Noshame in action

In modern battle rap, nothing is off limits. Marriages break down as affairs are brought to light, and relationships are destroyed as rappers are blamed for the deaths of their friends. No insult is too offensive, and the merest suggestion that a rapper is anything other than a cis-gendered, heterosexual, gang-affiliated stud is often enough to lose a battle. This is what makes transgender battle rapper Noshame so remarkable. In a scene where compromising information about an opponent's private life is an invaluable commodity, she is uniquely and defiantly open about her queer identity.

The major battle leagues in Britain and North America regularly sell out thousand-strong venues, and command an audience of millions online. But although the wider queer hip-hop scene has been getting a lot of shine recently, queer representation within battle rap remains marginal at best. (The only real exception is all-female league Queen Of The Ring, whose roster boasts a number of talented bisexual and lesbian MCs.) Noshame is the only transgender battler in the world.

Noshame came to prominence in a battle against gibbering tool (and fellow Texan) Michael White, but her recent clash with Joe Cutter is a better showcase of her aggressive, subversive style. I spoke to her to find out why she keeps returning to the ring to subject herself to onslaughts of transphobic abuse.

VICE: Tell me about how you got into battling.
Noshame: I battled as a male, in the [now unfashionable] freestyle genre, but after I transitioned I decided that I wouldn't battle any more. But [Dallas radio DJ] Headkrack told me that I was wasting my talent, and an opportunity to shine a light on my situation. It wasn't "go chase your dreams," it was "you owe this to your community."

When people think of battle rap, they think of 8 Mile and freestyle on beats. How would you describe the modern era of pre-written, a cappella battle rap?
It's a more intricate form. It's a more intelligent, well-thought-out process. I can prep, I can study you, I can find out your weaknesses, and you can find out mine.

People in the queer community might find it strange that you actively want your trans identity to be exposed as a "weakness."
It's the culture. If I go into hip-hop, I have to have thick skin. I know that people aren't fully educated. One of the things I found most therapeutic about my transition was that if I wanted people to accept me for who I was, I had to accept their viewpoints, no matter how disgusting. Some of the most redneck, right-wing people have come around to accepting me.

So nothing's off limits?
If your mother has a disability, it's gonna get used in a battle. So for me to be like "I'm trans, don't bring that up because it might be offensive to my community" would be asking for special treatment. And that's the last thing that I want.

The only exception was Kidd K in my debut for AHAT. If I could, I would've punched him in his face, because he started with hate speech even before the battle. I wanted to kick that guy's ass. I got in his face like "please, dude, swing on me, and get your ass kicked by a tranny."

Battle rappers often talk about people struggling to separate battles from reality, and thinking they can insult battlers online or in the street.
Definitely. But I don't want the [LGBT] community to be upset because someone calls me a tranny, or even a faggot, in a battle. Joe Cutter went pretty hard too. He said some hurtful things. Then afterward I bought him a hot-dog from Wienerschnitzel. That's exactly what I like about battling.


When I was a kid, I don't know how many times being good with words kept me out of a fight. It's that way in battle rap. [Cutter] is now one of my best friends in battling. We still talk to this day. He had trouble, and I told him I'd find him a job if he wanted to move to Dallas. He's a wonderful person. Of everything he said, he meant nothing.

Does the LGBT community need to understand that attitude before battling can continue its expansion into the mainstream?
[Battling] has to target the right audience. The LGBT community might be a small audience, but in America there is a lot of support for LGBT rights so [queerphobic battlers are] actually shutting out a portion of the population. We looked to African American culture [in the past] to show us what was cool. But recently, it's been the LGBT community that's been the trendsetter.

Joe Cutter and Noshame

You can see that tension in the way your writing moves between subverting trans stereotypes and straightforward gun bars.
In my debut, I played it up more. "You know I don't play, I already told you that I pack / I just keep it tucked away"—everyone said that was cheesy. In a cypher last week, Eminem said he "keeps it tucked like Caitlyn Jenner's dick." It's so cheesy that one of the greatest lyricists of all time said it.

If I rap about being trans, it's a gimmick. If I rap gun bars, I don't know about it because I'm trans. If I rap about my actual life, growing up on the west side in Phoenix, people don't believe it. They can't see that 13-year-old kid who beat people up just to prove that he was tough, so that no one would pick on him, and no one found out his deep, dark secret.

Whereas when a guy's shouting transphobic abuse at you in a battle you can scream back "fuck you, I'm trans" in his face.
It's definitely a relief. There's that other side of me that did protect me for so long and did keep me safe for all those years, and it's good to let that person come out. If I [get aggressive] in battle rap, it's over when it's over.

I know that I've changed hundreds of peoples' minds, and made them think differently, positively, of my community. And for that I'm blessed. I just wish someone else would step up to battle me.

Follow NoShame on Twitter.

The bears in action. Screenshot via YouTube

Ah, the Berenstain Bears.

These fuzzy critters are hands down some of the most beloved children's literature characters of the modern age. Who of us hasn't learned a valuable (if not a little heavy-handed) lesson from Brother and Sister Bear?

The Bears taught us such varied lessons as: you should stop being a greedy little asshole and share, and if you bite your nails you're a gross, disgusting person who deserves to be a pariah among your family.

The treehouse-living Bears love us so much that they're still teaching us—technically grownups—important lessons today. And they have one final major lesson in store for us: We all live in an alternate reality and nothing we know is real.

You could say that they are our Ursidae Neo.

Whoa.

The Bears are communicating these newfound realities to us through their name. Take a cold hard look at the wording above. Does something look wrong to you? Do you remember it being Berenstein with an E, not Berenstain with an A?

If you do, you're not alone. There are many who remember it this way. In fact, there are so many Berenstein believers that people in the know will cite that as proof that this is a glitch in the matrix. I've dubbed these people Berensteinites. I talked to quite a few people I knew, and most of them remember the bears' surname being spelt with an E.

"I only realized that 'A' reading to my kid about eight months ago," one of my friends said. "That was a disturbing bedtime."

To be completely honest, I am one with the believers of the E. I personally remember, vividly, the Berenstain Bears being spelt with an E and calling it that for years. Even during the writing of this piece, the misspelled name is right there on the tip of my tongue. I constantly need to go back and change all of the Berensteins to Berenstains because my mind is so set in its way.

Learning that I have been wrong all these years has caused what can only be described as a personal crisis of sorts.

I always figured something would eventually break me mentally and emotionally. I never thought it would be the Berenst(a)ein Bears.
— Mack Lamoureux (@MackLamoureux) August 5, 2015

The Berenst(E)ain Bear theory has been around for a few years. But it recently exploded last week when Run the Jewels rapper/music producer, and possible Berensteinite, El-P, went on, I assume of course, a weed-powered tweeting spree about it.

Unlike many other conspiracy theories, the doctrine of the Berensteins seems to be gaining traction due to that fact that readers can take a side. There's Team Stein and Team Stain and some of the people misremembering the fact, whatever they think that fact is, see that misremembrance as proof of a different, and possibly darker, timeline.

