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Photo via Flickr user ​​Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile​

​When the upcoming publication of Jonathan Franzen's novel Purity was ​announced by the New York Times on Monday, the internet predictably had some things to say, some jokes to make, some cringes to cringe. "I'm just sitting here waiting for @jenniferw​einer's take," ​tweeted Rebecca Mead. Jennifer Weiner, the subject of a January New Yorker profile by Mead, is perhaps the most famous of Franzen's many haters—the author coined the confusing term "Franzenfreude," disdains his on-the-record snobbiness about "self-promoters," and resents the exalted place he holds in the literary pantheon, which she feels comes at the expense of female writers such as, ahem, Jennifer Weiner.

Mead didn't have to wait very long. "Easy for Franzen to rail against social media and shameless self-promotion when he's got the paper of record announcing his new book," Weiner ​dutifully tweeted less than half an hour after Mead's tweet. This was thought-provoking and, I thought, mostly valid: It IS easy to recede gracefully from the clamorous, dirty public marketplace and dismiss everyone who isn't as graceful as you are when you know you don't risk your livelihood by doing so.

But the rest of the social media chatter from armchair Franzenologists I've witnessed this week has just been silly. Several people observed that "'Purity by Jonathan Franzen' sounds like the name of a cologne." Haha. One person complained that Franzen is "obsessed with poo." The general tone was snide and dismissive, as though Franzen had done or said something dumb, bad, and deserving of mockery. A lot of people said that a "a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents" sounded "boooooring." Basically, it wasn't how you'd expect a bunch of engaged, funny, literate, literary, mostly young writers and thinkers—this is how I think of my Twitter feed, and it's kind of true, even!—to respond to the news that one of the most exciting and funny writers working today was going to have something new for them to read in less than a year.

As you've probably guessed, I was a lot happier about his coming new novel than most of my internet peers. Because, man, I LOVE Jonathan Franzen. I love his novels and—not that I really know him—the man himself. I think he's cool, and pretty much a mensch, in addition to being a reliable source of some of the most fun and entertaining reading experiences I've ever had in my life. True, I don't understand or agree with his phobic, scoldy dismissal of digital life. I remain convinced that if he just gave Twitter a chance, he'd realize that it's not (always) about shouty self-promotion. It's a forum for connection, communication, friendship and, most importantly, jokes. But other than that, I find myself mostly sympathetic to his points of view.

And while criticism of his cultural preeminence and that of his male contemporaries resonates with me, I don't believe that we should lay all the blame for widespread and endemic cultural problems at his sensibly shod feet. Franzen has long been a champion of under-read and emerging female writers, providing introductions to new editions of their work (Christina Stead, Paula Fox), blurbing their books (Marisha Pessl, Jami Attenberg), and, recently, even helping a writer he met over email find an agent and a publisher. The result was a novel, Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, that's one of this year's most exciting: It's been raved about by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and even the New York Times. True, Zink might have found her way to publication without Franzen's intervention. But then again, she might not have, and literature (seriously) would be worse off for it.

Why do people hate Franzen so much, or feel like it's cool to publicly proclaim that they do? True, his anti-technology screeds do come off as pompous and get-off-my-lawn-y, and the internet as a whole has never been great at liking and accepting people who don't like it back. It's also probably not helpful that he's rich and successful and critically revered; there's nobody striving writers hate more than a wealthy and acclaimed writer. Somehow I'm able to put all this aside and like him and his books, though, and it's not because I'm some kind of saint who's able to rise above my petty biases. I have loved and laughed at his books. I remember reading both The Corrections and Freedom (his last two novels) in such a state of immersion that I was functionally unavailable to the world around me for days; nothing happening in real life seemed half and important as what was happening in the worlds of those books. Franzen's gift for creating characters who are full of foibles and who seem to live and breathe is, in my reading experience, unparalleled. I read both those books with an eye on the pages that remained to me, getting sadder and sadder as they dwindled. I looked forward to forgetting enough of their details that I could read them again. (Lucky for me, I have a shitty memory.)

OK, so he hates the internet and thinks iPhones are the devil. So he's published some personal writing that has a weird mix of unsparing, highly attuned observation and gaping blind spots about his own failings and culpability—who hasn't? For every false note he hits, Franzen has written at least one deathless perfect sentence or sketched an indelible character. There aren't a whole hell of a lot of people writing today who can boast that kind of batting average. You can deny yourself the pleasure of his work if you want—I don't much care what you do. I, on the other hand, will be lining up at midnight outside the bookstore to get my hands on Purity, and I promise not to make fun of you if you swallow your pride or whatever it is and line up alongside me.

Emily Gould, with Ruth Curry, co-owns Emily Books and is the author of Friendship and And The Heart Says Whatever. 

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Sid Neigum cape, vintage cape, hair by Ronnie at Palm Sunday

PHOTOGRAPHY: ​MAYA FUHR
​STYLIST: NATASHA MH

Photo Assistant: Hannah Ward-Beveridge
​Style Assistant: Sarah Lorre
​Make Up: Steph George
​Hair: ​Aisha Ebon​y​, Ronnie & Mark at ​Palm Sunday, and Chanel at ​D N​ S 
​Models: Henri, Viktoria @ Elite, Zak @ Elite, Gabrielle @ Elite, Aza @ Elite, Caitlyn @ Elite, Alana @ Elite, John, Richie

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Vintage shirt, hair by Chanel at D N S

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Thomas Tait top courtesy VSP Consignment, hair by Carly at D N S

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Courage My Love bustier, NOMAD jacket, hair by Aisha Ebony

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The Leather Atelier gold bustier, Mitch Fraser jacket, vintage dog collar, hair by Mark at Palm Sunday

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Stussy bomber jacket, hair by Chanel at D N S

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American Apparel top, hair by Mark at Palm Sunday

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Ann Demeulemeester courtesy VSP Consignment, Stussy shirt, hair by Aisha Ebony

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Balenciaga blazer, Sid Neigum top, Hair by Carly at D N S

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​Calvin Nicol was assaulted by four males earlier this month, and called the attack a "hate crime." Photo by Tim Obas via Facebook.​​
​
​Anyone who's been in a physical altercation knows that getting your ass kicked totally sucks. But getting your ass kicked because you've been singled out for your race, gender, or sexual orientation sucks doubly as hard. That's because the impact of the assault extends beyond your own physical and psychological trauma, and leaves your entire community feeling victimized, vulnerable, fearful, isolated, and unprotected by the law. Cultural intolerance coupled with random violence is one of those things that we as a society should all agree is unacceptable. That's why we've got laws covering hate crimes.

But what if you were beaten up not because you're gay, or because your attacker doesn't really jive with your religious beliefs, but rather because you're covered in tattoos, piercings and look really, really intense. Would that also constitute a hate crime?

This was the question posted by 31-year-old Ottawa-based piercer, artist and body modification enthusiast ​Calvin Nicol, who was assaulted by at least four males earlier this month. Nicol—who also has a split tongue, silicone horns implanted in his head, and the whites of his eyes tattooed black—was left with, among other things, a broken nose, and a fractured and impacted shoulder. The assailants also pulled a piercing from between his eyes, ripping an eight-millimetre chunk of skin from his face.

In a recent inter​view with the Ottawa Citizen, he called the attack a hate crime. "They pretty much just called me a freak with horns, and mentioned my eyes and how they were going to give me black eyes," he told the Citizen, "For me, it was pretty much a hate crime. I was just walking by and they jumped me."

While there's no doubt the attack was a heinous and vicious crime, a few questions remained: Was this a hate crime? Aren't all assaults motivated by hate, in a way? And finally, if we gave a Star Trek nerd a wedgie, is that a hate crime?

VICE wanted to learn how Canadian laws work, and just how bad it would be to be charged with a hate crime, so we talked to ​Toronto criminal defence lawyer Lucas Rebick.

VICE: So first off, does this guy have grounds for calling this a hate crime?
​Lucas Rebick: Well, in terms of his subjective feelings about the manner in which he was assaulted and what he perceived to be the motive for the assault, it seems reasonable that he would use that language. But there's a fairly high and very specific threshold in criminal law that needs to be met before an offence like this is considered to have been a hate crime. And there's an argument to be made, assuming that the assault was in fact motivated by his appearance, but it's not one that's ever been made before as far as I'm aware, and anyone making it would probably have a difficult time.

Why is that?
​In criminal law, the determination of whether or not a crime was motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate happens at the sentencing phase, after the offender has been found guilty. In the Criminal Code's sentencing provisions 718.2(a)(i) directs the court to consider as an aggravating factor "evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor."

Could it be argued that all assault is motivated by hate?
​Hate, anger or financial gain, yeah, I guess. The court would have to find that the reason the assault took place, the motive for the assault, was the offender's "bias, prejudice or hate" against the person he or she assaulted.

If the defendants admitted that they beat him up because he was super-freaky looking, would they have a case?
​The judge would still have to be convinced that your choice to cultivate a freaky appearance was a "similar factor" to religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. That is a tough argument to make.

How much more serious is it if this would be deemed a hate crime, theoretically?
​Theoretically? There have been a number of cases in Canada where a finding that an offence was motivated by hate resulted in a sentence being imposed that was double what it would otherwise have been. It also probably makes imprisonment more likely.

There's no general rule, except that the sentence should be longer or more onerous in some way if an offence is found to be a "hate crime", but the impact in particular of an offence being found to be a hate crime would be very significant.

