The Department of Justice announced last week it would no longer enforce federal marijuana laws on Native lands, which theoretically opened the door for tribes to pass the same sort of progressive pot legislation that some states have. But some are asking why the DOJ took that step when it's not clear that the tribes themselves want to legalize the stuff.

"It's almost proactive," said Anton Treuer, director of the American Indian Resource Center at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, of the DOJ decision. Treuer, a member of the Ojibwe Band of Chippewa and the author of several books on Native Americans, was at a bit of a loss over the new turn of events when we talked over the weekend. "Honestly, as a political matter, it makes the Department of Justice look like revisionists," he said. "It's just kind of an incremental, creeping normalization kind of thing."

While the DOJ move may have been headline news, if weed is to be sold alongside cigarettes at roadside stands, it'll have to overcome the same opposition as it has elsewhere.

"When it comes down to it, culturally and politically, a lot of tribal people are opposed to the use of marijuana," Treuer told me. "The fact of the matter is we have real substance abuse issues in Indian country. That is a reality. Those who are working in tribal government—not all, but many—are really strongly opposed to anything that would normalize an addictive substance."

Located four hours north of Minneapolis deep in Minnesota's northwoods, Bemidji is a regional hub for three Indian reservations—White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Lake. All are bands of Ojibwe, but only Red Lake is a closed reservation—meaning the tribe has increased autonomy.

Red Lake's closed status is important to note because Minnesota, like several other states with large Native populations, operates under Public Law 280. The act means the state—not individual tribes—has prosecutorial jurisdiction over felonies, including marijuana possession (past a certain threshold) and distribution. So just because the feds aren't going to enforce pot laws doesn't mean every police officer from Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension down to Bemidji beat cops won't throw you in jail for holding.

Then, even if you're an enrolled member of a tribe, you'll likely be indicted for possessing whatever amount of weed you have on you. And, like other minorities, "the rate at which Natives are arrested compared to their white peers is higher, the rate at which they're sentenced is higher, and the length of those sentences is longer, as well," according to Treuer. These facts of life, combined with the power of Public Law 280, essentially make the DOJ announcement an illusion in his eyes.

"I think at Red Lake or Bois Forte, or any reservation where Public Law 280 is not in effect, you get a little bit of that gray area. But most of those tribes have some kind of drug code where [possession] would be illegal," he told me. "It does make the Justice Department statement kind of confusing, but I don't think this is going to create a major paradigm shift."

Especially in Red Lake, the possibility of legal weed seems slim. The authorities there have deemed alcohol to be so detrimental to their small reservation that it's illegal. (With Bemidji a 30-minute drive away, however, alcohol is readily available through backdoor sales.) Prohibition isn't in effect on other area reservations, but alcoholism is a major problem in Indian country.

"Personally, I think we should not be proliferating the use of another addictive substance," Treuer said. And not just for Natives, he added, citing a much talked-about Journal of Neuroscience study that showed brain abnormalities among people who smoked. Legal weed might lead to more people smoking, the argument goes. In Indian country, increased marijuana use would be tacked on to high alcohol consumption, and might feed into "deeply intertwined" issues of "poverty, joblessness, historical trauma, violence and substance abuse"—a dynamic Treuer lays out in in his book, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask.

On the other side of the issue is Sheldon Cook Jr., head of Red Lake–based Rez Rap Records. Cook told me he believes as much as 70 percent of the reservation's population of 1,200 smokes weed. I asked if, in such a small place, he was worried about the cops coming down on him for his very public use and support for marijuana.

Not one bit.

"I smoke a lot and publicly let people know I do so. If the cops wanted to do anything to me, they would have by now," Cook told me. "Stoner shit aside, this is good for our people. We live and breathe in a community struggling with poverty and depression. Day by day, people are losing their lives to themselves. It's about how we are living—poor, lower-class, placed to the side by the world. It's like we don't exist. [Weed cultivation] has the potential to make our land worth billions. I'm very excited and anxious to see what my reservation's leaders decide to come up with. I just hope it's for and not against this amazing plant."

But without those new laws making dope legal, there are other possibilities at play. For instance, what if tribes—in acknowledging the state's existing marijuana laws—never passed their own? That scenario could lead to sticky situations for police, tribal officials and prosecutors navigating these new legal waters, according to Frank Bibeau, an attorney and enrolled member of the White Earth band. Treuer agreed, suggesting Public Law 280's supersedence could be challenged in court if there were no tribal marijuana laws on the books.

"If they lawyer up and fight it, it could make for a pretty significant case," Treuer said.

According to Bibeau, there's no law against weed in Leech Lake's tribal code, something he should know as a former member of its legal department. But fighting for the right to possess weed in the absence of tribal laws is a piecemeal path toward legalization, he said, adding that tribes should be looking to take advantage of the DOJ announcement in the same way they pounced on gambling in the 1980s, reaping massive profits for Native Americans across the country.

"I think it's all coming down to dollars and cents and logic," Bibeau said. "It's a resource to be used like everything else."

The DOJ announcement named no tribes in particular who asked for the government to step away from the enforcement of federal marijuana laws. But North Dakota US Attorney Timothy Purdon alluded to tribes there who might be interested, and Bibeau said he's heard the same. Over in Wisconsin, the Ho-Chunk tribe has made their stance in favor of weed known. Still, as states have found in the past decade, legalizing marijuana isn't always an easy task when many in the halls of power still sees it as a dangerous gateway to use of harder drugs.

And like baby-boomer parents with weed-heavy pasts telling their kids not to smoke, there's also the matter of hypocrisy: Marijuana use in Indian country is fairly commonplace—where even those who are using meth, crack, or drinking alcohol also smoke weed as a "base," according to Treuer. But just because a lot of people are toking up doesn't necessarily mean politicians will be going to bat for the herb any time soon.

"Bear in mind what somebody does in the privacy of their home and what somebody says in public are two very different things," he told me. "It's been a while since we've had a president who has not used pot, but it's unlikely that we'll have a president who will advocate for the legalization of pot. And tribal politicians are just the same. That's where we're at in the United States of America, and that's where we're at in Indian country, too."

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

Ducks crossing a road. Photo via geograph.ie.

When considering wildlife rescue on the highway, it's important to keep in mind that the worst-case scenario is not the potential death of distressed animals.

The worst-case scenario is what happened when business student and animal-lover Emma Czornobaj stopped her car in the fast lane, put her hazard lights on and got out of her car to help a family of ducks get off of the shoulder of Highway 30, south of Montreal.

The ducks ended up ignoring her and as she walked back to her car, André Roy was approaching on a motorcycle with his 16-year-old daughter Jessie riding pillion. Cruising at approximately 120 kilometres per hour in a 90 kilometre per hour zone, Roy's Harley Davidson collided with Czornobaj's parked car projecting his daughter into the rear windshield, over the car and eventually pinned underneath the front of the Honda Civic. They died shortly after impact. All of this happened while Pauline Volikakis, wife and mother of the victims, watched from her own motorcycle and also crashed into the car, causing her to suffer serious injuries.

Czornobaj was eventually charged with two counts of criminal negligence causing death as well as two counts of dangerous driving causing death and after four days of deliberations in July, a jury found Emma Czornobaj guilty on all four counts.

Technically, Emma Czornobaj was looking at life in prison, the maximum sentence for criminal negligence causing death. But because this was Czornobaj's first offence, prosecution was asking for a nine month prison sentence, 240 hours of community service, and a five-year suspension of her driver's license.

Even her lawyer Marc Labelle admitted that his client's behaviour was "stupid" but argued that as a 26-year-old former Dean's list student and financial analyst with no priors, that 240 hours of community service should have sufficed as punishment since she had no criminal intent.

Quebec Superior Court Judge Éliane Perreault obviously disagreed today when she sentenced Czornobaj to 90 days in prison. But because the sentence is only 90 days, it allowed Judge Perreault to order an intermittent sentence that will be served only on weekends. She will also have to perform 240 hours of community service and will be barred from driving for 10 years. Labelle has said he plans to appeal the driving ban, but that the prison sentence is "fit and reasonable."

Over the summer, an online petition named "Please don't send Emma Czornobaj to jail" asking Quebec Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée to apply the most lenient sentence possible received over 18,000 signatures.

Photo of Emma Czornobaj via change.org.

Volikakis reacted negatively to this public outpouring of support: "Hey, wake up, people," she said at a sentencing hearing in September, "you are saying that this person's negligent driving that caused the deaths of two people—my husband and my daughter—is to be treated as an action that should be overlooked? Would you turn your back and look the other way if it happened to you?"

In a press conference held at the Montreal courthouse today, Volikakis said that the sentence was a fair one and reflects the gravity of Czornobaj's crime. She concluded her statement by adding that the one positive outcome of this could be making people realize that "driving is a privilege."

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See more of Leslie's work here.

(Image via New Jersey Department of Corrections)

Activist Assata Shakur is laying low. Somewhere in Cuba, the 67-year old African American – born JoAnne Chesimard – is still hiding out, 40 years after she was branded a fugitive. Shakur was a prominent female member of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, and became the subject of a nationwide manhunt after she was named the prime suspect for a string of bank robberies and "execution style" murders of New York City police officers in the early 70s. 

