This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I'm really into the Watch Dogs soundtrack, not because it's particularly good (Alkaline Trio, anybody?) but because it's the rare example of in-game music that is actually chosen by your character. The licensed songs you listen to in Ubisoft's 2014 game aren't coming through the radio, a la Grand Theft Auto, nor are they playing non-diegetically over the action, like your typical orchestral score. They're all on protagonist Aiden Pearce's smartphone—whether he starts the game with them, or steals them from other people's devices using the in-game "SongSneak" app, all these songs are ones Aiden has picked himself. And that makes me wonder: what does Aiden's music taste tell us about him? Like political smear campaigners rifling through someone's trash, what can we glean about Aiden by examining his music collection?

First off, let's take a look at his punk and rock selection. There's the aforementioned Alkaline Trio with their track "Private Eye," also Rise Against's "Help Is On The Way," and Madina Lake's "Goin' Down High." To me, it feels like Aiden, who's 39 years old, has gone onto Google, searched "punk music" and downloaded whichever tracks popped up first on YouTube. The press in Watch Dogs is awash with stories about him, calling him "The Vigilante" and "The Fox," and it's as if he's got swept up in his own myth and tried to live up to an anti-establishment image by feigning an interest in punk culture. It's the music of a dad trying to "get down" with his son—it's easy to imagine that nephew of Aiden's, rolling his eyes at his uncle's insistence that he's "really into Rise Against."

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It's not all try-hard, cribbed-from-Google affectation, though. Aiden also has a couple of tracks by The Vindictives, a 1990s punk band originating from his native Chicago—the game's setting. They're a bit more obscure, and the two songs he plays, "Alarm Clocks" and "The Invisible Man," are way toothier than the rest of his punk line-up. Perhaps in his younger days Aiden was a bona-fide punk, and his playlist is reminiscent of all the underground bands that he used to go and watch. After all, both Rise Against and Madina Lake were formed in Chicago—maybe, instead of a pretend punk, Aiden is just very plugged into the Illinois music scene.

And it's not like he's not entirely desperate to appear "with it," as there's plenty of "dad" music on Aiden's phone. We've got Alice Cooper's "Dangerous Tonight," Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up," and a bit of Iggy and the Stooges. There's also "Wake Up Sunshine" by Chicago and Vampire Weekend's "Diane Young," just to tick the box of inoffensive pop records. This is definitely the music of a man approaching 40. It's classics. It's easy listening. It's the kind of thing Aiden can play through the iPod speakers his brother-in-law got him last Christmas, while he knocks together a pasta sauce for tomorrow night's dinner party. In fact, adding to his middle-aged credibility, Aiden keeps a choice selection of dance and electronic numbers, ranging from Daft Punk to Squarepusher and Gods of Fashion.

On first glance, those might indicate a man who is on the cutting edge of modern music—they're the types of sounds befitting of someone who spends his days doing cool hacking on cool touchscreens. But my dad, back in his 40-something days, before he segued into his full leather-jacket-and-hiking-boots-Clarkson 50s, kept plenty of trendy albums in his glove box, and he never went near a computer. All of that music was, in fact, nicked from Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems, which the young lads on the night shift used to insist on listening to on a Sunday night. So again, I suspect Aiden of trying to keep up with the youth, this time by plundering the Spotify playlists of his trendy hacker pals.

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But none of this is particularly egregious—the profile I've built so far of Aiden is that of a slightly over-eager but mostly avuncular semi-muso. He seems like a nice enough fella, right? Wrong. Because finally on Aiden's phone is a prime line-up of rap and hip-hop records, and through these we can see what a hypocritical, unthinking, violent piece of shit he really is.

Let's take a look at "C.R.E.A.M." by Wu-Tang Clan. "It's been 22 long hard years of still struggling," says Inspectah Deck in the second verse. "A young buck sellin' drugs and such who never had much / Trying to get a clutch at what I could not touch / The court played me short, now I face incarceration / Pacing, going upstate's my destination." Like "One Mic" by Nas, and "I Shall Not Be Moved" by Public Enemy, two other tracks that Aiden listens to, "C.R.E.A.M." talks about the struggles of people of color against systems like social classification and segregation, economics and law enforcement. It's a song that illustrates how the actions and prejudices of people like Aiden—white, affluent types with hardline attitudes toward policing—create and propagate the suffering of young, black, poor people.

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Essentially, it's pretty fucking rich for Aiden to listen to this kind of music and then spend a whole massive chunk of Watch Dogs shooting and killing young, black people in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago. You have the whole sub-plot with Bedbug, Iraq, and the Black Viceroys gang. You also have the innumerable side-quests and one-off crime encounters, which typically result in Aiden chasing and killing some young purse-snatcher or drug dealer.

In a game that has such woefully uncomplicated ideas about criminals and policing, it's uneasy how Ubisoft has bought and used hip-hop. It feels both like an affectation on the part of Aiden and his creators, and an abuse of where the music truly comes from. I like that the in-game music in Watch Dogs can tell us about the person we're playing as—I think it's an interesting and humanizing little touch for his character, which neatly fits with the game's modern-tech aesthetic. But I also like that it can tell us something about Ubisoft, how the developer perhaps never stopped to question Watch Dogs' politics. As the game itself repeatedly illustrates, it's amazing how much you can learn just from looking at someone's smartphone.

Follow Ed Smith on Twitter.

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Look at Stephen Maurice Graham's website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Frames from Omar Khadr's interrogation. via Flickr.

The Supreme Court of Canada isn't buying the idea that Omar Khadr was sentenced as an adult by the US when he agreed to a plea deal that said at the age of 15, he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier.

On Thursday, Canada's highest court rejected the federal government's argument that Khadr should be declared an adult offender.

The question before the court was whether Khadr's eight-year sentence handed to him by the US military in 2010 was an adult sentence or a youth sentence.

The federal government argued Khadr was sentenced to five concurrent sentences of eight years each, but the nine court judges unanimously agreed that an eight-year sentence for first degree murder was a youth sentence.

Outside the court Thursday, Khadr's lawyer Dennis Edney repeated his accusation from last week that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a "bigot" who dislikes Muslims.

When a Canadian judge released Khadr on bail last week, the former Guantanamo inmate asked Canadians to give him a chance.

"See who I am as a person and not as a name and then they can make their own judgment after that," he told reporters at a press conference outside his lawyer's house, where he's now living.

Last weekend, Elizabeth May rejoiced about the bail decision, infamously telling the Ottawa press gallery dinner, "Welcome back Omar Khadr! You're home!" and "Omar Khadr, you have more class than this whole fucking cabinet."

Whether you believe Khadr was a child soldier or a terrorist largely depends on which facts you find friendlier.

Khadr's family had ties to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and Khadr fought with al Qaeda and the Taliban in 2002—the year he allegedly threw the grenade that killed US soldier and medic Christopher Speer. After the incident, he was arrested by American soldiers and detained in Guantanamo Bay, where he was at one point the youngest detainee.

In 2010, after maintaining his innocence for eight years, he agreed to a plea deal that released him from Guantanamo, but sentenced him to eight years in prison.

In 2013, Khadr said the plea deal left him with "a hopeless choice" and if he hadn't taken it, he would have endured "continued abuse and torture" in Guantanamo.

Today, after the 13-year ordeal, Khadr is free on $5,000 bail. According to his bail conditions, Khadr must live with his lawyer, abide by a curfew, wear a tracking bracelet, and he must only communicate with his family in English. He's allowed to use the internet while supervised.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

On Wednesday afternoon, the House passed the USA Freedom Act by large margins 383 to 88. What happens now—specifically, what the Senate will do—is anyone's guess.

The bill, authored by Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner and New York Democrat Jerry Nadler, would replace the existing phone dragnet operated under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Currently, the NSA aims to obtain the records of all American's phone calls every day, and holds on to those records for five years, querying under limited circumstances. Under the USA Freedom Act, telephone providers would instead hold onto the records, and the government would submit queries on individual accounts to get daily data on ingoing and outgoing calls and connected accounts.

USA Freedom Act also includes some other limited surveillance reforms, including requiring the government to release limited statistics on the government's use of surveillance programs, and at least a summary of significant decisions made by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court. It would also create an "amicus" panel of attorneys that the court could consult on in more significant decisions, but from whom the government can still withhold important information.

