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The VICE Reader: André Alexis Has Written the Best Novel About Talking Dogs and Existential Crisis You’ll Read This Year

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Illustration by Gillian Wilson

The gods Apollo and Hermes are in Toronto, knocking back beers, when they decide to make a friendly bet. Thus begins this year's unlikely north-of-the-border "it" novel, Fifteen Dogs, by Trinidad-born, Toronto-based André Alexis. Last month, the book received the Giller Prize, Canada's top fiction honor.

Since his first book, 1994's Despair and Other Stories , through five novels before this one, Alexis has been one of Canada's most inventive writers. His stories carry out heady experiments that are needfully and beautifully grounded by a lyricism with one working rule: no bullshit. The grand experiment of Fifteen Dogs begins with power-drunk Apollo and Hermes making their little bet. They wonder: What if dogs were as smart as humans? Would even one out of 15 of them die happy?

Thus 15 dogs at a vet clinic are suddenly thrown into existential crisis. After living perfectly natural and orderly lives up to this point—real lives—they are made painfully self-aware. Every day, the surviving dogs must face the same vexing question, something like, how should a dog be ?

"The Giller," as the Scotiabank Giller Prize is called around kitchen tables in Canada, has no match in the US. It's a household name with the familiar ring of a brand of hockey stick, synonymous with something like, "You have to read this, even if you don't like books." Half a million Canadians watched the nationally broadcast award show on TV on November 10. That night the usually ultra-casual Alexis—who accepted the Rogers Writers' Fiction Prize for the same book one week earlier in a big, brown street jacket—was provided a fresh tux by the Giller people. He was appointed his own personal stylist, hairdresser, and makeup artist. The TV special went down after a six-week-long press junket, without a day's break, that had the five short-listed authors touring the entire country, soapboxing and sharing the love.

Thanks to the Giller, sales of Fifteen Dogs has sweat pouring off the gloss-black 1965 Heidelberg press at Coach House, the Toronto-based independent publisher that's famous for printing their own books on dated machines that few can fix. On a recent Friday evening past normal work hours, editorial director Alana Wilcox and her small production team were upstairs shouldering lamps and answering more emails than ever, while downstairs a four-man assembly line was printing, folding, collating, and trimming the edges of copies of Fifteen Dogs , all by hand. When asked about figures, Wilcox admitted they'd lost track of print runs, but have put at least 73,000 copies of Fifteen Dogs "out there," a delightful, shocking figure for independent presses, where 2,000 copies of a novel sold is pretty good, and anything over 5,000 is considered a great success.

After visiting Coach House and seeing all the ruckus Fifteen Dogs has caused, I wanted to speak with Alexis about it all. I caught up to him while he was in Banff, Alberta, on a two-week writer's residency.

VICE: Writers and artists tend to put projects behind them quickly. Did the months-long spectacle of the Giller put you in limbo?
André Alexis: No, you know, it really didn't. Because by the time Fifteen Dogs was published, I'd almost finished a draft of my next novel, The Hidden Keys, which is coming out next year. So, my focus was already elsewhere. The Giller was stressful and strange, but it didn't really impinge on my imagination.

Crossing the country and holding it down at so many celebratory events, did it feel good and reassuring?
No, the whole Giller thing felt strange. Like a play I'd wandered into where my role was determined, but no one had told me about it. For months after the Giller nomination, I became a "Writer." It's one of those moments when your society tells you you're something and expects you to embody it. Of course, my society's idea of what a writer is is different from mine. For one thing, my idea of being a writer involves pseudo-bunkers, isolation, and loud music. No cocktail parties!

The best thing about being a Giller nominee was meeting the other candidates. Rachel Cusk said this. So, I'm echoing her sentiment. But it's more than that. I feel fortunate to have met Rachel and Samuel Archibald, Anakana Schofield, and Heather , not only because I liked them personally, but because their work is so good. The first chapter of Rachel's Outline is among the best writing I've ever read! The novel itself is great, but the first chapter was a kind of shock to me. I'm only sorry that I hadn't read it when we met. I'd have liked to tell her how moved I was.

What were the earliest influences on your writing?
That's an easy one to answer: Trinidad, the way Trinidadians speak, the rhythms of storytelling, the repetitions, the simplicity of language. It isn't that I necessarily write so that a reader can see or hear those things in my work. But they're where I start from. My ideal is the simplicity and beauty of the folk tale. My whole writing life has been one long, fairly amusing failure to meet my own ideal. I'm surprisingly OK with this.