Shakur was eventually apprehended on the New Jersey turnpike in 1973. A routine roadside check by state troopers Werner Foerster and James Harper turned into a gun battle that left two out of five people dead, and a whole lot of unanswered questions about who was responsible. Travelling in a car with Zayd Shakur (born James Coston) and Sundiata Acoli (born Clark Squire), two other well-known activists at the time, Shakur ended up with three bullets in her body and one arm paralysed almost beyond recovery as per reports from Vibe magazine, NPR and Shakur's own account in her recent autobiography. But the FBI and the American mainstream press (including Fox News, New Jersey's Star-Ledger and the Associated Press) offer up a different story.

According to the Feds, Shakur shot and killed police officer Werner Foerster in cold blood and then tried to flee the scene. She was eventually convicted of Foerster's murder in 1977, but served two years in prison before she was broken out in 1979, lived underground for five years, then escaped to Cuba in 1984.

It wasn't until May last year, though, that Shakur made history when she became the first woman to land on the FBI's Most Wanted terrorist list – joining such company as plane hijacker Mohammed Ali Hamadei and Saudi national Ibrahim Salih Mohammed Al-Yacoub. "Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer execution-style," said Aaron T Ford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Newark Division, in a May 2013 press release regarding Shakur's upgrade to the list. "Today, on the anniversary of Trooper Werner Foerster's death, we want the public to know that we will not rest until this fugitive is brought to justice." Why, decades after her escape, and well into her sixties, was Shakur suddenly deemed to be a renewed threat?

To understand how this petite woman from Queens, New York came to threaten the US government as much as men reportedly linked to Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, you have to backtrack. You've got to connect the dots between rappers like Common and Chuck D name-checking her in song, the wider context of the black power movement and the frisson of tension between black revolutionaries and the state. Only then might can you make up your mind about Shakur: Is she friend or foe? Fugitive and felon, or heroine to the children of the black power and civil rights struggles?

"You don't get Assata Shakur lessons during Black History Month in elementary school, with the images of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King," says writer and blogger Mychal Denzel Smith with a laugh, over the phone from New York. "It just wasn't stuff I was exposed to. But in my teens, I started listening to hip-hop, and listening to more artists that weren't necessarily getting all the radio play. I started hearing Assata's name mentioned in those folks's rhymes." Born in 1986, Smith wasn't of the East Coast generation that would've been somewhat familiar with Assata Shakur's face from the "wanted" posters the New York Daily News plastered around the city when Shakur was charged with a spate of crimes in the late 60s and early 70s.

Instead, it was rappers whose music was released by the Rawkus Records label – Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch – that piqued Smith's interest in Shakur's story, as well as Common and Cee-Lo Green's "A Song For Assata", out in 2000. Tupac gave Assata a shout out in "Words of Wisdom" and was both her godson and the stepson of her brother, Mutulu Shakur. Afeni Shakur, Tupac's mother, was in the Black Liberation Army alongside Assata Shakur. Her connections to music extend further, with poet and rapper Saul Williams (who starred in the recent Tupac-tinged flop musical Holler if Ya Hear Me) name-checking her left and right. "If you want to understand Tupac, read the autobiography of Assata Shakur," he told Noisey's Drew Millard earlier this summer. "That's his aunt, and read what's happening with her right now, via the state of New Jersey. She's listed as the number two most wanted terrorist in America today... for something that went down in 1976, based on COINTELPRO."

Yeah, about that. From 1956 until 1971 the FBI collected information for its anti-terrorism counterintelligence programme, dubbed COINTELPRO. The programme grouped the Black Liberation Movement, Black Panthers and other black nationalist organisations with the communist party of the US, socialist worker's party and the Ku Klux Klan – terrorists, in the bureau's view. It wasn't the most constitutional programme at times. Or, in the FBI's own words, "although limited in scope... COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticised by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons."

COINTELPRO's cover was blown when a March 1971 break-in at an FBI bureau uncovered hundreds of documents, detailing the surveillance that various groups had been placed under by both the FBI and local police forces. For example:

(Scans via the FBI)

Together, the government and local law enforcement covertly monitored, anonymously called and relentlessly arrested black power activists (often on charges "pushed against" them). They also used radio stations and newspapers to deliberately skew public opinion. Tactics like these demonstrate the sort of threat to national cohesion that Assata and other black nationalists represented at the time; clearly enough of a worry to warrant running a 23-city wide programme like COINTELPRO.

To rapper Akala, raised in a pan-African tradition in London, it was Assata Shakur's status as a black, female radical that pretty much encapsulates her place on the most wanted list. "She is a threat," he tells me, on a sticky July afternoon. "But she's not a threat in the way the FBI and the American government want us to believe she's a threat. She's a threat in that she represents the one that got away. Pretty much every other black revolutionary of her era was killed, imprisoned, silenced, put in exile." Akala lists a flurry of names, ranging from Huey Newton and Malcolm X to Geronimo Pratt and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaking with the sort of weary impatience that sounds as though he's made (or laboured) this point before, Akala continues, "When the American government says Assata Shakur is a threat, they mean what she represents – a black woman who refused to compromise in any way, shape or form with white supremacy and escaped to the 21st century 'maroon' camp of Cuba (as she calls it) – is a threat."

Akala hits on a basic point, reiterated by 20th-century American history academic Dr Anna Hartnell: Shakur's place on the list is both totally ludicrous and completely logical. "Why the US government want to flag this up now is both mysterious and disturbing," Hartnell writes in an email. When we speak over the phone, she elaborates: "If they really were pursuing her for what they say they're pursuing her for, it doesn't make any sense. She was a large figure of threat, and the United States government are asserting the fact that they are still interested."

They're still interested because Shakur's beliefs go against the American narrative of progress. She experienced a different America to the one that apologised and made amends for slavery, coming out on the other side as a post-racial beacon of exceptionalism. In her view, the story of a nation built on white supremacy and black enslavement couldn't be that simple. "America says that it's the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the greatest nation to have ever existed. And it needs a history to match. So you tell this story so it doesn't look so bad," says Mychal Denzel Smith, articulating the perspective Shakur worked to debunk.

Shakur represents a challenge to that perfectly formed narrative. For the FBI, that level of dissent just isn't acceptable. Her survival over decades that saw other radicals imprisoned, murdered and snuffed out goes against the bureau's plan to "neutralize" and "frustrate" the activities of black nationalists. As such, perhaps it only makes sense that they're still on her tail, and that she's still laying low.

Assata: An Autobiography, by Assata Shakur with forewords by Angela Davis and Lennox Hinds, is available now from Zed Books priced £8.99. There will be a launch event for the book on August 21st at the Black Cultural Archives with rapper Akala, performance poet Zena Edwards and others.

Tshepo is a Guardian journalist — follow her on ​Twitter.

More stuff on the Black Power Movement: 

We Interviewed Tommie Smith About the History Behind the 1968 "Black Power" Salute

The Amazing Lost Legacy of The British Black Panthers

The Black Undercover Cop Who Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out there are many more magazines in the world than VICE. This new series, "Ink Spots," is a helpful guide on which of those zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not staring at ours.

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Hannah Burton - "Marjan," Issue 4

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Accent Magazine is an online quarterly that celebrates the lives of people who dare to buck the conventions of the mainstream. It's a platform for documentary portraiture about extraordinary but unknown—and often marginal—subjects, with each issue featuring ten original stories from all over the world.

Created by London-based photographer Lydia Garnett and illustrator/designer Lucy Nurnberg, the magazine is now in its seventh issue. Accent has featured a wide range of photographers and most importantly, subjects—from fluoro-tracksuited Gabber fanatics in the Netherlands to a modern-day caveman who has spent the last 15 years living off-the-grid in the remotest Yukon.

Lydia and Lucy picked us out a few of their favorite stories in the line-up so far, and told us a little about some of the images.

Visit Accent Magazine online and follow them on Twitter.

Landing your golf ball in a sand trap comes with a particular maddening friction. At least, I think it must—I can guess from watching it on TV, and from playing golf video games with my dad as a child. You aren't supposed to be in there. You need a pitching wedge to take the ball up and out—a pale, soft comet tail of resistance spitting up in the wake of your attempt.

You wouldn't want to golf in a desert. It'd be like one long exercise in futility, like a sand trap you never get out of. Yet Justin Smith's Desert Golfing is one of my most important game experiences of 2014, a silent and endless slog, just me and my slingshot finger pitching a tiny ball from one awkward, lonesome hole to the next, with a soft and distinctive tok.

In his excellent critique of the game, Brendan Keogh asserts Desert Golfing is more about crossing a landscape—with the unique physics of its soft dunes, weird peaks, and precipitous recesses—than it is about golf. As he writes, just as a person who really wants to put a ball inside a hole would never choose such an odd instrument as a golf club, a person would never cross a desert by golfing. But maybe that's one of gaming's defining traits: "To strive for some goal through inefficient means."

In Desert Golfing, concentration-intensive, precise taps toward each featureless, procedurally-generated stage's goal take you from one screen to the next, and the only factor to manage is how long it takes you to get there. There are no stars, no pop-up congratulations, no level select screens and, importantly, no re-dos. The closest thing you have to a "scoreboard" is simply a count the game keeps of the total number of strokes you've taken. A record of your shame, and of all the tiny movements you can't take back.