In addition to these limited changes, though, the bill also provides new goodies for the intelligence community, including emergency authority to obtain data before submitting an application to the court, and a "roamer" authority that allows the NSA to continue wiretapping foreigners for 72 hours after they enter the US. The current version of the bill also includes several measures unrelated to surveillance, like extending the maximum penalty for those convicted of providing material support for terrorism and extending the definition of an acceptable spying target to include those who "conspire with" or "abet" suspects involved in weapons proliferation.

On its face, surveillance hawks should embrace USA Freedom Act, particularly in light of a Second Circuit court decision issued last week that found that Congress had not intended Section 215 to authorize a dragnet of every American's phone records. The court's opinion, written by Judge Gerard Lynch, suggested that the court probably would find the dragnet unconstitutional if Congress doesn't end it, so it is likely lawmakers will need to alter the program with reforms similar to those in the USA Freedom Act anyway.

Watch: Shane Smith Interviews US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter

Perhaps most importantly, for surveillance hawks, USA Freedom Act appears to close certain gaps that have arisen in the NSA's data collection USA Freedom Act appears to permit the collection smart phone records—that is, records of communication that is sent across the Internet, as well as phone calls facilitated by telecoms providers.

To understand why there's a gap, some history is in order. Back when the NSA started this dragnet as part of an illegal wiretap program the agency collected both phone and Internet metadata from telecom companies, though at first the Department of Justice didn't consider the different legal implications of collecting data sent via the Internet from that sent as phone calls.

Once lawyers at the Justice Department finally did consider that question, they realized there were legal problems with collecting such records without a warrant—likely because it's hard to collect Internet metadata without also collecting content. That's because communications sent across the Internet are chopped up into little bits called "packets" with addressing information—the metadata the government wants to collect—as well as some content that's included with each little bit.

When the FISA Court first authorized the Internet dragnet in 2004, it dealt with this legal problem by limiting the categories of information the NSA could collect from Internet communications. But within the first months of the program, the NSA violated those limits, and continued to do so until finally, in the fall of 2009, the agency finally admitted that every single record they had collected over the past five years included data that did not fall within FISA's category restrictions.

The FISA Court shut down the Internet dragnet down for about nine months, until around July 2010, when the NSA convinced the chief FISC judge to restart and expand the dragnet. In the interim, the NSA appears to have moved some of its collection of Internet metadata to two other authorities, data collected overseas and PRISM. And so, a year after restarting the Internet dragnet, NSA shut it down its Internet dragnet again.

As far as we know, ever since then, the NSA has used very different legal approaches to collect phone records and Internet records.

Motherboard: US Companies Are Throwing a Fit Because They're Losing Control of the Internet

That appears to be reflected in the phone dragnet orders, which FISC specifies apply only to "telephony metadata," that is, presumably, the metadata for calls transferred as calls, rather than those transferred as online content. But most people don't make many telephone calls anymore. Increasingly, they rely on call and texting programs like Skype and iMessage, which are transmitted via the Internet, sometimes all the way down to your private WiFi router in your home.

Sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times have been complained about gaps in the phone dragnet for well over a year, with some suggesting that the NSA gets as little as 20 percent of the phone traffic in the US, though those anonymous sources never explained the source of the gap.

One potential impact of that gap was exposed during the Boston Marathon attack trial. Witness testimony revealed that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had no telephony phone records in the weeks leading up to the attack, because his account had been shut down for non-payment. Rather than calling his brother on his AT&T iPhone to plan the attack, Tsarnaev used Skype.

And because wannabe terrorists tend to be younger, and are often immigrants, it follows that they might disproportionally communicate via Internet messaging services, rather than calls transmitted via phone providers. That means any phone records program—dragnet or targeted—that doesn't include Skype (and iMessage, and other online messaging functions) would be largely useless.

After attending a secret intelligence briefing this week, Senator Bob Corker described the existing phone dragnet as such. "Malpractice is the best word I can use to describe the amount of data that is actually being collected in the metadata program. Corker told the Christian Science Monitor. "It's beyond belief how little data is a part of the program and type of data especially if the goal is to deal with terrorists."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr seemed to suggest the debate about Section 215 was about Internet metadata the other day, when he claimed in a Senate colloquy that Section 215 authorizes a dragnet for IP calls—though his office later claimed Burr had misspoke and deleted the comment from the congressional record.

Unlike Section 215, the USA Freedom Act appears to include those IP packets; unlike current FISC orders, nothing in the bill is limited to "telephony." Indeed, the House Judiciary Committee's report on the bill notes that when a request is made for call records on an account, "an electronic mail address or account also qualifies as an 'account' for purposes of the bill." The report also specifies that the bill does not permit the prospective chaining on Internet routers suggesting it does envision accounts accessed through the Internet.

While it's true that committee's bill report refers to obtaining call detail records from "telephone companies," it doesn't define that term. Phone manufacturers—like Apple, Google, or Microsoft—are all, to greater or lesser degrees, classified as phone companies, both as hardware manufacturers and software providers, even if they're not telecoms companies.

But instead of embracing the USA Freedom Act for closing those gaps, surveillance hawks instead appear to be aiming to get Congress to approve a full-blown Internet and phone dragnet going forward. For example, after attending that secret briefing on the program on Tuesday night, Senator Bob Corker has been arguing the government needs to vastly expand the dragnets, even while refusing to explain what the NSA does not collect because it remains classified. Which is why no one knows what will happen in the Senate over the next several days. It's not even clear whether we're debating a phone dragnet, or an Internet one.

Marcy Wheeler an an independent journalist who writes about national security and civil liberties.Follow her on Twitter.

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Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

After 11 years on Effexor, my psychiatrist and I agree it is no longer working. We gradually decrease the Effexor and introduce Prozac. We do this over a series of weeks during a time when I am having less panic attacks and anxiety in general. She warns me that there could be withdrawal symptoms, but I don't have any. I am like, Bitch, whatev. I feel special and awesome for not having withdrawal symptoms.

But then, in my first week fully off the Effexor, I spin out into an anxiety hole so deep that it feels less like anxiety—or that I am dying, as I usually fear—and more like I am in a battle with demons.

Maybe I should have seen this coming when, during the first few days completely off the Effexor, I started seeing inanimate objects as body parts and other haunting images. I saw part of a blanket and thought it was a person's leg. I thought a black suitcase was a monster. But unless shit is really going down, I always think I can handle it. I laughed about the objects when I realized what they were. I was like, This will be funny to tweet about.

Then, on my fourth night off the Effexor, I awake away from home and feel what I can only describe as a darkness in my soul. It is like my soul is screaming or something is screaming in my soul. It is the terror of Who am I? Am I bad? Is my life meaningless? What have I invested in? Why can't I breathe? Who are any of you people? And, most scarily, is there a bottom? These are all important questions, but they don't need to be answered at 3:30 in the morning in rapid fire.

I get into a fetal position and do a "21-second countdown" technique from an ebook called Panic Away, where I tell the thoughts and feelings that they have 21 seconds to do their worst to me. I count to 21 over and over until I fall back asleep.

Day 5 off Effexor

I wake up scared and I'm scared all day. I'm scared of being scared. Scared of "losing it." Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not OK. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home—that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.

I feel self-conscious about sharing this publicly, because the feelings are so raw and immediate. But that's what So Sad Today is born from. So I tweet about it.

It's weird, you can be "so sad today" and still be scared of judgment. Like, how much mental illness is "acceptable" and how much is going to be "too much"? Someone DM's me, "We convince ourselves that we can own the identity of the anxious or depressed person. Then it sneaks up again." It's like I got this. Then the mental illness is like, No, I've got you.

Night 5 off Effexor

A little better than the one before. I wake up once again at 3:30AM with the night terrors, but now I know what's going down. It's no longer an amorphous, emotional rendition of Munch's The Scream. It's Effexor withdrawal. Instead of spinning all the way out, I'm like, OK, these are just sensations I am feeling from the withdrawal. Don't buy into them. I go into the bathroom in the hotel room where I am staying and do some yoga poses. I haven't done yoga in years. I think you should be doing more yoga and why don't you? and get back in the yoga game . It feels good to be admonishing myself about yoga rather than my profound, existential badness. I feel almost excited by the experience. I'm still scared but I also feel like, You really are strong, gurl, as I do a crappy tree pose in the mirror.

Day 6 off Effexor

All day I feel like I am on acid. Bad acid. I eat lunch in a restaurant with a painting of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. Marilyn is laughing and she looks gross and terrifying to me. She seems to be saying, Hahahahahahaha, look how they have sold you my corpse! Look how they have sold you the American Dream, the vacation dream, any dream to distract you from asking too many questions about existence. I'm not sure who this "they" is exactly. Maybe it's the government? Maybe it's a machine we are stuck in as we all angle for our own stuff only to become a sad girl eating in a yuppie restaurant, freaking out internally while appearing "fine" as she tries not to choke.

