME published some right old rubbish. Secondly, I had the time of my life working there, and so did a lot of people now responsible for what you read in some of your favourite websites and newspapers.

Three random memories: people gathering around my computer to hear the just-leaked new single by Beyoncé (I declared that the song, "Crazy In Love", was "going on a bit"); getting the Cheeky Girls to dress as the White Stripes for an NME yearbook I was curiously not invited to edit the following year; and arguing in a Sid Vicious cover story that because he too had learned bass in order to get into a band he was basically the 70s equivalent of Matt from Busted. I also got to spend four days in New York for a half-page *NSYNC live review, found myself in Glasgow for Kylie’s world-first performance of "Can’t Get You Out of My Head" and had a shameful phone argument with Carlos Santana.

We are the Whitey Stripes, we are the Whitey Stripes

Plenty of people will regard all of the above as a smoking gun in their case for NME’s decline, but of course while I was doing all that there were countless other writers getting just as excited about music in their own favourite fields. Sometimes that meant Jet ended up on the cover, but 51 covers a year can’t have been easy to fill. And 51 covers a year – even if half were either The Libertines or a Gallagher – were surely preferable to none.

Alex Needham, former deputy editor

I joined NME at the beginning of 2001. At that point, indie rock truly seemed pretty much dead – both Select and Melody Maker had folded – though signs of life were detected in the first Strokes EP, released around the same time.

It was clear, however, that we couldn’t base a magazine around one band who spent most of their time in New York. What we should do, I was convinced, was throw ourselves into covering the most exciting music of the time. To me, that meant R&B, which was going through an incredible renaissance, with geniuses like Timbaland, Pharrell Williams, Rodney Jerkins and She'kspere redefining pop on what seemed like a daily basis.

So much to the readers' surprise, the first year I was there we put Missy Elliott, Destiny’s Child, Aaliyah and So Solid Crew on the cover. The readers hated it, and [owner] IPC weren’t too thrilled when the Aaliyah cover tanked, but 17 years later I’m proud that we celebrated the artists making records as stratospherically great as "Get Ur Freak On" and "We Need a Resolution".

I remember interviewing Destiny’s Child in the penthouse suite at the Metropolitan Hotel in London – Beyonce fell off her seat while stroking Kelly Rowland’s hair. We went to Ayia Napa to investigate where UK garage went on holiday. We photographed and interviewed Aaliyah in a photo studio in Los Angeles – I remember her incredible poise and charisma, and her stylist and hair and makeup people, a funny and genial bunch. Two months later they were all killed in a plane crash after filming the video for "Rock the Boat" in the Bahamas. Aaliyah was only 22.

My hope was that the readers would be carried along by a magazine that had Mogwai on the cover one issue and Destiny’s Child the next, but it didn’t happen, and it was with a tangible sigh of relief that the magazine reverted to its core mission of covering indie once there were enough guitar bands around to fill it. I knew it was over after I’d been out to New York to cover Fischerspooner for a cover feature, but the deputy editor James Oldham put a scruffy new band called the Libertines on instead – a decision I was furious about at the time, but which seems highly sensible in retrospect.

Of course NME was a magazine about indie music, but it was also one big stars wanted to talk to, and which had a significance to the wider world. Sure, we put Arctic Monkeys on the cover, but we also did the same with Outkast – even if IPC did cover them with a cardboard slip. NME was the paper of Joy Division, but it also brought Public Enemy to the British public’s attention. However clumsily, we did try to continue that tradition.

Louise Brailey, writer

The late aughts was a curious time for the NME; the foundations that had sustained it – all that stuff about bands being your life and skinny-tied genre tribalism – had begun to disintegrate under the weight of the internet. It was a topic we couldn’t stop banging on about at the time, but people’s listening habits had been blown wide open.

The NME’s response – and this is credit to amazing editorial staff, like Emily Mackay – was to get stuck in and make sense of it all. I was charged with covering a lot of electronic music, stuff that just a few years back would’ve never got past security. It wasn’t quite the wild west, though: I once tried to give a 10/10 to Shackleton’s Fabric mix, but that was vetoed in favour of a relatively sober 9. Darkstar, the post-dubstep group, were another band we’d be forever getting in there, sandwiched between S.C.U.M. and Lily Allen. It was a constant code-switch, and all the better for it.

The issue was, you didn’t know quite how weird NME had got unless you actually bought it, so I ended up chatting to a few electronic producers who seemed utterly bemused that NME even cared, or would spend interviews covertly testing me. Sometimes it got ugly. I remember one dubstep producer – no names, ‘cos what’s the point – took an intense personal dislike to me after the subs used a line about mephedrone as a pull quote. See what I mean: curious times.

Emily Mackay, former reviews editor

Yesterday was a sad, strange day, but thankfully I still have quite a bit of the indifference I started building up around 2009 to sneery received wisdom, the thunderbolt insights of armchair publishers and the frankly weird animus many people have towards NME.

Of course mistakes were made (not least by me – I count ’em down in the small hours like a middle-aged Arya) in a weekly magazine that became an increasingly difficult editorial conundrum. But the usual cliches – not as good as it used to be, full of derivative landfill indie bands, dumbed down – just didn’t hold up when you read beyond the cover to the great writing on, say, Wild Beasts, Fever Ray, St Vincent, Fucked Up, Odd Future, Katy B, Battles…

And some of the absolute mad shit we managed to get printed! I was given amazing latitude as both writer and reviews editor to put sacred cows to the knife, send teenagers out on tour, let people get weird over hundreds of words. I treasure memories like Gavin Haynes savaging Fleet Foxes, Lizzy Goodman on a rock cruise with Black Lips, that time Angus from Liars reviewed the singles ("I feel like maybe I would like this if I was… someone else?") and that other time Kev Kharas wrote an album review that was entirely an extended metaphor about his testicles.

But while the hatchet jobs were fun (I guess yesterday brought a lot of karma), NME for me was always at its best when most exhilaratingly enthusiastic: the dizzying 9s and 10s, the live reviews crackling with excitement, the swimming pools of simile. We had a fantastic column for a while called Unspun Heroes, in which writers enthused about underexposed records they loved: Laura Snapes on Lizzy-Mercier Descloux, John Doran on World Domination Enterprises, Hamish MacBain on Broadcast. They weren’t looked after well enough by a stupid company that didn’t realise the value of what it had, but I had a roster of such incredible writers – my inbox was a jewel chest come deadline day. I really miss that. And I’m sorry all the been-shit-for-decades crew missed it too.

Alex Miller, former Radar editor

It's easy to look back and judge a magazine like NME for the boring cover stars, but those choices were utterly driven by sales and, as such, by readers. If The Knife sold issues, they'd have been on the cover every week.