It's not totally unlike a weird, stripped-down Angry Birds. You pull, and you aim, and you watch the tiny dotted line of your trajectory adjust to the subtle roll of your fingertip. You do it on the bus. You want it in your idle moments, and the cumulative expense of your time becomes increasingly absurd, even as your secret pride ratchets up.

Except, not very long ago, I realized I kind of hate Angry Birds. Moderately engaging slingshot; ugly cartoons; capricious blunt-force physics. Green and squinting pig-orbs may or may not be sufficiently pinched between ever more absurd arrangements of wood and glass. That's basically it.

You mostly think about what you've done and what you've yet to do, and whether you might spend real money to scratch the itch for more—and not that much about the comic projectiles or the black-eyed, roly-poly puke-green pigs, or whether their egg theft situation is even plausible.

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And then there's Angry Birds Star Wars, Angry Birds Transformers, Angry Birds stuffed animals, a board game, a Hot Wheels car. Last time I was in the Times Square Toys "R" Us, there was a veritable Angry Birds fucking shrine. This sort of idolatry, for a game that is "addictive" and monetizes well. This mean little pick-and-flick.

In recent months, my job in video games has taken a hard left turn toward hopeless territory. When rhetoric as mild as " games should be made and played by anyone who wants to make and play them" is so wildly offensive as to trigger a harassment campaign, you frankly start to wonder what you're doing with your life. For example, it seems obscene that as a woman you will probably have to consider your personal safety if you ever become successful doing anything with video games. It seems as improbable as infinity holes of golf played for eternity in a sand trap.

Let's be real: You have to have some deeply-felt beliefs in order to be a person over the age of 30 who is devoted to video games for their whole living. You must derive some intrinsic joy from creating them—or, as a writer, you need to have some damn good reasons not to be dissuaded from your belief that they are worth talking about with actual intelligent adults. Either they matter a lot these days and you just have to convince the normies, or they will matter someday and you want to be part of that frontier—Calamity Jane in the establishment of that dusty new vocabulary.

When it comes down to it, I've received some death threats—and some stalkers, no less obnoxious for their sophomoric tactics—because I have consistently asserted that games are for everyone. To make that case, I can link to this sophisticated roundup of feminist critique, or I can talk about narrative games that are about walking and looking instead of twitching and triggering, or games made by artists or for celebrity branding. Virtually anything.

Yet none of that is ever as digestible as asserting: "Everyone plays games, because everyone has Angry Birds and Angry Birds is everywhere." So I'd been saying that a lot, and then I went to Bali with the intention of escaping work and the internet after everything that happened in my field in 2014.

I found myself walking around a lagoon that lay opposite a temple. The water was prohibitively dark, and dotted all over with sinuous lilies. I saw some roosters and a dog, and some children crouched fearlessly in the dark water, fishing with little lines they held between their fingers.

And then, lying like a raw sore on the edge of this lagoon, I saw a red Angry Birds notebook. The perturbed bird, its garish cartoon colours and glaring eyes, was on one of the kids' spiral notebooks. Everyone has Angry Birds and Angry Birds is everywhere. I felt the jaundice of guilt. I shouldn't have said that. I don't want a world like that.

It may sound florid to call Desert Golfing an exercise in accepting the past, or in surrendering to the things you can't change, but if you ever find yourself awake at 1 AM, wracked with anxious insomnia, your entire surreal world coming down to a tiny white pinpoint on an endless desert golf course, you'll start to understand.

If the reason you can't sleep is power fantasies and business models and death threats and Twitter, you might feel that Desert Golfing—an utterly pure, random-generated, consciously unfettered and un-monetized golf march through a sand trap to infinity—is this year's most perfect video game.

It really is about crossing the desert: beginning with a hope against hope that you'll reach the other side. That there is another side.

Creator Justin Smith said that, theoretically, Desert Golfing can generate a sort-of end—an impossible stage—eventually. He himself encountered one in the "upper 2,000s."

You can pull and flick and "tok" on for ages, until finally you can't any more – until the world itself dead-ends you. All you have after that is the cold, simple numerical record of everything it cost.

Follow Leigh Alexander on Twitter.

Previously:

Video Games to Argue with Your Family Over This Christmas

'The Crew' Is the Video Game Equivalent of the Great American Road Trip

Video Games Rule the World, So You Should Probably Just Embrace eSports Already

The bizarre tale of the massive hack on Sony Entertainment has escalated over the last few days from Thanksgiving small talk to an orgy of paranoid concessions and enraged calls to action. Yesterday the New York Times reported that the White House had determined North Korea was involved in the attack and was "debating whether to publicly accuse" them. Around the same time, Sony announced they were canceling the release of The Interview amid a wave of theaters opting out of screening it thanks to vague threats of terror from the hackers. Then, New Regency, taking Sony's cue, scrapped Steve Carell's planned action film based on the graphic novel Pyongyang. Some outlets still doubt whether the Hermit Kingdom is behind the hack , but many are now trying to find a way to label this an act of war and hoping that the US government will bring the hammer down hard.

It's natural to wonder why North Korea would risk all this just to take down a stoner buddy comedy, especially when they have never reacted so fiercely to a negative portrayal in American media before. So today VICE spoke to North Korean commentator extraordinaire Victor Cha , the Director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University and former White House Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, who made a cameo as himself in 2012's anti-North Korean Red Dawn. We asked what about The Interview has Pyongyang's knickers in such a collective knot compared to, say, Team America: World Police, and what they thought they were doing by attacking Sony, if they were in fact behind the hack.

VICE: Do you personally think that North Korea was behind the Sony hack?
Victor Cha: Yeah, I do.

Do you believe that because of the cyber evidence, or because there's good recent precedent in North Korean policy that says they'd do something like this?
It's first the fact that they clearly were very upset [with the movie]. Second, we do know that North Korea has been experimenting with cyber hacking. Third, North Korea's tried and true method of operation has always been to poke and prod the United States and other actors to basically coerce other people to sit down and talk to them. Whether it's missile tests or nuclear tests or fiery, provocative statements, that's been their MO.

Clearly we're at a point now where there is nothing going on, on the diplomatic side, between the United States and North Korea. So every once and a while they'll do something to shake up the table and see where the pieces land because where they were originally positioned—it was not to their benefit.

The other thing is that this whole guerilla type tactic of out of nowhere attacking and then disappearing, this has always been something that the North Koreans, going back to Kim Il Sung, they see as their prime method of operating. There's never a smoking gun, but I think there's enough circumstantial evidence to lead one to believe that even if they're not behind it they were certainly supportive of or linked to whoever did it.

Is this just opportunism then? Because we didn't see this kind of reaction for Die Another Day or Team America: World Police. Were they just not useful tools?
This movie was substantively different in that it was explicitly about killing him. Ridicule is something that they're used to. But I don't think there's ever been something like this that was so public and so mainstream that the whole plot was to kill him. That, in combination with the fact that I don't think the leadership transition process in North Korea is complete yet after two years. I still think there's a lot of churn inside the system because this 30-year-old is running the country and killing off important people and things

Team America: World Police was pretty mainstream. It had Kim Jong Il killed as a key element of the movie. So how much of this is Kim Jung Un being tetchy and less into movies than his father, and how much of it is the political environment he's operating in?
We don't know. The other big difference between Team America and this movie is that North Korea was much more sealed off then than it is today. It's a well-known fact that all sorts of media forms get into North Korea. And I'm sure that—maybe the propaganda wing or others probably saw this as a threat because if it ever were to get into the country, who knows what sort of effect it would have.

I fully get the point that, yes, this is logical, but does this mean the state itself would orchestrate a campaign against a private film company to try to stop the movie ? It seems outrageous even by North Korean standards. But they've certainly gotten our attention, and through this have touched American lives in a way that nuclear threats and ballistic missile threats never did.

It's sad that taking a movie away has a greater impact on us than the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Right [laughs]. Might it be a case of mistaken identity— this is some other group and the North Koreans are just sort of tagging along and supporting [them]? That's equally plausible, I guess.

To push that: You say this could be them trying to poke and prod us to the table. But if they were involved, it was meant to be concealed. And there are a lot of people trying to find a justification to label the 9/11 terrorism reference an act of war now. This seems different than a prod, so what's up with that?
The language of that threat sounds to me like classic North Korea Propaganda English—over-the-top, fumbling North Korean bluster. Which some hacker could have done just by reading other North Korean statements, obviously.

But why do they in some cases conceal and in some cases like the nuclear threats be pretty overt? When [experts] try to think about what other type of provocations the North Koreans can carry out, one thing that people thought about was terrorism—something that could... not be directly attributable to the North Koreans but still raise concerns that it was [them]. And they've been building a cyber capability for some time now, so people are putting these things together. The other thing you have to remember is that the North Koreans love to be ambiguous. There's that variability in their behavior and their tactics. Sometimes they fully attribute to themselves, sometimes they remain deliberately vague until they feel like saying, "it was us."

You talk about North Korea as a wild card, and have been quoted as saying we've underestimated their capabilities. So do you think there really is a risk that they would have attacked theaters that screened The Interview?
I doubt it. My personal view is that Sony pulled the movie more for liability reasons than for anything else. But who knows what the North Koreans had up their sleeves—what their ability was to access those theaters electronically in terms of tickets and credit cards? If there was any sense that North Korea was on the margins of cyber threats, I don't think that's the case anymore. I can guarantee that this is going to be one of the top issues of cyber defense and cooperation with partners and allies.