Then I get to a part of the "acid trip" I enjoy. I drive out of town, into the desert, and walk around on some rocky-desert thingy. For a few minutes, I feel like everything is going to be OK and that I am OK, because the wide-open space won't judge me. I feel wild and alive. I take some of the rocks with me, even though whenever I take "spiritual souvenirs" they never end up holding the same magic and it's better to just keep experiences like that in your heart maybe.

But mostly, it's hard to enjoy the faux-acid trip because I keep running into the same fears I had when I used to take psychedelics for real, like What if this feeling never goes away? and What if I'm like this forever? I'm always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.

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Day 7 off Effexor

No night terrors last night, but then the day is awful. I try to watch standup comedy in bed and suffocate. Mostly, I am just exhausted. I am exhausted from dealing with this and exhausted from trying to convince myself that I'm not dying. My friend says that whenever I start to feel weird I should just say to myself that I'm sick, but I'm going to get better. I keep making these weird sounds just to make sure I'm still alive and breathing. I hope this shit has a happy ending.

Day 8 off Effexor

I am scared. It's fear on top of all the fear chemicals that are being released in me. They are just like whoosh and it is very hard (impossible) not to believe you are dying, or about to lose it, when your body is having a chemical terror response. I am looking for evidence to reflect my feelings back to me. My chemicals are like, DANGER! Doom! I feel alone and angry and scared. My head is like,

What if I fucked myself changing the meds and I'm never OK again?

Day 9 off Effexor

I wake up in a panic, covered in sweat, and stinking. I jump in the bath and then go back to sleep. I have a dream about the person who I may never fully get over. In the dream, he goes down on me with a pacifier in his mouth. I come really quickly.

I try to answer my "what if" questions with "so what" answers that diffuse them.

What if this is the wrong medication?

So what, I'll just work with my psychiatrist until we find the right one.

What if I want to sleep forever and can't stop sleeping?

OK, so then you sleep the rest of your life. You've done a lot already in your life. You've probably done enough.

What if these butterflies in my stomach never go away?

Good. I think you should just vomit all over the floor. Just keep vomiting. It's fine.

I am desperate. I buy a blue crystal from a new age store that's said to "bring serenity." I know that I officially live in California because I'm carrying around a crystal in my bra. I reach in, while driving, and feel around to check and make sure it is still there. Some bro looks over and thinks I am feeling myself up. Good for him.

Day 10 off Effexor

I call my psychiatrist, even though I don't want to be a nuisance. I tell her that I'm feeling surging anxiety. She says there's no way I'm in Effexor withdrawal anymore/ Maybe I am on too much Prozac? She tells me to decrease the Prozac.

My friend gives me a tarot card reading and says that I am going to be fine. While she is reading the cards I have a panic attack. She points to a card called "Strength" that shows a woman taming a lion and a card called "The Fool" with some dude dancing on the edge of a cliff without falling off. I feel like I am not taming the lion. I feel like the lion is attacking me. Also, I think I am going to fall off the cliff.

Day 11 off Effexor

I call my psychiatrist, even though I don't want to be a nuisance. I tell her that I'm feeling surging anxiety. She says there's no way I'm in Effexor withdrawal anymore. Maybe I am not on enough Prozac? She tells me to increase the Prozac.

I talk to this crazy girl I know. She tells me that people with anxiety shouldn't take Prozac and that I should get off it or I will go "over the edge." She says that I live in California now and I should just "green juice it." This is one of those girls who doesn't stop talking shit or gossiping. The only thing she knows about meds is that her sister works in pharmaceutical sales. I feel tempted to take her medical advice.

Other people give me advice too . Don't go back on Effexor, ride it out, it might take months but you can do it, I believe in you! I don't believe in me. Not at all. Everyone thinks I'm going to be OK except me.

Day 12 off Effexor

I'm going back on fucking Effexor.

Day 13 off Effexor

I'm not going back on fucking Effexor.

Day 14 off Effexor

I'm driving my car on the highway and I have to take a shit. There is nowhere to pull over. For the first time in ten days, I experience a sensation more powerful than the anxiety. I feel grateful for the feeling of having to take a shit and having nowhere to take it. I am like, Yes. I feel like myself. But then I take the shit. And the anxiety returns.

I go to a work-related meeting. This dude is talking about sports. He goes through every sport before he even gets to the matter at hand. He does basketball, football, baseball, hockey. He even does golf. I am scared my head is going to pop off. I'm not even there. But what's scarier than the feeling in the meeting is the feeling after the meeting. Usually, when I am in an anxiety-inducing situation, I experience relief as soon as I leave. But when I leave the meeting, there is no respite. Golf dude is gone but I am draped in a thick, gray, pulsating cloud.

Day 15 off Effexor

I'm going back on fucking Effexor.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.

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The ABC taking away the kombucha. Photos courtesy of Loboman

Full Circle, the Los Angeles new age temple co-founded by 10 Things I Hate About You actor Andrew Keegan, has been raided.

An undercover agent from California's Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) infiltrated the temple on Friday night, clearing the way for a 9 PM incursion by five officers who confiscated two kegs of blueberry kombucha from a neighborhood kumbucha brewery called Kombucha Dog.

Jason Dilts, Full Circle's communications and development director, called the raid "distressing," and explained to VICE that "part of our spiritual practice is drinking kombucha."

"It's a sacred tea to a lot of people who come into our temple. So to have a raid, saying we can't do the sorts of practices that we do on a daily basis is rather disturbing," Dilts said. He added that the event was a benefit for Sea Shepherds of California, and another charity that supports sustainable communities in Ghana.

According to Eduardo Manilla, a member of the Venice neighborhood council who witnessed the raid, the ABC declined to identify themselves when people repeatedly asked them who they were. "All they said was 'you'll find out on the report,'" he told VICE.

Kombucha is a preparation of tea mixed with yeast that is lightly fermented, resulting in fizz, and an alcoholic content that can sometimes exceed 0.5 percent. It tastes like green tea with light beer in it, and a splash or two of vinegar.

A beverage cannot be labeled non-alcoholic if it exceeds 0.5 percent. However, kombucha, like kefir, something that also has trace amounts of alcohol, isn't traditionally something drinkers imbibe in order to get sloshed. This became an issue in 2011, when Lindsay Lohan claimed her kombucha habit was what caused her to fail a test for alcohol.

"We weren't aware that we needed any sort of special license to sell kombucha," Dilts said.

"Kombucha Dog meets the legal definition of an alcoholic beverage, so it requires a license to sell it," Will Salao, supervising agent for ABC told VICE. "We went in and contacted the persons involved, got their identifications, and seized evidence," he said, estimating that the whole thing took "a total of a half hour or 45 minutes."

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The raid came just one day after Keegan spoke at a town hall meeting organized by the LAPD, which concerned the controversy over the recent killing of a homeless man named Brandon Glenn. I was at the event that night, and heard Keegan speak about explaining another run-in with law enforcement. He claimed that during a charity event meant to raise money for multiple causes, he was "set up," by the LAPD and "had a very unfortunate situation in which I was taken down by ten police officers for no good reason."

Keegan was most likely referring to an event In 2011, when he was caught on video, screaming in pain as officers handcuffed him. He was reportedly uncooperative after police asked him to turn down his music, according to TMZ.

"I want to be really clear that we don't see those as being tied in together," said Dilts. ABC is a state agency, acting separately from the LAPD. However, Dilts said, "I would question the judgement of the ABC coming into the temple on Friday night when tensions are so high in Venice...It really does a disservice to the LAPD."

According to Salao, the timing was pure coincidence. "We wouldn't be there if there weren't a complaint," he said. Salao declined to name the person who notified the ABC, but explained that the complaint concerned the sale of alcoholic beverages in general, and "not kombucha particularly."

According to Dilts, this complaint was part of a series of complaints they'd received from other Venice residents. "We have not been able to serve alcohol at the temple because there's some concern with one specific neighbor next door."

The actual citation for selling alcohol without a license was given to an as-yet unnamed vendor who was working in Full Circle that night, not the temple itself. A court date has been set for July, and according to Dilts, Full Circle "will be monitoring this."