Think about it like this: everyone loves Buzzfeed's news coverage, but it won't be what gets them traffic. So imagine that all of the content they ever produced was hidden behind one story every week. In order to get the largest number of people possible to read their investigation into, say, the suspicious death of Boris Berezovsky and eight others, they'd have to put "Katie Perry Just Roasted Kim Kardashian In This Throwback Photo" on the cover. Which would make them look silly, no matter how much great stuff lurked inside. Basically, magazines are brilliant, but less good than the internet.

With all that in mind, the second Beth Ditto cover was good. And I got Dev Hynes on the cover. And Fucked Up for some reason. It's fun to get away with that stuff, because, frankly, NME would have sold a lot more if they just put Liam Gallagher on the cover every week for a million years; just ask The Guardian, Noisey, GQ , the Indy, or anyone else who enjoyed some Liam traffic recently. Come to think of it, we've all just chiefed NME's one last selling point. Shame on us.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The leader and deputy leader of Britain First – the far-right Facebook page, cum-shouty street team, cum-historically disastrous political party – have been jailed for 18 and 36 weeks respectively.

Paul Golding, 36, was found guilty of one count of religiously-aggravated harassment, while 31-year-old Jayda "Retweeted By Trump" Fransen was found guilty of three counts of the same charge.

The pair were arrested on the 10th of May, 2017 in relation to their unique style of "campaigning" against the defendants in a trial at Canterbury Crown Court – three Muslim men and a teenager, who were eventually convicted and jailed for raping a 16-year-old girl in a flat above the 555 Pizza takeaway shop in Ramsgate, Kent.

Both Golding and Fransen were convicted on a charge of religiously aggravated harassment for an incident at the takeaway on the 5th of May. Fransen banged on the shop's windows and doors, the court heard, and screamed "paedophile", "rapist" and "foreigner" while two children and a man – none of whom were directly related to the case – were inside.

Fransen was also convicted on another charge of harassment after turning up at a house she mistakenly believed to be owned by another defendant, and on a third charge for visiting the home of defendant Tamin Rahmani and shouting racist abuse through his door.

During the rape trial, Britain First distributed propaganda leaflets and uploaded videos pushing their agenda. Sentencing Golding and Fransen at Canterbury Crown Court, Judge Justin Barron said, "'I have no doubt it was their joint intention to use the facts of the case [in Canterbury] for their own political ends. It was a campaign to draw attention to the race, religion and immigrant background of the defendants."

Judge Barron added that the duo's words and actions "demonstrated hostility" towards Muslims. This, of course, came as no surprise: Britain First has made its name through travelling the country, visiting mosques and harassing Muslims.

In case you're still not sure where you've heard of them, the group has also made the news for: picking up a dismal share of the vote in the 2016 London Mayoral elections, being roundly told to fuck off by the residents of towns where they have held demonstrations, and for that time US President Donald Trump retweeted three anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, one of which was shown to be fake news.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The thing about having a nervous breakdown is that, for an indefinite amount of time, your life feels like the first five seconds of a terrible car accident.

You’re dimly aware that something awful is happening and that you have been deeply—perhaps even mortally—hurt. Time thins to a liquid in which you are suspended; you miss work deadlines, blow off friends, neglect bills. You are helplessly caught in the undertow of the world.

Next thing you know, you’re pouring boxed red wine into a dirty paper cup in a grocery store parking lot because shopping seems like more than you can reasonably handle sober.

So, this why I’m driving alone down a back country highway in Montana in the middle of January, strung out on bad truckstop coffee and cheap American smokes; because my accident is over and everything in my life has come to an abrupt and brutal stop.

As per the laws of physics, an object not in motion needs an external force to set it into motion. I’m kind of hoping that if I just drive far enough I can just shoot myself off the overpass and into a new, fully mobile life in which I am in complete control.

So far, on day five of eight of a road trip between Whitehorse, Yukon and Montreal, Quebec via the States, the results are middling. On one hand, I am hungry, tired and broke, living in the sort of motels where you check the seam of the mattress for bed bugs before you lay down. On the other, I am not drinking half a bottle of whiskey every night just to put myself to sleep and crying every morning before work.

Despite the blue, sunny day, I am making poor time. There was freezing rain overnight; the blacktop is a slick, treacherous mess and I’m going 20 kilometres an hour under the speed limit. When the trooper turns on his lights behind me, I momentarily think he must be after someone else, except there is no one else on the road but me.

I pull over. The cop pulls up behind me and gets out of the car. In the backseat, my dog whines.

The trooper is immaculately clean shaven, with a pallid complexion which makes his face seem blurred, as if he were done in watercolours. He asks for my papers and tells me he is pulling me over because my license plate is dirty.

He takes a step back and instructs me to come with him.

“In your car?” I have a terrible feeling of dread.

“It’s procedure,” he says, unsmiling.

I get out of my car. As I walk away I can hear my dog barking angrily at the trooper. I open the door and sit down on the passenger side. He closes my door with a bang and gets in next to me.

My heart is beating hard and I fold one hand over the other, squeeze tight. In the months leading up to my breakdown, I had been raped. The incident—along with the brutal mismanagement of my case by the police—was one of the main reasons for my illness. In the passenger seat, I am struggling to fend off a panic attack while the trooper taps away at his screen.

“You seem agitated,” he says, abruptly. His watery eyes have narrowed.

And I think I’m in a car alone with a strange man with a gun. Yes I am goddamn agitated.

I say, “No. I’m just tired.”

That’s when things take a bizarre turn; he asks me if I am on crystal meth.

“What? No!”

He asks me if I’ve been drinking, if I’ve been doing other drugs. He is increasingly forceful, increasingly aggressive. He won’t stop staring at me. He comes back to the meth—have I ever done meth? Is there meth in my car? Am I sure I am not on meth? No, no, no.

He doesn’t believe me. He makes me do a straight line walk on the highway. I am shaking so bad from nerves I’m scared I’ll fall over and he’ll take that as proof of guilt. I can’t imagine what would happen then. Cars pass by, see me doing the walk. I can see heads twisting to catch a glimpse of my face.

He searches my car. He makes me stand on the side of the highway holding my leashed dog. It’s cold. The snow is deep. He is going through my clothes, my books. He opens a tin of homemade cookies and sniffs them suspiciously. I am at his mercy; nothing I say seems to reassure him. I am humiliated.

When he finds nothing he tells me to wait in my car. My things are in disarray. I don’t understand why this had happened to me. I feel violated.

He writes me a warning ticket for the dirty plate and tells me I can go. So I go.

I drive 10 miles to the next town, pull over in a parking lot in front of a small restaurant which is attached to bowling alley. I take the key out of the ignition, lean forward over the steering wheel and cry for a long time. I cry because I am afraid of men and because I am afraid of losing control and a man just came and took control away from me again for reasons I don’t understand. I cry because I am tired and hungry and cold. I cry because I am alone and I don’t want to be alone. I cry because my nerves are still so fragile and probably will be for some time.