Several theorists in particular thinks that the Berenst(E)ain Bear conspiracy is proof of the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect is the brainchild of Fiona Broome, and it pulls its name from when a large group of people all had vivid memories of Nelson Mandela dying in prison. A thing that in this timeline, as they say, never happened. The theory reasons that if there is a large population of people who all share a similar false memory, then the phenomenon is "related to alternate history and parallel realities."

The whole thing makes total sense right?

Like all complex and important issues, you firstly must understand the history if you want to understand the theory, and what a long and enchanted history the Berensteinites have. The first time someone noticed the bears attempt to warn us was back in 2009 on a dreadlock-dedicated forum. A user by the name of Burke posted in Dreadlock Truth asking why the pronunciation of his favourite childhood books has changed. In these days, no one grasped the the issue at hand and the severity of the bears' true message. Other users just offered solutions that the Berenstein name "sounds Jewish" and the change could've been a result of neo-Nazi aggression.

The theory remained dormant for a number of years before it popped up on the humourist website the Communist Dance Party in a lengthy 2011 post. Although the words were written in jest, the writer—the false prophet—blows the whole Berenstain Bears theory open and relates it to theButterfly Effect.

"At some point between the years 1986 and 2011, someone traveled back in time and inadvertently altered the timeline of human history so that the Berenstein Bears somehow became the Berenstain Bears," he wrote. "This is why everyone remembers the name incorrectly; it was Berenstein when we were kids, but at some point when we weren't paying attention, someone went back in time and rippled our life experience ever so slightly."

Little did he know how important that notion would come to be in the movement.

The next appearance of the theory came in the form of a 2012 post on the blog The Wood Between Worlds by a user named Reese, called "The Berenstain Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe." These 1,600 words would prove to be the main literature of this modern movement. It is simply the Berensteinites' New Testament, their Vedas.

In it, the blog's author makes a "modest proposal," one that implies that all of us are "living in our own parallel universe." He propagates that there are at least two universes; the "stEien" universe and the "stAin" universe. The author attempts to prove the theory as true, and breaks it down into mathematical and scientific terms.

Here's a tidbit:

I propose that the universe is a 4-dimensional complex manifold. If you don't se habla math jargon, that means I propose the 3 space dimensions and the 1 time dimensions are actually in themselves complex, meaning they take values of the form a+ib, part "real" and part "imaginary."

Keep in mind this is all about the Berenstain Bears—those beloved children's characters.

The Berensteinites don't mess about.

From there, the theory gestated until it started appearing last year on a subreddit with the apt name Glitch in the Matrix. This is when the gospel began to spread. The subreddit is dedicated to those things that "we usually tell ourselves to forget, because they're just too out of step with what experience tells us reality should be like." The Berensteinites first major Reddit appearance occurred when they took over a post asking if anyone had ever seen a picture of Henry VIII eating a turkey leg. They have called this corner of the internet home ever since.

The Mandela Effect became such a popular subject that a subreddit dedicated solely to the idea was started in 2013. It exists as a place where people can see if misremembering the release date of "Boom Boom Pow" is proof of parallel universes. It is a bastion of intellectual thought. A recent post on the subreddit went up by dedicated Berensteinite Roxxorursoxxors who laid out the plans for a 20-year experiment on their two-year-old to see if the theory is valid.

"I'm going to do my best to forget this debate even exists, not bias her, and make sure she has berenstAin bear books until she turns about 10," Roxxorursoxxors wrote. "At that point I will take them away. When she turns 25 or so I'll ask her to what they're called and have her write down the answer."

To try and get a handle on what may be the most important scientific theory to arise in the 21st century, I thought I would go to an expert. Dr. Henry L. Roediger is one of the foremost experts on false memories in North America, so obviously I wrote him about the Berensteinites to get his thoughts. Roediger responded by explaining what's occurring may be more Occam's Razor than X-Files.

"I'm not sure that misremembering one letter in a long name is a major league false memory," he wrote VICE in an email. "My guess is that in this case that "stein" is remembered because it is a common ending of many names—Einstein, Frankenstein, Goldstein, etc."

He's obviously a shill in the great Berenstain conspiracy.

I knew I couldn't believe this expert's account in regards to this notion, as Reddit is never wrong. So I wrote Random House, the publisher of the books since 1962, in an attempt to confirm this theory. In the email I asked if they had always spelled the name with an "A" and if they were certain there were no titles printed under the Berenstein name. Almost immediately after I sent the email I received a reply from the publishing house. It was supernaturally fast. Almost like they knew it was coming.

"Thank you for contacting the Random House Children's Books publicity department," they wrote me. "Please note that due to the volume of emails we receive daily, it may take some time for us to respond to your request."

A likely story.

They know the Berensteinites are on to them.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Roosh V doesn't like beer showers. Screenshot via Youtube user The ConU.

Read: Why Do So Many of Canada's Women Columnists Write Like They Hate Women?

In a video posted Saturday evening, infamous blogger and "pickup artist," Roosh V, is shown getting beer thrown at him and fighting with angry women and men on a Montreal street, where he was to hold a conference about the "problems that Western men face."

Roosh V, short for Daryush Valizadeh, has made his way into Canada despite an online petition signed by over 40,000 people trying to keep him out. "We must ensure that Roosh V and his following are not allowed to flourish in the dark corners of our society, for the same reasons that we do not allow white supremacy a legitimate place in Canada," reads the petition.

In the video, a crowd surrounds Valizadeh in a confrontation when two women throw what appears to be beer on him.

"You piece of shit, how dare you fucking come to Canada?" says one of the women in the video. "This is fucking Roosh V! This is the guy who says that rape should be legal!" she screams through the streets.

Roosh V gets beer thrown at him in Montreal. Video via Youtube userThe ConU.

Valizadeh has been vocal about wanting to make rape legal on private property.

"Get the fuck out of here you piece of shit! You're not welcome in this city!" says a man at the scene.

Earlier that day, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre denounced Valizadeh over Twitter saying that he is "not welcome in Montreal," and calling on the federal government to make clear whether his presence is accepted in Canada.

Valizadeh responded to the incident on Twitter saying "They shower my wig with beer, I shower their entire country with truth." There is also a new post on his site saying that he is filing a police report for aggravated assault against the woman he says assaulted him. He also calls her out on deleting her social media accounts after he doxed her, and claims that she spent the night hunting for Valizadeh with a group of men to intimidate him.

Two years ago, a woman was charged with assault after she threw a drink at Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Charges were later dropped during the trial.

Valizadeh is known for his controversial site Return of Kings (Google it yourself), where he and his writers advocate for things like the legalization of rape, and dehumanizing women in general. Some headlines on the page currently include "American Women Are Only Good For One Thing" and "6 Ways Modern Women Are Just Like Orcs."