They also plan to lobby for a change in ABC policy, Dilts said. "We'll reach out to ABC ourselves, so that they know that kombucha isn't something they need to be worried about."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia

In February the ABC current affairs show, Four Corners, ran an investigation into greyhound trainers using live baits to "give their dogs a competitive edge." Secretly filmed at tracks in Queensland and Victoria in Australia, footage showed trainers using live piglets, possums, and rabbits to lure dogs around the track. In one particularly affecting scene, a possum was zipped around the track until it was only attached to the lure by its spinal cord. The trainers were laughing because it was still alive.

Repercussions were swift. The NSW government sacked the entire state racing board, while dozens of trainers were suspended and fined across the country. Right now, there's probably no sport in Australia with less social standing than greyhound racing.

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Dogs at Sandown Park. All images by the author.

To see how the dogs and fans were fairing amidst the scandal, I headed to Melbourne's Sandown Park. I didn't know it prior to my visit, but Sandown Park is one of the premier tracks in the world. Not that you could tell. When I arrived, the place was dead. The crowd of around 35 people, mostly retirement-age men, spent the evening in the restaurant-bar, placing bets and watching the races on giant TVs. The races took place every 20 minutes so there was plenty of time to chat.

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Ian, 71.

I found Ian inside, biding his time until his dog ran in the final race. He explained that he'd been training dogs for more than 30 years. "I was already a fan of the sport before I got dogs," he said. "I used to come here on a Thursday night to gamble. I'd come and lose me wages every week. It's the winning and losing I find exciting."

Ian denied knowing that live baiting was taking place before the scandal broke. "But now it's put a bad image on it for everybody, it's tarred everybody with the same brush. And you've got to resent those trainers doing it because they've got an edge." He paused a moment and then doubled back to explain that live baiting doesn't necessarily create a competitive edge. "Some dogs just chase better than others," he said.

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Peter, 59.

Peter sat in the grandstand watching the dogs taking turns to sniff around and piss on the shrubs. "See that dog there?" He asked me, pointing to a buff little white dog with a brown head. "That's Fernando Bale. That's currently the best dog in the world."

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Fernando Bale getting ready to run.

A trumpet sounded and the dogs were led into their boxes and the lights in the stands dimmed. Suddenly the lure came flying around the track and the race was on. Within seconds, Fernando Bale had stormed out in front. "Just watch the power of those dogs," bellowed peter. "See the power? It's unbelievable."

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...And then running.

Before I had a chance to process what I was seeing, the race was over. Fernando Bale had stormed the competition to clinch the win. "You'd probably think that was the same as any other race," said Peter, calming himself down. "But he's just broken 29 seconds and that's only the second time a dog's ever broken 29 seconds. 28.98—that's 0.2 seconds off the track record." Despite Fernando Bale's near-record breaking win, nobody in the crowd was cheering or even seemed interested. Most just continued to stare glumly at the screens.

"This is only half the crowd that was here three or four months ago," said Peter. "The baiting scandal has rocked the sport, there's no debate about that. A lot of the top trainers and people involved in the sport have gone because they've been chucked out."

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Alf, 56

Alf said he'd been coming to the greyhounds nearly every week for the past two years. "The excitement is about the betting," he explained. "I like outsiders, ruffies. You get a buzz if you can pick a ruffy and they win." I mentioned that the last dog to win was Fernando Bale, the favorite, and Alf explained this was why he hadn't bet on him. "The return just wasn't good enough."

To some extent this might have explained why no one cared when Fernando nearly broke the record. Unlike horse racing, where even the favorite produces reasonable returns, the odds on dog racing are much shorter. To make money on dogs, you've basically got to pick an outsider.

"I heard about live baiting happening 40 years ago," said Alf. "I thought it'd all died out though. Using animals as live bait is absolutely disgusting. A dog has a tendency to chase a rag and it tries really hard. I don't think it's damaged the sport though, not for the hardened race fan."

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Dennis, 60

Dennis told me he'd been coming to the races for a few years. He wasn't interested in betting he said, but was drawn to the sport for his love of greyhounds. "It's like the Olympic games," he said. "The excitement's great—watching a field of athletes at the top of their chosen sport compete and win. It's the same for us who love dogs."

Like all the guys I'd spoken to, Dennis reluctantly addressed live baiting, but admitted he knew it went on. "I'd heard rumors of live baiting," he said. "If you keep your ears open, you'll hear snippets of conversation that you're not supposed to hear. But I think it's naïve to think that nothing bad happens in sport when there's money involved."

As the general silence of the place settled on us again, he was keen to bring the subject back to athleticism. "One of the dogs nearly ran a record tonight," he said, beaming. "That's magnificent to see. Tonight was a good night to be at the races."

Follow Max on Twitter.

Official trailer to 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)

This weekend, millions of people will flock to movie theaters to see Mad Max: Fury Road. The film is a rarity in the landscape of Hollywood reboots, as it's directed, produced, and co-written by original Mad Max director George Miller, ensuring that it maintains the spirit of its source material. And critics seem to love it too. With a 99 percent "fresh" rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, it's shaping up to be one of the most acclaimed big-budget action movies since Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

But there's one thing about Fury Road that has rankled some men across the web—the film features an empowered female character named Imperator Furiosa, who is played by Charlize Theron. As VICE's own critic David Perry put it, to the dismay of MRAs everywhere, "Fury Road is an explicitly feminist movie, with Furiosa and Max joining forces to take down a literal patriarchy."

The film's feminist bent led writer Aaron Clarey to cry foul in a viral post for Return of Kings, a site that describes itself as a "blog for heterosexual, masculine men." In the blog post, Clarey bemoans the fact that the true focus of the new film isn't Max, it's Furiosa, who much to Clarey's chagrin, "barked orders to Mad Max" in the trailer. In Clarey's eyes, "nobody barks orders to Mad Max."

Continuing, he writes, "Men in America and around the world are going to be duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes."

Clarey's big call to action is that men should not see Fury Road, because if the film is the hit it's shaping up to be, he claims, "Then you, me, and all the other men (and real women) in the world will never be able to see a real action movie ever again that doesn't contain some damn political lecture or moray about feminism, SJW-ing, and socialism."

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Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)

I reached out to Clarey—who also runs a blog called Captain Capitalism—via email with some questions about the boycott, Charlize Theron's mechanical arm, and whether or not explosions were gendered. His initial response was, "You want to get rid of the snark/fake questions and then I'll take you seriously?" Which, fine. Asking if a robot arm is gendered is at least light trolling. I then asked him what he made of the response to his post, which had made the rounds from the Huffington Post to the A.V. Club to Wired.

He responded, "Didn't think an obscure blogger would elicit such a reaction, let alone get on HuffPo, the Telegraph, etc. However, the content of the reaction was completely expected and predictable and doesn't surprise me. Anytime one dares to be politically incorrect and speak blunt, indifferent truth, you can expect a near-scripted reaction. In this case, it's the accusations of being 'ist' (sexist, misogynist, etc.), 'I have mother issues, hate women,' etc. Been down this road before many times and there's no surprises."

On Twitter, meanwhile, Clarey expressed bemusement that his post had "gone viral in lefty and femmy circles," and posted this response to his YouTube channel. "To the leftist media," he says while flipping off the camera, "fuck off."

Though the idea of a blogger calling for a boycott of an action movie for being "too feminist" in it is inherently ridiculous, there's definitely precedent for petulant dudes banding together to cause chaos with their wallets. During the halcyon days of the largely anti-feminist GamerGate controversy, GamerGaters successfully petitioned advertisers to remove ads from the gaming site Gamasutra for running a piece critical of the term "gamer," and managed to get Mercedes-Benz and Adobe to pull ads from Gawker over some jokey tweets. The basic idea was that if enough young men complained to advertisers, advertisers would be worried that a large portion of their consumer base might cease to support them. That this group of consumers were upset that writers might have the audacity to criticize their online harassment of women throughout the web was irrelevant. The tactic worked.

Related on Motherboard: The Avengers and Mad Max: A Tale of Two Futures in Sci-Fi Trailers

There are some very obvious flaws to the argument in Clarey's initial post. For one, Mad Max is not a piece of American culture. Miller is Australian, and the original Mad Max movies were shot in Australia. Fury Road was shot in Namibia, and its stars—Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy who are South African and British, respectively. Meanwhile, Mad Max is George Miller's creation. If he says a woman gets to bark orders to Mad Max, then a woman gets to bark orders to Mad Max. Clarey's response to this was, "George Miller has every right to do with his piece of art that he wants. Just as the Wachowskis had every right to do what they wanted with The Matrix franchise. And just as George Lucas had the right to do what he wanted with Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III."