When I can stop crying I get out of the car, go into the restaurant, order a sandwich and a beer. I eat alone at a little table. The beer does me more good than the food. When I get back to the car I feed my dog a piece of bacon I saved for him in a napkin. Then I take a deep breath, back out of the parking lot and get back on the highway.

My hands are still shaking but as I begin to drive my anxiety slowly melts away; an immense relief blooms within me. The highway unfolds in a perfect, prairie-straight line. There is a black road and there are red mesas covered in white snow and there are black birds lined up on wires. The trooper, the drinking, the breakdown—everything is behind me.

I am moving forward again; I am moving slowly, but I am moving.

I first met cartoonist Sloane Leong last year at Small Press Expo (SPX), arguably the premier festival for American indie and small press comics. In Bethesda, Maryland, Leong appeared alongside Iasmin Omar Ata, Chris Kindred, and Tillie Walden on a panel I’d organized about page architectures, particularly in Japanese comics. Leong, 27, is a self-taught artist of multiple ancestries who has been self-publishing since she was about 16.

She’s currently based in Portland, Oregon, where she’s hard at work on two major projects: A Map to the Sun (First Second), due in 2019, and Prism Stalker (Image Comics), whose run began yesterday. A Map to the Sun, a slice-of-life basketball comic, came up on the panel in the context of sports comics, of which the Japanese are true masters. But relatively little was said about Prism Stalker, Leong’s anti-colonialist biopunk story featuring Vep, a space refugee separated from her family.

Prism Stalker is all neon colours and sound, particularly unique because the work comes with its own original score. Last month, Leong and I exchanged emails to discuss what Prism Stalker is all about.

VICE: I've been reflecting a lot on the impact of sound in storytelling and how that is conveyed in print media. I listen to a lot of soundtracks because they're the quickest way to ambiently return me to a world or to a story while I function in the real world, in my own story—so I was excited to learn that Prism Stalker has taken the route of an original score, composed by Neotenomie, as opposed to the making of playlists or suggested listening. What was the decision process there, and how are the score and the comic linked?
Sloane Leong: I feel the same way about music and its effect of helping lull me into a narrative. I had been following Riley [Neotenomie] and her frequent collaborator Porpentine, a writer and game designer, for a while and really connected with Riley's soundtracks for Porpentine's amazing games. Riley's music has this really reverberant underlying base to it and I knew she could capture the airy, echoing environments in Prism Stalker while also conveying the inflections of subtle emotions that Vep experiences throughout the compositions. I don't have a lot to do with the creation of the music besides providing the comic for inspiration, so I trust in her skill and taste completely.

Excerpt from Prism Stalker #1

One of the beauties of comics, some say, is that the story is entirely paced by the reader. Though prose can be read as quickly or slowly as a reader wants, the consumption of images and motion in comics is different to this sense; the reader is control of the action. But: the mp3 for issue #1 is three minutes and two seconds, a defined length of time. When you and Neotenomie discussed the creation of these soundtracks, did this sense of time factor into it? How is it designed to be listened to?
I originally asked Riley for something about a minute long, little atmospheric vignettes that would be sonic snapshots of the world. Riley went above and beyond, providing these beautiful lengthy pieces that really move with the comic and still have space to breathe. I imagined that after the first reading (a link to the music is on the last page), the reader could go through the pages again to the beat of the music, letting it move them along at its own pace. I think it adds a heavy layer of emotion, anticipation, and tangibility with Vep's world.

Sloane Leong. Portrait by FRANK

In the vein of sound: talk to me about language in this comic. There's an intersection between sound and image involved in the way much or most of the world—that is, our world—communicates, and it seems like you very much get at that with the way characters discuss language and how language is shown.
Language plays multiple crucial roles in Prism Stalker, as connective tissue to the past, a carrier of culture, as a tool of assimilation, and as a shaper of our mental and physical realities. Most of the comic is spoken in a standard [language], but when alien cultures can't communicate what they want in it, which happens often, their visual written language seeps through. For Vep, we see her mother's language in its native written form: she can't understand it, so neither can we. I find the dynamism of language really fascinating in how it captures the world around us, contours our reality, and influences our perception.

There's this example I always bring up from this professor from several years back, I'll quote it: "Tuvan [a Turkic language out of Siberia] has a word iy (pronounced like the letter ‘e’), which indicates the short side of a hill. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and shorter than the others. If you are riding a horse, carrying firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept: You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more energy to ascend, and an iy descent is more treacherous as well. Once you know about the iy, you see it in every hill and identify it automatically, directing your horse, sheep, or footsteps accordingly." That's just a tiny example of how language is able to apprehend a feature that may go unnoticed in the world around someone. In Prism Stalker, I'm extending this idea into an alien universe, where language is not going to just convey features of the immediate environment but foreign biological and cultural experiences, inhuman sensations. This becomes one of the focal points of the story early on, because translating previously unknown, indecipherable knowledge is suddenly communicable and becomes a form of intimate psychic combat.

This kind of leads into the idea of weaponized language, something introduced in the first issue. One of the most common ways to colonize a people is to destroy their language, "to induce a historical amnesia" and to reconfigure a culture's history so that its seen with the colonizer's eyes—desolate, weak, defeated. Colonizers reframe the oppressed culture's history and make their [own] conquests romantic, seductive. If the language and therefore the culture is effectively obliterated, this leads to a cultural alienation and subsequently an identifying with the colonizer because to a colonial child, what else is there? I could go on and on about this interplay of storytelling, language, and power, but that's what the comic is for, so I don't want to spoil it too much.

What went into the design of the settings? I'm curious about what went into decisions about the colours and shapes and forms involved.
Growing up in Maui, one of the world's most geographically diverse climates concentrated into such a tiny place, I was surrounded by oceans, volcanic deserts, and forests! That varied geography is only topped by the aquatic landscapes, fields of brightly coloured corals in all these crazy shapes and these flashing neon fish. It's hard not to take inspiration from those! I also just wanted to try something different, brightly coloured organic forms in the genre aren't really common for the setting, it usually ends up that aliens and their planets have a more minimal Western European take on architecture.