That plays very much into what North Korea wants to do. Lately the North Koreans have been very vocal about their nuclear capabilities. It seems like under Kim Jung Un they like to deal from a position of perceived strength.

Two birds with one stone: take out a noxious movie and show everybody you're tough?
Yeah, yeah, that could be part of it. It does fit into a strategy of trying to force people... basically to rent some peace. We in the Western World have more invested in the peaceful status quo. North Korea has nothing else to bargain with, so they like to upset that status quo and see if they can negotiate peace in a way that benefits them. That could be what they're trying to do here too in addition to the fact that they took such a personal affront at the storyline of the movie.

Now that they've taken such a hard line on the movie, are you going to try to get a copy?
[Laughs] We'd all planned to go see it.

I would imagine that copies of this movie will get out no matter what. I'd imagine that they are going to be pirated versions of this thing and much to the consternation of the regime, they will get into North Korea at some point. And I'm sure that the human rights groups are going to work as hard as they can to get that movie into North Korea.

Like the balloonists promising to drop in DVDs from above.
Right, right. Which could create a whole new dynamic. One of the things that [military officials] worry about in terms of upsetting the peace is that North Korea might start firing on those balloons. And if people die because of that, it creates a whole new dynamic. So it seems like it's just about a movie, but it could be a lot more.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Nestled in the shadows of towering incineration smokestacks in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights is the LA County Crematorium Cemetery. If you die in LA and nobody cares enough about you to claim your body—or can't pay the fees to do so—it gets cremated, the ashes sit around for three years, then they get carted over here and finally put to rest.

The cemetery is peaceful, and otherwise indistinguishable from a well-kept lawn lined with some pine and sycamore trees. The sounds of a passing light-rail train blend with the jets descending into the nearby airport. The only indication of the tens of thousands buried in the grass are the dozens of half-square-foot concrete plaques imprinted with a single year that are scattered throughout the landscape.

Each plaque marks the space where the unclaimed dead for that year are buried. The earliest marked graves date back to the early 1960, though LA County opened the burial ground for the unclaimed dead in the early 20s.

Another small concrete rectangle was added on December 11, 2014, marking the final resting place for 1,489 people who died in 2011. The county held a small interfaith ceremony in the morning to commemorate them.

"It is difficult for us to imagine how someone could be unclaimed," said LA County Supervisor Don Knabe. "It stirs us, and makes us wonder who they were. But it's important for us to celebrate them and their life."

Numbers from the County Morgue tell us that over the past eight years, LA County has buried 12,963 people in the cemetery, accounting for those who were unclaimed and died between 2004 and 2011. A pamphlet handed out at the beginning of the ceremony attempted to explain why, indicating that if the remains are unclaimed or legal next-of-kin do not have "sufficient funds" for burial or cremation, the county cremates the remains and stores them for about three years.

But that doesn't tell us who they were.

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Joyce Kato is an investigator with the Los Angeles Coroner's Office, where she's worked for 25 years, both in the field and behind a desk. Kato is one of the two investigators working in the coroner's notification's department, meaning it's her job to find a dead person's next-of-kin in cases where that's not immediately clear.

"A lot of these people lived their lives in a way that didn't leave anyone behind to take care of them after their gone," explained Kato, cycling through some reports from 2011, on her computer.

She pulled up a case of Gerald Lee Bastin, a 54-year-old white man who was found by staff in his room at a Motel 6 in El Monte. His death was officially ruled as the result of natural causes, but a quick glance at the report reveals Bastin lived a troubled life.

"He follows a homeless nomadic lifestyle, packing all his possessions and three dogs into a dilapidated camper truck" reads the investigator's narrative. "Grossly obese with over 300 pounds on a 70-inch frame, Bastin suffers anxiety, unspecified seizures, and schizophrenia in addition to uncontrolled diabetes."

When paramedics arrived, they had to move his dogs into an adjacent room so they wouldn't bother them. They found Bastin on the bed.

Kato pulled up the notes on the case, hoping to find something that could lead to someone who knew him. The notes mentioned a woman named Melody Bastin-Hamilton, potentially an estranged sister. When contacted by Kato, though, Bastin-Hamilton said Basin had attempted to kill her multiple times.

"In 2001, a bit of time after our father died, he found out where I live and attacked me," Bastin-Hamilton told me over the phone. "He broke my front window, threatened to cut my daughter's heart out and shove it down my throat."

Bastin was was apparently jealous relationship with their father; Bastin-Hamilton said that while she had helped take care of him during his fight with cancer, her brother chose, more or less, to lean on his relationship with their father only when he needed money or was in trouble. He was in and out of state prison multiple times for offenses ranging from criminal insurance fraud—he set his car on fire in an attempt to get a payout—to assault with a deadly weapon. So it's understandable that when the coroner's office called her in 2011 to notify her of her brother's death, she was relieved.

"It meant I didn't have to keep looking over my shoulder," she said. "I felt free for the first time in a very long time, less worried for my own and my children's safety. I'm glad he's gone."

When the coroner's office asked if she could claim the ashes, she couldn't afford the fees. (In Los Angeles County, the price for a county cremation and body transportation is about $400.)

"I wish I could have, but I couldn't afford to bury him," she said. "And to be honest, I didn't care. I feel bad for saying that but I honestly don't care. He was a brutal man who wanted me dead."

Sometimes bodies that are left around for a long time are claimed by someone. For example, in the case of Eva Bassey a first cousin once-removed eventually paid to bury her at a Forest Lawn in West Covina. But the sort of narrative of estrangement and hurt that surrounded Bastin's death was mirrored in most of the 52 other cases I looked at for this story.

There was John Fisher, an 80-year-old man who was found unresponsive by employees at a Bell Gardens nursing home where he lived. No next-of-kin was found.

Nor was any relative located in the case of James Nugent, a 76-year-old discovered by a handyman in a Long Beach garage. Nugent told his landlord he was renting for vehicle storage. When investigators arrived, they found Nugent in "pack rat conditions," on the ground next to a car and a live duck. Neighbors recalled seeing Nugent visiting the nearby park, toting the duck along in a wicker basket.

Then there's Ruth Pace, a 470-pound woman who died with a tattoo of Snoopy on her chest and no upper teeth. During her last month of life, Pace was admitted to three different medical facilities, eventually dying at Marina Care Center in Culver City. As with the others, no next-of-kin were ever found, nor have any come looking.

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All of these people are now in the ground at the LA County Crematorium Cemetery ^, marked by a concrete block that simply reads "2011."

During the ceremony, chaplains recited the Lord's Prayer in English, Spanish, Korean, and Fijian. A reverend led a Hindu chant, and a rabbi recited a Jewish prayer in memorial.

According to Kato, the audience this year was substantially larger than it has been in the past; fewer than two dozen people tended to show up, but on this Wednesday, about 60 people stood around the grave, half of them armed with press passes for local news agencies.

Those without press credentials were there to commemorate the existence of the buried. Rick Watts, a disabilities advisory board member from West Hollywood, explained, "It is the only chance they'll get to be acknowledged one last time. I'm here for that."

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A few religious leaders read some poems by Maya Angelou, then yielded to final remarks by another chaplain about 20 minutes after the ceremony began.

"They had mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers," he said. "Memories of childhood, of hopes and dreams. Now we must remember that they existed."

The ceremony concluded, freeing onlookers to scatter around the cemetery and glance at the other gravesides and wonder who these people were, and how they ended up there, nameless under the grass.

Matt Tinoco is a wannabe reporter living in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo by Sam Clarke

When I first met Haim Bodek, back in November 2013, he was shooting the shit at a downtown New York loft. As I entered the sprawling apartment, a group of finance bros were playing Call of Duty on a massive projector screen, the spray of bullets barely drowned out by the blasting music. The markets hadn't been closed for more than an hour, and the party was already in full force. As I waded through the crowd of white-collar millennials, someone passed me a blunt.

It felt like an unlikely spot to meet the fortysomething Bodek, but there he was, standing at the back of the room, grinning sheepishly. There was a time when the man greeting me with an eager handshake was raking in millions a year by trading options. Bodek, a Goldman Sachs alum, was once what Wall Street calls a "big swinging dick."

But two years after going to authorities with what he claims to be one of the largest heists in Wall Street history, Bodek was practically blackballed. Dubbed by the Russian media as "the Edward Snowden of finance," Bodek was wondering how he'd support his wife and kids as he awaited the SEC investigations.

That, he asserted, was the fucked-up part about Wall Street: The incentives are disproportionately aligned in favor of the "bad guys." It's one reason we don't see more industry whistle-blowers in general. If you stumble upon a scheme to make guaranteed profits, you don't kill the goose laying the golden eggs—you demand a cut, especially if you know how futile it is to fight the system.

This, of course, only made Bodek's case even more curious. I would spend the next five hours trying to figure out why a man who'd had it all was willing to risk everything to battle an opponent he could never defeat. In one night, I'd learn more about how Wall Street works than in the two years I spent employed at an investment bank.

Whenever I asked Bodek why he squealed, he appeared unsure, though he was always adamant about one thing. He was pursuing what he described as a quest for the truth. It was his inner scientist calling.