Additionally, Clarey and those who agree with him seem to be missing a much larger point, which is that action movies on the whole are incredibly homoerotic. Think of the scene in Fast 5, where the Rock and Vin Diesel are fighting, their muscly visages seemingly fusing in some sort of primitive man-on-man mating ritual. Or the weird romantic tension between Sam and Frodo in the Lord of the Rings franchise. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up to the past naked in the Terminator movies. Or how in Die Hard, Bruce Willis gets progressively more greasy and undressed. Or pretty much the entirety of 300. The list goes on, spiraling into an infinite void of phallic-shaped guns and subtext. Straight men getting mad that an action movie features women kicking ass is like straight men getting mad that women show up in a gay porn. When I brought this trope up to him, he simply responded, "Heh, I really didn't study the LOTR series that much."

As to why he was specifically upset about Mad Max: Fury Road and not movies like Terminator, Tank Girl, and Alien—action movies featuring strong female leads, Clarey had this to say: "They hired a feminist to consult on [Fury Road]. The main actor (Charlize Theron) claims the movie is feminist. Even VICE.com has an article claiming it is a feminist movie. This unfortunately differentiates Mad Max from [previous] female-action films in that it now is practically guaranteed to have a very 'It's On Us' like sermon or lecture."

Ultimately, fears that action movies might be becoming too feminist comes from the same place as the anxieties of GamerGaters: the idea that spaces that have classically been reserved for men might no longer be strictly theirs. Those men are cowards. Pay them no mind, and go see the hell out of Mad Max: Fury Road this weekend, secure with the knowledge that your dollars are playing a small part in eroding the hegemony of men in Hollywood.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user Peter Wright.

Drew Millard is on Twitter.

The second season of HBO's crime anthology series, True Detective, is back on June 21. We've already watched the moody teaser, but HBO just dropped a longer trailer for the new season, which stars Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, and Rachel McAdams and has a pretty badass clip of McAdams going to town on a dummy with a giant knife. Give it a watch above.

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A traditional chicken, complete with beak. Photo via Flickr user Olivier Duval

On Tuesday, the scholarly journal Evolution nonchalantly published an article detailing a successful attempt by American researchers to manipulate chicken embryos so as to restore dinosaur-like snouts, a predecessor to the modern beak. The researchers were able to identify two proteins that seem to have evolved to fuse snout bones together. Blocking the proteins essentially amounts to rewitnding the evolutionary clock by tens of millions of years.

This act of selective time-traveling through modern birds to their dinosaur ancestry , especially so close to the release of Jurassic World, may inspire hope that researchers will soon be able to create quasi-dinosaurs from living creatures. Scientists say that isn't totally impossible, although it's highly unlikely—and the paper's authors cannot stress enough that this is not their aim.

"Please understand that this is not why we did these experiments," Harvard biologist and paper co-author Arkhat Abzhanov told VICE. "We were driven to explain how modern birds, with their unusually shaped crania, evolved from a more reptilian condition. It is exciting to know that one can actually explain a specific part of such vast evolutionary transformations in mechanistic terms, and it will take an enormous amount of research to understand the full complexity of the dino-to-bird transition."

Despite Abzhanov's words of caution, the intense longing on the part of Jurassic Park fans and other nerds to see some vestige of extinct dinosaurs revived is sure to hover over their research. After all, the 1993 blockbuster and its simplistic concept of using preserved dinosaur blood as a source of DNA to be inserted into modern reptiles' eggs has almost certainly helped popularize efforts to bring back ancient species through similar methods, most notably in the de-extinction movement.

As of 2014, scientists in Russia and South Korea had initiated a project to birth a Woolly Mammoth by implanting an intact nucleus from a frozen specimen into a live Asian elephant embryo. Meanwhile, other researchers aim to create hybrids by splicing mammoth and elephant DNA. Both processes sound a lot like those described in Jurassic Park by author Michael Crichton. While the mammoth efforts are unlikely to succeed, it's conceivable that we might revive more recently deceased creatures like passenger pigeons within the next couple of decades (which conservationists fear could make extinction seem less dire than it does now). The technology could well improve from there, allowing the recovery of older and older species, feeding fantasies of a real Pleistocene Park full of Woolly Mammoth-era life carved out of rural northern Siberian territory.

However, de-extinctionists rarely discuss reviving dinosaurs, if only because they can't be revived through traditional cloning or splicing practices. All DNA degrades over time, and the longest a strain could even conceivably survive is 6.8 million years, about one-tenth of the time that dinosaurs have been extinct. For lack of genetic blueprints and of closely related species into which to place their DNA, recreating dinosaurs or even dinosaur-like hybrids has long been far out of human reach. Dino enthusiasts have had to suffice with a few real and proposed animatronic dinosaur parks instead.

Still, even before the Evolution publication, some scientists believed that it might be possible to approximate dinosaurs, only not recovering their genetic information, but rather by functionally reversing their evolution. The idea is to lean on what we know of the fossil record and the development of uniquely avian features in modern birds. Last year, Jack Horner, a notorious paleontologist at Montana State University, proposed a similar process to the one used in the beak-to-snout experiments to help restore reptilian tails in modern bird species. Such processes wouldn't be able to restore an actual dinosaur, but it could work us back towards something like the tiny, proto-bird archaeopteryx.

"[The evolution of birds from dinosaurs] implies that buried deep within the DNA of today's birds are switched-off genes that control dinosaur-like traits," University of Oxford biochemist Alison Woollard told the Telegraph in 2013. "In theory we could use our knowledge of the genetic relationship of birds to dinosaurs to 'design' the genome of a dinosaur."

For his part, Abzhanov, the new study's co-author, believes that we may be able to revert features besides the beak.

"For example, a closer comparative analysis may reveal a mechanism which allows for birds to be warm-blooded as opposed to the crocodilians, which cannot control their body temperature," he told VICE. "Removing such a mechanism from a modern bird then may revert it to the more primitive cold-blooded condition."

However, Abzhanov and others point out that even if we can revert other parts of bird embryos, we don't have a roadmap to revive all of the dinosaur-era traits within them. We have a good understanding of the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, but it's not definitive, and we certainly don't know enough about bird genomes to understand which parts of them are ancient candidates for editing, especially given our complete and eternal lack of a dinosaur comparison.

"[Our] work is a first step," Yale paleontologist and paper co-author Bhart-Anjan Bhullar told VICE, "but it will be some time before we even know what parts of the genome could be altered into more ancestral sequences to ultimately produce more ancestral phenotypes."

Abzhanov also points out that making a change in an embryo doesn't mean that a creature can live with that specific alteration to its otherwise modern physiology. And as some aspects of their older bodies might be lost forever, that could mean that a living hybrid is effectively beyond reach.

"It is unlikely that [our unborn embryos] would survive very long," he says. "The slender palate bones of modern birds are shaped to allow for the movement of the upper beak—something they require for normal eating. This function would be strongly affected, if not impossibly, in many of the experimental chickens [i.e. they might well be unable to eat].

"At this point we do not know yet if [a dinosaur hybrid] is really possible. Many of the dino features have not been used by birds for tens of millions of years, so they may be gone forever genetically."

Still, even if they can never bring back an actual dinosaur or a quasi-dinosaur hybrid, Abzhanov, Bhullar, and their team have brought mankind about as close to living dinosaurs as we've been in millions of years. That's enough to drive the dreams of dino lovers for a few decades more, potentially launching some good new sci-fi franchises, if not actual, living specimens.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Ever tried browsing through Romanian stock photos? No? Well, if you had, then you'd probably have come across more than a few pictures of guys trotting through busy shopping streets on the backs of horses. Somehow these stallions have managed to bridge that cultural gap between the country's cities and its villages and carve out a place for themselves in modern day Romania.

For those after a unique insight into the country's love of horses, the market in Titu is probably the place to start. Even though it's only about 25 miles from the nation's relatively cosmopolitan capital, Bucharest, walking into the town center feels like walking into an Eastern European cowboy movie.

The horse market itself is less of a market and more of a fair. No one really buys or sells anything there, perhaps because most of those attending barely have a penny to their name. It takes place every Tuesday and it's generally treated as the week's "must-go" event. Locals show up with a horse, have a look about, possibly swap their horses for someone else's, then go home.

The event kicks off every week with the cart owners "test-driving" their horses. By that, I mean chaining their animal to a cart, inviting as many people as possible to climb onto said cart and then yelling and whipping the unfortunate animal until it begrudgingly manages to pull them forward.

VICE News: Bahrain's King Heads to UK Horse Show, While Human Rights Activist Heads Back to Prison for a Tweet

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This "unique" form of racing is imaginably the kind of thing that keeps RSPCA members awake at night. The poor creatures usually crack with exhaustion less than a few feet from where they start.