When you first described Prism Stalker to me, you used the term "biopunk." What's the significance of that term to you? What do you imagine it will mean for readers?
I don't know how readers will take it. Usually they imagine something goopy? But yeah, biology, and how we apply what we learn from this field, is a constant source of inspiration to me. I think it was a few years ago someone stored 700 terabytes in a single gram of DNA? EXistenZ-style Gameboys are right around the corner! But besides Cronenberg, I was also inspired by Octavia Butler's work, like the living architecture and ships the aliens use and the symbiotic relationships she created. Those dynamics resonated with me, especially growing up in Hawaii, where the importance of and respect for animals, forests, and corals was taught in schools and throughout the community. Corals are colonial, hermatypic, symbiotic communities that protect coastlines and provide habitats. They're incredible! So making the architecture of the city and modes of transportation living things in Prism Stalker was a start to conveying this overall utopic feeling, that this society respects all living things and wants to live in harmony with everything else. But being alive and being sentient are two different things…

Prism Stalker #1 is out now. Keep up with Sloane Leong’s work on her website.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Team Trump Tried to Set Up Back Channel to Kremlin, Mueller Suspects
A cooperating witness told the special counsel that a meeting between Blackwater's Erik Prince and Vladimir Putin associate Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles during the transition period was a deliberate effort to assemble a line of communication between Trump's nascent administration and Russia. Anonymous officials said George Nader, who assisted in arranging the meeting, has provided Mueller’s team with testimony, though it was not clear how central that was to the probe. Prince previously claimed he met with Dmitriev solely by way of coincidence..—The Washington Post

Trump to Sign Tariff Plan Despite Republican Opposition
The president was expected to officially approve new tariffs on steel and aluminum Thursday, in the face of a letter signed by 107 House Republicans urging him to rethink “broad tariffs” and focus on China instead. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the measures would not initially apply to Mexico and Canada.—The New York Times

Hope Hicks Reportedly Told Investigators She Was Hacked
The outgoing White House communications director informed the House Intelligence Committee she had an email account hacked, according to sources at the closed door session last week. It was unclear whether the account was personal or one she used in her work for the Trump campaign, and Hicks did not divulge any details about potential suspects.—NBC News

Florida Lawmakers Pass New Law on Guns
The state legislature passed a bill raising the age to purchase firearms from 18 to 21 and introducing a three-day wait before most guns can be bought in most cases. It would also allow some teachers and staff to carry guns in school, after a modest training program. Governor Rick Scott has 15 days to decide whether to sign it into law.—CNN

International News

UK Vows to Investigate Poisoning of Former Russian Spy
Home Secretary Amber Rudd promised a firm response to a “brazen and reckless attack” after British police determined Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were deliberately poisoned with a nerve agent. Both were still critically ill in the hospital. An anonymous official revealed the agent used on Skripal and his daughter was neither VX nor Sarin.—BBC News

Women in Spain Unite for National Strike
A one-day “feminist strike” designed to highlight gender discrimination was slated to see women across Spain boycott both paid work and domestic labor. Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, said it would show that “without women, the world really does stop." Protests were likewise expected to be held in cities around the world to mark International Women’s Day 2018.—The Guardian

New Israeli Law Demands Loyalty from Palestinians in Jerusalem
A bill passed by the Israeli parliament gave the interior ministry power to evict Palestinians from Jerusalem if they were deemed disloyal to Israel or to have engaged in terrorism. The policy affected both newcomers and permanent residents in different ways. Israeli Arab lawmaker Esawi Frej condemned the move as part of a “campaign to empty East Jerusalem of its Palestinian residents.”—Haaretz

China Pledges Retaliation Against US Tariffs
Beijing's foreign minister said his country would be forced to “make a justified and necessary response” if the Trump administration imposesd tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Wang Yi warned the US that “choosing a trade war is a mistaken prescription. The outcome will only be harmful."—Reuters

Everything Else

Amazon Promises to Fix Alexa’s Weird, Random Laughs
Following widespread complaints from Amazon Echo buyers that Alexa bursts into laughter for no apparent reason, a company spokesperson said: “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.” Amazon said the problem was related to “false positives."—The Verge

Michael B. Jordan Says His Company Will Use Inclusion Riders
The Black Panther star said his production firm Outlier Society would use contracts to ensure its projects do not lack diversity. The move followed Frances McDormand’s call at the Oscars for inclusion riders to be understood and employed across the industry.—The Hollywood Reporter

Q-Tip Appointed to the Kennedy Center’s Hip-Hop Council
The rapper and producer from A Tribe Called Quest has been named as artistic director and advisor-at-large for the Kennedy Center’s new Hip-Hop Culture Council. The group also features Questlove and Black Thought from The Roots.—Noisey

New York City Names First Night Mayor
Ariel Palitz will head up the city’s Office of Nightlife, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced. She was expected to oversee licenses and permits, and also to help shape nightlife-related policy in general.—VICE

Finn Wolfhard’s Band Drops First Video
The teenage rock band Calpurnia, fronted by the Stranger Things star, released their debut music video for “City Boy.” The group said it was “really just the product of a bunch of friends who love music coming together to create something."—i-D

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re looking at the history of bite-mark matching, the junk forensic science that put innocent people behind bars.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

It's International Women's Day today – a day declared by the UN to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women.

Some people will do this by listening to women who are still struggling in those spheres, finding out how they can help them. But instead of thinking as a woman, perhaps I should just join the winning team instead? Misogynists seem to have it pretty well off, don’t they? Yes, all men have a higher social standing, more money and better political representation than all women, but misogynists carry none of the guilt of living the good life! What a fantastic way to live, just striding through your days oblivious to the ways we all miss out when women miss out. How fantastic to simply not care that, say, two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner, and that women are paid, on average, 20 percent less than men, for the exact same work!

Inspired by the give-no-shits attitude of the modern day misogynist, I decided to do a bunch of things misogynists do, except to men, instead of women (who kind of have it hard enough as it is).

First, I went on Tinder. I uploaded a few two-year-old photos of me looking smarmy, then swiped right until my "Like" allowance ran out, without ever stopping to look at who I was right-swiping.

I matched with a few young men.

Because I was thinking like a misogynist would, I responded with the most illicit things my delicate lady brain could concoct:

Either my Tinder profile photos display my erstwhile beauty to such a flattering effect that my words are no deal-breaker, or these guys are just happy to be relieved of the burden of having to be gross first. Perhaps I’ve gone even further, re-affirming that Tinder is merely a to-do list.

But Tinder isn’t the only sphere in which misogynists treat women like a different species – oh no.

Next, I headed to Twitter to correct some men who are far smarter than me.

Why weren't they engaging? Why weren't they crying? I must have been doing something wrong.

If I couldn't convince people I was a misogynist with my words, maybe I could do it with my looks?

Something was missing in my quest to look like the sort of guy who worships Julian Assange, pre-ordered that Jordan B Peterson book and likes to bitch about Hillary Clinton nearly 18 months since she lost the US election.

A fedora!

Now I truly looked the part of a proud misogynist, a guy who only ever cares about FGM when he can weaponise it in attempts to derail feminists when they talk about other silly stuff that's nothing to DO with Actual Feminism, like equal pay for equal work.

Misogynists like to wolf-whistle at women, right? So I wolf-whistled… at men!

Out of breath from all that empty attention-seeking, I looked for a man doing some work so I could tell him he was doing it wrong, this time IRL.

"Mate, you’ve missed a spot."

"Have I?"

"Yes. Men aren’t very good at painting?"

"What?"

"It’s true."

"Why?"

"Because you missed a spot."

Onwards, and I discovered a man who wasn't smiling, and it made me sad because this is a public street and he was on show, so he should have put on a show. Plus, who wouldn’t be ecstatic in my presence? I'm a complete stranger in a fedora, waistcoat, stone-washed jeans and sheux!