Despite all the controversy, Valizadeh still feels he "won" the Canadian battle against "Social Justice Warriors" such as feminist activist Aurelie Nix. In a recent post on his site, an article titled "How Roosh V Won The Battle Of Montreal," describes his victory through the fact that he made it to Canada and still gave his speech.

But yesterday, Concordia University's community blog The ConU shared a story alleging that Valizadeh didn't actually get to give his speech and that he faked the celebration. "Instead, Roosh V gathered with about a dozen MRAs in the room where he was staying and began a disinformation campaign. Using Twitter and his personal forum, fake accounts published decoy posts claiming the event was taking place," reads the post.

Valizadeh shared this "Historic victory in Montreal" video filmed right after he says he finished his speech.

"They had over 100 people today combing the entire city like idiots trying to find where the hotel was," he said in the video. "But yet, as you can hear in the background, the speech was successful. We did it, and now we are enjoying our victory lap."

Glass of wine in hand, he calls out everyone who tried to stop him and stop his speech from happening, including the CBC and Bell Media.

"If you are for me, I want to tell you that today, your team won. You are on the right side. You are on the team that will continue to win. And if you are against me, better luck next time," and the crowd of men in the background begin to laugh.

"We are better than you, we are smarter than you, and I can't speak for the guys here, but I am better looking than you."

Next up on Valizadeh's tour, and his last stop, is Toronto on August 15.

City Councillor/Twitter demigod Norm Kelly tweeted out today that Toronto does not welcome Valizadeh's views.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has yet to take a public stance on Valizadeh's upcoming event.

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter.

All photos by the author

On a Wednesday afternoon in August at the Jersey Shore, while most busybodies were at work, tourists and locals alike prepared for a highly anticipated beauty pageant. Shelley, Ocean City's resident mermaid, introduced this year's contestants with a pleasant melody sung over the microphone:

Here it comes, Miss Crustacean...
Here it comes, our ideal...
Isn't it so pretty Crowned today in Ocean City...
Claws so cute and feelers so bitty
It's a crab with true, true gritty...
Oh here it comes Miss Crustacean....

To state the obvious, these aren't your ordinary, run-of-the-mill bikini-clad beauty queens—they are hermit crabs, the beloved crawly souvenir you likely made your parents buy you on the boardwalk as a child. "Contestants are judged on the originality of their entries," Mark Soifer, Ocean City's Director of Public Relations who has been running the pageant since 1980, tells VICE. With entries ranging from multiple "Crabnados" to "Crabby Wonka," there was no shortage of creativity.

As with human beauty pageants, Miss Crustacean is not without controversy. For a town with an award-winning humane society, the crabs are often overlooked in Ocean City. While a pink painted shell might look cute, it's ultimately a death sentence for the hermit crab. There were people brandishing placards that read "HERMIT CRABS ARE NOT 'PETS'" and "CAPTIVITY KILLS HERMIT CRABS," at the pageant, and Soifer himself even told a crowd showing off embellished shells, "We want to see nice, healthy hermit crabs at this event from now on." He later told me, "The best thing we can do is give them information on how to take care of the crabs."

Controversies aside, the day carried on, and in the end there could be only one winner. "The Wicked Pinch of the West" took home the coveted Cucumber Rind Cup and walked down the runway wearing a black witch hat and broomstick. As the pageant song suggests, the first place decapod had claws that really were cute and feelers so bitty.

See more of Amy Lombard's photographs from the Miss Crustacean Beauty Pageant below. And follower her on Twitter.

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and Twitter.

Source photo via WikiCommons

Read: Should Weed Be Used for Treating Eating Disorders?

A new scientific study shows that Shakespeare might have put down the quill to spark a joint as he penned his classic plays—at least according to the study's author, Professor Frances Thackery from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Thackery's study, published in the July/August 2015 edition of the South African Journal of Science, takes a close look at 17th-century pipe fragments excavated from Shakespeare's garden and around Stratford-Upon-Avon. The fragments, which contain traces of nicotine, cannabis, and cocaine, were originally reported on in 2001, according to CNN. Four of the pipes in Billy's garden tested positive for weed.

Thackery's study explains that the nicotine found in the pipe fragments may have been brought by explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who was reported to have introduced the plant to England. Similarly, the cocaine can be attributed to explorer Sir Francis Drake, who may have brought back the leaves after his 1597 visit to Peru.

Taking the pipe findings and running with them, Thackery dove into Shakespeare's prose, searching for proof that the bard liked to blaze. He became particularly enamored with Shakespeare's Sonnet 76, which mentions an "invention in a noted weed," which Thackery assumes to be pot, and a "compound strange," which he thinks is cocaine.

As air-tight as that argument may seem, a Shakespeare scholar told Huffington Post last weekend that Professor Thackery's reading of the sonnet was a "really lame interpretation" and that there's not really any evidence that people called marijuana "weed" back in Shakespeare's times. Sorry to kill your buzz, Thackery.

At the time of publishing, the professor has not yet attempted to scrape Shakespeare's bowls for a Renaissance-era resin hit, but we wouldn't put it past him.

Illustration by Tyler Boss

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

Near dusk, once the last customers had been sent off clutching their sachets of Earl Grey and green jasmine, K closed the doors of his little shop in Montreal's Latin Quarter and lowered the blinds. A few of us had already gathered, and by dark a few more trickled in. We pushed six tables together, set two electric kettles to near boiling, and started to unload our haul—foil pouches with Hong Kong addresses, baggies of dried green herbs with scribbled notes. This select group of collectors had gathered in North America's best tea shop for the free-for-all that K officially calls "After Hours." When he described it to me, he said, "Think Fight Club." Everybody brings his or her best stuff and, under the guise of camaraderie, hopes to be pummeled into enlightenment.

We'd taste 15 to 20 teas, doing several infusions of each. K asked whether I'd ever been tea-drunk. A whole leaf releases caffeine more slowly than a pulverized bean, but the more players you add, the more it builds toward a kind of mental gamelan concert. "When you consume a lot of tea, like we're going to do tonight," K said, "it's quite a nice buzz, because you're getting very stimulated and very soothed at the same time."

Tea geeks eschew sugar. Milk is kryptonite to them. They seek out teas of consummate lightness, often coming from tiny "gardens" in places like Darjeeling, Taiwan, and southern China. These rare teas have always simmered on the back burner of caffeine culture, damned by association with Grandma's cuppa. To coffee people, tea is just dirty water. But lately, as more people have discovered Camellia sinensis's 5,000-year pedigree and pharmaceutical charms, it has become an unlikely breakout.

I'd gotten to know K at a UC Davis conference on terroir, the French term for "taste of place," in 2012. He was the tea guy with the crisp English accent and diction so soft and precise that it could be taken for menace. We poured a legendary cabernet from one of Napa's best vineyards, and the Masters of Wine in the group expounded on its "powerful nose" and "essence of cassis." Then K set down his glass and said, "There's a hole right through the center of this one." And we all got quiet and stared at our glasses because, now that he mentioned it, there was a hole right through the center.