Amazingly enough, on the day I visited Titu, only one of the horses ended up injured. Which was odd, given that they were pulling around cartloads of men screaming all sorts of unsettling things like: "Let's kill this horse!" They said it was meant as encouragement. But to be honest, it was pretty hard to stomach.

As an outsider, I was in way over my head, but who am I to judge? It was quite obvious by the looks on people's faces that this event meant everything to them. Everyone seemed genuinely happy. Not so happy that they didn't take the time to come over and scream at me for taking pictures—but still, happy.

All in all, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't nice to witness the market's strong sense of community, but does it really have to be based on whipping the shit out of an animal?

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The breast-filled painting via WikiCommons

Fox 5 New York ran a story yesterday about the $179 million sale of Pablo Picasso's legendary painting Les Femmes d'Alger and, being the cultural pillars of morality that they are, they took it upon themselves to blur out anything that could come close to an approximation of a tit in the painting. "We decided to blur the nude portions so that we could show it to you, on-air," Fox's co-anchor Dari Alexander explained during the segment, Mediaite reports. By "nude portions," Fox means "stylized cubist boobies."

When New York magazine art critic/ace social media user/apparent breast fanatic Jerry Saltz saw the censored Picasso, he was sufficiently enraged, and took to the internet to air his grievances. "How sexually sick are conservatives & Fox News?" he wrote.

To be fair, Fox aren't total prudes. At least they left the cubist butts unscathed.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/NIdDStzt23Q' width='100%' height='360']

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A California Superior Court judge ruled earlier this month that teaching kids not to have sex rather than how to do so safely violates "an important public right." Although the ruling only applies to Fresno County's Clovis Unified School District and the five schools therein, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) hopes it will set a precedent that encourages other states to reevaluate their own programs.

It's interesting that the landmark ruling came down in the Golden State, because California is actually among the most progressive in the nation when it comes to teaching kids about sexual health. Back in 2003, lawmakers there mandated that all sex-ed materials be "medically accurate and objective"—which doesn't seem so unreasonable. But the parents who initiated the suit in Clovis County three years ago contended that some of the materials shown in classrooms were straight out of the 1950s.

For instance, according to the original suit, the students were using a textbook that advised them to "get plenty of rest" to avoid STDs, but didn't mention the existence of condoms.

And as late as 2013, some schools were apparently still showing the video "Sex Still Has a Price Tag," which "espouses extreme and biased viewpoints against women and teaches that condoms provide no protection from the transmission of STDs, that hormonal birth control makes women ten times more likely to contract an STD, and that the only legitimate relationship is a monogamous heterosexual marriage," according to the judge. (Among other artistic indulgences, the film compares a sexually active woman to a dirty shoe.)

After the suit was filed, the school district started making changes to comply with the law. The parents felt safe dropping the suit last year, so Judge Donald S. Black's decision was about who will pay attorney fees for the lengthy court battle. Phyllida Burlingame, Reproductive Justice Policy Director at the ACLU, says she hopes that the fear of a costly suit will cause other school districts to make sure their policies are in line with state law.

But many states' laws aren't as demanding as the one in California. Federally funded, abstinence-only sex-ed came about during the AIDS epidemic and "got a huge boost in the mid 90s," when it was written into a welfare reform law, Burlingame explains. This federal funding ballooned under George W. Bush and only began to decrease in 2010.

Still, as of this month, only 22 states and Washington DC have laws mandating sex-ed, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute. Remarkably, only two states outright ban their programs from being religious, and three insist on requiring that only "negative" information be taught with regards to sexual orientation. And California law technically only requires that middle- and high-school students be taught how to prevent HIV/AIDS; if schools want to go further than that, however, they must be "comprehensive," according to the Sacramento Bee.

Burlingame says that religion is slowly being deemphasized in various states' programs and that parents have the power to demand medically accurate information through the legal system.

"We hope that this ruling in Clovis is something that can serve as a national wake-up call or incentive for school districts or states that have similar requirements to take a look at the cirricula that they're using," she says. "And it shows it takes advocacy by students and their parents to say, 'Not on our watch, you cannot provide this misinformation that puts youth populations at risk.'"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Installation view of 'Maira Kalman Selects' (2015) at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo by the author

A quote from Darwin, scrawled on a column, greets visitors as they enter the music room at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum: "But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything. One lives to only make blunders." Perhaps a strange find in a museum dedicated to optimistic visions of the future and precision in design, but the quote itself stumbles into a kind of ars poetica for the exhibition it introduces—Maira Kalman's Maira Kalman Selects—which celebrates the incidental, the happenstance, and perhaps even the occasional error or malfunction.

Even if you don't know Maira Kalman's name, you've probably seen her work. The artist has been behind numerous New Yorker covers since 1995. She's also written and illustrated over a dozen books for children and regularly contributes illustrated columns to the New Yorker and the New York Times, painting subjects ranging from the quotidian to the monumental, from teapots and shoes to parks and monasteries, to Presidents Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington. Kalman has a clear affinity for historical figures and places, making her Cooper Hewitt show, in which almost no illustration appears, seem a natural extension of her practice. In fact, the show feels a bit like stepping into a real-life version of one of Kalman's whimsical and highly erudite milieus.

A love of history—and a love of the quirk in history—made Kalman a perfect candidate for the latest in a series of exhibitions by artists and designers who serve as guest curators at the Cooper Hewitt by handpicking their favorite objects from the impossibly large Smithsonian collection. The museum itself occupies the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in New York's Upper East Side. In what was once the mansion's music room, 18th-century French breeches share a display case with a 13th-century Egyptian cap, a few feet away from Lincoln's pall and pocket watch on one side, and 1940s screen printed linen next to a bowl from Greece, circa 800 BC, on the other. Time feels compressed, no longer linear. But it's a fitting space for Kalman's show, now.

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Installation view of 'Maira Kalman Selects' (2015) at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo by the author

As Kalman walked in for our interview, a ticking sound began playing over speakers, and a female opera singer's voice (that of Anne-Carolyn Bird) floated in over that: "What is the most precious thing? / Time. / And the time is too little."

The ticking is a recording of Lincoln's pocket watch, turned into a percussive beat by contemporary composer Nico Muhly, a friend of Kalman's. Kalman had selected the pocket watch from hundreds of thousands of pieces from the Smithsonian archives.

"I didn't go through all 210,000 objects, but I did go through a lot of them," Kalman told me as Muhly's song ended. "Then I had to create some kind of order. The idea was that we eat and we dress and we sleep and we live and we read and we die. In the meantime, we listen to music and dance and do other things."

As we walked through the show, the grouping of historic pieces seemed odd at times. A velvet-bound book containing documents signed by Holy Roman Emperor Josef II in 1785, granting a title to composer Johann Ferdinand Richter, is displayed next to a bulb lamp from 1966.

Read on Motherboard: Abraham Lincoln Would've Loved Drones

"I'm not a curator or historian, so I didn't have any constraints," said Kalman. "I was just able to put things together by instinct and a sense of space."

This approach reminded me of how Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, described her own understanding of history on Fresh Air following her second Man Booker Prize win: "Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they'd just gone into the next room."

Kalman's show is that next room. The dead are very real and very present—in addition to Lincoln's pall, there is an embroidered portrait of Queen Victoria commemorating her death and an embroidery sampler listing the birth and death years of four members of a single family—but with objects spanning so many centuries, the dead seem to be in conversation. It isn't such a leap that the calligraphy on a piece of paper by 17th-century Dutch painter Jan van de Velde should seem similar to the graphic-printed pattern on a piece of linen by designer Angelo Testa from the late 1940s and then echoed in a cuff bracelet made in 1993.

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Installation view of 'Maira Kalman Selects' (2015) at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo by the author

"Some things are clearly related," said Kalman. "The squiggle of the calligraphy, the squiggle of the bracelet, the line drawing." And then, pointing to the van de Velde piece, "It's almost like [famed New Yorker cartoonist Saul] Steinberg created that. Everything that we look at informs something else. And there's a sense of playfulness, that you can be inspired by something that's 2,000 years old. You don't have to know when something is made. You don't have to know anything."

Playfulness is at the heart of Kalman's oeuvre, generally, so it's no surprise that the most obviously humorous vignette in the room comprise three objects from Kalman's own personal collection. On the back of a ladder, circa 1949, hangs a pair of baggy pants once worn by Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini; beneath the pants is a pair of reddish-brown Oxfords Kalman has titled The Shoes That Slow Down Time.