When you look at 718.2(a)(i) [which is the part of the criminal code that allows for an aggravated sentence for "hate crime",] you can see that the sort of prejudice that can give rise to something being found to be a hate crime is left open-ended—but that the factors mostly describe bias against objectively identifiable groups ("race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor").

So in order to find that an offence motivated by hatred for the person's appearance was a "hate crime", you'd have to make an argument that that their choices around their appearance were a "similar factor" to race, gender, language, sexual orientation, etc.

Right, so you'd have to prove that cosplayers or urban primitives have lifestyles akin to a religion. Some would argue that Star Trek nerds are religiously fanatical...
​Yeah, it's probably fair to say beating up someone for being too into Star Trek wouldn't qualify as a hate crime.

It might be a little misleading to look at the religious ground in terms of lifestyle, interest or belief, specifically. It's probably easier to understand if you look at the "religion" grounds as about cultural identity rather than specifically about belief. Many of the big bias crimes are against religious groups, obviously. Most of them, really, when you think about it.

The fact, or the likelihood, that assaulting someone because you don't like their Spock ears wouldn't qualify as a hate crime under 718.2(a)(i) doesn't mean that the motive for the assault wouldn't be taken seriously as an aggravating factor. It would. It just wouldn't be considered under that specific rubric.

There was a ​movement in the UK to add "appearance-based discrimination" to hate crime law. They argued that if you called someone a fatty, you should be charged with a hate crime. What are the immediate challenges to enforcing a law like that?
​Well, probably overbreadth would be the biggest challenge. Chances are if you're assaulting someone it's because you don't like some aspect of their appearance or personality. The law already tells us it's not okay to punch someone in the face because you don't like the way they look; it's a criminal offence to punch someone for almost any reason. The penalties are more severe for bias- or hate-based crime because we as a society want particularly to denounce that kind of behaviour, hatred resulting in violence or other crime that is motivated by someone's membership in a distinct and identifiable group.

No matter what, a judge is going to take a very dim view of an assault that's perpetrated on a stranger because of some general dislike for some aspect of that person's character or appearance.

With the ubiquity of social media, the lobbying for subcultures to be recognized as legitimate religions seems like it will only grow. Take ​Pastafarianism for example.
​Jesus. Good luck to them.

Well, recently, a Utah woman exercised her religious right to wear a colander on her head when she had her driver's license photo taken. So I guess they're on the right path.
​What we're talking about would be someone who threw a snowball at her for wearing a colander on her head being denounced as a hate criminal.

Right, and she'd have to prove that the perps knew what Pastafarianism is...
​Not only that, but that they threw a snowball at her not because they thought anyone with a colander on her head was an asshole, but because they hate what the colander represented.

I guess I want to know what protects a guy from getting fired from his job for being an intense, freaky-looking tattooed guy but not protected for getting his pierced nose from being broken for what sounds like the same reason?
​Well, I'm not entirely sure he's protected from getting fired either, necessarily. Anyone's protected from getting their nose broken, pierced or non-pierced, in more or less the same way. It's against the law to punch someone in the nose. It's just that if the assault is motivated by hatred for that person's membership in certain distinct groups, the law considers it more serious. The law wants to send a message at sentencing that that type of assault is extra unacceptable. When you're being discriminated against by a private person or organization, you're only protected from discrimination by human rights legislation on the basis of a number of specific grounds.

...And being a freaky dude who has their eyeballs tattooed black is not one of those grounds.
​Not as such, no. If you have tattoos or piercings related to your place of origin or your religion, then you could apply for protection on the basis that your appearance is a part of the expression of one of those protected grounds, but otherwise an employer is probably able to decline to hire you based on your surgically-implanted horns and facial tattoos.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT.
​
​This article argues that trying someone under US hate crime laws actually create a "victim hierarchy" and that under it, victims are not being treated equally. How are hate crimes tried in Canada?
​Here, a hate-motivated offence is not called a different crime because it was motivated by hate. It's just (potentially) treated differently at sentencing. And the author is right, that from the victim's point of view, being beaten up for your cultural status is probably not twice as bad as being beaten up for no reason, or for some other reason, but I don't think that's why sentencing on hate-motivated offences works the way it does here.

We don't consider a hate-motivated offence objectively twice as harmful to the victim as a non-hate-motivated offence. We (I think) have these sentencing provisions because we want to send a message to the public that hate-motivated offences are twice as intolerable to our society as non-hate-motivated offences.

It's called "denunciation and general deterrence" in sentencing law.

And that does make sense, right? It feels something like twice as offensive to beat someone up because they're gay as to beat someone up because they called you a mean name.

Let's say Mr. Nicol wants wants to see his assault prosecuted as a hate crime, how would he do it?

​Assuming that the procedure is something like it is in Ontario, he should be given at least one opportunity to communicate to the judge about how he was affected by the offence, and the fact that he feels it was motivated by hate.

(In Ontario, it's through a written document called a Victim Impact Statement, which he should be given the opportunity to read aloud if he wishes to.)

Ultimately it's the judge who decides whether or not to treat it as sentencing as a hate crime, and in real life it's up to the Crown to make the argument that it should be treated that way.

So if the judge is like, a secret Juggalo, they might sympathize.
​He or she would have to do more than sympathize, they'd have to find beyond a reasonable doubt that his freaky status was the REASON they beat him up, which is a really hard thing to prove. But yeah, it's very hard to imagine a Juggalo judge. I guess they could all be drinking Faygo out of those white pitchers they have.

The People vs. Fucking Magnets: how do they work?
​A matter for the courts if ever there was one.​

​@katigburgers

The northeast corner of the United States is currently going through a real-life version of the movie Frozen, except not uplifting: Homes are iced over, enormous snow walls have ​trapped people inside Walmarts, and the region is experiencing what the ​Weather Channel called "one of the longest sub-freezing spells on record for the month of November." It's so cold outside that people are dying—as of today, one in ​New Hampshire, one in ​Michigan, and at least ​five in New York.

And it doesn't appear to be relenting, either.  ​Washington DC announced a weather emergency yesterday in anticipation of even colder temperatures. In Buffalo, which set an all-time, nationwide record for snowfall in a 24-hour period this month, people are posting photos of their doors sealed shut by snow. Casper, Wyoming, broke a record with a temperature of minus 27 degrees on Wednesday.

So why is all this happening? I asked Dr. Jin-Ho Yoon, a climate scientist at the Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, what was causing all of the extreme cold weather. He said climate change might be to blame for at least some of it.

"There are two potential causes: One is that the reduction of the Arctic sea ice can amplify the polar vortex," he said. In other words, as the sea ice melts, freezing-cold air escapes from the Arctic and travels elsewhere. Yoon co-authored a  ​recent study on the subject that pointed out that many of these cold spells tend to happen just after sea levels drop in the Arctic.

The other hypothesis, according to Yoon, is that "the change in the sea temperatures over the Pacific generates some wave of motion in the atmosphere, which we call the polar vortex." So rather than coming from the Arctic, the wave of cold is coming from the Pacific.

The big question here is whether this extreme weather is manmade, and Yoon said that it's hard to say for sure. Since there's so much variability in the climate, there's no way to definitively say which weather events are the result of human interference and which are the result of wholly natural causes. And, Yoon adds, there hasn't been enough scientific research about extreme cold fronts to make a strong argument about their possible connect to climate change.

"The change in Artic sea ice is much easier to explain when the global warming happens, as we are likely to have a reduction in sea ice over the Artic," he said. "Once we have more evidence, I believe that the link to the human cause might be stronger."

Dr. Thomas Ackerman, who directs the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean Professor at the University of Washington, isn't so sure about that. He told me that climate change doesn't really have anything to do with it, and there's nothing particularly nefarious about this month's weather.

"If you look at the averages for November in the past ten years, is this a huge anomaly out of a hundred Novembers? No."

Heavy snowfall in November is normal, he explained, because there's more water in the air than there is in the dead of winter, and a couple days of cold don't mean anything in the long run. "It'll warm up by the end of the weekend, and those temperatures will probably be above normal," he said.

When you look at the ​forecast on NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—it actually looks as though the northeastern United States is poised to be warmer than average this winter.

So then what's causing all of these people to literally freeze to death?

Ackerman chalked it up to human error and unpreparedness. "People got dumped on [with snow] before they were really ready for it."

Oh.

Follow Arielle Pardes on ​Twitter.

​The latest epic east coast winter storm has devastated commerce, taken lives, and has now ruined a ​classic Noughties band's long-awaited comeback tour. The guys in Interpol, who are in the midst of a multi-city jaunt to support their new album, El Pintor, have apparently been trapped inside their tour bus for almost two whole days. 

Snow plows trapped in the snow.-DK pic.twitter.com/igkxOEoNw5

— Interpol (@Interpol) November 19, 2014

​Underneath all of that white shit is a town, some vehicles, roads, mailboxes, a bunch of unopened boxes of Interpol merch, and a few brave snow plows trying to free your favorite band from premature retirement.

And can I just say firemen are awesome. They just are yo. Serious ballers during these conditions.-DK

— Interpol (@Interpol) November 19, 2014

The above tweet was the last communication we've received from the band thus far. Obviously, firemen ARE awesome and we will keep you updated on this tense ordeal, but in the meantime, let's backtrack.

​This high-pressure situation started when the band had to cancel their show in Toronto due to the inclement weather that trapped them in Buffalo, New York. They released a ​statement to their Canadian fans saying the following:

​ Dear Toronto,

Our bus is trapped in a snowstorm just outside of Buffalo. We haven't moved our position on the road in over nine hours. Unfortunately, we'll have to cancel tonight's concert at the Kool Haus. We were greatly looking forward to the show but the big bad winter has come early this year. We will be informing people of a new date as soon as we can.