"I grew up around rocket scientists and particle physicists," Bodek explained, recounting a childhood spent running around Fermilab, the particle accelerator in Illinois. His father, Arie Bodek, is an award-winning physicist whose work was instrumental in finding the quark, one of the grandest accomplishments in contemporary science.

So junior had big shoes to fill, and by the time he hit puberty, Bodek Sr. had already told his son that he hoped he would one day win the Nobel Prize. Bodek turned his back on academia and instead followed the money, to his father's disapproval. "He thought I was wasting my talent," Bodek said.

After college, Bodek found himself at Hull Trading Company, a prestigious firm in Chicago at the forefront of electronic algorithmic trading. A haven for math geeks and physicists, Hull emphasized the scientific method and quantitative solutions, and its culture was closer to NASA's than to Wall Street's. But Hull's success couldn't elude the Street's grasp forever, and in 1999 Goldman Sachs acquired the firm for more than half a billion dollars.

"I got in through the back door," said Bodek, describing his ascendancy to the upper echelons of global finance. But if Bodek felt like he didn't fit in, it didn't appear to affect his achievement. By 2003, he was the global head of Electronic Volatility Trading at UBS. Four years later, he was running his own shop, Trading Machines, which, at its height, accounted for half a percentage of all US options trading.

That's when everything went wrong.

One unassuming day in 2009, Trading Machines started hemorrhaging money. "It didn't make any sense," he said. In search of an explanation, he spent the next half a year scrutinizing his software, more than a million lines of code, and scouring endless public disclosures released by options exchanges for clues. His investigation ended in vain. Bodek was flummoxed.

Wall Street is a zero-sum game. There are winners and losers, and if you're a loser, you have no one to blame but yourself—you simply aren't good enough. Someone else is smarter, faster. Bodek's inexplicable failure consumed him with self-doubt. In the eyes of the Street, he was a loser.

No one ever made it without a bit of luck. Bodek got his break at a holiday party hosted by Direct Edge, a leading exchange that executes 1 to 2 billion trades a day. There, the company's sales director, Eugene Davidovich, told him that it wasn't some mystery software bug that was undermining his fund. He was using the wrong order type (an instruction, in computerized, high-frequency trading, to trade within specific parameters). Bodek was old-school. He was still using basic-limit orders—the same kind of order you or I might use when we call our broker. As Davidovich was speaking, Bodek took out a pen and scribbled on a bar napkin the words HIDE NOT SLIDE.

As it turned out, Hide Not Slide was the name of an esoteric order type, released at the same time Bodek's company went south. But in truth, it was a cheat code, one that, if properly applied, meant guaranteed profits.

Hide Not Slide was the name of an esoteric type of trade. But in truth, it was a cheat code, one that, if properly applied, meant guaranteed profits.

The way Bodek explained it, abusing Hide Not Slide was like scalping sold-out concert tickets. The business of ticket scalping is about being first, not so dissimilar to high-frequency trading's need for speed. And one might even argue that this is a fair system. It's not inconceivable that those willing to acquire the knowledge and put forth the investment toward being first in line might be rewarded for their trouble.

What was sinister about Hide Not Slide is that, by exploiting a legal loophole, anyone with the secret password could essentially cut the line whenever they wanted. As is often the case, the Great High-Frequency Trading Heist was grounded in conflict of interest. Bodek's purported conspiracy involved only a few prominent opportunists—privileged players who owned not only exchanges but also the trading operations they serviced. From there, stealing was trivial. All it would take was to create a special order type that no one else knew about, one that would provide certain advantages that only its architects were privy to. And that's exactly what they did.

For Bodek, the realization of Hide Not Slide's existence was a moment of vindication. Rather than being a loser, he was a victim of assholes who'd rigged the game. The problem, of course, was that no one knew that. Suddenly, Bodek's quest became clear.

The desire for vindication eventually led Bodek to Scott Patterson, a New York Times best-selling author who would land Bodek's dotted mug on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and later feature him in the book Dark Pools.

And eventually that press led him here, to our questionable rendezvous destination. This loft wasn't just some makeshift Manhattan frat house—it was the home and office of Sang Lucci, a then up-and-coming hedge fund.

"I read about Haim in Dark Pools," said co-founder Charlie Bathgate, a Duke graduate and quintessential Cali bro. Prior to being Sang Lucci's head of marketing, he worked at a skate shop.

"Charlie was like, you have to read about this guy," said Peter Zhang, another co-founder and the guy who had passed me the blunt. He's also CEO.

"I hit up Haim on Twitter," Bathgate said. These guys weren't bound by the establishment's unspoken rules, so they had little issue working with Bodek, and they made him a partner. They genuinely believed his tale, as did I—even if, at the time, we were firmly in the minority. It struck Wall Street as a conspiracy.

Sang Lucci's bankroll was peanuts compared with what Bodek was making in his prime, but the respect was mutual. "Us old-timers, we can't operate without our models and our systems," Bodek said. "This new generation of kids have intuition. It's like they're piloting on manual.

"There would be times when you'd see some weird shit on the screen," he continued. "It wasn't a lot of money, so you'd write it off as a glitch in the Matrix. Now I know it was these guys with their hit-and-runs."

If Gen Y, as modern society's Lost Generation, feels hard-done by the Baby Boomers, they have no better testament than the state of finance, an industry poisoned by the events of recent history. This made an alliance between Bodek and the young guns all the more surprising.

Theirs was a pretty picture, if not a profitable one. At least it wasn't yet. As we walked to the subway, I asked Bodek about his quest for the truth. "Was it worth it?"

"I might lose my house," he said, before descending into the station.

There was a time when it seemed like the bad guys were going to get away with it, without a scratch and with their reputations fully intact, labeled not as crooks but as geniuses.

But then, in spring 2014, best-selling author Michael Lewis released his book Flash Boys. Though it didn't mention Bodek specifically, I'd be highly skeptical if it wasn't inspired in part by his work. Whatever the case, Lewis's brand and credibility were more than enough to shift public opinion in Bodek's favor.

And today, things are looking up. "The industry is being awfully nice to me these days," he beamed when I checked in with him this past autumn. He's still working with his boys at Sang Lucci, who moved into legit midtown digs earlier this year. He also has his own company, Decimus Capital Markets, where he has the colloquial title of "badass." He's the guy who advises people on how not to get screwed.

The way he talks, you might conclude that his pursuit of the truth is far from over. I'm "currently enjoying beating up the NYSE while Direct Edge goes through settlement talks on my allegations," he said, teasing that the result would be "explosive."

In truth, these are victory laps. Because Bodek was the guy who figured it all out. Bodek was right. In the end, that's all he ever wanted.

When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing on Wednesday, environmentalists were elated. After six years of relentless protests against fracking, the findings of the state Health Department's report confirmed what activists have been saying all along: That the potential environmental consequences—the threat of flammable water, dangerous hydrocarbon emissions near drilling sites, radioactive waste—are too costly for the state to ignore.

But activists say they aren't done protesting the oil and gas industry. Now they plan on ramping up the fight pledging against other natural gas developments in the state, which they say could bring New York the same negative health and environmental impacts associated with fracking, even if fracking itself is banned.

The decision to ban fracking ends a drawn-out battle over whether the state would use the technique to tap its reserves of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale Deposit that it shares with Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. New York has had a moratorium on fracking since 2008, when the state first began to consider granting permits to drill. Since Cuomo took office in 2010, environmental activists have been stalking the governor, trying to get him to make the ban permanent.

Their wish was granted yesterday with the release of the long-awaited Health Department study from New York's Health Department, which found the practice — which involves pumping a mixture of chemicals , sand, and millions of gallons of water into earth to fissure shale and extract fuel — too risky to regulate.

In a letter accompanying the study, the state's acting Health Commissioner, Howard Zucker wrote that fracking poses "significant uncertainties" to public health and the environment, and cast doubt that the state could implement regulations that would mitigate against its potential negative impacts. The state should prohibit the practice, Zucker recommended, "until the science provides sufficient information to determine the level of risk to public health" that it poses.

"It just goes to show you when you actually pay attention to science, science speaks very loud," said Josh Fox, whose 2010 documentary film Gasland raised early red flags about the environmental risks of hydraulic fracturing in the US. "It says very unequivocally to the governments and the governors of other states that they are willfully ignoring the scientific majority in order to protect oil and gas companies' profits over the health and safety of their own citizens."

Predictably, proponents of the state's oil and gas industry fumed, arguing that New York is losing out on the opportunity to cash in on the domestic energy boom. They have framed hydraulic fracturing—and the natural gas that it could extract—could be a job creator and an economic boon to struggling small towns in the state. According to the nonpartisan government watchdog, Common Cause, companies looking to drill in New York "spent $1.1 million on campaign contributions and $15.6 million on lobbying" in the state between 2007 and 2013.

"Today's action by Governor Cuomo shows that New York families, teachers, roads and good-paying jobs have lost out to political gamesmanship," Karen Moreau, executive director of the New York State Petroleum Council, a division of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement. "This is the wrong direction for New York. Robust regulations exist at the federal and state levels nationwide for natural gas development and environmental protection."

According to the government watchdog CREW, hydraulic fracturing is actively takingplace in 21 states. A number of municipalities—including Boulder, Beverly Hills, Denton, Texas, and more than 200 towns and counties in New York—have used local zoning ordinances toprohibit fracking, but New York is only the second state to do so, after Vermont.