"Cheer up, love, it might never happen."

"Sorry?"

"Smile!!"

"Okay, I’m smiling."

"Thanks!"

And what’s this? A man parked on the road! That must be bad parking, because he is a man.

"Hi, darling, do you want to hop out so I can park this thing for you?"

"Eh?"

"It’s just you’ve gone a bit wonky – I know your brains can’t always work these things out!"

"What?? I’m parked fine."

Soon, I arrived at Brewdog, where I could finally get my hands on one of these much-discussed Pink IPAs, which is "not for girls", but actually says on the label it "is for girls".

"Darling, can I get a Pink IPA please?"

"Sure, it’s just in the fridge."

"Can you get it please, sweetheart"

"No worries… just going to put this through…"

"And I get a discount, right, love?"

"Yes, you get 20 percent off… let me just see how to…"

"…."

"Okay, let me just grab my colleague, I don’t know how to put the 20 percent discount through."

"I’m here all afternoon, babe."

Finally, I got my lips around that cool, crisp beer. But if I was in a bar and no one noticed I was there, was I really in the bar? Time for some peacocking…

One guy succumbed to my charms (I knew this because I walked over to him and told him that he'd succumbed to my charms. He was reading a book, but I didn't care, because Im charming).

"Sorry?"

"I’m very charming and have a massively capacious vagina."

"Mate, that’s really weird."

"Sorry, I can’t hear you, you’ll have to come closer, bitch"

And then he came closer and I got some human contact. Maybe that’s all I needed all along.

That’s not to say the sexualised conversations, wolf-whistling, mansplaining and negging aren’t troublesome and uncalled for – it's just that they tend to be the symptoms as much as they are problems of gender inequality. None of the guys reacted with anything other than confusion and surprise to my behaviour, and that’s not because men are stronger than women when it comes to deflecting oppressive behaviours; it’s not because women are delicate snowflakes, giant tear-stained crybaby victims of our own inability to stand up for themselves. It’s because this stuff isn’t surprising when it happens every day, in a hundred different little ways. Because we’re still, after all these years of oppression, hemmed in by the set of constantly reinforced arbitrary codes and conventions of society – no matter how big or small – which collude to tell women that, in 2018, we’re mostly here for men’s entertainment and pleasure.

Well, no longer, you fuckers. I’ve got the fedora now.

@sophwilkinson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A fish so huge and unrecognisable it took the breath away from the couple who found it has washed up on the shores of Bundaberg, the ABC reports.

It looked to be about two metres long and around 150 kilograms, according to John Lindholm, one half of the Victorian couple lucky enough to stumble across its gaping maw.

A veteran charter skipper who really knows his fish, Lindholm also told the ABC he had no idea what species it was:

"I've seen a lot of fish, and a lot of big fish, but I've never seen anything like it," Lindholm said. "I thought it might have been a groper, but looking at the head shape it still may be a groper, but it just doesn't seem to fit with what other people up here have told me."

"It was a big, big fish," he added.

The couple went back for a gawk the next day but the fish had vanished. Meantime, their call out on social media drew suggestions of cod, groper, and "one guy I think might have nailed it when he said it was what they call a tripletail," Lindholm said.

A spokesperson for Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol (QBFP) told the ABC it had shown images of the fish to experts from the Queensland Museum, who in turn said the "condition of the fish made a definitive identification difficult" but that they thought it could be a Queensland groper.

May its grey, lumpen mass rest in peace.

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

Today Viola Desmond will become the first black person ever and the first non-royal woman ever to appear on regularly circulating Canadian dollar bills.

In a ceremony to honour Desmond in Halifax today at 12:30 PM, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz will reveal the $10 bill bearing her likeness.

Desmond was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1914. Throughout her life, she was a businesswoman and beautician who mentored young black women. Following an incident in which she faced an act of racial discrimination in November 1946, she became a civil rights icon.

“It’s a long-awaited sense of belonging for the African Canadian community,” Russell Grosse, executive director of the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, told Global News. “The launch of the bill sends people of African descent the message that Canada is finally accepting us. We belong.”

On November 8, 1946, Desmond refused to accept it when a movie theatre clerk in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia would not allow her to purchase a ticket for a seating area customarily used solely by white people. Desmond was only allowed to purchase a ticket for a segregated section (on the balcony) but sat in the section she was prohibited from anyway, on the main floor. This resulted in the theatre manager calling the cops. They dragged out of the theatre—which left her injured—and threw her in jail overnight.

Desmond was charged with attempting to defraud the provincial government via not paying the one-cent amusement tax, the difference between ticket prices in the segregated areas of the theatre. However, Desmond had offered to pay the difference in price, which she made known when attempting to purchase the proper ticket at the theatre.

Desmond’s criminal conviction was brought to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court by her lawyer in hopes of having the conviction put aside. However, in 1947, the court ruled against Desmond. Her conviction stood. She ended up paying a $20 fine and $6 in court fees.

Desmond’s case is known for inspiring the civil rights movement in Nova Scotia, a province with a long history of injustice toward its black population, going back to the 1600s.

The incident involving Desmond at the theatre in Nova Scotia occurred almost a decade before American civil rights icon Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Though she died in 1965, Desmond was pardoned in 2010, along with an apology and a public declaration by Premier Darrell Dexter, who described what happened to her as an injustice.

For seven years, Kennedy Yanko hustled to make ends meet, like so many young artists do when they move to New York. She lived in a basement with 12 actors and performed at the the now-shuttered Living Theatre in the Lower East Side, where Al Pacino and Yoko Ono paid the rent. She taught yoga and worked as a personal trainer, competing as a bodybuilder on the side. And through it all, she built a name for herself as an artist, first as a painter and then as a sculptor who bends and torches sheet metal into raw and imposing works.

VICE visited 29-year-old Yanko in her Bushwick studio as she used a high-powered drill to put the finishing touches on a piece chosen by artist Mickalene Thomas and collector Racquel Chevremont for The Aesthetics of Matter, their exhibition at the VOLTA NY contemporary art fair. Strewn throughout the studio were bits of glass, marble, wood, paint, and discarded metal from old cars. “I first find the objects I’m going to work with, which is its own project,” said Yanko, who scours New York’s derelict buildings and junkyards for materials.

Yanko, who grew up in suburban St. Louis, spent part of her childhood visiting construction sites. “My dad, Thomas, was an architect,” she said. “I would watch him work on blueprints, and after dinner we would go on what he called, ‘Tommy tours,’” where they would drive around and survey houses under construction that he had designed. “This is partially why I am so comfortable with construction guys," she added. "Like, I grew up wearing a hard hat.”

Left: Separate Thoughts, Kennedy Yanko, 2018, metal and acrylic 77 x 36 x 6 in. Right: The artist in her studio.