​Obviously, it's only gotten worse from there. The guys are drinking themselves into oblivion, praying to be released from their wintery tomb, and doing their best not to eat each other like that  ​movie about those guys who eat each other.

Hour 13 trapped in the snow. Dry goods and vodka. We will make it. -DK pic.twitter.com/bEQhaUokKi

— Interpol (@Interpol) November 18, 2014

Liquor and ramen noodles can only sustain them for so long before they start to go stir crazy. If you've seen The Shining, Panic Room, or that Simpsons episode where Homer and Mr. Burns get caught in the blizzard, you know how difficult it can be to maintain your sanity when trapped in an enclosed spaced for longer than, like, 20 minutes.

Try doing it for two days with a bunch of dudes marinating in their own BO and sweating alcohol.

Perhaps Interpol can use this valuable time to reconnect with each other. Maybe they can remember why they started a band in the first place and rededicate themselves to art over commerce. They could pass the hours in confinement by writing, recording, releasing, and marketing a brand new, free album from inside the bus. With Garage Band, WiFi, Twitter, and a Soundcloud account, anything is possible. This could be like their Beyonce-surprise-album-release moment, except Beyonce wasn't, you know, trapped in a snowstorm. 

You might be asking how they'd plug in their instruments though. Well, instead of getting a full session going, why not experiment with whatever the fuck they have laying around? When you shake a bag of Starbursts around, it kind resembles the sound of maracas. Drums? Hit yourself in the face really hard. Not only does that resemble percussion, it will keep you from passing out. Guitars? Go acoustic and fashion a guitar out of an empty box of Cheez-Its and straightened-out pubic hair. What about replicating Auto-Tune? Easy. Sing into an empty bucket. It's the same thing. 

I'm not saying it's going to be a breeze to replicate a complete album cycle from inside a tour bus in the middle of an apocalyptic snowstorm. I'm just saying, don't let this opportunity go to waste, Interpol. Your fans are waiting! Though, chances are good that whatever you come up with still won't top  Turn On the Bright Lights. Hang in there, boys!

Follow Dave Schilling on ​Twitter.

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Tina Fey and Amy Poehler being witty as fuck at The Oscars. Image ​via Moustache Magazine

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

When you're not witty, life is garbage. As a kid, I was smashed over the head with a conceptual hammer again and again until my self-confidence was somewhere between my knees and my asshole, as all the sharp kids were given standing ovations for exquisitely timed "your mom" jokes. It was a fucking nightmare, I tell you.

Apparently Benjamin Errett doesn't suffer from this problem. Apparently Errett can knock socks off feet with nothing but a glass of bourbon and a copy of Good Housekeeping. Apparently he's known throughout the National Post as the Grandmaster Flash of the pithy remark.

In his new book Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting, Errett collects the sharpest people of all time—your Wildes, your Louis CKs, your Rebecca Northans—in order to help people like me figure out how to seduce women. Er, I mean, make my friends laugh so hard they piss themselves.

I tracked him down to somewhere in the outskirts of Toronto to have a really serious discussion about the dichotomy of good and evil, the future of the emoji and The Office.

VICE: Hi Ben. Just a light one to get us started. Can you help people seduce women? Asking for a friend.
​Ben Errett: What? I'm not a pick-up artist. I'm a professional writer and scholar.

Ben, please. He's a desperately lonely man. How can he utilize wit to charm?
​In the book I talk about Rebecca Northan, who did this show called Blind Date. She's dressed up as a mime, which is a French clown. She randomly selects a male member of the audience, calls them up on stage, sits opposite her and they go on a date.

That sounds horrible.
​The funny thing is, the person always ends up looking good. Rebecca's theory is that everyone is interesting.

Bollocks.
​It's up to you to find out why they are. Being witty isn't just about a quick mind, it's also about being genuinely interested in your fellow man.

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Benjamin Erret. Photo by Alyssa Bistonath

Interested people are interesting people.
​My advice for a first date is: Get them talking. A terrible blind date is when someone comes in and tells you what they're looking for. Everyone, fundamentally, just wants to talk about themselves.

Should he get pissed, and build up some Dutch courage?
​To a point I've done some science and decided that people are at their wittiest after two drinks. Any more and you lose perspective on yourself.

I'll take note of that.
​How did you find out about the book?

Wait a second. Aren't I doing the interview?
​I'm just interested.

I'm not sure I'm happy with this role reversal, it feels like going on the bottom after a lifetime of missionary.
​I'm not sure I warranted that imagery.

The irony is, Ben, that I write this up later. So you better wind your neck in or I'll give myself all the witty lines.
​Two half-wits make a whole, right?

I saw you've got a Socratic dialogue in your first bloody chapter of the book, which renders this interview process pretty null and void. What do you have to say for yourself?
​I was looking for a grand unified theory of what makes good things good: the plays of Tom Stoppard, the comedy of Louis CK, the poetry of Patricia Lockwood, Jay Z... And so on and so on. It's not that they're funny, more that they're witty.

A crazy little thing called wit.
​Wit is spontaneous creativity. It takes a lot of work to have the material at hand. It is certainly something you can get better at, like painting.

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Some artwork from the book, by Sarah Lazarovic 

How would you recommend I got wittier? Should I stand in front of a bathroom mirror each morning firing off one-liners at my reflection?
​Just keep quipping until you're exhausted.

I believe that people are born witty and you can't learn it. Is that a witless opinion?
​George Bernard Shaw was originally a terrible speaker and about as sharp as a beach pebble, yet over time he worked on it and developed into one of the great wits of his day. Half the battle is accepting that you can learn it.

Wait a fucking second here. Your book can teach people to be witty?
​Yes... That's the whole point of this interview, is it not?

Don't rhetorical question me. All I'm saying is, wouldn't it be a nightmare if this book fell into the wrong hands? Like, what if an absolute prick got hold of it and suddenly he's really witty and everyone loves him and you, Ben, have created a monster?
​You put something out there and it can be used for good or for evil.

How Zen of you.
​I have a chapter on Cruel Wit, which is, in fact, a particularly British connotation of wit.

I'm going to ignore the implications.
​The Ricky Gervais strain of Cruel Wit. As a Canadian...

Oh, I was in Toronto this summer!
​Dave, have you written a book yet?

No.
​Then shut up.

OK.
​So, as a Canadian, I have a good vantage point of pervading wit—the American genre and the British. There's an American thought that wit is cruel, that it's snark and inherently bad. I don't think that's correct. It's a very simplistic way of looking at things.

So Americans are simple?
​Haha. Never say anything bad about people, that's my motto.

So British wit isn't cruel, then?
​If you think of it as an art form—something that can be worked on—there's no reason why it should be bad. Nobody has said: this painting is so mean, this sculpture offends me.

Wit can be used for both evil and good. Except the comment section beneath articles. They're always just mean.
​Oh, god. People in the comment section are lovely. Wit makes everything better. Social situations are always improved by a good quip. You can use wit at interviews, on first dates... Winston Churchill stole so many of his best lines.

What?
​There are two types of people. Parrots and magpies. Some people just steal their lines, and repeat them. Others hunt out gold.

Yeah, I have a couple of mates who just fire The Office quotes at each other constantly, while I'm basically Alan Partridge.
​I'd actually give them a pass for that because The Office is all about quotations and parroting. It's meta.

"Yes I've enjoyed the odd doobie." One of the catalogue of The Office quotes a meta-wit might give on a daily basis 

They're the two smartest people I know. Certainly the smartest people you know.
​A couple of chilled out entertainers. A parrot just shoehorns the best lines into a conversation. But it's not wit. Parroting is high school humor.

You see that, lads? You're high school boys. 
​Didn't you open with a question about seducing women, though? That's a typical high schooler. Wit is thinking on your feet, of selling something.

Like your body?
​Can you type out: "Ben sighs"?

Would the world be a better place if everyone was a little wittier?
​At that point, wit moves into empathy. You can have the best wit in the world, but if no one is listening, what's the point?

This is precisely what I say about my Twitter. I never get retweets for my gold.
​Have you considered the possibility...

OK, changing topic. Is Barack Obama witty?
​For all his rhetorical strength, he isn't known as a wit... Though he's come up with some great one-liners.

You've very carefully walked around saying Barack Obama is not witty. He was pretty good on ​Between Two Ferns.
​Look. He's an effortlessly cool man. I will not fall into your trap.

Are emojis wittier than Barack Obama?
​Certainly more than you. In fact, I'd say they're definitely witty, the digital future of wit. You can portray a sentiment in one image.

Where does wit come from, do you think?
​Ancient Greece considered wit as virtue... But then it sort of disappears. The Middle Ages weren't very witty, what with the Bubonic Plague and all. There was a rebirth during the Enlightenment. In the courts there would be contests for the best ripostes. But then, everyone said so many good things about wit nobody knew what it really was anymore.

Like disco.
​Precisely. Then America spread it across the world through motion pictures and online. Right now, the pervading wit is the wit of the United States of the internet.

What?
​That's where language, sentiment, and thinking is evolving. Memes are witty.

Wait. Are you saying the modern day wit is "American Wit: Online"?
​I mean, the country of the internet.

Thank fuck for that.
​Thanks for talking to me, Dave.

Thanks for quipping with me, Ben.