What's your latest influence? Do you tend to be self-aware, or even self-conscious, of allowing something to become an influence?
Hard to say what my latest influence is. My guide is Walt Whitman, when it comes to influences. I'm happy to take everything in as deeply as I can. So, I'm as likely to be influenced by Sharon van Etten's lyrics as a poem by Ted Hughes or The Song of Roland. I suppose the one influence I should mention, though, is Harry Mathews. He's the one who told me about "poems for a dog," an Oulipian invention. So, he's partly responsible for Prince's poetry. Beyond that, he's a constant inspiration to me. I mean, his work is inspiring, but so is his commitment to art and literature.

VICE Meets Norwegian literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

There's a writer's gospel hidden in Fifteen Dogs. Out of the chosen 15, it's only the dog-poet Prince who dies happy in the end. Was this always part of the book's plan?
Hmm... you know, I sometimes wish I hadn't made Prince a poet. But, to answer your question, he was always going to be one—he's somewhat based on the blind poet Homer—but I wasn't sure at the beginning that he was going to be the one to die happy. That became clearer as the book became more and more a kind of meditation on love and power.

It strikes me as a writer's privilege to imagine that the only one who will scrape through this life, spiritually speaking, will be... the writer! This is a pointed case too, since all the rest drop off in heaps of pain and suffering.
And this is why I wonder if I shouldn't have made Prince a visual artist, say. It wasn't his being a writer per se that allowed him happiness. It's his being an artist. And what's important about the artist is the ability to transform words or material into things of lasting beauty or communal value. And the thing that was important about that transformation is that Prince (the artist) is able to take a curse—and I do think the gods curse the pack of 15—and turn it (that is, turn language, the new way of thinking) into something precious. Is Prince's work precious to others? To some others, yes, but it's the transformation that was important to me. I don't think, in so-called real life, that artists are necessarily better at this alchemy than anyone else, but they make a good symbol for it. At least, that's what I thought while I was writing the novel. And that's the moral I was hoping to convey: That in this transmutation—of a curse, of loss, of self-consciousness—there's the possibility of happiness. Whatever "happiness" is when it's at home...

"In a way, I do think of myself as a product of my publisher."

Back to Prince, the dog-poet. His verses really warm up and get quite good. But I kept thinking, This poetry is just not messy enough for a dog. Can you defend the tidiness of his stanzas?
That's very funny. You think canines would write poetry more like Alvaro de Campo than Ricardo Reis? You might be right. But I think I can defend the tidiness. Two things: First, the poems become more sophisticated as the novel progresses. That was a way of showing Prince's changing, deepening relationship to language. Second: I wanted to emphasize the art, the artistry, the manipulation. Prince is an artist first. The tidiness or formal precision was a way of pointing to that artistry.

Your publisher Coach House makes their books on the first cramped floor of their quaint and curious offices. Your success really has them sweating, albeit happily, but still. Have you chipped in on the production line? Done any late-night collating?
The answer to that is: Well, yes and no, I guess. I mean, the guys in printing actually allowed me to "make" copies of my previous novel, Pastoral. The whole bit: glue, cover, cutting. So, I can, technically, say I've "helped" them. Just not with Fifteen Dogs. As for the late-night collating. I don't like rats, so I'm not late-night anything-ing at Coach House!

What do you love best about Coach House?
Alana Wilcox, my editor. I'm more faithful to people than institutions. So Alana is first. Besides, she's a great editor. But I'm also a fan of Coach House. I recently wrote a short article about Michael Ondaatje's Long Poem Anthology. It's one of a number of Coach House books that has influenced my writing. So, in a way, I do think of myself as a product of my publisher.

That building is packed with mementos and Canadian literary history. Do you have a favorite object or image, something you look at each time you go there?
Yes: the full-sized cut-out of bpNichol that you see as you enter the press. bpNichol was one of the most adventurous and thoughtful and inventive Canadian poets. His nine-book-long, epic poem The Martyrology is a work I think about constantly.