I stayed in touch, bought teas whenever I was in town, and every now and then he slid me stuff that was beyond my pay grade. It was exhilarating to get a glimpse of tea's heights, the ethereal aromatics that had no earthly analogues, and depressing to realize just how low on the mountain I'd been toiling. Then K let slip that he'd soon be returning from Asia with some ridiculously rare goodies. "I guarantee that a tasting of this caliber is not happening anywhere else in North America," he told me. I gave him the full puppy dog, and he said I could come, but he banned cameras and other obvious journalistic paraphernalia. The first rule of Tea Club is you do not talk about Tea Club. "Can I take notes?" I asked. "Everybody takes notes," he said.

For more on unique beverages, watch our doc on Korean 'Poo Wine':

At K's shop, the tables were scattered with notepads and packets of tea and an insane number of pots—some triangular, some heavy-bellied, some iron, some clay. All were tiny by Western standards. Serious tea is to Lipton as espresso is to Folgers. Fistfuls of leaves are stuffed into elfin pots for brief, intense infusions. After a few hits, your mind does somersaults.

For our first cup, we had a golden Bi Luo—"Snail Spring"—from Yunnan. We set the pots on boats—low wooden boxes with slatted tops—and filled them to the brim with water, then pushed down the lids so water cascaded over the sides and through the slats. It was nice and malty, but everyone withheld praise. It was just a warm-up.

We followed it with a Yiwu made from centuries-old wild tea trees, then white tea, oolong, Hei He Shan from the Vietnam border. The cups were coming every few minutes, and I began to feel my chest opening like a flower.

PU'ER TEA
Pu'er is a type of aged dark tea made in Yunnan, China. After they're dried and rolled, the tea leaves go through a process of fermentation and oxidation.

By the 20th cup, the heavy hitters came out. K staggered us with a chestnut-scented Thurbo Estate from Darjeeling. "So spacious," somebody murmured. Everything was hyper-sharp, like I'd been chewing coca leaves all day. I wondered whether I was tea-drunk.

The oolong specialist at the shop presented a velvety Da Hong Pao from China's Wuyi Mountains, some of the oldest tea turf on Earth. Good Wuyi costs more per ounce than gold. "It's the Holy Grail of tea," he said. "In Japan, Taiwan, and India, we know what the best teas are. We can find them. But China is different. Over a million producers, with the longest history and culture. Some old families still have the best plants and knowledge. There's always some double-black-belt master in the Wuyi Mountains making tea beyond what you've encountered."

The Tea Club usually ends with the Pu'ers. Most teas are best as fresh as possible, but Pu'ers get better with age, making them eminently collectible. In China, Pu'er "cakes"—compressed disks the size of small Frisbees—are bought and sold like masterpieces. This spring, a disk of ultra-rare 1910 Pu'er surfaced in Vancouver at a price of $600,000.

A Gérard Depardieu lookalike who writes the poetic descriptions for K's online catalogue brewed a 1996 Dayi full of musty cave energy.

It drank like a Werner Herzog film. Like all Pu'ers, it's prized ($15 a gram, if you must know) as much for its chi as its flavor. "With great teas, I always look for that special feeling," he said. "Westerners taste from the neck up. But in Asia, they taste with their whole body."

"Nice bib on that one," said K, tracing the chi down his chest.

The Depardieu lookalike, who leads whiskey-tea-pairing seminars around Montreal, broke out a bottle of 2003 Evan Williams single-barrel bourbon and matched it with a 1976 Bai Hao roasted oolong that made us swoon. I was deep in the cave, free-associating like a schizophrenic, dots of meaning stippling my consciousness, and suddenly a theory of "The Leaf and the Bean" coalesced on the cave wall. Tea, I realized, doesn't work like coffee or wine, where flavor is an edifice built from blocks of compounds, like a cathedral, the more complex the more impressive. It's more like a reflecting pool, where you lean in closer and closer, seeing nothing, and then suddenly the wind stops and the ripples calm and you gasp as the whole sky blinks back at you.

I turned to communicate my revelation to my fellow clubbers, but the kettles were already burbling for another round. There were still a few hours of night, and there was so much more tea to drink. As the sun swung hard around Yunnan, firing a trillion chloroplasts on green terraced hillsides, K filled his pot with something rare and potent—I'd lost track of what—and wraiths of steam rose from the clay as we drained our cups and tested one another's limits. Sooner or later, we knew, the light would come.

Pat and Joe Prosey, the owners of the largest Cabbage Patch Kids collection in the world, have decided to sell their dolls. They are asking for $360,000 for the whole thing.

I met Pat and Joe earlier this year when I went to their house in Maryland to film them for a VICE documentary about how Xavier Roberts, the "creator" of Cabbage Patch Kids, stole the idea for the dolls from an independent artist.

The Proseys' collection, which is housed in a private, custom-built museum they call Magic Crystal Valley, is made up of about 3,000 pieces of Cabbage Patch Kids memorabilia, as well as around 5,000 Cabbage Patch Kids dolls (though the couple refuses to call them "dolls," opting instead to call them "kids," and spelling out the "the D-Word" whenever they need to use it in their presence—like when people say "W-A-L-K" around a dog).

The cheapest of the dolls the Proseys bought was $10.99. The most expensive was $8,000. By Pat's estimate, the collection is worth substantially more than their asking price, somewhere around $900,000.

This picture shows less than half of Pat and Joe's collection.

Pat and Joe's obsession with Cabbage Patch Kids has been such a priority for them that, despite owning a 6,000 square-foot building and almost $1 million worth of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and merchandise, they do not own a house. The couple live in a trailer attached to their museum.

Their collection has made them (sort of) globally famous. In addition to the documentary they did with VICE, Pat and Joe have been featured on TLC's My Crazy Obsession, Anderson Cooper's talk show, and VH1's Totally Obsessed, amongst others.

Pat and Joe with their "Kids."

I called Pat late last week to ask her about the sale. When she answered the phone, she sounded deflated—a far cry from the upbeat Cabbage Patch lunatic I'd filmed a few months previously. She told me that she and her husband didn't want to sell their collection, but felt they had to so they could move to California to be closer to their grandchildren. "It was a very tough decision to make," she said. "Other things in life take a higher precedence now, I guess."

Because property costs are substantially higher in California than in Maryland, the Proseys were unable to find a place there with enough room to house their collection, unless they were willing to box the dolls up and put them into storage. Which, Pat said, was something she would "not be a big fan of."

In addition to the difficulty she and Joe will have letting go of their collection, Pat said that the greater community of Cabbage Patch Kids fans will also mourn the closing of their museum. "I've gotten quite a few emails, there's people who haven't come to the museum that are regretting not coming, and more people that have been here and wanna come again, they just..." Pat trailed off. "It's not gonna be the same anymore without the Proseys' museum."

A Cabbage Patch Kid for the Confederacy, one of the more than 5,000 dolls included in the Proseys' collection.