In her remarks, Moreau pointed to neighboring Pennsylvania, where 6,600 fracking wells have cropped up since 2005 to tap into the tight gas reserves in the Marcellus shale, as an example of the economic boost New Yorkers are missing out on. There, she said, "more than $630 million has been distributed to communities since 2012—including more than $224 million in just 2014. These once economically poor areas are now thriving. The commonwealth has also benefited from over $2.1 billion in state and local taxes generated by the shale energy industry."

But environmental activists say Pennsylvanians have also paid a heavy price for fracking. In August, state environmental regulators revealed that they have documented 248 cases of water contamination that can be tied to fracking. The figure could be even higher, given that Pennsylvania's Department of Health, according to a now retired administrator, instructed employees not to return phone calls from residents who complained of illnesses related to the drilling in their backyards. Meanwhile, PA's Auditor General, Eugene DePasquale, hasdescribed the state's Department of Environmental Protection as "underfunded, understaffed and inconsistent" in its approach toward regulating drilling.

"Pennsylvania rolled out the red carpet for the gas industry and said 'we'll figure out the rules as we go along,'" Fox said. "As a result you have people getting sick. It's a disaster situation. All the industry has accomplished in every state but New York is shut out democracy and shutout citizen participation."

At times it appeared as if Cuomo was leaning toward allowing fracking to proceed in New York. In 2012, he considered a plan that would have allowedfor fracking in New York's Southern Tier, as a way to boost the upstate region's struggling economy. But opponents of fracking accused the governor of trying to create "sacrifice zones," in which the state's poorest residents would bear the brunt of drilling's environmental costs. Even on Wednesday, Cuomo seemed to distance himself from the decision, telling reporters that he was deferring to his health and environmental advisors on the decision.

Never the less, environmental activists gathered outside the governor's office in midtown Manhattan yesterday for a victory rally after the announcement. But while they celebrated the ban, many also warned that a battle lays ahead over natural gas developments— gas pipelines, compressor stations, storage facilities—that have begun cropping up as gas from neighboring states passes through New York and into energy markets along the Eastern Seaboard. The new projects, they argued, could come with their own set of negative environmental impacts, even if drilling itself is banned.

"This is the next big battle," said Fox, citing the Constitution Pipeline, a 125-mile natural gas transmission vein that was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) earlier this month, as a future target of protest.

A slew of FERC-approved natural compressor stations have also cropped up in New York, including one in Minisink, a township about sixty miles for New York City where residents have told me they are afraid to go outside for fear of the headaches, nosebleeds, and dizzy spells that they have started to experience since the station went online in June 2013. The FERC, together with the New York DEC, also gave their blessing this year to a plan that will allow Texas-based energy firm Crestwood Midstream to store natural gas in abandoned underground salt mines near Seneca Lake in upstate New York.

"They've fracked so much gas out of the ground now that there's a glut of it," said Sandra Steingraber, a biologist at Ithaca College and a vocal opponent of fracking. "Natural gas storage projects don't just represent environmental health problems in the long run — water contamination, air pollution, which is what fracking gives us — they also represent basic safety issues," she added, emphasizing that natural gas is also highly explosive.

Steingraber is one of the 130 activists who have gone to jail for protesting the Seneca Lake storage project, including a group of 41 who were arrested for trespassing on Crestwood property on Tuesday, the day the fracking ban was announced.

External factors appear to be working in favor of the anti-frackers. Increased oil and gas production has flooded the market with fuel, driving down prices. On Wednesday, US crude oil fell to just $55 a barrel, nearly half of where the price stood six months ago. The drop has made some operators more cautious about drilling new hydraulic fracturing wells, particularly in hard-to-reach shale like the Marcellus. In other words, the "glut of gas" that fracking has ushered forth could be its own demise.

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Fannie Sosa (center-left) and Pussy Draama (center-right) with two people dressed as vaginas. All screenshots via YouTube

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

People, we're messed up. About a lot of things. Food, our bodies, money, basic human emotions. We have all these feelings that we don't really know what to do with, especially when it comes to something like sexuality—a realm that becomes even more of a minefield when the word "children" is added to the conversation.

That's maybe why a video called " Baby! Love Your Body!" aimed at kids aged three and over recently went viral in France. Bad viral.

The clip—produced by Fannie Sosa and Poussy Draama from the art collective School of No Big Deal—starts with your standard kids' show opening: Two cute, colorful performers (Fannie and Poussy) leap into view and welcome everyone, all toothy smiles and furious hand waving.

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Rainbows shoot across the screen, followed by a selection of words for vagina: "Cooch, punani, Cookie, mound of Venus." We're then introduced to two adults dressed up as vaginas, if vaginas looked like something Michael Alig might have worn to an Outlaw party 20 years ago. These club-kid vaginas describe themselves as "juicy, fun, and cosy" and "warm, soft, and a real good friend." Then the vaginas and artists all shout together: "We're never afraid of them because they're awesome! Let's play!"

We're a little further away from the Teletubbies than we were 30 seconds ago.

Soon after, a reggae song called "I Love to Play with My Friends" starts to play. Lyrics include: "Don't forget to ask first," "Sometimes we just want to play by ourselves," and "I respect that."

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The two vaginas

The video climaxes with a psychedelic dream sequence inside a vagina, where the artist who's "ready" finds a magical character under a waterfall. I'm guessing this represents an orgasm, but, to be honest, by this point I'm a little lost. Then the credits roll with twerking from our two main protagonists and I'm left confused. Did I love that or hate that? Is this progressive or dangerous? Are Fannie and Poussy actually just Tim and Eric in really good prosthetics?

"It went viral out of hate," laughs Fannie. "We didn't expect the backlash, but we did know it would be challenging a lot of people's conceptions."

What was it that people were upset about? "Pedophilia." People accused the pair of encouraging the sexualization of children, rather than sex-positivity in children.

"I think it's symptomatic of the way we treat sex and children," says Fannie. "I come from the belief that the less frustrated an individual is with sex, the less likely they are to develop rape impulses or abusive impulses."

So this video is an exercise in radical openness with children about body-positivity and sex-positivity, in the belief it will help tackle rape culture and promote consent.

At points, the interview with Fannie made me feel deeply uncomfortable; the same kind of discomfort I saw plenty of in the wake of last month's Lena Dunham controversy. What Dunham describes in her memoir—touching her sister's vagina at age seven, or bribing her for kisses when they were older—was it abuse?

The media's array of professional opinion-havers were conspicuous in their silence, with very few prepared to back a solid yes or a no. There ended up being more debate around race and privilege (some thought Dunham got off easy because she's rich and white) than there was around children, their sexuality, and how we prepare them safely for a healthy, happy life. What the response to the Lena incident made me realize is that we don't really seem to be sure what's healthy for any children, regardless of class and race.

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Lena Dunham (Photo by David Shankbone via)

I ask Professor Peter Fonagy, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre—a UK children's mental health charity—about the Dunham story. "Very few people don't have sexual explorations with other children," he says, adding that—a century after Freud—we should be less confused about this stuff, but that there's a biological reason why we're not. Most of what we know about our emotions, says Fonagy, we learn from our caregivers mirroring what we're expressing.

"If a child or infant is sad, a mother mirrors that sadness, communicating a sense that she's coping with it," Fonagy explains. "So the child's sense of their own sadness is a combination of physiological experience and what they see—the parent's attitude or concern."

This happens with anger, happiness, sadness, joy—basically every single emotion we experience, bar one.

"We do not have this kind of active mirroring of our sexual excitement as we do of all other emotions," Peter continues. "The reason why we—you, I and the rest of the humanity—have complicated feelings in this particular domain is because it was never sorted for us in childhood, and all other feelings are sorted."

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Fannie and Poussy playing with their friends

Fonagy makes clear that things as they currently are—our culture of ignoring children's sexuality—could well have an important function and should not be tinkered with. That it could be dangerous to experiment with the status quo. So I suppose this is where he and would disagree.

"Misguided" is the single word he uses to describe the video. "They seem to be trying to bring adult concerns into the world of a child, and that doesn't sit well," he says. "I don't see this as the future of sex education."

That's very much part of the problem here: In an age where we're confused about children and sexuality, yet child sexual abuse is rarely away from the front pages, we have no compulsory child sex education. So while any kid old enough to switch on an iPad can potentially access an entire internet's worth of porn, how can caregivers strike a balance between sex- and body-positivity, while protecting their children and without the shaming that happened with Dunham?

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Poussy about to enter the vagina

"I feel like this is a conversation that society is not ready to have," says mom-to-be Ruth Barnes. "I'm wary of the blurring of the line between sexuality and exploring your parts innocently as a child, and when those feelings become erotic. I'm all for sex-positivity—and the message of consent is an important one. I just think this is too much too soon and that more research is needed."

Self-described "liberal mom" Alice Briggs thinks "it's a hard line to draw." She has a three- and a six-year-old and, like most parents of kids that age, never knows what they're going to do next.

"The way they explore their own bodies and each other are just as a child would. We don't want them to think of it as a bad thing," she tells me, adding that—of course—she wants them to be clear about boundaries. But how do you control your child's experience of their body so there's no shaming, no abuse, and yet no repression? "We deal with it by being open and as natural as possible," she says, before admitting that it's sometimes a tricky balance to find, as "every child is different."