Her piece Separate Thoughts is a suspended sculpture made from scrap metal Yanko sourced from a demolition pile in Brooklyn and layered with what she calls "paint skins," or membranes of dried auto body paint. Her art toes the line between hard and soft, masculine and feminine. It's meant to start a new dialogue about the shifting nature of beauty and identity. “I want to immediately disrupt the conversation around metal as being something that’s industrial,” Yanko said. “It's actually from nature. It’s made from manganese and calcium. It's no different than a flower when you look at its atoms."

As a female metalworker experimenting with traditionally masculine ways of making art, Yanko seems to thrive when she's defying expectations. VICE sat down with her in the studio to talk about the innovative way she combines paint and metal, how construction dudes taught her how to weld, and why being a bodybuilder helped her become a better artist.

How did your time as a performer and a bodybuilder inform your art?
Discipline, endurance, and language. Working with The Living Theatre gave me a language and philosophy that’s not at the forefront of conversation in the art world; there was a different emphasis on physicality and movement.

While I was acting, I became a personal trainer in New York to make money. It led me to try bodybuilding. The competitions were so mentally and physically exhausting. I see bodybuilding as performance, too, because you are always being looked at. I am always questioning that in my art. I am also thinking about the idea of physical and identity manipulation, and how much you can change things. I’m exploring these ideas in my pieces.

The artist in her studio.

How did you get into welding?
I live in industrial Bushwick, and last January, I went next door to these Romanian guys' big iron and steel factory, because I was ready to go to the next place in my work. I wanted to bring in a new material, and in Bushwick, metal is abundant and obvious. So I went next door and I said, "Hey listen, can I do an apprenticeship with you? I really want to learn how to weld." It was a really important experience for me, because it took me out of the studio. And for me, as a painter, to become a part of a different world, it changed the way I looked at everything.

Construction guys know way more about art than any artist I’ve been around, because they know these materials, linear aesthetics, and how to make something clean and sharp. They are building the homes we live in. They think like architects. I talk to my construction guys more about art than I do any other artist.

Materials like metal have been traditionally associated with male artists like John Chamberlain, Leonardo Drew, and more recently Hugo McCloud. Has being a woman working in a space defined by men informed your experience as an artist?
Whenever I go look for metal, it’s just me and a bunch of construction dudes. The experience has changed the way that I look at dudes, especially as a woman who gets catcalled on the street all the time.

The other day, I was over at the metal yard and this guy was like, "Hey girl, I got something for you," and I just ignored him, and focused on what I was doing, and didn't pay it any attention. But then I was walking around, and he had this cute little reindeer set up for me, and it was funny and very sweet. Working with a lot of men has opened me up a lot more to people in general, and my humor has really reached a new level because we really just fuck around.

Left: Extension, Kennedy Yanko, 2018, metal, urethane, enamel, moss 33 x 27 x 7.5 in. Right: Underscore, Kennedy Yanko, 2018, metal, urethane and enamel 33 x 21 x 11.5 in

How has making sculptures evolved your idea of painting?
Sculpting and painting are not interchangeable for me, but they share certain aspects and qualities. When I’m creating a piece, I’m arranging colour and material to reach a particular end, like a [painter] would over a canvas. I like that “painting” describes both the act and the end result of the action. I’ve always used it as one part of the process—as a means to get to the next step, be it shaping my skins or pairing them with other elements. I’m allowing painting to inform the physical movement of what I’m doing. When I installed 33 for PULSE at Art Basel in Miami this past December, I considered arranging its metal components to be a form of painting. I don’t think painting can be so narrowly defined as a brush-to-canvas discipline anymore.

Invisibility, Kennedy Yanko, 2017, 60 x 42 x 17 in

How are you exploring identity in the work you are showing in The Aesthetics of Matter?
There are masculine and feminine systems at play when I’m working with metal. In the way that my work chooses how it wants to be seen, is also indicative of what I perceive identity to be: identity is an ephemeral thing. It’s a choice, it’s changeable, and it’s something that we have to keep questioning.

In the Volta show, I created pedestals that match the walls of the booth. It’s about presentation, which relates to growing up and being close to the black side of my family, where presentation was everything. I'm also exploring this in the malleability of the metal and paint skin which allows me to continually construct and deconstruct, making dramatic shifts in perspectives.

Fluorescence, Kennedy Yanko, 2017, metal, urethane and enamel 37 x 32 x 21 in

The sculptures you recently showed at Long Gallery Harlem, Dis-integrate and Underscore are really beautiful. How do you think about beauty when you're working with such rough materials?
Conceptually, the work is about how the manipulation of materials relates to the malleability of perception and identity. I think that beauty is life; beauty is a necessary facet in our appreciation of existence. But with the work, I am saying beauty, like identity, is subjective. I think about each piece as an experiment, and I am totally okay with fucking it up to try to explore some of the ideas I am thinking about, in terms of manipulating the identities of the materials I use.

The sculptures seem to be about creating your own language with paint by re-imagining the possibilities of wood, metal, and marble.
The language I’m developing is about perception and object relationships: what are natural elements, and how can we understand ourselves better by better understanding them? Each of us, and everything, is comprised of the same vibrating energy and material. The way we show up translates into how we interact and whom we interact with. We are all reflections of each other, sharing experiences and exchanging matter. Which ultimately relates back to my understanding of identity as something that’s necessarily in flux, shifting, and adjusting—responding to and shaping its environment. Materials have that power, and people have that power.

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It’s rare to read about the Easter Bunny in a court ruling—it’s even more of an anomaly to read it in a ruling centred on the Canadian Charter of Freedoms.

In a decision handed down by an Ontario Court earlier this week, Judge A.J. Goodman ruled that a couple who had three girls they were fostering taken away had their charter rights violated. The couple, Frances and Derek Baars, are devout Catholics and the children they were fostering were taken away in 2016 by the Children's Aid Society of Hamilton after a dispute with the agency.

At the heart of the disagreement? The Easter Bunny.

The Baars argued that because of their religious devotion they didn’t want to pretend that things like Santa and the Easter Bunny were real and didn’t want to lie to the children. That explanation didn’t sit well with a CAS officer who—after admitting the girls looked well cared for—effectively ordered the couple to tell their children about the Easter Bunny and when they didn’t comply the children were removed from their care and their foster home effectively shut down.

To make matters even more of a bummer, according to court documents, the Baars were planning to hide chocolate and play games on Easter, just not tell them about the Bunny unless they asked. In an affidavit Frances Baar described having the girls taken away from them as “deeply painful” and that the couple continues to have a picture of the girls on their fridge.

The Baars filed a suit against the CAS in April of 2017—a year after the girls were taken away from them—with the support of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. In it, they argued that their charter freedoms of conscience, religion and expression were violated. The court agreed.

"There is ample evidence to support the fact that the children were removed because the Baars refused to either tell or imply that the Easter Bunny was delivering chocolate to the Baars' home," reads the ruling. "I am more than satisfied that the society actions interfered substantially with the Baars' religious beliefs."