While filming the Proseys, it became clear that they were not as insane as they appeared on television. Before traveling to Maryland for the documentary, the couple told me over the phone that they would be willing to act however we'd like them to for the piece. In previous media appearances, they explained, they'd done things to seem crazier for the cameras, at the insistence of producers—like the time they appeared on a television show pretending to have raised a Cabbage Patch Kid named Kevin as though he were an actual child (something they assured me was not actually true).

Read: This Guy's Trying to Collect Every Single Copy of the Movie 'Speed' on VHS

I got the impression that the Proseys were willing to play up their craziness because it gave them control over it. By pretending to be weirder than they are, they were able to get in on the joke. Which is not to say they're not crazy. They're definitely spend-$1 million-on-dolls crazy. Just not raise-a-doll-as-though-it's-a-real-child crazy.

Related: Watch our documentary about how Cabbage Patch Kids founder Xavier Roberts stole the idea for his doll:

The reality of Pat and Joe is much more boring. They're just a normal couple who are really into their hobby. Like many people with an extreme obsession, whether it's sports, or celebrities, or games, the Proseys' obsession with Cabbage Patch Kids seemed to be more about the friendships and experiences they've had as a result of their collection, rather than the actual objects themselves.

"We have met so many nice people," Pat told me. "We have met and kept them as friends over the years that we still talk to. We just came back from West Virginia and spent a weekend with some Cabbage Patch friends of ours."

Pat and Joe with Cabbage Patch Kids "creator" Xavier Roberts (left) and a Klingon Cabbage Patch Kid (right)

The decision to ditch their collection is perhaps made slightly easier by the fact that, in recent years, the Proseys have become disillusioned with Original Appalachian Artworks, the company that makes Cabbage Patch Kids.

The cracks in their love for the company and its products first started to appear in 2012, when the Proseys ran out of room for their collection, and decided against building an extension to their museum (which they'd already extended a few years earlier). Worried that they wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of buying more "kids," Pat and Joe decided against going to the annual collector's meetup that Original Appalachian Artworks holds in Georgia. It was the first time in 20 years that they hadn't attended the meet-up. It was also the first year they hadn't paid their annual dues for membership to the Cabbage Patch Kids Collectors Club.

Because she and Joe had been such a huge part of the Cabbage Patch Kids scene, Pat said she expected to hear from someone at Original Appalachian Artworks asking about their absence. That, she said, didn't happen. "When we stopped going to conventions and didn't pay our dues, no one in that organization acknowledged that we weren't even a part of Cabbage Patch. No phone call, no email, no nothing. It was like we didn't exist."

Read: This Kid Rented Out a Theater and Recreated an Entire Lady Gaga Concert

Pat felt that, because she wasn't giving Original Appalachian Artworks any more money, the company no longer cared about her. People at the company who she had previously been in regular contact with completely cut off all contact, she told me. "I think they care more about the bottom dollar than they do the collector."

Pat said that, to this day, she hasn't heard from anyone at Original Appalachian Artworks—a silence she finds especially bothersome, given how much free publicity she and Joe have given the company on TV and in print over the years.

"That was 30 years of our life just about," she said.

She also felt that the company's founder, Xavier Roberts, had stopped giving the collectors the respect they deserve. "When I first started going to the conventions down in Georgia, Xavier would be there for every convention, but now he's not part of the convention anymore," she said. "I don't think he showed up at all this year or last year. I could be wrong, but, y'know, it's a one time event they have down in Georgia and you would think he would wanna be there with his collectors at least one day out of the year... that's kinda disheartening."

The Proseys with their collection of unwanted Cabbage Patch Kids dolls.

It's hard to imagine who would buy the Proseys' collection. I asked Pat if she would be willing to come down on the price if it meant keeping the dolls together, and she told me that's the exact reason the collection is listed at such a reduced price already. "We didn't get into this to make money," she said. "We're trying to price it at a price where somebody might be able to take it and do what we did."

"I'm trying to get someone to take the collection and open up a museum sort of like we did. It's the most iconic toy of the 80s, I mean, so..." she added, before trailing off.

The Cabbage Patch Kids fans who do still exist seem to be slowly disappearing. While filming with the Proseys, I spent some time in a trailer on their property that they've packed with hundreds of other Cabbage Patch Kids (which you can see in the photo above) that had been given to them either by collectors who had been forced to get rid of their dolls when moving into nursing homes, or by the surviving partners of collectors who had died. It was, without question, the saddest trailer in the state of Maryland.

Young people aren't exactly flocking to become collectors, either. Though Original Appalachian Artworks still produces Cabbage Patch Kids products, the dolls haven't managed to capture the hearts of children in the way they did during the 80s and 90s. As I write this, the official Cabbage Patch Kids Twitter account has 1,897 followers.

Over the years, Pat and Joe have hosted a lot of events for Cabbage Patch collectors at the museum. But Pat said she doesn't think she has it in her to host a farewell event. "I'm not sure I'm up to that," she told me. "I know it sounds silly, but I've put so much into this collection, and it's so hard to let it go."

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

A US fighter plane goes down back in 1951 Photo: US Navy

It was never supposed to live in the sea, but once there it made itself at home. For weeks it drifted, basking in the sunshine, carried along by the great currents of the Indian Ocean. But it wasn't alone.

The young barnacles approached it cautiously at first, probing the object with modified antennae before deciding to make it their home, cementing themselves to its surfaces. A few individuals became a thriving colony, casting limbs into the water, fishing for plankton, enjoying the kind of serenity you can only achieve when you have no real brain and the world's longest relative penis size.

On Motherboard: Hell on High Seas

They chilled out for a few months, peacefully cruising over 2,000 miles in the general direction of Africa. And then the object hit a beach. A lot of barnacles were probably killed that day. Their little world had ended; but that wasn't the biggest story. Not to the islanders who discovered the hollow lump of aluminum, and realized what they'd found—and more importantly, where it may have come from.

French experts have identified that lonely barnacle-encrusted fragment as a "flaperon," a control flap from the wing of a Boeing 777. It's still under intense investigation in Toulouse, but since there's only one missing 777 we know of, it's almost certainly from Flight MH370, the aircraft that disappeared without trace 16 months ago, and was assumed on the basis of rogue communication pings to have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean.

Out of more than 200,000 kilograms of aluminum, plastic, fuel, electronics, luggage, flesh, and blood; in spite of $150 million spent deploying the most advanced technology we have for month after month after month; it is the only single shred of the aircraft that has so far been recovered. Predictably, it's driving everyone a bit mad.

The calmest people are the air crash investigators working in the laboratories of the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses in France—since the debris washed up on La Réunion, a French territory, they take the lead in the investigation. That's a big stroke of luck, since France has a lot more expertise than, say, nearby Madagascar. They were quick to say that it's very likely the part comes from MH370, but continue to work to rule out any other possibility, however remote.