Follow David Whelan on ​Twitter

In March, Ronnie Morales and his girlfriend Jessica Rosado bought some allegedly LSD-spiked steaks for themselves and their two kids at a Tampa Walmart. The ensuing family trip, which involved them going to the hospital, where the nine-months-pregnant Rosado gave birth to was ​national news. Eight months later, no one knows where the heck that acid came from; it ​emerged yesterday that Tampa police have turned up nothing in their investigation, even after checking the whole supply chain from slaughterhouse to retail floor.

The story of the Walmart steaks is a bit confusing—for one thing, the acid could have easily been destroyed when the steaks were cooked, since ​LSD hates heat. It seems more likely that the drug was in their water, or a side dish, not the meat. 

In the decades-long history of mythical acid spikings, nothing ever quite adds up. Often, between eyedropper and mouth, there's a gap in time and space where motives can become shrouded and blame is misallocated. 

The CIA's MKULTRA Mind-Control Scheme - 1953 

By the time former CIA agent Sidney Gottleib died in 1999, the project known as MKULTRA had ​ceased being regarded as a conspiracy theory that was too farfetched and too downright psychopathic to be true. Instead it turned out to just be another sad chapter in the big book of fucked-up shit perpetrated by the American government. Essentially, the CIA figured that if acid could alter perception and cognition, it only stood to reason that that power could be harnessed for mind control and interrogation purposes. That resulted in horrible experiments during which lots and lots of people—including the johns of San Francisco prostitutes, mental patients, and ​an entire French town—were involuntarily dosed with acid and very few of them had a good time.

Perhaps the most famous individual case of a CIA spiking is the story of Frank Olson a military scientist. One night, ​a colleague handed Olson a glass of Cointreau, which he assumed was just a normal glass of orange liqueur—if such a thing exists—and he drank it. According to legend, in the ensuing trip, he jumped out a window, thinking he could fly, and fell to his death instead. 

But other facts lead away from the idea that he was killed by drugs: Olson was troubled, was trying to quit his job, and had also been recently roped into a violent interrogation experiment in which he'd had his skull cracked with the butt of a gun. LSD was just one of many of the stressors that had been in his life that month, which is why his death leap didn't occur until nine days after his acid trip. 

The Beatles' Dentist Giving Them LSD-Laced Coffee - 1965

Something happened involving the Beatles, a dentist, and coffee in 1965, but we'll never know exactly what. The accounts we have are from the two dead Beatles, and their stories contradict each other a little—long story short, a dentist named John Riley gave John Lennon, George Harrison, and their wives some LSD-laced coffee, maybe without really telling them what was it it first. The best part of Harrison's version is the part about dentist John Riley's alleged ​pervy intentions:

I'm sure he thought it was an aphrodisiac. I remember his girlfriend had enormous breasts and I think he thought there was going to be a big gang-bang and that he was going to get to shag everybody.

The rest of the story is just the usual stuff: thinking an elevator is on fire, Harrison's wife trying to break a window, and driving really slow in a Mini Cooper (don't drive on acid). It's better if you hear the story in goofy Beatles accents:

Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests​ - 1968

One of the central figures involved in turning LSD from a scary weaponized chemical to a counterculture staple was Ken Kesey, as Tom Wolfe documented in his​ seminal 1968 book on the subject:

This new San Francisco-LA LSD thing, with wacked-out kids and delirious rock 'n' roll, made it seem like the dread LSD had caught on like an infection among the youth—which, in fact, it had. Very few realized that it had all emanated from one electric source: Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

And I know, Ken Kesey is a hero of yours, but here's the thing: If you read back through the book and refresh your memory about what Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were doing back then, it kinda sucked. They weren't telling people they were giving them acid, or even what it was, since people were still figuring out what LSD was back then. When people stopped by the Magic Bus, they were just ​handed Kool-Aid and told to drink up.

People who didn't pass the test would freak out, and if that happened, the Pranksters would put a microphone in front of them and broadcast the sound of their terror through loudspeakers. Some of the Pranksters started to ​doubt the ethics of what they were doing, probably because what they were doing sounds pretty dickish. 

The Horror-in-Our-Schools Era - 1970s–1998

In the 1970s and 1980s, a ton of urban myths sprang up, not just about how LSD can kill you, but about deviants trying to slip it to your kids. Since LSD is expensive (about $10 to $15 a hit unless you're getting gouged at a music festival) that doesn't really make sense. In the 1970s, when flyers started going around warning parents about " ​blue star tattoos," supposed LSD-spiked lick-and-stick tattoos meant to sneakily get kids high for some reason, the notion was total bullshit. Besides, what pleasure is there to be had from making kids act weird? Kids act weird anyway.

But in the 1990s, LSD went through a resurgence in popularity, and there really were some cases of LSD spikings in schools. Most of the victims were teachers, though, not students. In 1996, a high school English instructor named Linda Woodard in—where else—Florida ​had her soda spiked with LSD, but someone tipped her off after she'd only had one sip. She reported feeling nauseous and disoriented but didn't hallucinate, and the kids got charged with felonies. 

Another case, in 1997, happened in San Diego, where a 13-year-old spiked a teacher's iced tea in order to get revenge for a bad grade, according to the ​Los Angeles Times story about it. 

In 1998, CNN reported a bunch of elementary school kids having to be hospitalized after getting their hands on a ​spiked bottle of Ice Drops. During the acid renaissance of the 1990s, this was ​actually a ​popular way for dealers to prepare acid for consumption, so it was probably a mix-up, not a dastardly spiking.

Skream and Ben Fogle Getting Dosed - 2013

For some people, starting to hallucinate for no apparent reason is no big deal—they just figure they got dosed with acid and go about their business. That seems to be what happened when British dubstep guy Oliver "Skream" Jones got slipped some acid right before going on a plane. He doesn't seem to have been traumatized at all:

But that is decidedly not what happened to ​Ben Fogle, a British TV personality. Someone slipped him acid while he was having a normal night out in 2013. After he came home and tucked in one of his kids, he started feeling weird. When he picked up his other kid and she felt "incredibly light, like a grain of rice," he freaked out, became convinced he was going to die, and had to be locked in a bedroom until an ambulance could take him to the hospital. Of the prankster who did it, he told ​the Mirror, "I will never, ever forgive them."

As long as there are eyedroppers, pranksters, and LSD, people will be getting dosed against their will. That's a raw deal—tripping can be a fun or even transcendental experience, but if you start seeing things without apparently having taken a drug you'll naturally think something terrible is happening. And anyway, it's a waste of acid.

Follow Mike Pearl on T​witter.

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Beata Ushe top, Hautnah skirt

PHOTOGRAPHY: ​NAAMA ALEX LEVY
​STYLING: JAVI

I met Javi at a burger joint where he works as a cook. After getting to know him a little I asked if I could take his photo, and he invited me to his home. 

There, he told me about his training in the Spanish army, how he's traveled through 46 countries, and about his belief that most people have a "hidden closet." He wants to encourage people to wear whatever they want, and, most importantly, to feel good doing it.

He's now both a great inspiration to me and a very dear friend. I hope these photos convey a sense of the character that I've come to know and love.

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AMISU New Yorker top, vintage skirt

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H&M bra, Humana top, skirt found in the street

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Fishbone dress (top), AMISU New Yorker dress (bottom), Deichmann leggings

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AMISU New Yorker top

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Vintage coat, AMISU New Yorker top, H&M skirt, Deichmann shoes

For the past ten years, nestled in an industrial park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, a 525-bed minimum-security jail has sat empty. Now it's being used to showcase America's infatuation with mass incarceration and solitary confinement.

Wapato Jail, erected just as the frenzy of "tough-on-crime" politics began to wane, is fully equipped—it even has a dentist's office. But despite a $59 million outla​y for its construction, the prospect of the place ever being filled was suspect from the start thanks to a strange brew of high-minded local liberalism and the minutia of the tax code. That makes it a potent symbol of the shifting national conversation on punishment and government waste.

Ramon Hamilton just wrapped shooting a pilot at Wapato for an upcoming web series about solitary confinement, wHole. It will debut in January and he hopes it will provide the public with a window into the daily reality of all the people involved in prison, from those incarcerated to guards and wardens to their respective family members. (There are 2.3​ million people incarcerated in the United States today.)

"We just sort of forget about these people in prisons," Hamilton said. "We've built up a society that is very punishing. We want to punish, we don't want to see the so-called criminals and so we forget about them like they never existed... You know, that has worked; mass incarceration is not a topic of general conversation. We've psychologically locked it out of our lives. Most of society is happy we've done that so we don't have to face the reality."

In 1996, when Multnomah County voters approv​ed funding to build the new detention facility that became Wapato, they also voted for a tax reduction, which pulled some of the money officials were relying on for day-to-day operations of the jail. Nevertheless, the 466-square-mile county has spen​t between $300,000 and $400,000 each year—$3.5 million so far—on maintenance and upkeep, basically just to keep the lights on.

"It was built over a decade ago, back in the day when we were really interested in mandatory sentencing and we needed more jail space," Jan Elfers, the public policy director of the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, explained. "Once it was built, the cost to run the facility was brought to light, and we realized: Wow, we didn't have the money to keep this facility running. So they were coming up against an issue of not wanting to raise taxes and a societal shift in our attitudes as to whether or not incarceration is really making our communities safer."

Wapato is just one of several jails operated by the County Sheriff's office, whose we​bsite includes a video about prison policies on composting and eating local that looks like it might have been ripped from Portlandia.

"We held a ceremony, cut the ribbon—then locked the doors," former Sheriff Bernie Giusto told the LA Times in 2006. "We have a brand new jail sitting here empty, and I don't have a good answer when the public asks me, 'Why was it built if there was no plan to operate it?'" He added, "Even I get tired of telling people how dumb we are.