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Poussy hurtling through space into the vagina

The School of No Big Deal is trying something different out of desperation for change. Fannie is clear with me again and again that this is about consent and is in no way condoning pedophilia.

Jon Brown, who leads the NSPCC's program tackling sexual abuse, tells me: "This might seem an unusual video, but there are different ways of delivering sex education. The important thing is for children to learn that their bodies are to be respected and that they know how to protect themselves from abuse."

Fannie and Poussy had what Fannie describes as early awakenings into sexuality. "It was very difficult for us, because being a child and being a young teenager and being awakened in that sense means that you get shamed or you get abused, basically," she says. It's this experience—and her academic exploration of the subject in her PhD—that has led her to believe that "the more you talk of sex, the more you talk of things that are called shameful, the more they are in the light, the less likely they are to be lived with guilt."

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Not sure what's going on here, tbh

Fannie hopes that the video will do more than just liberate us sexually, explaining: "I'm trying to start dismantling sexual repression and frustration, because I think its at the core of a lot of things that are fucked up at the moment."

She goes on to paraphrase second-generation psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich: "I think capitalism works on sexual frustration—that's how they sell you stuff," she explains. "Reich says fascist states use sexual frustration and they sublimate that into fanaticism. They use that energy to turn them into fanatics. I think it's happening now. Let's rethink everything; let's imagine a different society."

Problem is, I'm not sure the School of No Big Deal is quite ready to show us this yet. While Fannie says there are already things, post-reaction, that she would change with the video, maybe we also need more collaboration between artists, psych professionals like Professor Fonagy, moms like Alice and Ruth, the NSPCC, and the education system. At the same time, artists—the people we want to push boundaries—shouldn't be strung up for making us face uncomfortable truths. While the video is a bit weird and confusing, in all honesty, if your three-year-old is roaming around YouTube unsupervised, there are roughly 5 million more videos that are going to fuck with their heads more than, "Baby! Love Your Body!"

I ask Fannie if the video was a kind of therapy for her—if actually it isn't for kids, but for adults to retrospectively bring clarity to things we found hard to define as children. She says it's for anyone aged three to 99, and that it's about being "compassioned about your sexuality"—not self harming because you had a weird thought, or shaming others because they told the truth about their childhood.

Shouldn't we, in this eerie territory, treat each other with the transparency, openness and compassion Fonagy says a parent should? If, as a culture, we're confused, shouldn't we try to avoid the temptation to squeeze anyone who dares shed light on the subject into boxes labeled "right" and "wrong"?

I'd say: yes, definitely. But your mind is yours to make up.

Follow Deborah Coughlin on Twitter.

[body_image width='900' height='664' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='food-stamp-reforms-are-ruining-christmas-1218-body-image-1418999478.jpg' id='12826']Maria Melo sits at her kitchen table with stacks of unpaid bills. Photos by the author

By the time Maria Melo went to the state social services office to apply for food stamps, things had been going badly for months. She'd lost her job as director of nursing at a rehab facility. Then, longstanding problems with anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder shut her body down and she ended up hospitalized for two weeks. Between unemployment checks and her husband's work as a self-employed electrician, they might still have been able to squeak by OK and even get some decent Christmas gifts for the kids. But the unpaid hospital bills made that impossible now.

Food stamps, Melo figured, would reduce the monthly grocery bill, giving her a little breathing room in the family budget. But, sitting in the crowded waiting room at an office of the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance near her home in Lowell, she was more embarrassed than hopeful.

"I was like, I can't believe I'm doing this," she said. "Here I am, a registered nurse, sitting there, just hoping for help."

Melo handed an intake worker the family passports, photos, and various paperwork verifying their income. After struggling with the computer system, the worker told her he'd expedite the application and she should be all set. He gave her a temporary electronic benefits card and told her to keep calling the number on the back to find out if it had been activated. By the time she got back to her car, the two hours she'd had on the meter had run out and she'd gotten a $15 ticket.

"I called my husband bawling, saying, now I have my first parking ticket, but I qualify for food stamps, so whatever," she said. "One washes out the other."

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Over the following weeks, Melo kept calling the number to see if the funds had come through. "It just says zero balance, zero balance," she said. Finally, she went back to the office, sitting in the waiting room for another two hours before getting called up. "Then I come in and the lady goes, 'Oh, no. you haven't been approved. You're going to be getting a denial letter,'" Melo said. "I was just, like, baffled. Literally, I almost lost it on the lady."

The DTA says it commonly hands out cards to people after an intake interview so that they can get their benefits quickly if they get approved. But Melo said she doesn't understand why, after sharing all of her family's financial information, the office initially told her she would be approved and then took it back. Although the DTA promises to send a denial letter explaining why an applicant wasn't approved immediately after the decision is made, weeks after her first visit, Melo said she still hasn't received one.

Melo is not alone. Jason Stephany, spokesman for Service Employees International Union Local 509, which represents DTA workers, said the system has struggled to process applications, due in part to a lack of manpower. "When we are short staffed by upward of 200 workers, the result has been significant delays and backlogs that are undoubtedly impacting eligibility, recertification, and those who receive benefits," he told me. "We hear from clients every day who are waiting two, three hours in the DTA offices to try to submit information, ask questions."

Talk to food stamp recipients in pretty much any state, and you'll hear the same story: Phone calls that go unreturned, benefits cut off after a form gets lost in the mail, little hassles and major mistakes that hit particularly hard because you're in a bad spot to begin with. Some of this may be unavoidable hiccups in a program serving 46 million people nationwide, but efforts in states across the country to "reform" the federal food stamp program, formally known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, seem to be making the problem worse.

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In recent years, several states including Massachusetts, where Melo lives, have added photos to EBT cards in an attempt to prevent food stamp fraud. Others are trying to make applicants pee in a cup to see if they're on drugs before qualifying them for benefits. Dan Lesser, director for economic justice at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, said the intense focus on fraud is partly a result of the huge growth in food stamp use since the 2008-09 economic collapse. But he added that reform attempts are also misplaced—the SNAP program has grown at a time when many people needed it, exactly as it was designed.

There's no indication that fraud is actually a growing problem for the food stamp program. In fact, since 1993, the US Department of Agriculture, which runs SNAP, has reduced the illegal saleof food stamps from 4 percent of benefits—or 4 cents on the dollar—to just 1 percent, thanks to new electronic tracking technology.

New reform measures are unlikely to improve those numbers further, Lesser said, and add hurdles for SNAP applicants, diverting funds that might otherwise be used to streamline the application process. And a lack of resources can quickly snowball, as anxious applicants start calling state offices, forcing workers to spend more time answering the phones. "It diverts resources to wasteful purposes, and then you don't have the resources to process cases," Lesser said.

Last year, Massachusetts became one of the first states in the country to require food stamp recipients to add photos to their EBT cards. The changes cost the state $1.5 million, and, according to a recent letter from the USDA, the transition did not go smoothly. Old cards were deactivated before new ones arrived, leaving many families without benefits for weeks, and state workers often failed to honor an exemption for elderly and disabled applicants.

"Because the state really hastily and sloppily implemented this, they did not take steps to make sure people's rights were protected," said Patricia Baker, senior policy advocate with Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. She added that some of the new cards were sent to the wrong addresses and others were apparently lost in last year's holiday mail rush. "People literally were food shopping and they found they couldn't use their cards—12,000 of them," she said.

But here's that would really get Kafka's juices going: Under federal law, anyone in an eligible household can use a SNAP card, whether or not their name or photo is on it. So adding a picture to the card isn't actually an effective way of preventing fraud at all. Practically speaking, it doesn't change anything at all.

If that seems odd to you, it's also confusing to retailers, who, in some cases have ended up turning legitimate customers away. More than a year after the start of the photo policy, Lowell resident Mary Tevepaugh said she's still having problems using the card, which was issued to her father, whom she lives and who suffers from debilitating back pain that makes it difficult for him to leave the house. "I have to go shopping for him, but they won't let me use the ID unless he's with me," she said.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts DTA has gotten even slower at processing SNAP applications. In 2008, the state's processing efficiency was the second best in the country, with nearly 98 percent of applications completed on time (within 30 days for regular applications, or seven for expedited ones). By 2013, the number was down to 84 percent, putting Massachusetts in the bottom half of the states.

Her doctor has warned her to try to avoid stress, so she's trying not to think too much about the growing tower of bills on her counter.

This year, the DTA launched a new centralized system for processing applications that it says should get people through the process faster. But Stephany, the union spokesman, said that so far it's causing more delays, and likely leading to people unfairly having their benefits dropped.

"We're certainly seeing a backlog of tens of thousands of documents every day within the system, which has an effect on how quickly eligibility and recertifications can be processed," he said. "At the end of the day, if those documents aren't acted on in a timely manner, the cases have to be closed by federal law."

The problems in Massachusetts haven't deterred other states from pursuing similar reforms. Both Maine and Georgia began requiring photos for SNAP cards this year, and at least a dozen other states are considering doing the same. In other places, state lawmakers have proposed requiring SNAP applicants to pass drug tests. The USDA barred one such law from taking effect in Georgia, but some members of Congress are now trying to change federal law to allow it.