It's through the presentation of small things Kalman gets at a big thing, the big thing: death.

"There are some things I completely adore and went very well with the room," she said. "Like that ladder, which is so beautiful. Toscanini's pants had to be in there, because of the importance that I own Toscanini's paints, and they're antifascist pants, and then the shoes."

What makes Toscanini's pants antifascist? "As far as I know," Kalman said, "these pants were the pants he wore, or could have worn, in 1936 to conduct the then Palestine Orchestra in their inaugural concert. He was invited by Bronisław Huberman, the man who created the Palestine Orchestra/Israel Philharmonic. Toscanini was really antifascist; he was anti-Mussolini, he wouldn't perform in Germany, he was anti-Hitler. His coming to Palestine at the time, to Tel Aviv, was really making a statement: I'm with these people, not with you."

"So I call them my antifascist pants," explained Kalman. "Because I'm from Tel Aviv, and mother's family came to Tel Aviv in the early 30s, I imagine [Toscanini] meeting her and falling madly in love. But I don't call them my 'Falling in Love with My Mother Pants.'"

I wondered how Kalman lives with all of these things, these artifacts accompanied by narratives both real and fictional, at home. "My living room is where I keep my ladders," she explained. "It's not as if the living room is filled with ladders, but sometimes it is. The pants are hanging on a hanger on a shelf in the living room. Really, the room is about time and memory, and those things represent a very poignant way of living with time."

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Installation view of 'Maira Kalman Selects' (2015) at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo by the author

On the platform displaying the ladder, pants, and shoes, Kalman has transcribed a long passage from Robert Walser's classic novella The Walk: "The man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters."

If Darwin's quote about blunders serves as the greeting to Kalman's exhibit, perhaps Walser's could serve as the thesis, with all these various and seemingly irrelevant items—spoons, figurines of dancers, 200-year-old school primers, a 16th-century woodcut of a rhinoceros—each demanding to be studied and observed as if of tremendous consequence. It's through the presentation of small things Kalman gets at a big thing, the big thing: death. Nowhere else is this better illustrated than by Lincoln's pall and watch. As we stood in front of these objects at the tour's end, the mood became decidedly somber and reverential.

"Originally, I had wanted to borrow Lincoln's hat from the Smithsonian, because I thought that was one of the most iconic and important design objects in our country. But it was too fragile to travel," said Kalman. "So Harry Rubinstein [the Smithsonian's curator of political history] opened his Lincoln archive and said, 'What else would you like?' When I went through it, something I kept stopping at was this pall, which juxtaposes a utility—it's a pall, it hangs over a coffin—with a lot of tassels and fringe."

"The watch was clearly something so poignant," Kalman continued. "[Lincoln] held it in his hand, he heard the ticking. We were able to take it to a watch restorer, George Thomas, who spent a day performing microsurgery, cleaning the whale oil off of it, and making it tick for a few minutes so that we could hear what Lincoln heard." As she said this, the ticking of Lincoln's watch began over the speakers again, followed by the trumpet and strings, and then Anne-Carolyn Bird's voice.

"The emotional connection to Lincoln is just something that's so primal for most people," Kalman explained. "To layer the ticking with music—he loved music—and the tenderness of hearing this ticking with this song, it really completes the story for me."

Maria Kalman Selects is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through June 7, 2015.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter.

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College doesn't have to be the "best four years of your life." Even Kant agrees. Photo by Flickr user Visha Angelova

During my senior year of college, a few friends who had graduated the year before came back to campus for homecoming. As we chugged beers and watched the football game (something we didn't care about, but felt like we should do for tradition's sake), a few alumni turned to me. "Don't let a single day go to waste here," they told me, "because once you graduate, it all goes to shit."

This was not the first time, nor the last time, that someone told me college would be the "best four years of my life." That everything would get worse after graduation. That adulthood was awful, and that I should cling to my last threads of youth before being pushed into the cruel "real world." In the weeks leading up to my college graduation, I was paralyzed with the horror that if these were the best years of my life, then I had surely wasted them feeling stressed and confused and hopelessly trying to figure out what I wanted out of life. If these were the best years of my life, what the fuck was my life going to be like going forward?

As it turns out, not bad at all—better, even. This was crystalized with the help of moral philosopher Susan Neiman, whose latest book, Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, could make any would-be Peter Pan reconsider the meaning of adulthood. I knew I loved Neiman from the second page, where she refers to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which I had been forced to read as an undergraduate, as the "worst-written book in the history of modern philosophy."

To her credit, Neiman makes Kantian philosophy accessible throughout the book, as she uses his writings as a launching point for her own thoughts on growing up. Her book arrives at a surprising conclusion: Growing up can be the most subversive act of all.

We like to think of "growing up" as a modern phenomenon—the growing pains of first love and teenage angst and having no idea what to major in seem unique to our time—but really, the concept started in the 18th century. "Growing up became a problem in the middle of the 18th century, which was the first time people actually had the choice to become something other than what their parents were," Neiman told me over the phone. Kant and Rousseau—philosophers who Neiman leans on heavily throughout the book—grappled with these issues intimately. "For all their differences, both Kant and Rousseau came from what we would now call 'working class' families, where it was something of a miracle that they got an education," Neiman explains. So "growing up," for them, took on a special meaning. "Really growing up is about thinking for ourselves, and this is something that we're actually too lazy and too scared to do as often as we should."

During the Enlightenment, when subversive thoughts were in themselves dangerous, thinking for yourself—and, vis a vis, growing up—was a dangerous, frightening thing. (Neiman noted a parallel between present-day Saudia Arabia or China, where there are similar societal restraints.) Plus, as Kant argued, governments don't want people to grow up either. "It's much harder to deal with adult mature citizens who think for themselves than it is to deal with complacent 'cows,' as he calls them, who are simply doing whatever is expected of them, and who are consuming and not asking any questions," said Neiman. "So what we have to overcome in growing up is a double problem: the one comes from the inside, and that's our own complacency, and the other comes from the outside, which is that no society that I know of really acts to encourage adulthood."

Couple this with the information-saturated world we live in—one where it's frighteningly easy to kick back and watch an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians rather than try to figure out, let alone express, our unique beliefs—and you've got a society of totally infantile adults. Which maybe explains why millennials are constantly accused of the stunted growth called "delayed adulthood."

It's true that millennials are taking longer to achieve the milestones that we associate with adulthood. We are waiting longer to get married, if we're even getting married at all. We are waiting longer to have children (though not as long as we're waiting to get married, curiously). We are more dependent on our parents, less likely to be financially independent, and seem to have "lost the map" on the road to adulthood. There has been much ink spilled about the subject, including an entire book ruminating on why young adults seem "stuck."

On Motherboard: The Great Recession Might Take the Narcissism Right Off Millennials

In Neiman's framework, though, these milestones have nothing to do with growing up. "Growing up is not about when you get a drivers license or when you can legally drink or even when you get married or have your first child—or even when your parents die," Neiman said to me. "There are these sets of markers that people traditionally associate with adulthood, and yet, none of those are proof of 'growing up' in the sense I'm talking about, which is really being self-determined and being able to do this quite difficult balancing act between the 'is' and 'ought.'"

The "is" and the "ought" are Neiman's way of reconciling our childish idealism (how the world ought to be) and our adult pragmatism (how the world really is). If childhood is a time when we see everything as it ought to be, and teenagehood is a time when we want to rebel against and reconstruct everything we see, then adulthood—in Neiman's sense—is the ability to balance the two.

Related: VICE meets philosopher Slavoj Žižek

Neiman's version of growing up isn't something that can be thrust upon you. You have to really want to grow up. One becomes an adult through experiences like education and travel, reading and learning, challenging your own beliefs. Neiman also suggests taking breaks from the internet, since for all its informational value, it's often a distraction in really growing up ("If you spend your time in cyberspace watching something besides porn and Korean rap videos, you can gain a great deal," she writes in the book, though in a later chapter, she talks about the benefits from going a whole week without the internet).

When you talk about growing up in this sense, no one is ever really "grown up"—it's a constant balancing act, a perpetual state of growing.

At the end of the book, she reflects on a conversation with a colleague, who is appalled that she is writing on the topic of growing up. "How awful," she remembers him saying. "My hero was always Peter Pan."

The mistake here is confusing "growing up" with "giving in"—one who has resigned to living a dull, complacent life, going through the conventional steps, accepting the conventional thoughts, never growing, never changing. "But in fact," Neiman tells me over the phone, "it would be much more powerful if all decided, 'We're working on growing up. We want to be self-determined adults, not children who are closing our eyes.'"