Two or three times a year, film crews come in to shoot various television series, and Portlandia has been among them. But the story of the rise and fall of the facility has been an especially useful talking point for Hamilton, a founder of Think Ten Media Group.

"I'm glad that it's not being used as a prison, but it's a big space that millions of dollars went into that's not being used. Maybe it can be used as a tool to help the cause, to talk about mass incarceration. It can serve a purpose but maybe not the one they intended," he said. "Obviously, the symbolism was good."

Hamilton counts himself as a recent convert to the anti-prison cause. Although he lives just three miles from the Pitchess Detention Ce​nter in LA County, until this year he had never appreciated the vastness of the prison-industrial complex.

"We became aware of the hunger strikes at Pel​ican Bay and just started doing some research. We had no knowledge of what was going on in the prison system at that time," Hamilton said. "As we started going down the so-called rabbit hole, we learned about the horrific conditions. It's a large, complex thing that is going on in America with a lot of moving parts, from the companies profiting off those who are in prison right down to the individual in solitary confinement."

The title of the series attempts to reflect this, with "the hole" being a colloquial phrase for solitary confinement while "the whole" is meant the entirety of the system, according to producer Jennifer Fischer.

"We are hoping it really opens people's eyes to this issue," Fischer said. "I think a lot of people don't realize the extent of the use of solitary confinement and what solitary confinement actually means. It's a way to open the door to conversations and reach people who aren't already aware of it."

As neophyte prison reformers themselves, Fischer and Hamilton reached out to people directly impacted by the experience of solitary confinement to help write the script and portray the characters in the series.

"Being able to have someone with that personal experience was instrumental in getting the script right," Fischer said.

Working in the facility was a challenge for both the artistic goals and logistics, she said. It's hard to make the dull, soul-crushing space of a jail look interesting on camera. At one point during the filming, the whole crew accidentally locked themselves into a cell, and no one could find the key.

"It was eerie to be in an empty prison," Fischer said. "It certainly affected us all to be in that space. I kept thinking, I can't believe I'm voluntarily doing this."

Five Mualimm-ak is a prison reform advoc​ate based in New York City who served as consultant for wHole and plays a guard in the show. He spent five days at Wapato over the summer during the shoot.

Mualimm-ak was incarcerated in New York State for 12 years, five of which were spent in solitary confinement. So working inside the abandoned jail was a complicated experience.

"They really just gave us the keys," he told me. "When I felt the keys in my hand, I wanted to run through the jail and unlock every door, even though no one had ever been in there. It was a creepy feeling. I couldn't connect to being on the other side of the fence."

Although naturally an outgoing individual, Mualimm-ak struggled in his scenes as a guard.

"I had to do 20 takes of one scene that was about one second long. I was supposed to be checking the security of the cell, but couldn't do anything but look directly at the person inside to see if he was alright," he said. "Even though it wasn't real, I felt like just letting him out the whole time."

The series begins with solitary confinement, "the dungeons of mass incarceration," Mualimm-ak said, to talk about the way we, as a society, are hiding our problems rather than addressing them because we fundamentally don't care about the people locked up in the prisons.

"All this concrete and steel, $50-something million, it could have paid for two colleges," he said.

If nothing else, the web series is timely; while Wapato's emptiness reflects a recent reduction of jail and prison populations in some states, the rate of incarceration remains a recalcitrant national issue. On Wednesday, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a ​report showing that state prison populations will rise by about 3 percent before 2018. (Oregon is one of the few states expected to reduce the number of incarcerated citizens.)

According to Hamilton, the aim of the show to humanize the various characters—to see not only the end result of what the system did to this one person, but to look into what happened and what got us here. At the same time, the show tackles criminal justice in America at large.

"This is about all of us," Fischer said. "What does it say about a society that we would allow this to happen?"

Nick Malinowski is a social worker, writer, and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. His recent work can be found at the Huffington Post, Alternet, Truthou,t and the Indypendent.  Follow him on ​Twitter.

Photos by Barrett Emke

I am a part-time dad. It's a hard thing to admit in print, or to myself. My eldest daughter was largely raised by my first wife-for most of her childhood I only took care of her every other weekend, though she did live with me a bit during her teenage years-and my two younger daughters, Portia (seven) and Margaret (nine), are mostly being raised by my second wife.

Let me be blunt: I think that my failures as a husband, and many of my failures as a father, have been the consequence of two of my character flaws-laziness and cowardice. I'm even a little frightened, as I sit here writing this on a Sunday evening, of the prospect of putting my kids to bed tonight and getting them up and fed before school in the morning. True, I used to do it often when I was married to their mom, but it's been a few years...

Well, I'm 47 years old now, and lately I've been waking to an urge that was a daily part of my psychological life in my teens and 20s: the desire to improve myself. I don't know when or why it went to sleep. Maybe it was all the good wine I started drinking when I opened my jewelry stores and my wine bar. Maybe it was the ten years of alcoholism that dominated my 30s and early 40s. Maybe it was a cynicism that emerged from the many moral mistakes I made during that time-a kind of "Yeah, I'm a shitty person, but so is everyone else, so what the hell?" attitude. But we're not all shitty people. And we can make ourselves better. Or at least, I can try to be. To be precise, that's what's been happening inside me recently: I remember what it's like to want to try to be better.

*** 

So my ex-wife texted to say that the girls wanted to take karate lessons. We already spend too much money on violin and cello lessons, aerial silk lessons (don't ask), acting lessons, and my knee-jerk reaction was "No karate." But then we were lying by the community pool one day, watching the girls jump into the deep end, and Amie, my current wife, said, "Maybe I could get my black belt." She was about nine when The Karate Kid came out, and it's still one of her favorites.

I said, "Now that's a great idea! All three of you could go to karate together, and it would be a big bonding thing for you guys."

She's no stranger to my bullshit.

"Since it's such a good idea, how about all four of us get our black belts together?" she asked.

"There's no way I have the time. Plus, it means we'd be getting them after school three days a week. You're in shape. I'm too old. I can't go to a karate studio. Not to mention keeping track of the uniforms... It sounds way too ambitious."

But when I looked at my daughters-who both said they'd love to take karate-I thought, Don't you want them to be able to defend themselves?

The next weekend we were walking into AKKA Karate on Broadway, a dojo about a mile from our house in Kansas City. We opened the door, and there it was-the gym. I saw 3,500 square feet of failure: a place I had hated and feared in school; the sour stale smell of sweat; the blue mats on the floor; the jumbles of equipment; the mirrored wall I wasn't going to want to look at myself in; the locker rooms in back. Instant involuntary memory-seventh grade. I was trying, and failing, for the 20th time to do a lay-up (I still can't do one); the other seventh graders were laughing; the gym coach was loving my humiliation (how I hated Mrs. Nagel).

Behind the desk was a five-foot, hundred-pound, early-30s Indian woman named Ritu Nanos. Meet my future sensei, a fourth-degree black belt, a kind of soft-voiced, graceful, deceptively gentle reincarnation of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket.

"Pick 'em up and put 'em down, Private Pyle! [Read: White Belt Clancy.] Move it out! Quickly! Are you going to die on me? Do it now! Do you feel dizzy? Do you feel faint?" In fact I don't think Sergeant Hartman could go two rounds with Mrs. Nanos.

"Front row to the line!"

"Ma'am!"

It was the first day of karate class. New Order played on the studio speakers. There were about 20 of us-all girls, aged seven to 12 or so, and Amie and I. I couldn't look more ridiculous. We stood in four rows of five and ran to taped lines on the floor.

"Honesty in the heart, knowledge in the mind, strength in the body!"

"Ma'am!" we all shouted in response.

It was 90 degrees outside and nearly that in the gym. We did 50 jumping jacks, 50 plank jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, mountain climbers, and some kind of squatting exercise I can't remember. That was the warm-up. Then class started. Square horse position: Spread your legs and bend your knees until your thighs are almost parallel with the floor, keeping your back straight. Now hold it for 30 seconds. Then, just as you're about to collapse: "OK, let's drop a bit lower! I want to hear thirty more, louder! Four-knuckle punch! Hammer fist! Reverse hammer fist! Knife hand thrust! Tiger claw! Let me hear those kiais like you mean it!" Our kiai, or battle cry, was ites (rhymes with "bites"). Front kick: "Ites!" Wheel kick: "Ites!" Half fist, thumbless fist, front-back combination...

"Mr. Martin! Lower those legs! You're sitting on a horse! Fists at your waist!"

Mrs. Nanos stood low to the ground, fists in front of her face, a wall of samurai swords lined up behind her.

"Ma'am!"

An hour later I was in the changing room, and a gold belt walked in for the next class.

"Jesus Christ, I had no idea," I told him. "It's horrible!"

He laughed. "Yeah, I lost fifteen pounds in the first two weeks. One of the teachers here lost a hundred pounds in her first six months."

Afterward, as we got into the car, Portia said, "Dad, are you OK?"

Margaret said, "You're kind of sweating. A lot." They both were laughing. My jeans were stuck to my legs. My eyes were stinging. My shirt was plastered to my back.

"So you guys thought that was fun?"

"I loved it," Amie said.

"We're going back tomorrow, right, Dad?" Portia said.

"Day after tomorrow."