It seems like we as Canadians are somehow better at exporting our bands to the US than we are our books and writers. Why do you think this is? I haven't seen anyone on the L train reading Fifteen Dogs, and I'm waiting impatiently.
Well, I suppose some of that has to do with Coach House Books. They're trying to establish themselves in the US. But their presence isn't as significant as Random House obviously, or even smaller American presses like Tin House. It'll be a while before they break into the market in a significant way, I think. But Canadian writers with larger presses seem to do OK. Atwood, Ondaatje, Munro, Yann Martel—they all sell in the US. But so do newer writers like Miriam Toews and Patrick DeWitt. Interesting question: Has The Life of Pi made as big a splash in the US market as Arcade Fire's Reflektor? Also: Do Americans even know that Arcade Fire is a, largely, Canadian band? Or do they assume they're American because Win Butler is?

You have had to talk about Fifteen Dogs a lot. This seems like it might be hard for a writer who never repeats himself. Do you have fallback lines or are you always making it new?
Actually, I'm a writer who repeats himself constantly! I'm always talking about the same four or five things, but I do it in different genres, so maybe it's not as obvious. When it comes to interviews, though, I try to keep things new and I lie constantly. Well, not "lie." Maybe "mislead" is a better word. But it's because I often mislead myself. I tend to disagree with everything I've said as soon as I've said it. You know, I probably disagree with the first answer I've given you here. But I meant it while I was saying it.

Have you ever seen stray dogs in Toronto? I haven't, but maybe I will now.
Easy answer: No, I haven't.

After you've written about a place, does it stay the same or feel and look different? Have High Park or the Beaches taken on new kinds of light?
Yes and no. While writing about Toronto, I was able to feel a new attachment to the city. I'd previously only been able to write about Ottawa, so writing A and Fifteen Dogs was new territory for me. They're the first long pieces I've set in Toronto. On the other hand, High Park and the Beaches are parts of Toronto that were emotionally and sentimentally meaningful for me before I wrote about them. I associate both of those places with women I've loved. So you could say writing about them was only a way of making concrete the "light" they already had on them.

I keep thinking about the "tang" of Lake Ontario you describe. I'm pretty sure next time I smell it, it's going to be more tangy.
The lake is pretty interesting, smell-wise. I've always wanted to talk to someone from, say, Milwaukee and ask them what the lake is like for them. I wonder if we don't have some kind of lacustrine connection with cities, like Milwaukee or Chicago, on the Great Lakes. I also wonder if and how we're different from cities on the ocean. "Tang" probably does come into it. I wonder: Does the ocean create different versions of desire or longing than lakes do?

I've heard that you write with big headphones on, blasting music. If so, why do you do this? And, if you're willing to share, what was the soundtrack to writing this book? It's such a quiet book in many ways, so contemplative.
On YouTube, there's a long conversation —four hours long!—between John Cage and Morton Feldman. In the first 30 minutes or so, the two composers talk about how to deal with the noise of (then omnipresent) radios when there's the need for silence. Cage talks about accepting the radio noise by thinking of it as belonging to his universe of sound. Taking it in, claiming it, was his way of overcoming the distraction. He then talks about meditation and how some mystics look for difficult situations—situations with maximum distractions—in order to improve their ability to meditate. For instance, he mentions a mystic who tried to meditate while having sexual intercourse. I have to say, writing while listening to loud music was almost certainly easier.

What music did I listen to while writing Fifteen Dogs ? Loud music, pop songs, things that make it difficult to concentrate while forcing me to concentrate if I wanted to get anything done.

There's a new to me and, I think, very beautiful definition of love in this book. It comes from Nira, the woman who develops a huge, nuanced friendship with the black poodle Majnoun. Love is defined as no idea, but rather as the collection of every single thought and memory, and every experience of love, that she has had. Nothing excluded. Does this idea have a source for you or is it a personal definition?
The idea that the ultimate meaning of a word is in the sum of its nuances comes from Wittgenstein, I think. Or from semiology... In any case, it doesn't originate with me, but I agree with you: It's a lovely idea.

Follow Jesse on Twitter.

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis is available in bookstores and online from Coach House Books.


Remembering the Hipster: VICE Staffers Reveal the Most Hipster Stuff They've Ever Done

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Enough time has passed since the world was at Peak Hipster for us to look back at it as a movement, or a craze, or a meme, or whatever the fuck it was and try to take stock of what it all meant, if anything. So this week we're doing exactly that in a short collection of stories.

There's really no way to get around the fact that VICE is, or at least was and probably still is depending on who's asking, definitely, probably, at least a little bit totally hipster. For that we will offer no apologies, yield not a single inch of ground, other than to say fuck it, somebody else was probably going to go to that dog show on acid.