They were then totally undermined by the Malaysian PM, who blundered in saying it was "confirmed" that the wreckage was from MH370 even though he had no real right to do so. Then he and the media went further, and soon every bit of garbage in the Indian Ocean was plastered over the press as the latest bit of MH370 to emerge. The result is the same as we get whenever authorities give conflicting stories—crazy conspiracy theories and irresponsible speculation.

There's one key difference between scientists and conspiracy theorists. Scientists adjust theories to fit new evidence. Conspiracy theorists adjust new evidence to fit the theory. As soon as the flaperon emerged, it was twisted to fit the conspiracy narrative. It didn't land on the beach, it was planted by the authorities (after being very carefully weathered in seawater for 16 months, I guess). Why would the CIA/aliens/Russians/whoever shoot down a random 777 flying between Malaysia and China? Who the fuck knows.

The conspiracy theories aren't going to end any time soon, though. This isn't CSI, and the debris can only tell us so much. Scientists have a pretty good map of ocean circulation, so we can roughly simulate the likely path of a floating object around the world. From that we know that if MH370 crashed off of West Australia, where searches are taking place, it would fit with debris washing up on La Réunion 16 months later.

The state of the flaperon could tell us something, too. Depending on how badly damaged it is, investigators might be able to tell how hard the plane hit the water, whether the flap fell off or was torn off, and other useful information.

Even the barnacles could help. We can't talk to them because barnacles can't talk and in any case these ones are all very dead; but we know where different species of barnacle live, and we know how long they take to grow to maturity. The age and type of the barnacles, combined with what we know about ocean currents and possible routes, could give us some idea of what region the flaperon was in and how long it was there. We're still talking about huge areas, but it might let searchers rule out parts of the search zone.

We'll find it. We have to. But until then, until we get the black boxes and we can replay and reconstruct everything that happened in the hours after the plane disappeared, science and reason won't be enough to stop the theories.

People need there to be someone to be in charge, for there to be a story that gives everything some kind of sense. The one thing scarier than a villain is the idea that something can just happen without any plan or meaning. That the universe doesn't care, and our lives aren't some great movie with a satisfying plot. That we're really just the same as those barnacles, clinging to our fragile world, waiting for a rock to hit.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

The author, with his wife and baby.

I'mma keep it with ya'll: I'm doing this column for the yaper. Babies are wild expensive, and as they grow into full-fledged dudes and dudettes with wants and desires and susceptibilities to advertising tactics, they only become more expensive. And child labor laws today make it hella hard for them to get a job until they're like 14 or 15 or some shit. So pretty much it's on you to make sure you got enough yaper to keep the thing alive for that first stretch.

Now seeing as how you had a baby, most likely you're bad at planning ahead and thinking things through, otherwise you would have been like, "maybe I shouldn't have a baby." But too late doggie, you're in the thick of it now, and that means you need to get your yaper up. Yaper, also known as feddy, bread, guap, clams, smackerinos, legal tender, coinage, etc., is crucial to child rearing. Which sucks, because money is wild fake. Oh, word? You mean to say I hand you all of these worthless tiny pieces of paper and I can walk out your store with hella items? You must be out your damn mind.

That's what money's like.

You made another person who is now, against their will, fully ensconced in this charade along with you, and they have no idea how to do anything, let alone fade on rent.

What's even crazier is that you need money to even live indoors. Like it's hella empty buildings in the world, fully constructed and paid for, yet you still have to perform hella different tasks, collect whatever arbitrary amount of fake ass currency your weak ass country says has some type of innate, legitimate value, and then write another arbitrary ass number on a piece of paper and hand it to some asshole so he doesn't kick you out of a building he "owns" but doesn't live in? Fuck outa here. But that's life, I guess.

Crazier than that, you made another person who is now, against their will, fully ensconced in this charade along with you, and they have no idea how to do anything, let alone fade on rent. Matter of fact they stay shitting themselves so much you gotta buy them disposable pants for every single time they take a dump for like two years. That shit adds up.

More solid parenting advice: What to Do with a Baby

Look into getting a "baby registry," which is basically a sideways ass way of begging all your friends and relatives to buy stuff for your kid, sort of like Kickstarter or GoFundMe or whatever but instead of asking for money to make your stupid movie or shitty album you're asking that people help you keep a tiny human being alive until it's forced to be enslaved by capitalism like the rest of us. Slightly more gravitas there so fools really cake you up.

As far as toys go, no need to wild out. Keep it simple, a couple stuffed animals, a rattle or two, something with blinking lights. We got ours a little electric piano and she stay shredding on that. Books go hard; never too early to start reading to them. They like kids' books but they'll even listen to illuminati conspiracy theories or a Kehlani interview if you read it with some drama and funny voices. Really though, I think a lot of parents go overboard on the toys, and it's not necessary cause I mean anything is a toy to a baby—a pillow, a t-shirt, a plastic cup, a spoon, a newspaper, your keys, a vacuum-sealed pound of weed, 3K in large bills, anything.

But yo, this thing ?

A baby will fuck with that thing heavy in those early months when all it wants to do is lie on its back. Hella dangling things, little light-up butterflies, the works. Don't put the music on, though, that shit is garbage. Just the "soothing rainforest sounds," those go hard.

Bottom line is that babies are money pits, and you're gonna need some deep pockets to keep them fed and at least kinda happy. If you're not already stacked, don't sweat it—when you have a kid the hustle sector of your brain expands. Rob a bank, become a professional gambler, sell drugs, learn to code, become a B-list rapper, write a parenting column... Point is you find ways to amplify your yaper capers: you stop binge-ordering Jordans off the internet, you go out less and hooride your sister's Netflix account more... you make it work.

I believe in ya'll. The kids are the future, we can do it, etc.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

[Editor's note: Don't rob a bank or sell drugs.]

Summer campers circa 1984, when millennials were still kids. Photo via Flickr user Hunter Desportes

When, at the age of 28, Levi Felix decided he wanted to go back to summer camp, he did what most Americans do when they need an answer: He consulted Google. It was 2012 and the search term "summer camp for adults" yielded few results, save for several senior citizen retreats in the woods—not exactly what Felix, an Oakland-based entrepreneur, had in mind. He'd recently left a high-profile tech job to found Digital Detox, a company that leads yoga and meditation retreats—and then he had a revelation.

"I realized on one of the retreats, people were on typewriters and they were face-painting each other and they brought arts-and-craft supplies," said Felix, now 31. "I found that when people were playing and being silly and making art and making music, they were more present and more able to be fully kind of themselves—to be their kid version. That's when I was like, 'Oh shit, this is like summer camp!'"

In 2013, Felix launched Camp Grounded. Two years later, adult summer camps are everywhere. A Google search lists dozens of new businesses with flashy websites and whimsical branding: Camp No Counselors, Camp Bonfire, Camp Throwback, Soul Camp, and the minimally-named CAMP, to name just a few. Netflix's new Wet Hot American Summer series, which derives much of its comedy from its casting of 40-year-olds as teenagers, has only added to this mass nostalgia for summer camp.