At AKKA they teach kenpo karate, a style popular in America that traces its roots back to Shaolin kung fu. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but kenpo was effectively brought to the West by an American, James Mitose, who lived in Hawaii in the early 20th century. Mitose was sent to Japan at the age of three to learn what was then called the Kosho-Ryu kempo (or Old Pine Tree) style of karate. The story is that Mitose taught it to William K. S. Chow, who refined kenpo under the influence of his father, a Shaolin master and Buddhist priest named Hoon Chow. William Chow in turn taught Ed Parker, who formalized the kenpo-also called "fist law"-system and became its great popularizer in America. The basic idea behind kenpo is that it is self-defense, and as a martial-arts technique it relies heavily on a series of very swift punches and a knowledge of the vulnerable points of human anatomy.

When you begin kenpo you are a "drunken monkey." I quote from our manual: "A drunken monkey is lazy, rude, skeptical to a fault, undisciplined, and seeks to escape himself through indulgence in external stimulation." They left out "cowardly"-then they would have my character more or less nailed. So I'm a drunken monkey, and I'm hoping karate can straighten me out. "Sober monkey emerges and sits in the gymnasium of the warrior soul," our manual promises, by the time I get to 1 Tuan (first-degree black belt). After consultation with Amie and the girls, that's what we agreed to: The four of us, for the next four years, will study karate until we all become black belts.

Fortunately, the white-belt class is more mixed than I feared at first: A few boys and even one grown man, my own age, showed up for our third lesson. And then, one day, maybe seven lessons in, as I was taking off my robes, I suddenly felt like my body was, well, not my enemy in quite the way it had been before. I don't want to exaggerate, but for a minute or so I felt almost at home in my body.

Amie and I were watching a movie last night, and I told her that, in the session the day before, I had finally taken the time to watch Margaret and Portia at work. (For most of class I'm just panting with the effort of keeping up.)

"They watch Mrs. Nanos. But I see them sneaking looks at us all the time too. Both of us. They're watching us to see how we do the moves."

"Really, even me?" Amie asked.

"Yes, definitely you. Both of them were watching both of us. And it got me to thinking, you know, here are these two little beings, and they are looking at us for... for everything. Like there are a handful of people they think about, and our opinion and what we do is basically their whole world, and all they want is for us to love them, and encourage them, and tell them it's OK, and take care of them..."

"Yeah," Amie said.

"And I can't help thinking that someone like me shouldn't even be allowed to be a parent."

Amie watched me quietly. "I think you're being a little hard on yourself, but I think you're telling the truth about how you feel right now."

So here we were. Basic training on Ritu Nanos's "Parris Island" of Kansas City. Learning to stop being a drunken monkey. To get a black belt. To be a better dad.

We were learning Dancer B, a series of head and shoulder movements, two open hand strikes, and three leg moves that result in a prone opponent with your elbow on his throat and his left shoulder dislocated. There was another family in the dojo-a mom, dad, and two daughters, just like us-and I was practicing the move with the father, who was about to get his gold belt. He's a stocky guy, shorter than I am, 48 years old, and he felt like he was built of iron. When he took me down to the carpet I was like a kitten on its back. When I took him down, it was like a great tree falling in the forest and I was the squirrel holding on to the tree.

"Dig your right elbow into my Adam's apple," he told me. "Yank up on my arm. Get your left arm close to my side so I feel it in my ribs."

After 60 push-ups-yes, 60-and another couple hundred jumping jacks, we walked out of class to the car. The girls are usually quiet when we pick them up after school, but they babble away after karate. It loosens something up in them.

"So what are you going to do in the tournament, Amie? I think I'm going to do short kata," Margaret said.

"Tournament?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," Amie said. "Maybe opponents at sides B." (A complicated dancing-style kung fu move that I still can't do, even in slow motion. I'm the worst of the four of us.)

"Dad, there's a tournament in two weeks. All the karate schools in Kansas City are gonna be there. What are you going to do? You should spar with somebody, Dad."

Our dojo is planning to host a citywide tournament. That's why they've been painting the walls and installing new mats, I realized, moving the chains that the weight bags swing from.

I'll be sparring.

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I'm going through a bit of an existential crisis right now. I can't say it's my first rodeo, though. As a matter of fact, if I had a dollar for every time I've gone through an existential crisis, well, it wouldn't mean anything. Because money is a worthless societal construct, and we're all adrift on a sea of meaninglessness in which we'll eventually drown. Am I right, ladies?

I currently find myself at a crossroads—I'm not a girl, not yet a 31-year-old woman willing to accept the fact that the only constants I have in my life are crippling student loan debt, an inability to stop texting my ex, and an addiction to documentaries about eating disorders. (What can I say? They make me feel slightly less damaged!) I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do it. I don't know, period.

If you've never gone through an existential crisis, you've never truly lived. Questioning who you are, where you are, and why you're here is, IMWO (In My Worthless Opinion) a necessity for sentience. Some choose to ignore these questions, self-medicating with drugs, sex, complacency, television, or a combination of all four. Braver souls choose to tackle them head on.

Why did God (or, depending on your belief system, an unforgiving and Godless universe) place us on this big blue marble? Was it in His (or Its) divine plan for us to toil away at unfulfilling jobs until we finally expire, having spent our last days putting even more money in the overstuffed coffers of insurance companies?

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I've spent untold hours asking myself questions like this—the answers have, by and large, been as crisis inducing as the questions themselves. I am but one person, an individual in that aforementioned sea of meaninglessness. There is nothing I can do, no selfie I can post, no status update I can write, that will make my existence any more consequential than that of your average mindless coed. I will die, as will (spoiler alert) you; in time, no one will remember or celebrate our existences. I used to find that sad, solemn truth terrifying. I no longer do.

Instead of fearing the meaninglessness of life, I now embrace it. There is a comforting liberation in knowing that, once I have left this mortal coil, there is nothing I can do to further alter the world in which I have exited. There is nothing, period. I may go to Heaven, to Hell, to the ground, to nowhere. One thing's for certain, though—I sure as shit won't stay here. And so, if everything ultimately means nothing, I have concluded that nothing means everything (don't roll your eyes at me, reader).

There never has been, and there never will be, a cheat code for life. Instead of sweating the small things, the large things, or anything, I've decided to make my finite existence infinitely easier by embracing the tenants of positive existentialism (a concept I came up with, and therefore can't endorse heartily enough), which are as follows:

Your Problems are Meaningless
​Your present psychodrama, your temporary financial setbacks, getting cut off in traffic—these inconsequential problems, at the end of the day, are meaningless. The alleged "love of your life" broke up with you? Boo hoo. You don't know how you're going to make rent next month? Join the club. Instead of fixating on your individual problems, view them on a grander, more universal scale. You are not the only person who has suffered through these issues. As such, said issues are as insignificant as your existence. Now doesn't that make you feel better?

You Aren't Special
​A lifetime of being told you're special is enough to give anyone a big head. But what if—hear me out—you weren't? What if all the gold stars you received in middle school were as disposable, as worthless, as the shiny paper they were printed on? If we're all "special," none of us are. Think about that next time hubris rears its ugly head.

Existentialism Is Not Nihilism
​ Nihilism is the realm of the coward, the safe haven of the life experience-deficient petulant teen. Just because your existence will be forgotten when you die doesn't mean you have to be an insufferable piece of shit while you're still alive. You may as well be a decent person while you're still here—after all, you have nothing to lose by doing so. If anything, it'll definitely get you laid more.

Nothing Is the End of the World
​Every slight you experience may feel like the end of the world, but clearly isn't. If it were, life as you know it would cease to exist. And yet still, in spite of the shitiness of your studio apartment, the world keeps spinning, with you in it. Funny, that.

Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself
​This is, of course, easier said than done. There are few things more comfortable than wallowing in one's own self-pity; it's like an emotional Snuggie® that, at times, seems impossible to escape (even to go to the bathroom). It's important to recognize the futility in wasting your days ruminating over past mistakes and present tribulations, though. Nothing good will come of sitting in your bathtub sobbing. Something good might come of getting out of that bathtub, getting dressed, and moving on with your life, knowing that what you found so upsetting in the first place really didn't matter at all.

Recognize That I, as You, Am Full of Shit
​I, while the author of this ragtag guide to a bullshit philosophy I stumbled upon after years of trial and error, am not an authority by any means. I am simply a person typing into the void. The beautiful, horrific void of air strikes and human misery and sunsets and beauty and nothing and everything that envelops us all. You needn't take anything I've said to heart. You, after all, have complete and utter autonomy. In a way, it's all you have.

So long as you're not hurting yourself or anyone else, I don't give a fuck what you do. Neither should you.

Follow Megan Koester on ​Twitter.

Illustration by ​James Burgess​

Hi! I'm not an alien. My name is 197. I'm serious. I have a name, but sometimes I almost forget it. No one here calls me by my name, because my world is Gitmo.

I guess my tragedy starts from that first day when I was captured by bounty hunters. I was so, so scared. I thought I had only a slim chance of surviving. But I also thought, maybe this is just a bad dream, like you see in Hollywood movies. Movies don't last long. I thought it would all be over in a couple of days or months or maybe even years, but a decade? No way. There are no montages in life. A decade doesn't flash by in a rush of images and music. You live every single second.

When they handed me over to the American soldiers at the airbase I thought they looked like ninjas, and I was frightened. They dragged me around like a sack of potatoes. Then they shipped me off in a cargo plane like a parcel. I had been working for a charity in Afghanistan. When war broke out, I fled to Pakistan. The funny thing is that I was returned back to Afghanistan by US airplanes. On the cargo plane I found they had stuck a number on my chest. It felt mad then, but now I have gotten used to numbers. In Kandahar, at the US military airbase, I was Mr. 189, if I'm not mistaken. I can't describe my days in that camp without crying. It hurts so much to live and have memories that you want to bury forever.