In a 62-page decision, the court agreed with the Baars, writing that the young girls had already faced a lot of turmoil in their lives and had finally found some consistency with the Baars, something the CAS interfered with.

“By taking the children away on such short notice, the Society took that away from them and contributed to the turmoil these children faced in their short lives,” reads the decision. “As Lindsay [the CAS officer] writes in one of her case notes, ‘is it more important to have the Easter bunny or permanency?’”

“The Society very clearly chose the Easter Bunny.”

The Baars, who now live in Edmonton, told the Canadian Press they still want to adopt and foster children and hope the court’s decision will make that easier.

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Rachel Dolezal has mostly disappeared from the public eye in the past few years. Back in 2015, the former NAACP leader became the center of a nationwide media frenzy after it was revealed she was pretending to be black, but after some infuriating interviews and a couple of dark story turns, the world collectively sighed, shook its head, and tried to just moved on. But Dolezal hasn't moved on—she's continued to vehemently defend her position as a "trans-racial" black woman to everyone who will stop to listen or flip through her memoir, In Full Color.

Over the past two years, filmmaker Laura Brownson and her crew have followed Dolezal and her family through her ongoing, unsuccessful quest for legitimacy, and on Thursday Vulture premiered the first clip from Brownson's documentary, The Rachel Divide—and the thing is pretty bleak.

All judgments about Dolezal herself aside, her story is supremely sad for the people in her life who got dragged into the controversy, like her sons. The two-minute clip centers on Dolezal's relationship with her biological son, Franklin, who seems unsurprisingly hurt and resentful about his mother's unwillingness to just give it up and move on.

"I really do not want to focus on this for the rest of my life. Why don't you just let it go away?" Franklin says as Dolezal tries to defend herself. "This is going to affect more than just your life."

"I resent some of her choices," Franklin explains to the camera later. "And I resent some of the words she's spoken in interviews."

The full-length documentary is set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival next month before landing on Netflix. The idea of a documentary about Dolezal has already started to stir up controversy with some users who would rather see Netflix putting its money toward someone a little less "fraudulent and problematic," but Netflix jumped to defend the choice, saying that the doc isn't just focused on Dolezal but "on the larger conversation" about race and identity.

In any case, The Rachel Divide is scheduled to hit the streaming service on April 27 whether we want it or not. Give the clip a watch above.

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We’ve all fantasized about going Kill Bill on some jerkwad who ripped our heart out. It’s understandable to want to lash out when you’ve been hurt, betrayed, and abandoned. [Blares Alanis Morissette's “You Oughta Know."] But it takes a certain kind of person to make that dark dream a stark reality. Banging your ex’s little brother, staging elaborate gags, or stirring up shit (sometimes literally)—these are all ways spurned lovers have staked their revenge. (By the way, we don’t endorse any of this behavior. If someone dumps you, it’s usually smarter to quietly mourn the demise of your relationship, blow some money on a fancy serum at Sephora, and then go on a few mediocre Tinder dates until you get your mojo back.)

But, if you have lost your mind on some bitch-ass fool, we want to hear about it. We asked friends and co-workers about the shitty things they’ve done to stick it to an ex. Here’s what they said.

“I slept with his younger brother.” - Kim, 34

“Posted his phone number on Craigslist.” - Billy, 35

"Made him think I was pregnant." - Hailey, 23

“Pretend friended his sister for years.” - Woj, 34

"Wrapped his house in toilet paper." - Melinda, 22 (17 at the time)

“Rumor: His GF has hairy nipples.” - Lauren, 34

“Wished them much love and light?” - Mary, 36

“I drank his limited-edition Hennessy.” - Kim, 26

"Changed the passwords to his accounts." - Brittany, 24

“Swapped numbers around in his iPhone.” - Jason, 40

“Fucked his best friend. Sent pics.” - Jenelle, 36

"Became great friends with his mom!" - Tara, 25

“I keyed his brand-new truck.” - Julie, 33

“Sent a card full of glitter.” - Melissa, 37

“Told him he got fat. Ha!” - Paula, 38

“I left with all his pillows.” - Jane, 49

"Left some poop on his doorstep!" - Tonya, 25

“I secretly befriended his new girlfriend.” - Jasmine, 33

“Put dog shit in her mailbox.” - Bryan, 32

“Slept with my ex’s best friend.” - Beth, 34

“Took out restraining order on her.” - Mark, 34

“Spammed ex’s email with Trump bullshit.” - Jessi, 31

“Used his Netflix account for years.” - Lynn, 39

“Gave him bad review on ratemyprofessor.com.” - Laura, 36

“Made fake Facebook profile to spy.” - Eric, 30

“Lied about being three months pregnant.” - Sara, 34

“Anonymously emailed his girlfriends detailing indiscretions.” - Sandra, 44

“Paraded new boyfriend at his work.” - Josh, 24

“Enlisted fake boyfriend in jealousy attempt.” - Carly, 31

“Burned a painting he made me.” - Aviva, 39

“Continued a friendship with her mom.” - Kyle, 30

“Sent Meat Lovers pizza. She's vegan.” - Justine, 32

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Since it's International Women's Day, we had our favourite female cartoonists do portraits and tell us about their favourite women artists.

Anna Haifisch - Amelie von Wulffen

"Amelie von Wulffen paints moments of artistic and social stress like nobody else does. I feel so close to her work because I deal with a similar theme in my comic series, The Artist. But I am a cartoonist. I need words and drawings. Von Wulffen is a painter. She is able to put it all so well in one picture. Please look at her series of drawings, This is how it happened. First you laugh, and then you cough." Follow Anna Haifisch on Instagram and Amelie von Wulffen on her gallery's website.

Valentine Gallardo - Phoebe Gloeckner

"Phoebe Gloeckner is an American artist mostly known for A Child's Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which was recently turned into a movie. She is important to me because her work deals with what it's like to grow up as a girl. There aren't many coming-of-age stories that feature teenage girls, especially not ones that talk about sexuality. Did you know that in French, The Diary of a Teenage Girl was translated to Vite, trop vite ('Fast, Too Fast')? I think that's already a judgment on a girl dealing with her sexuality. I really like Diary because it cleverly combines writing, comics, and illustrations." Check out Valentine Gallardo's work on her website and on Instagram, and follow Phoebe Gloeckner on Twitter.

Alabaster Pizzo - Tove Jansson

"Although they're popular in Europe, I didn't discover Tove Jansson's The Moomins until my first year of college. I was drawn to the aesthetics of the comics initially, but enjoyed the content of the stories as well. The Moomins live carefree, simple lives close to nature, which is how Jansson lived, although she was prolifically productive. She and her lifelong partner Tuulikki Pietilä, herself a graphic artist, lived together in a little house on an island off the coast of Finland and shot a few self-made documentaries about their cute life together. The Moomins are nice to each other and to strangers and in the stories you can find many allegories for tolerance. No mistake made by a character is completely catastrophic. Her characters are still world-popular and have been made into an animated TV show and a theme park, and I pretty much wanna have the same life she did." Follow Alabaster Pizzo on Instagram and see Tove Jansson's work on her website.