Still, much like being too drunk or being too into Marxism, there's such a thing as being too hipster. What that means, however, is totally open to interpretation. Is being too hipster having a vlog about Phil Collins, or is it going to a garage sale at the CobraSnake's house? In the spirit of journalistic inquiry and in a misguided attempt to figure out what the term "hipster" means to the humans of VICE, I decided to ask a few of my fellow VICE staffers to tell me the most hipster thing they've ever done. The first answer from a lot of these people was something along the lines of, "Took a job at VICE lol," but after I berated them for not taking my dumb article idea seriously, they actually ended up telling me some poignant, personal stories, and in the process revealed what hipsterdom means to them.

Shanon Kelley (Publisher, Broadly): Maintained a Phil Collins Vlog for a Short Period of Time

I went to college with Grizzly Bear and Aziz Ansari. I've worked at the FADER, Paper Magazine, and now VICE. The first time I went to Coachella in 2007 I stayed with CSS and sang "Age of Aquarius" in a pool with Of Montreal. My first serious boyfriend worked for Dim Mak back in 2004. I had a bowl cut for two years (see above). I watched David Wain and Paul Rudd (again, see above) sing karaoke at the now defunct Studio B. I saw the Unicorns' first NYC show. I remember complaining one time about how many times I'd seen the Kills in one week. I wrote an article back in 2005(?) about the genius of Oneida. I have taken my shirt off at a Spits show on more than one occasion. I lost a tooth from getting too drunk at a Lost Season 4 premiere party. I wrote a fan letter once to Wes Anderson and never heard back.

I wouldn't consider any of these hip. I am merely painting a picture of what an asshole I am.

The hippest thing I've ever done was have a very short-lived blog that included a video series called "Little Known Phil Facts." Each episode was 15 seconds and was just me drinking red wine and stating a little known fact about Phil Collins.

Slava Pastuk (Editor, Noisey Canada): Bought Five Red Plaid Shirts

When I got the call that I'd be working for VICE I was immediately met with a surge of emotions. Most of them were of joy and excitement, but one of the feels was trepidation. Would I fit into the culture of the company? My previous jobs had all required me to wear dress shirts that had to be tucked in, and this would be the first job where there was absolutely no dress code. I decided to buy a shit-ton of red plaid shirts, which would make me feel connected to my old life while still providing the accreditation I would need to work somewhere as cool as VICE. Since I don't believe in taking half-steps, I went ahead and bought five of these shirts, all of which varied in shades of red and in the sizes of the plaid squared. "Ooh yeah," I whispered to myself as I did up the top button and slid into my chair, ready to create content. "This feels right."

Zach Sokol (Weekend Editor, VICE): Partied at a Spa, Woke Up in the FADER

When I was maybe 20 years old, I went to a party in Bushwick on a Monday called Night Spa. It was at a literal spa, and you'd get cocktails and chill in a hot tub or sauna with other 20-somethings as somewhat-popular DJs did ambient-ish sets nearby. You could get that spa therapy treatment where they whipped you with plants, too.

It was a school night and I felt a bit ridiculous going out with an ex-girlfriend of mine to chase some event that was supposed to be secretive and possibly a bust, especially since it was cold and rainy. But when we got there, it was pretty lit. Mostly babes; lots of art school vibes. We got piña coladas and chilled in the big hot tubs and saunas. I think they served THC-infused liquor there.

There was a photographer, and she asked to take photos of me and my ex-girlfriend. My ex was getting whipped by some plants, so the photog only took pictures of me. It ended up being published in a print edition of FADER with Juicy J on the cover. The photo of me isn't on the online post, but my nips are prominent and large in this feature in the mag, which they titled "New York's Hottest Party." I felt pretty cool. It almost made my hangover in class the next day feel justified, though I can't say the sinus infection I got from the possibly-unclean spa was worth it.