It's not just summer camp: There's a preschool for grown-ups in Brooklyn; around the country, people long out of high school are attending proms; a coloring book marketed for stress management sits atop Amazon's best-seller list. Products and packaged experiences that would have previously been regarded as novelties or gimmicks are now fueling an industry that thrives on the reenactment of childhood. And the boom shows no sign of slowing down.

Video by Camp Grounded via YouTube

Frank Furedi, a former sociology professor at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, and a frequent commentator on youth culture, has watched the "global phenomenon" of kids' activities for grown-ups flourish over the last decade. "When I first started writing and talking about this, people used to tell me, 'Frank, this isn't really happening, you're exaggerating, this is a small niche minority,'" Furedi said. "Whereas now when I talk about these things"—things like School Disco, a popular London club night where the dress code is a school uniform—"a lot of people lash out at me and say, 'What's wrong with it?'"

For years, buzzwords like "Peter Pan syndrome," "boomerang kids," and even simply "millennials"—used as shorthand for tech-addicted adult-toddlers everyone loves to hate—have dominated headlines bemoaning a generation royally screwed by the Great Recession. And as the job market has improved over the last five years, growing up seems to have only become even more undesirable. In the US, 18 to 34 year-olds are less likely to be living on their own and setting up their own households today than they were during the height of the unemployment crisis in 2009, according to a Pew Research Center poll released last month.

Furedi believes the recession, or at least the concept of it, has become a kind of crutch for 20-somethings averse to spending nine-to-five hunched over a cubicle desk. "It's not like we're living in the middle of the 1930s Depression," he said. "I think there's an inflated sense of injustice and an inflated sense of how difficult this is, when in fact, when you look at people in their mid-20s, they are reasonably pampered, especially in the middle classes." Meanwhile, young people who have embraced the risks of entrepreneurship and start-up culture have turned to summer camps and other child-like ventures as a form of structured playtime.

An ambitious self-starter, Adam Tichauer, like Felix, is part of that group. The 32-year-old found himself on the fast track to burnout after founding a short-lived music streaming service called PlayButton. "I had the board always coming down on me and my investors were never happy with sales," Tichauer recalled. That all changed when he switched gears to launch a new company last summer: Camp No Counselors, billed as a "sleepaway camp for adults." The work is just as demanding, Tichauer said, but now he receives gift bags and hand-written thank you notes from happy campers—literally.

At Camp No Counselors, traditional kids' camps are rented post-season and revamped into woodsy getaways complete with open bars, themed parties, and cafeteria food that's more steak and kale than Sloppy Joe's and tater tots. Kid-size mattresses get swapped out for fuller, adult ones, but at the end of the day, the cabins are still sleeping anywhere from ten to 20 grown-ups on bunk beds.

"We really want people to choose their own adventure," said Tichauer, running down a list of popular activities like archery, zip-lining, and Capture the Flag. "That's the good thing about camp is you can really make it what you want. If you want to read a book and drink rosé by the lake, you can do that."

Summer camp is the place where everybody has the possibility of being cool. - Levi Felix

That is, if you can afford it. Registration for Camp No Counselors runs between $500 and $575 for a three-day weekend. Prospective campers must by submitting their Instagram handle and answering a series of questions such as "What did you do for your last birthday?" If someone answers that he celebrated at a strip club in Las Vegas, for example, he's probably not a good fit for Camp No Counselors, Tichauer said. The questionnaire and social media background check are designed to "curate" the crowd, he explained, to create an equal gender balance and ensure that campers don't all work in one particular industry.

But Felix, whose camp nickname is "Fidget," thinks this type of curation is exclusionary. "For me, like, that's the opposite of what summer camp should be," he said. "What I believe is summer camp is the place where everybody has the possibility of being cool. They don't care if you're the cool kid at school or the dorkiest kid or if you have the weirdest outfits."

Tichauer estimated that 65 to 70 percent of applicants get accepted to Camp No Counselors, which launched in New York and has since expanded to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Nashville. "The majority of people that are coming to our camps are millennials, and millennials are putting experiences and memories more important than objects or things," he said. "With our little incremental incomes that we have as millennials, people are buying that shared experience with their friends rather than buying that pair of jeans or a purse."

That might be true, but why spend the money on a grown-up version of summer camp instead of just a normal vacation? According to Michael Freeman, a psychiatry professor at University of California, San Francisco, it might have something to do with the generation's underlying desire to unplug from technology and reconnect IRL—an interaction that's increasingly been replaced by digital screens.

"Young people have this syndrome that they call 'fear of missing out,' but you're not really missing out on anything," said Freeman, adding that some people have completely forgotten how to have meaningful experiences offline. "I think there's a yearning and an alienation and a disconnection and a sense of being lost."

"I have clients of mine that go to Digital Detox, and they come back and it's like, they were able to talk about something like a challenging part of their life for like 30 minutes and somebody listened and it's like the most amazing thing that ever happened," he said. "What happened to friends? Didn't we used to do that with friends?"

Do millennials do anything face-to-face anymore? VICE explores how the increasingly digital world affects love, sex, and dating.

Freeman said he's skeptical of flashy, Silicon Valley-designed retreats that offer a temporary life disruption in exchange for a resort fee. "I think what has been figured out is that the internet is so rewarding and so kind of addictive that people are willing to put up with the pop up ads to get the service for free, and as a result of that, it just infiltrates into life," he said. "They figured out the face-to-face can be packaged and commercialized, and now you have your summer camps."

Indeed, Tichauer claims that operating Camp No Counselors isn't all that different from running PlayButton, or any other tech start-up. "While we are disconnecting and we are having fun, it's about creating something that people want," he said. "It's about creating a product and it's about creating an infrastructure and scaling that infrastructure up so it becomes a real business and it affects a lot of people."

The business model appears to have widespread appeal. Indeed,while Camp Grounded initially attracted people from the tech scene because of its proximity to Silicon Valley, it has since transcended age, geographic location, and industry, according to Felix, who claims the company has a 40 percent return rate among campers. The camp will hold its first session in North Carolina later this month, and is looking to expand to campgrounds in Japan and India in the coming years. In the meantime, there's already a waiting list for next summer's flagship camp in Mendocino County, California, with bunks going for nearly $600 for the weekend. For the sake of immersion into nature, Felix said, booze and electronics are banned.

The whole thing strikes Furedi as odd. "If you compare these kinds of experiences to the beginning of the counterculture in California when you went away into these retreats and everything," he said, "In those days, it was all about doing drugs and LSD and mescaline and basically going out of your mind for a couple of days and then on Monday getting back to work. It's interesting how that kind of culture has mutated into this very safe, branded, and real template-focused, almost like bite-sized therapy that you kind of manufacture and people just buy into it."

At Camp No Counselors, though, the drinks flow freely—the only overarching goal, Tichauer said, is leisure. "There's nothing underneath it. Let's just have some fun and forget about being serious," he added.