Penelope Gazin - Hellen Jo

"Hellen Jo is one of my favorite artists because she is sweet, sassy, and cute, just like her artwork. Images of tough girl gangs have been very 'on trend' lately, but Jo was doing it before it was cool. Her style has been knocked off a lot but she made a Facebook post a few years ago that has always stayed with me. I might be butchering her words but it was something to the effect of, 'If you're making good art, people will copy and rip you off, it just comes with the territory. I use it as a constant reminder to continue to evolve as an artist so that others have to be constantly trying to keep up with me.' I've repeated her words to many other artists who were being tortured by the fact that mediocre artists were straight-up copying their style. I love this outlook and have adopted it wholeheartedly. She's certainly influenced my work to a degree, but hopefully not in an overly obvious way." Follow Penelope Gazin on Instagram and Hellen Jo on her website.

Inés Estrada - Tara Booth

"I first came across Tara Booth through Kuš! Comics, when they published her mini-comic, Unwell. Her work immediately struck me as beautiful and original. But then I read it and it wasn't just that, it was also really clever and funny. In 2017, we had a show together at Brainfreeze Comics in Nashville and from that we became good friends. It's really cool when you admire someone's work and then you meet them and they turn out to be lovely people too, that doesn't always happen!" Follow Inés Estrada and Tara Booth on Instagram.

Ida Neverdahl - Q Hayashida

"Q Hayashida is the creator of one of my favourite mangas of all time, Dorohedoro. It’s about a man named Kaiman who lives in a shitty world plagued with magicians from another world who come there to use regular humans as practice specimens for their sinister magic. For example, Kaiman gets his head turned into that of a lizard by a magic user, and loses all his memories. A lot of the plot centers around Kaiman trying to figure out who he is, and it’s all pretty mysterious. Likewise Q Hayashida is mysterious to me and there’s not a lot of info on her, as with many mangakas. All I know is that she churns out one of the most badass, intriguing, and cool mangas I know, and I dig her for it. All the girls in the manga are thicc and beat people up, which is neat. (Well, except for one who is a bit scrawny.) The manga is drawn in a seinen, action-y, and gritty style, but it shines through that a fellow girl made this comic because it’s sensible to both the male and female characters without sexualizing them too much or falling into boring female character tropes. All characters kick ass equally much." Follow Ida Neverdahl on Instagram and Q Hayashida on her website.

Anya Davidson - Ramona Fradon

"Ramona Fradon, born in 1926, graduated from the Parsons School of Design, and by 1950 she was working steadily as a cartoonist, at times for Marvel, but primarily for DC, doing distinctive runs on Aquaman, Super Friends, Plastic Man, and House of Mystery, among many other titles. In 1965, she co-created Metamorpho, the Element Man, with writer Bob Haney, but even when illustrating other artists' characters, her style was distinctive for its boldness and clarity, and although she left comics for seven years to raise her daughter, she continued working for her entire adult life. Fradon retired from illustration in 1995, and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2006. Do yourself a favour and look up her black-and-white pages on Heritage Auction's website—I guarantee you have never seen better draftsmanship or composition. Fradon made perfect American comics, far better than most men, at a time when women worked in the comics industry as colorists but almost never as artists." Follow Anya Davidson on Twitter and see original art by Ramona Fradon on Catskill Comics.

[Ed. note: If you're in the New York area, you can meet Ramona Fradon at Big Apple Con on April 14 and 15.]

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If you're a young person struggling with student loans, working a part-time job, and wondering if you'll ever be able to buy a house, it will probably come as no news to you that about 66 percent of your fellow millennials haven't saved a dime for retirement. According to a new study by the National Institute on Retirement Security, this "deeply troubling" data partially stems from both depressed wages and the fact that many new workers today are not eligible to participate in their company's 401(k) plans.

The majority of the employed people 21 to 32 who are saving for retirement have less than $20,000 stashed, though the average balance among that contingent of folks is $67,891. Unsurprisingly, matters are categorically worse for millennials of color. A whopping 83 percent of working Latinos in that generation have nothing saved for life after work. However, when a retirement plan is available, nine out of ten working millennial Latinos do put money away, which points to a massive structural problem in both the economy and the law.

In total, about 40 percent of millennials who didn't participate in a retirement plan said it was because they hadn't worked at a job long enough or didn't work enough hours to qualify, the study found. The NIRS recommends policymakers loosen the requirements of participation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

It also urges employers to increase auto-enrollment, up the percentage of contributions employers are willing to match, and generally inform workers about the necessity of putting a portion of every paycheck into a 401(k).

It is worth noting, however, that 401(k)s are generally bullshit. The savings vehicle was invented as an alternative to pension plans, though it ended up largely replacing them. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be putting the maximum allowable amount into one if you have the option, though. Something is always better than nothing, unless you want to literally die in the middle of your shift at an Amazon warehouse someday.

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The Bing may be closed for good, but The Sopranos live on. According to a new report from Deadline, Sopranos' creator David Chase has officially sold the script for a feature-length Sopranos prequel called The Many Saints of Newark, set in 1960s New Jersey. It may not be the Sopranos revival people have been dreaming of since that finale, but, marone, at least it's something.

The movie is reportedly set amid the riots that erupted between Newark's Italian and African American communities during the 60s, a time period Chase has already touched on in Sopranos flashbacks—most notably in the season one episode, "Down Neck," when a young Tony first realizes his dad and Uncle Junior are in the mob.

New Line has purchased the script, which was penned by Chase and his co-writer Lawrence Konner, who also wrote for The Sopranos back in the day. Chase will also be onboard to produce, though he apparently won't direct.

There's no news on the film's plot or characters yet, but Deadline promises that The Many Saints will feature "some of the beloved characters from the series," meaning we'll probably get to see a young Livia threaten her kids with a big fork or Johnny Boy Soprano chop a few fingers off or whatever at some point in the movie. There's no word on a production schedule or release yet, either, but at least we can count on some more Sopranos in the near future.

"David is a masterful storyteller and we, along with our colleagues at HBO, are thrilled that he has decided to revisit, and enlarge, the Soprano universe in a feature film," Toby Emmerich of Warner Bros. Picture Group, New Line's parent company, told Deadline.

Does that mean The Many Saints of Newark could be the beginning of an entire Sopranos cinematic universe? Could we finally get an entire spin-off movie dedicated to the Russian from "Pine Barrens"? Or a workplace drama about a grown-up AJ running that nightclub he wanted to open? Maybe a nice rom-com about Janice's days working as a barista in Seattle? Get to writing, Chase.

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