Mitchell Sunderland (Managing Editor, Broadly): Had a "Patti Smith" Phase

After my freshmen year at Sarah Lawrence College, which is regularly included on listicles of hipster universities, I lived in a $350-a-month room in Harlem. I bought a bunch of Mary Kar and Joan Didion books, downloaded a few Of Montreal and Beach House albums, and vowed this was going to be my "Patti Smith" summer to a Sarah Lawrence girl who was wearing a bowler hat. I mostly spent the summer working as a pool boy at condos and Trump Tower though, just to even things out.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete (West Coast Editor, VICE): Everything He Did, 2005-2015

The most hipster thing I ever did was my entire 20s: My boyfriend got arrested for stealing from American Apparel; I became a vegan; I nearly moved into a squat, but then chickened out because I was afraid my laptop (which I bought with inheritance from my Grandma) would get stolen; I was an extra in a Florence and the Machine video; I lived in Hackney; I lived in Silver Lake; I spent a few months in Williamsburg; I spent a few months in Wicker Park; I briefly worked as an assistant to the CobraSnake; I worked in a vintage clothing shop; I legally changed my first name to Jamie Lee Curtis; I lived with a girl who legally changed her name to Mable Cable; I appeared on the cover of VICE Magazine; my VICE cover was featured in a Honda commercial making fun of hipsters; I shaved someone's head at a house party; I gentrified neighborhoods while complaining about gentrification; I boycotted McDonald's; I got Amy Winehouse thrown out of a nightclub; I had a blog; I was published in at least five magazines that no longer exist; I shoplifted, but convinced myself it was cool and subversive because I only did it from corporate chains; I had a conversation on a bus that was so obnoxious, a stranger interrupted to tell me that he thought I was awful; I took photos of people setting off fireworks in the desert; I met people "before they were famous,"; I made branded content; I pulled over at the side of the highway to dance with my friend because "Wuthering Heights" came on the radio; I was an extra in a TV commercial while visibly high on drugs; I regularly wore a pair of jeans I found in an alley; through it all, I denied being a hipster.

Brian McManus (Staff Writer, VICE): Toured with Black Lips, Got in Onstage Fist Fight with Them

Photo by Jordan Graber

From the mid-90s until '07 I was in a band called Fatal Flying Guilloteens, which was named after a Wu-Tang song. We were hip as hell. We lived in Houston, Texas, and owned that town for a spell. We got lots of really cool gigs there and in Austin, and we toured the country a few times. We shared bills with Sonic Youth, Les Savy Fav, Big Business, Mr. Quintron, and Fucked Up. We also played a bunch of shows with cool comedians for some reason: David Cross, Zach Galifianakis, Eugene Mirman, Patton Oswalt, and Aziz Ansari. We had albums out on Estrus Records, GSL, and Frenchkiss. Those are three labels most hipsters would recognize. Pitchfork wrote some favorable things about our final album, Quantum Fucking, calling us "The last of the post-millennial pigfuckers" in a review, a huge compliment, obvs. (Score: 7.6, which was down .2 points from the review of our first album which has since been deleted off the site.) VICE gave our '04 masterpiece Get Knifed a 9 out of 10. Pretty fuckin' hip. I played guitar in the band, which is a very hip instrument. I also "sang" some of our most forgettable songs.

Maybe the most hipster thing we ever did, though, was tour through the south with the Black Lips. We didn't get along so well with them, for reasons I won't get into here. On the last night of that tour—at Athens, Georgia's famed venue 40 Watt—our singer tried to patch things up by pouring a beer into the mouth of their drummer while he was playing, because in addition to being hip we were also very dumb. Black Lips Drummer didn't like that too much (most of it wound up in his eyes), and he and our singer started to fistfight onstage. The other Black Lips jumped in, which meant we had to run from the side of the stage and fight too. It was damn-near a riot.

Alex Rose (Channel Manager, Live Nation TV): Rode Her Fixed Gear Bike to Her Internship at Sub Pop Records

One vivid moment occurred when I was living in Seattle, I went to college there... I remember having this realization, "Oh god I just rode my fixed gear bike to my internship at Sub Pop Records."

At the time I was probably wearing these tattered teal colored tights I'd let my friend tag with a sharpie at a party under a dress with some crummy flats that I only wore because they fit in my clips. Would have been around the time that first Fleet Foxes record came out. Smh.

Michelle Lhooq (Features Editor, THUMP): Threw a Party with Drugs

I threw my 23rd birthday party in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chinatown. We called it the Noodle Rave. It wasn't New York's hottest club, but it had everything that I guess people would associate with hipster bullshit: a bunch of kids on drugs, DJs, dresses with "@" signs, idolized Asian street food... oh, and awkward cultural appropriation disguised as ironic references. It was lit thooo.