Still, Camp No Counselors and Camp Grounded share one general guideline: Don't start any conversations by talking about work. "In New York or LA, you go to a bar, you meet someone, and it's like, 'Hey, what do you do?'" said Tichauer. "But if we don't have that guard up and if we don't immediately judge people and put them in a box, then maybe we'll give them a second chance or the benefit of the doubt."

Camp Grounded has discouraged career-related dialogue to the point that the camp has created a new kind of language to avoid it—and also to mock it. Camp activities—everything from truffle-making to potato-carving—are no longer workshops, but "playshops." FOMO-free playshops, to be exact. Inboxes are cubbyholes, where campers can leave each other love letters, doodles, coupons for ice cream, and even hand-written spam, intended to imitate email phishing. A message board at camp is just a roll of butcher paper with notes scribbled on it, and scrolling down means tearing the notes and hiding them in mason jars for someone else to find. And instead of Google, Camp Grounded uses "human-powered search"—a wall of construction paper where campers can post and answer typewritten questions.

"People will go and write, 'Who's that guy in that movie?' or 'Is there a difference between Himalayan sea salt and normal sea salt?' or things you normally would ask Google," said Felix, who runs Camp Grounded with a staff of eight, including his fiancé and brother. "Let's say you ask the question about Himalayan sea salt. You might go on Monday and see a thread of 50 questions or notes about people debating like they do on the internet."

"At camp, we just try to challenge ourselves and everyone else to say, 'Let's reclaim language and let's reclaim words that feel human rather than reclaiming what a few people in hoodies thought we should use on the internet," he continued, adding that he encourages campers to think twice about what Facebook jargon really means: words like "friending," "like," and "share,"—and even the term IRL—are discouraged.

Adults play a human-version of Hungry Hungry Hippos at Camp No Counselors. Video by Camp No Counselors via YouTube

Corporate or not, adult summer camp is a bastion of nostalgia for a simple time when there was no distinction between real life and the life mediated by social feeds, mobile apps, and messaging systems. Similar to adult preschools, coloring books, and proms, camp is a familiar, wholesome remedy for people "feeling uncomfortable with their relationship with technology," Felix said. It's an uneasiness that almost anyone who grew up with a screen name or avatar can relate to, whether it's boomerang kids live with their parents or tech CEOs who live in their offices.

Follow Jennifer Swann on Twitter.

Screenshot via GoFundMe

The state of Alabama, like much of the United States, has a budgeting problem. Currently, Alabama is more than $200 million over budget, which as of today, forced the state to cut millions of dollars from Medicaid, mental health programming, law enforcement, and other state agencies. Instead of asking taxpayers to turn over the money needed to balance the books, Alabama state senator Paul Sanford came up with the most democratic solution possible: He created a GoFundMe page.

The crowdfunding campaign, Fund the Alabama State Government, was started three days ago and encourages people to "send an amount that fits your budget, even request where your money be used." So far, 13 people have donated a total of $255 toward the $300 million goal.

Senator Sanford told local media that he would "make sure that the Department of Revenue receives the donated funds on behalf of each individual that contributes." But he also said he set up the account to "prove a point" about how nobody wants to pay more taxes, which is sort of like giving someone a booty call and then pretending it's a joke when they're not into it.

People have turned to crowdfunding for all sorts of weird things—spaceships, medical research, funerals, abortions. And while Senator Sanford's campaign seems especially bizarre, it's actually not unprecedented: Earlier this summer, someone launched a "Greek Bailout Fund" on Indiegogo, to which people pledged over $2 million.

The good people of Alabama do not seem as game. Senator Sanford's GoFundMe page is littered with comments accusing the Alabama state government of mismanaging the money it collects in taxes. (For what it's worth, Alabama has the fifth-lowest taxes in the state, according to Kiplinger.) One commenter, Kenney Smith, wrote: "I already have given to the state of Alabama. Every Friday for the past 32 years I make a donation to the State Fund. It's called state taxes. What did you do with that money?"

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Protesters gathered outside of the Ferguson Police Department on November 29, days after a grand jury chose not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown. Photo via Flickr user Mike Tigas

At around 1 AM on Friday, 19-year-old Christian Taylor pulled his Jeep up to a Buick GMC dealership in Arlington, Texas. Dressed in athletic shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, Taylor looked like he'd just walked off the football field at Angelo State University, the school he played for in town. In fact, he was about to start his sophomore training there this week.

Though details are scarce, security footage shows that Taylor, the youngest of three brothers, sprinted through the parking lot and jumped on top of a car and stomped on it methodically, as if he were marching or hopping through tires. Then he apparently drove his Jeep through a glass display, the Guardian reported, and things took a turn for the worse.

Not long after two police officers showed up and Taylor—who had expressed concern about losing his life prematurely on Twitter—allegedly took flight, he was shot dead. The cop responsible, a 49-year-old trainee named Brad Miller, has been placed on leave and the FBI is investigating, the New York Times reported.

It would be an isolated tragedy if there was such a thing anymore. The teenager's death came just two days before the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. When the 18-year-old was shot last August, it set off a wave of national protests that quickly became known as the Black Lives Matter movement. But Taylor's death shows that even as more people now consider race to be the biggest issue facing our country and young people are increasingly aware of how police target minorities, precious little in the way of reform has registered at the local level.

Or, put more simply: Black people keep being killed by the police.

Since Brown's death (and Eric Garner's a month earlier on Staten Island), there have been headlines and hashtags about Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in South Carolina, Sandra Bland in Texas, and Samuel Dubose in Cincinnati, among others. So far this year, 585 people have been shot and killed by police, according to the Washington Post, and as VICE News reported, nearly 1,100 people have been killed by cops since Brown's death last August. On top of that, several people of color—Bland among them—died in American jail cells during the month of July alone.

Obviously, the problem extends beyond black teens, and beyond race in general—although unarmed black men are seven times as likely to be killed as whites, the Post noted.

By now, all police killings are presumed to be political grenades until proven otherwise, and for many the official police account is always in doubt. On Sunday night after the protest in Ferguson, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris, Jr. was shot by cops after allegedly firing at them. His father told the New York Post he was in the "wrong place at the wrong time," while cops allege he tried to kill them. Meanwhile, as the Post reported, "NAACP board member John Gaskin III said members of the community are not willing to automatically accept the police version of events, noting 'there's still a tremendous level of distrust between law enforcement and the community.'"

On Monday afternoon, St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger declared a state of emergency, and DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie—two unofficial leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement—were arrested.

The dialogue about race and law enforcement has evolved a great deal over this past year. We have a whole new vocabulary for these incidents now, a bevy of databases documenting all the awful things cops do, and the federal Department of Justice seems to be taking the problem seriously. But local cops in cities across the country continue to gun down or otherwise ensnare people of color—some of them criminals, some of them seemingly victims of circumstance. How many more incidents and protests and angry op-eds it will take for a real culture change in American policing remains to be seen.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Correction 8/11: An earlier version of this story stated that Tyrone Harris, Jr., had been shot and killed, but he remains alive, albeit in critical condition.