When they put me on a plane a guard said to me: "You're going to hell." And when we got to Gitmo I realized that he hadn't been joking. Recently, I watched Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce, the English lawyer who campaigned for the ending of the slave trade. These kinds of slaves still exist in Gitmo, and there is no end to our suffering, just as there was no end to their suffering.

When I was first brought here, I thought that soon the world's superpower would work out that I wasn't the bad guy they were looking for. During all this time, the thing that breaks my heart the most is the thought that I will never see my wife, Abla, again. I tell my wife I don't care that she gets older and everything changes, I just want her heart to stay the same. I need her, and it gives me hope that she feels the same way about me.

I have been waiting years in this place to be repatriated, but I can't be because it's too dangerous for me to go back to Morocco. I grew up in Safi. It's a town by the sea, in the west. I have been waiting for another country to offer me asylum. "Soon" in Gitmo is nothing, you know.

One of the last films I saw is called The Green Mile. I liked this film a lot! When I saw it, I loved it and I felt myself in the place of the prisoners. I understood them. Sometimes I see myself as having been dead all this time, and when I get a call from family or my lawyers, it's like they have a date with a corpse, but it makes me so happy. These calls make me come back to life, if only for an hour or so. It's like some people have not forgotten that I am a human being.

Before I was in Gitmo, I had only ever seen men behaving the way they do here in the movies. I used to watch films about World War I and II. I used to watch films about the Vietnam War. I would see American POWs in the hands of the guerrillas, and I always sided with those prisoners. I cried for them, and when, at the end of the movie, I got to see them go home and be with their loved ones again, I was happy.

I hope that there is a happy ending to my movie, too.

This is 197 reporting from a dark hole.

About Younous Chekkouri:

Moroccan Younous Chekkouri was wrongly accused by US interrogators of being a member of a terrorist group in his homeland. All the allegations have since fallen away, and in 2010 Younous was cleared for release by the US, a process that involves unanimous agreement by six US federal agencies, but he is still in search of a country that will let him live there. Moroccan security service agents were allowed to interrogate him in Guantánamo. There, Younous says, they threatened to torture him should he ever set foot on Moroccan soil again.

Younous hopes to be resettled to Germany, where his aunt and uncle live.

Melbourne photographer ​Heather L​ighton recently returned from the world capital of kawaii, and although we're sure she saw a lot of interesting things, she mostly chose to take pictures of cute kids and hilarious pets.

There's an argument that the west's obsession with Japan as a saccharine, novelty wonderland that exists only to fuel our green tea Kit Kat–flavored fantasies is patronizing and archaic. But come on. There's a picture here of someone taking a raccoon for a walk. We're only human, people. 

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Illustrations by Dan Evans

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

I arrived early for my first call center shift, hanging around by the doors until I had to clock in. Inside, the guy to my left sighed, sinking into his seat. He'd already worked the previous session without much of a break. "You've just got to hustle, man," he told me, hooking a headset over his ear.

Normally, I would have empathized with a young jobseeker working back-to-back shifts for only slightly more than minimum wage. Mostly because that's also exactly who I was and what I was doing. But, as charity fundraisers, the job mostly seemed to involve coaxing donations out of the elderly's retirement funds. I wasn't sure who was being hustled.

Earlier this year, an investigation by Channel 4's Dispatches accused professional fundraising organizations of using underhand tactics to target vulnerable people, putting undue pressure on potential donors and using misleading scripts.

In my experience, fundraisers are well aware of this. Spending every shift asking pensioners to part with the money they've spent an entire life earning is a horribly depressing way to pay the rent. In fact, half an hour into my first shift, another new recruit put the phone down, picked up his bag and walked out. Most people hate making the call as much as the recipients regret picking up the phone.

Yet, evidence suggests that, despite how oppresively irritating it is, telephone fundraising works incredibly well: it's raised more than $3 billion over the last 25 years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alistair McLean—Chief Executive of the Fundraising Standards Board—told me that outsourcing fundraising is also cost-effective for charities.

"We live in a country where it's absolutely the right of the consumer to give," he said. "It's equally the right of the charity to ask."

The logic may be sound, but that explanation doesn't excuse the fact that most people really, really don't like being asked. Charity calls prompt more complaints per request for money than any other fundraising technique. More than a third of these complaints are due to people disliking the method itself.

McLean believes the directness of telephone fundraising might explain this—it's much harder to put down the phone mid-conversation than to throw a letter in your recycling bin or stride past a  ​santa holding a bucket.

"I do feel that, because it's a very personal approach, if you catch someone on the wrong foot, it's more likely to generate a complaint," he said.

Experienced fundraisers often don't even expect anyone to pick up the phone. They leave it to ring the required six times and continue chatting with the person next to them before hanging up. There's always a danger that, if someone does answer, they'll hear the end of a conversation about the fundraiser's latest medical issue, or a recap of last week's softball match against a rival branch.

The campaign I worked on involved asking donors who normally give by cash or check to set up a direct debit. This makes sense on paper, as regular direct debits help charities to budget. In practice, however, it doesn't work at all. Many contacts are technology-shy pensioners who would really rather just send a check whenever they see a disaster on the news.

Calls are strictly structured, and sticking to the script is essential in keeping your job. Once the contact agrees to the call, you ask a series of pre-planned icebreaker questions. The aim here is to establish a rapport, starting a two-way conversation.

Of course, that conversation is a little one-sided at first. Your opening speech is so long that you've reached the halfway point on your A4 script by the time you finish. Aside from the occasional "uh huh," the contact can't really contribute to the conversation. This, according to trainers, is kind of the point: you're building your argument for donating without being interrupted.

But this lack of personal involvement could actually prevent people from giving, according to Antoinette Nicolle, a psychology research fellow at Nottingham University. "Because it's so scripted, this build-up part, as a decision-maker you're not really getting involved in it," she told me.

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Argument built, you ask for donations three times. Every new employee gets an "objection handling" document, their bible for dealing with unsure donors. As a general rule, it instructs you to repeat what the contact said to show that you empathize with them. Maybe this is just me, but it's kind of tricky to feel genuine when even your empathy is scripted.

Objection safely handled, you rebuild your argument before asking for a smaller payment. If the contact hasn't yet slammed the phone down, you deflect another objection and ask for one final donation.

It's easy to see how asking someone for money they refuse to give three times might leave them feeling harassed. Psychologists call this method the door-in-the-face technique, because the first request is so huge that the contact is likely to slam their metaphorical door in your face. However, they're then more likely to agree to other, more reasonable requests. I overheard one retiree, shocked speechless at being asked for $125, sign up to give $60 a year with barely a second thought.

Donors are, to a certain extent, in a position of power. They can always put the phone down. But—in my experience, at least—the majority of the people who actually pick up the phone during the day are conversation-starved elderly people. Hanging up would mean ending the chat, so they tend to stay on the line.

When someone tells you about the rising price of their weekly shop, or how their husband was recently diagnosed with bowel cancer, or how they're on their own now, alone in an empty house, continuing to flick through your objection handling booklet makes you feel like a sociopath. Every ounce of your conscience is screaming at you to thank them for their time and click the "end call" button on your computer screen.

Dispatches found evidence that fundraisers received bonuses for exceeding targets, something I never encountered. Meeting targets was more likely to earn you control over the office stereo, a strange arrangement that once meant listening to two hours of Bhangra while updating donors on the Syrian crisis. An online review of one call center describes staff members rewarding themselves with a homophobic dancehall track.

Right at the end of the script was a disclaimer informing the donor that you worked for a professional fundraising agency. Dispatches suggested that donors might react differently if they knew professionals were involved earlier in the call. Fundraising copywriters leave it until the end of the script for exactly the same reason. According to Alistair McLean, it's actually just "common sense."

But telling new contacts I worked "on behalf of" a charity still felt dishonest. One elderly man appreciated what he thought was a charity's personal call so much that he promised to leave them money in his will. I could have set up a posthumous donation there and then, but I'm glad I didn't because I'd imagine the guilt would still keep me up at night.

"I have Alzheimer's," she whispered. I knew I couldn't do the job any longer.

Halfway through my first day, as part of my training process, I listened to an experienced caller tick off all the boxes, boasting uninterrupted about the charity's work. She moved straight into the first ask, suggesting a donation of $60 twice a year. There was a long pause and I wondered if the contact had hung up.

"I have Alzheimer's," she whispered. I knew I couldn't do the job any longer.

Many telephone fundraisers behave sensitively and do good work, and Alistair McLean told me he actually saw signs of good fundraising practice in the Dispatches report.

However, the evidence of fundraisers lying and harassing donors found by the program's investigators is worrying for the sector. Already, more than half of those polled are "very annoyed" by telephone fundraising, according to a 2014 survey.

"You can imagine that, in a situation where someone is frustrated," said Antoinette, "it might make them less inclined to donate, even if they're sympathetic with the charity."

To me, that hit the nail on the head. It's a given, but not treating donors with the right amount of sensitivity risks alienating. And how do you expect to make a difference like that?

Follow Owen Shipton on ​Twitter

​Soon, virtual reality is going to crash into our lives in a way we never even imagined. Though dating and masturbating have long been commandeered by the web, it's only been as a kind of middleman. Now we're nearing the possibility of falling in love with your computer, as meeting your dream partner could be as easy as slipping on Oculus Rift—the most advanced virtual reality headset in the world.

In Digital Love, VICE investigates how love and sex is faring in the digital age, starting with technology's notorious bedmate, the adult entertainment industry. We make a pilgrimage to LA's "Porn Valley" to witness firsthand how virtual reality is scarily close to creating fully interactive porn before heading to Europe's sex capital, Amsterdam, where the Dutch enthusiastically enlist the use of "teledildonics" to enhance their long-distance relationships.