It's not at all clear that the policies are financial winners. A Florida program requiring recipients of cash aid get drug tested—which operated for only a few months before it was shut down—reduced benefit pay-outs by only $40,480, while costing the state $246,050.

As for Melo, she figures if her SNAP denial letter ever shows up she'll decide whether she can appeal the decision. Her doctor has warned her to try to avoid stress, so she's trying not to think too much about the growing tower of bills on her counter. And she and her husband are still trying to figure out how to make Christmas happen for their kids. Their 16-year-old daughter told them all she wants is the payment for her drivers' ed class, and even their 13-year-year-old son has said he doesn't need much.

"They're smart enough," Melo said. "They know that things are tough. Things aren't going good here."

On Thursday afternoon, Colorado suddenly found itself the target of a lawsuit from neighboring states over its legalization of commercial marijuana. Nebraska and Oklahoma announced their intention to join forces in requesting the US Supreme Court overturn Amendment 64, the Colorado voter-approved law that legalized recreational marijuana sales after it passed in 2012. The two states accuse Colorado's booming cannabis industry of spilling across their borders, leading to an influx of Rocky Mountain grass where it doesn't belong.

"Fundamentally, Oklahoma and states surrounding Colorado are being impacted by Colorado's decision to legalize and promote the commercialization of marijuana which has injured Oklahoma's ability to enforce our state's policies against marijuana," Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a statement. "Federal law classifies marijuana as an illegal drug. The health and safety risks posed by marijuana, especially to children and teens, are well documented. The illegal products being distributed in Colorado are being trafficked across state lines thereby injuring neighboring states like Oklahoma and Nebraska."

The action filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma asserts that Amendment 64 is unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause, which states that any laws or treaties "under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding."

Constitutional law professor at University of Colorado Boulder Richard Collins says that while it's not uncommon for one state to sue another (Colorado has often found itself in legal entanglements with neighbors over rights to its river water), he's never encountered a Supremacy Clause case like this.

"I don't know of anything close to it," he says. "The novelty is the situation where federal law forbids what we do, but the [Obama] administration has decided to lay off to a certain extent, under specific rules. They could've gone after the president for not enforcing marijuana laws—as they are with immigration—but instead they've decided to come after Colorado directly and say that our violation of federal law causes harm to them."

To Collins's knowledge, the Supremacy Clause has never been used in connection with drug laws. And the Colorado government says that the lawsuit is nothing more than a cloud of smoke.

"Because neighboring states have expressed concern about Colorado-grown marijuana coming into their states, we are not entirely surprised by this action," Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said in a statement. "However, it appears the plaintiffs' primary grievance stems from non-enforcement of federal laws regarding marijuana, as opposed to choices made by the voters of Colorado. We believe this suit is without merit and we will vigorously defend against it in the US Supreme Court."

The way Amendment 64 was written, those with a Colorado ID are allowed to purchase up to one ounce per person, per day in each store; anyone with an out-of-state ID can only buy up to a quarter-ounce. The intention was to curb the amount of cannabis potentially brought home by visitors, though law enforcement officers in surrounding states say they've had to ramp up their efforts near the border to keep as much Colorado pot out of their jurisdictions as possible.

Mason Tvert, the communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, was instrumental in the passage of Colorado's Amendment 64, and has been working to facilitate similar changes in states throughout the US.

"We agree with the Colorado Attorney General's opinion that this suit is without merit," Tvert said in a statement Thursday afternoon. "This is a classic case of a solution in search of a problem. They are wasting Nebraska and Oklahoma taxpayers' dollars by filing this suit, and they're forcing Coloradans to pick up the bill for defending ourselves against it. Colorado's top law enforcement officials have better things to do, and you'd think their counterparts in Nebraska and Oklahoma would as well.

Collins says that since the Supreme Court is in session, it shouldn't take long for them to make a decision on whether or not to hear this case. "This will just be a preliminary ruling, which is just based on what they claim the harm is that has been done to their state, not on any evidence," Collins says. "If the court allows them to file a complaint, then it's possible that the states will ask for an emergency order of some kind . . . which may be a preliminary injunction to order Colorado to stop doing what we're doing while the case is being heard."

Collins adds that due to the unique nature of this case, it's difficult to predict how things will play out. Though in his estimation this grievance has a fair chance of being heard, it's unlikely that this will shut down Colorado's commercial marijuana industry. "I have a strong instinct that Colorado will win this case somehow," he tells me, "because it's so internal to the state—unless Oklahoma and Nebraska find some remedy that doesn't shut us down. If they have some proposal that controls the highways between the states, or some lesser remedy of that kind, the case might have legs. But the motion that they've made here really talks about shutting us down."

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

Officially founded in 1999, Nunavut is the youngest territory in Canada. It's only been two generations since Canada's stewardship of the land forced the Inuit people from their semi-nomadic way of life into a modern, sedentary one. But while the introduction of modern conveniences seem to have made life more comfortable, the history of Canada in the arctic is mired in tragedy, and the traumatic effects of residential schools and forced relocations are still being felt.

Today, Nunavut is in a state of social crisis: Crime rates are four times the national average and the rates of suicide are more than ten times higher than the rest of Canada.

If you ask people here what the driving force of the problem is, a lot of them will say: alcohol. Even though alcohol is completely illegal in some parts of the territory, it's been reported that 95 percent of police calls are alcohol-related.

VICE visited the beautiful expanse of land that is Nunavut to meet some of the people on the frontlines of the issue and to find out if this self-imposed alcohol regulation is helping or hurting the Inuit people.

I don't know very much about Oculus Rift, but I do know it induces people into a sort of otherworldly bizarro state. Statistically speaking, there has to be at least one guy who's tried it and lost all subsequent control of his bowels. This is our future.

In a sense, Yokai's music is probably just as transportive as Oculus Rift, except you don't have to be a Silicon Valley futurist dweeb to enjoy it. Take a listen to the Austin-based chillwave producer's new track, "Pharmacy," which will appear on his upcoming album, ( W E B B R A N D ). The song will make you feel like you're floating on a blow-up raft in a tropical lake composed entirely of Capri Sun and Dragon Balls.

Preorder ( W E B B R A N D ) on Bandcamp.

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Thumbnail photo via Flickr user The US Army

I have never been racially profiled, at least that I know of. I'm not terribly perceptive in social situations, usually because I'm too busy refreshing my Twitter notifications or quixotically trying to hide the bald spot on the back of my head by shifting my hair around. I still haven't figured out that people notice the spot more when I draw attention to it by touching it.

Unless you're point blank asking me what "colors I bang" or foisting some awkward "prison handshake" that you saw on The Wire on me, I would have no idea you were being racist or stereotyping me in any way. My wife just bought me a vintage Lakers Starter jacket that, unbeknownst to me, makes me look like fat Method Man. I shouldn't be wearing that in public, unless I want a patdown from the local 5-0, but I do anyway. I'm too much of a bumbler caught up in his own small, petty world of minor frustrations to see the bigger picture of prejudice. (This is not an invitation to light a cross on my front yard though. One, I would not appreciate that. Two, if you think I can afford a yard in Los Angeles, you're wrong.)

But like global warming or the release of a Larry the Cable Guy movie, even if you don't notice something, that doesn't mean it's not happening. Racism is real, whether it manifests in police stops or in everyday faux pas. And these little cringing moments of ignorance or bias happen to everyone, no matter how famous.

In an interview published in the latest issue of People magazine, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama revealed instances where they say they were racially profiled or treated in a stereotypical manner. The stories are familiar, which make them doubly uncomfortable to read in the context of America's commander-in-chief—not being able to get a cab, people thinking you're a valet, dinner guests asking you to fetch coffee for them. The Obama ascension was so important to people of color because we hoped his victory would put an end to these humiliating situations. Instead, his presidency has led to a series of "national conversations" about race that just show how far we have to go.

To his supporters, Obama is a transformative president whose election marked a major step toward racial harmony in America. He broke a barrier many thought could never be broken. Never mind the many missteps of the administration—just winning the election was a monumental, courageous feat that may not be repeated in my lifetime. Obama's flaws, in this view, are mitigated by virtue of his race.

His political enemies like to point out that this narrative makes Obama nothing more than a flashy gimmick, a historical footnote without the qualifications to run the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland, let alone the most powerful nation in the world. Even six years into his presidency, there remain pockets of the country that like to substitute the word "Kenyan" for "nigger." Obama's flaws are exacerbated because he's black.

Race is the major narrative of the Obama presidency, a simple fact which Jonathan Chait deftly described in his April New York magazine feature. Pretending that it's not there is as foolish as lacking the common sense to know when someone is being racist toward you. Obama's political enemies say he used his race to his advantage in 2008 and has continued to use racial appeals to dupe black voters into supporting him. If he would just stop talking about it, the world could go back to being color-blind, they say. Conservatives have even criticized the Obamas' People magazine interview by saying that the incidents they describe don't actually amount to racism.

Perhaps minorities are neurotic and obsessed with seemingly superficial slights—but that's only because the majority is actually privately judging them. You're not paranoid when everyone really is watching you for flaws. The shocking Sony email exchange between Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin is a stinging reminder for us that we will be singled out for ridicule based solely on the way we look. It doesn't matter if you're Kevin Hart or Barack Obama; a huge movie star or a head of state. You are different. You are an other. You don't belong.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.