There's nothing particularly seductive about the idea of adulthood as society presents it, but in Neiman's version, growing up becomes a subversive act. Our generation's growing pains are not so different from Kant's, or Rousseau's—and like them, we too can grow up.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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"I'd love to have sex with a black girl," read the message from David, 25, who had matched with me on Tinder. "I've never been with one before. You in?"

I unmatched with David immediately. And yet, the questions kept coming. "What are you?" asked Santy, 21, a student. "You look like you have a bit of oriental in you," wrote Darren, 22, a musician. "I have a thing for black girls," said George, 28, a banker.

This is what it's like to be a mixed-race girl on Tinder. Out of the hundreds of conversations I've had on the app, about half of them have involved a man tokenizing me for my ethnicity. And if they're not harping on my race and calling me "black beauty," then I'm often expected to respond to their pretty gross sexual messages or dick pics. It's because of comments like these, along with the rampant misogyny that seems to fill the app, that despite a fair amount of matches, I have only been on two real-life Tinder dates.

Read: Online Dating Is Turning Us All Into Tamagotchis

I understand why people are interested in people like myself who look racially ambiguous. Race, however flawed a concept, is used as a tool for understanding people. I'm curious about people's backgrounds, too. As humans, we are always searching for a way to identify, and things like race or skin tone serve as physical reminders of our ancestry and heritage. But there are appropriate ways to talk with someone about their racial background, and then there are ways to come off like a clueless asshole.

For the record, I identify as being mixed-race. I'm black Caribbean and white—but I also identify as black, since I recognize that this is how many people view me. By the very nature of our upbringings, mixed race people are more likely suffer from mild identity crises. A study released in the UK last year said that we often struggle to develop an identity for ourselves. The constant questioning over where we are from—"No, where are you really from"—is fucking painful. Those who make guesses that I am Caribbean, Egyptian, Nigerian, or "Oriental," instead of just asking me, are just as bad.

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According to statistics from dating site OkCupid, black women are the least popular demographic online. Kevin Lewis, a sociologist at the University of California San Diego who analyzed the data, said: "Most men (except black men) are unlikely to initiate contact with black women."

Lewis looked at interaction patterns of 126,134 users on the site, and although there aren't comparable figures for Tinder, he concluded that "racial bias in assortative mating is a robust and ubiquitous social phenomenon, and one that is difficult to surmount even with small steps in the right direction. We still have a long way to go." In other words, being a black girl in the online dating world really sucks.

Another study using the Facebook dating app Are You Interested reached a similar conclusion: black women have the lowest rate of response.

These stats don't make a distinction between black and mixed-race women, but they probably do apply in a world where most people still adhere, if unconsciously, to the one drop rule—the concept that any person who have "one drop" of black blood flowing through their veins is considered to be black.

On Tinder, I seem to be far more likely to be "matched" with black men, and less likely to match with white guys, which corroborates Lewis's figures. However, the comments about my race—"I'd love to sleep with a black girl" or "Do you have (insert race here) in you... Would you like some?"—come almost uniquely from white men. The danger of being fetishized is amplified in digital dating.

When I get a message on Tinder, one of the first thoughts I have is whether or not this person simply has a strange preference for black or mixed-race women. And when people ask me where I'm from, as they do in almost every single conversation I have, I know that chances are it's going to end badly. I don't want to fulfill anyone's racial fantasy of getting with a big-assed black girl or feel like I should thank them because, you know, they actually find black women attractive.

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I'm not the only one who feels this way. I recently took part in an academic focus group of mixed-race students, and amid our conversations about growing up in mixed-race households and racially "choosing sides," the topic of Tinder invariably came up.

One girl, 23, said that initially she didn't mind the questions or "focus" on her ethnicity on Tinder, but then it became too much. "I realized it was such a prevalent focus for a lot of people. Especially when they opened with lines like, 'Ooh you're exotic.' Like, I'm not a fruit," she said.

Another girl, 20, explained that she didn't use dating sites because she already had a "billion tales about dating and being fetishized."

"I dated a guy once who basically made it clear from the start that he found me attractive because I was mixed-race," she said. "This led to me developing an insane jealousy towards other mixed-race girls and feeling extremely self-conscious about myself. Dating sites, to me, just seem to make that kind of behavior even more commonplace, and the thought of being approached by someone with a mentality like that makes me feel ill."

I understand her outlook. I don't want to be reduced to a coarse stereotype of my race or made to feel like the only reason why I am being considered as a potential partner is because they have watched a lot of "ebony" porn and would love to get a taste of the unusual "other," but sometimes it seems an inevitable part of dating.

When, last week, a guy on Tinder told me I had nice features and subsequently asked if I was mixed race, I instantly became defensive.

"Yes I am," I said, as petulantly as Tinder allows, "but you can be of any race and still have nice features." To his credit, this man turned out to be an exception to the rule.

"I meant you have nice features as an individual," he retorted. I felt bad for the assumption, but I couldn't help it. Earlier that week, a guy on Tinder had called me "caramel cutie," and these things have a way of staying with you.

Obviously on Tinder, we are all reduced to a smudge of ourselves—a tiny profile picture, a few lines of a bio—and there's only so much interesting conversation to be had. But I really would love it if men would stop asking me about my ethnicity before questions about my profession, my studies, or my interests. There's a lot more to me than the color of my skin.

Follow Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff on Twitter.

Thumbnail photo via Flickr user Andy Rennie

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Old-school theatre marquee for an old-school event. Photo by the author

The quizmaster is stumping no one. Everybody in this packed Toronto movie theatre knows exactly who invented basketball.

"James Naismith!" they shout in unison.

Nerdy and nostalgic Canadians have gathered at the Carlton Cinema for a childhood history lesson—or 40—on a Wednesday evening. It's the premiere of the newest of Canada's Heritage Minutes, preceded by 40 of the old ones and a round of trivia about them. The event's free tickets were snapped up in all four host cities: Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, and Calgary.

Will and Thuy Tien arrived at the sold-out Toronto show first, securing seats up front.

"I guess it was an obvious nerd event to check out," says Will, who fittingly, heard about it through Nerd Nite, which promotes events with the tagline "Be there and be square."

The 100 people gathered in the theatre are a mix of friends and couples, mostly in their 20s and 30s. They could be awaiting any playfully ironic screening—maybe The Room or The Rocky Horror Picture Show—but instead they're clutching complimentary kiddie combos and getting ready for a trip back in time.

"This is the perfect event. It's free and it's nostalgia and it's Canadian history. Those are my three favourite things," says Danielle, who memorized the Minutes growing up in Halifax.

She's not intimidated by the prospect of tonight's Minutes marathon, which will feature half of the 80 Heritage Minutes produced.

"It's a challenge. A Canadian challenge," she said.

It turns out, it's a challenge that every person here has been preparing for their entire lives. As each minute springs onto the screen, people join in to recite the classic lines, like "The medium is the message!" and "But I need these baskets back!" and "Johnson. Molly Johnson."

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The premiere marks the return of the Minutes to movie screens after a 20-year absence. Back in the early 1990s, they used to screen at theatres and drive-ins before the feature presentation.

"We wanted to bring the Minutes back to the big screen because that's the way a lot of people have experienced them and remembered them, so we thought that could be a lot of fun," says Davida Aronovitch, who leads the Minutes program at Historica Canada.

While they're beloved, no one is taking the Minutes overly seriously tonight. We laugh at the giant costumes, the overwrought acting, the dramatic musical scores.

"I'm going to dress my child like that," one girl vowed when the little boy who named Winnie-the-Pooh appeared on the screen with his unfortunate bowl cut.

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The brand new minute, about the Nursing Sisters in the First World War, is well received, greeted with whoops and claps. It's consistent with the new style of the Minutes, which are less theatrical and have a more contemporary look and feel.

"We try to make the editing a bit quicker, we try to make the storylines and the drama move a little bit faster and the visuals are kind of bigger, more epic, more cinematic," Aronovitch says.

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Still, there's something about those classics.

"There's a level of camp that the old ones have. But the new ones are compelling," says Melanie, who owns them all on DVD. She stumbled on the Historica Canada store when she went online to rewatch old Heritage Minutes. As you do.

American audiences are well-accustomed to seeing their history come alive on the big screen. They immortalize it in Hollywood blockbusters like Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan. In Canada, we immortalize ours in bite-size Minutes. And we can't get enough of them.

When the screen fades to black, somebody screams out, "MORE!"

Follow Sonya Bell on Twitter.