Along the way we pick apart the digital world's grip on today's relationships. Apps and the rise of social media have revolutionized dating, while virtual affairs end real-life romances and online role-playing games have gone X-rated. Finally, we takes a look at a very modern taboo and ask: Can man's relationship with machine ever translate into real-life intimacy?

​"The city was on fire."

In his ​latest documentary, ​STOP, Spencer Wolff narrates the trial that took New York by storm, erupting into protests that pit community groups of all races against the cops and City Hall. "One for the history books," as City Councilman Jumaane Williams shouts at one demonstration. "Our kids will be reading about this!" It was a challenge that sought to reform the great Greek tragedy of New York law enforcement and civil rights: stop-and-frisk.

For the past four years, Wolff has followed the life of David Ourlicht, one of the lead plaintiffs in Floyd v. the City of New York, a case that, thanks to a ​ruling by Judge Shira Scheindlin, eventually resulted in the NYPD's unwarranted use of stop-and-frisk being branded unconstitutional. Soon enough, Wolff, a white lawyer, learns that Ourlicht, a young interracial adult, grew up down the block from him in the West Village—but the two men lived in two entirely different versions of New York that were defined, and divided, by the way we view each other. Wolff compares this polarization of realities to a miniature version of apartheid-era South Africa.

But the documentary, which premiered Tuesday night at the IFC Center as a part of the DOC NYC festival, digs at something deeper. Wolff follows the origin of this mentality back to the 1990s, a time when crime was at Mad Max levels in New York, and tracks its growth into an institution under billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (To recap: There were about 700,000 s​tops in 2011, meaning 2,000 stops a day, ​86 percent of which targeted blacks and Latinos.)

I met up with Wolff after the premiere to talk about his film, this notion of two New Yorks, and, of course, the boys in blue.

VICE: For years, stop-and-frisk has been a buzzword both here and nationwide. It was, and still is, an issue that sort of demanded a documentary about it. So at what point did you decide to make one?
​Spencer Wolff: Everyone knew we needed a documentary. Ross Tuttle over at the Nation did that amazing piece, The Hunted and the ​Hated, but it was an eight-minute piece. The problem with the craft of filmmaking, or the process of making a film, is you need a story. When I met the Ourlichts, I realized there's a story that can be told there. It also gave me the trial because David was there. It permitted me to tell a story with an evolution. I'll tell you the truth: I made a short film about stop-and-frisk in 2010, and I honestly thought the city would settle the case, as they did with Daniels v. City of New Yo​rk. But they didn't, and Bloomberg dug in his heels.

I already had this story with David as a plaintiff, so I kept filming and filming and filming until it became something. You see the Ourlicht family—you see the grandfather, you see this very interesting transversal history of the city. This is a man who was in an interracial couple in the 1940s. These are issues that are staying with us throughout the years, and it gives us that historical depth to the film. It's very hard to do a stop-and-frisk film with just a lot of people talking about being stopped and how bad it is, unless you have the trial and characters like officer Adil Polanco [who testified against the NYPD]. He carries the second half of the film.

You ended the film with Mayor Bill de Blasio announcing that he will drop the city's appeal. But more importantly, you showed Commissioner Bill Bratton, who you originally started the film with as this architect of stop-and-frisk and data-driven, aggressive policing. So what were your thoughts when you saw the Eric Gar​ner video and ot​hers that showed brutality? You know, these latest instances under de Blasio of police stops gone terribly wrong?
​It seemed like all my worst fears of bringing Bratton back. We know with Bratton that change is going to be incremental, as opposed to sudden. I think the NYPD needs a wake-up call, and they don't. There's no accountability! That's a problem, and Polanco talks about this: There's just no accountability. Until there is, nobody is going to worry about what they do, and that's the deepest issue. Last week, City Council Members were promoting the Right to Kn​ow Act, which is really Jumaane, Ritchie Torres, and others. We're going to need to keep legislating and somehow box the NYPD in until we have a structure that provides for accountability for crimes. When a cop commits a crime, it's still a crime.

These are obvious things, and these are the things that don't make a film. This is what's special about filmmaking: You can say all of these things, and we can get our facts right. I'm a lawyer as well, so I can present a case, but the film embodies it, in a certain sense. It embodies what these certain practices really mean, and it tells us without telling. It's there for us to feel. That's why I just ended it with Bratton. Because we feel that; we see it. There's an obvious play in the film that the people defending stop-and-frisk are the white and privileged. It gets back to these two visions of New York, and just to see Mayor Bill de Blasio and Bratton—as much as you like de Blasio, it's just two privileged, white faces, and that's why I decided to end the film there.

With your imagery, there's numerous shots of just a lot of cops on a corner. Like, 15 to 20 cops hanging out. You put those in a couple of times.
​Jeffrey A. Fagan, the professor at Columbia who wrote the expert report in the trial, gives those statistics that we have more cops per capita than any other city in the world. But he says, you know, the crime isn't that good; the police aren't really doing anything. We just deal with these cops hanging out on the corner all the times. 

We all knows what happens basically: We have all of these cops to give us a sense of safety. Bloomberg is a businessman, he wants results from his investments, so he embraces CompStat [the NYPD crime data system]. And that came from the Giuliani E​ra, which was less about crime and more about metrics. We get this kind of numbers game, like, well we have all of these police officers, so we better be getting good numbers. It creates these perverse incentives that Fagan talks about. I guess that's what I learned about it. 

Now, it seems as if the NYPD's line of defense is: Well, stops are going down, so it's at a total that is "justifiable." What do you think of this reasoning?
​We have Omniprese​nce. We have Broken ​Windows. It's the same tactics by a different name, essentially. That's what I wrote about in my ​article in the Huffington Post, which is that we can intuit from the fact that misdemeanor arrests, especially for low-level marijuana possess​ion and so forth, are the same or higher in the de Blasio administration, that the stops are still happening. They're getting a similar conversation rate, but what happens is that the stops, they don't convert. They don't have to anymore. They don't have quotas from those numbers, just for arrests and summonses. Any stop that is not converted is probably not written down.

I don't know, man, I talk to my friends in Bed-Stuy and East New York, and this Omnipresence, with the floodlights. It's unbelievable. And they call it Omnipresence, you're just like, "Did you actually get this from George Orwell's handbook?" They don't even try to pretend to be less scary. They don't even make that effort, and you just wonder.

Do you think there's this wave slowly happening across the country, with Copwatch, the Ferguson protests that aren't ending, and the idea of NYPD reform?
​I don't know, man. Like yes, we're so much farther than we were. Look at David's grandfather; he said he'd honestly never thought he'd see this change in his life.

I know you mentioned that you were a lawyer, and that you're looking to bring this movie to other theaters and cities. So do you think you'll follow in this line of work?
​Yeah, let's hope. I went bankrupt making this film, and now I live at home with my parents. And just time: It was a marathon over four years, and I didn't get other work. I work as a start-up lawyer now to pay my debts; it's completely ridiculous. I was concentrated in international human rights law. It's a tough sell, in a sense. If I can get this around and it leads to other work and I can keep doing this, I would like to. You saw I was speaking French to everyone; I lived in France for four years, and went to law school there. I kinda want to do the same film in Paris, where stop-and-frisk is exactly the same, but they're not allowed to collect any statistics by race. It'd be something where I'd go there, and interview the people being stopped. It'd be interesting to internationalize this.

In the beginning of the film, you bring in this aspect of South Africa, and how stop-and-frisk was reminiscent for you of apartheid. And you bring back the imagery of Mandela at the end. On a lesser scale, since this is a city, not a country, do you think that there is a seminal character like Mandela here, or that there needs to be one? Or is it better off a community-based effort?
​I'm glad we don't just have a Mandela. Living in South Africa now that Mandela is gone, the country is losing its way. I think we have a lot of people fighting; we have the Jumaanes, we have the Cornel Wests, we have the Jesse Jacksons, the Judge Shira Scheindlins, the Fagans, and the Polancos, you know? I'm grateful that we have so many actors in this. 

Everyone in Ferguson right now, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, too. We have a much stronger civil society than South Africa, and that's actually what South Africa is grappling with now. The collapse, in a sense, of their civil society. It's not their fault; they just didn't have the infrastructure that we do, and we shouldn't underestimate all the good people out there trying to do good work. We hope for Obama. We hope for de Blasio. We keep hoping for these people, but they keep disappointing us.

Follow John Surico on ​Twitter.

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A screenshot of just one of the many uplifting stories featured on the MailOnline website today

Yesterday, in ​an interview with MailOnline publisher Martin Clarke in the Wall Street Journal, the idea of a Daily Mail TV show was floated, apparently seriously:

Ultimately, Mr. Clarke has ambitions beyond the Internet. He said the site had been approached by several producers about possibly developing a television program in the U.S. modeled after "Access Hollywood" or "Entertainment Tonight."

But it turns out it's something totally different and more innovative that that. In fact, we found a clip from the original British pilot! 

Apparently it was directed by some guy named ​Char​lie Brooker. 

Some people might be confused about why we're doing an episode of Hi Shredability on a skateboarder, but while Greyson Fletcher is known for his skateboarding, it's not uncommon to see him in the water at T Street, or hanging on the North Shore with John John Florence.​ 

He also represents the fourth generation of a family that has produced some of the most influential surfers ever. How many people can say their great-grandpa, grandpa, dad, and uncle all rip?