Drew Millard (Associate Editor, VICE): Threw an Ironic Hipster Party

I apologize for having participated in professional air guitar tournaments. I apologize for being the lead singer of a locally-tolerated hardcore band whose most-loved song was called "Sports!" I apologize for naming my dog after an author whose books I have not read. I apologize for getting fired from my internship at Merge Records for going to Ultra. I apologize for quitting drinking, only to become a sanctimonious shitsack about everyone else's partying, half out of a misguided sense of superiority but half because I was jealous. I most severely apologize, though, for throwing an "Ironic Hipster Party," in which me and my hipster friends told the hipsters in our town to dress how a non-hip person would assume hipsters dressed and then made them buy Four Loko from us (this was after the great Four Loko Ban of 2010 and we were the only people in town with Four Loko).

Eric Sundermann (Editor-In-Chief, Noisey): Denied Being a Hipster

Welp, I guess this is my day of reckoning. The most hipster thing I've ever done is always denying being a hipster. But now, because my friend Drew decided to ask me, an apparent hipster, what the most hipster thing I've ever done is, I'm having a bit of an identity crisis, because that means I am a hipster... right? I can't really deny it anymore. He wouldn't just ask any ol' fool with a keyboard to talk about being a hipster, unless that fool with a keyboard was actually a hipster. I guess I do live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is where people who are too cool for Williamsburg live. I also wear skinny jeans. And damn it, I write about music for a living. Shit, yeah, I'm a hipster, huh. Or am I just a 20-something? Fuck it, I'm above thinking about this shit. I've got blogging to do.

Michael Cuby (Intern, VICE): Translated Radiohead into Spanish for School

In spring 2012, during my last semester of high school, my Spanish teacher was on pregnancy leave for the second time in as many years. We had a permanent substitute—an alumnus of my high school and a recent graduate from Harvard—who I'm convinced had a personal vendetta against me. He had a habit of giving us assignments that nobody understood the purpose of—his first, an "in depth" translation of an English-language love song. While everyone else in the class opted for straightforward classics like "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston or "We Found Love" by Rihanna, I decided to tackle "All I Need" by Radiohead. He gave me a D on the assignment, explaining that the song's lyrics were "too abstract" to be correctly translated by someone still taking high school Spanish.

Mike Pearl (Staff Writer, VICE): Made the Sixth-Most-Popular Music Video of 2006

Just after I graduated from film school in 2006, my friend Nate got it into his head to make a stop motion music video for our friends in the band Local Natives. Get this though: it was before they were called Local Natives, and instead they were called Cavil at Rest, and they sounded less like Grizzly Bear, and more like Minus the Bear. I lived in a tiny spare room in Nate's house in Orange County, and we co-directed it. After we had some of it done, we showed it to the band, and that was how we asked permission to do a music video. They said yes, so we spent about five months putting together a twee little diorama, and made figures of the band who get their performance space invaded by nature, kinda Jumanji-style.

It came out great, and it got them airplay on music video channels on actual TV (remember, this was the mid-aughts), which was this big cathartic triumph for us. But then one day they started calling themselves Local Natives and became a way better, more bankable band. But unfortunately for us, they completely disowned that song our video was for, "Who's There." In fact, they'd probably hate to know I'm linking people to it in connection to them. But I can definitely say Nate and I helped get them airplay before they were popular.

Hanson O'Haver (Social Editor, VICE): Went to Cory Kennedy's Garage Sale

From the moment I turned hipster—let's date it to age 13, when I bought the Velvet Underground box set on recommendation of a girl whose mom was common-law married to a pro skater—I've been committed to slim jeans and indie rock. To be clear, I have a nuanced understanding of what makes a true hipster. It's not worth really getting into here (it basically involves pursuing the finer things when practical, or subconsciously weighing all decisions on a cost-benefit scale and knowing when slightly increasing the cost—e.g. a shirt that costs $20 more might make you look twice as nice; a record that takes a few listens to get into will give you a lifetime of pleasure—will dramatically increase the benefit) but if you want to meet up for a couple Sparks I'll put on a Bonnie Billy record and we can hash it out.

Which is just to say, I am a lifer. Trying to pick the most hipster thing I've ever done is like asking Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian about the night he felt most melancholy. Like, I went to NYU and minored in French. I once organized and hosted a CMJ panel called '2003: A Hipster Flashback' where I asked people who were there about what the MP3 blogs and cocaine era was really like. I mean, I've spent the last five years running VICE's twitter, which means I'm essentially a responder in the ecosystem of all things hip.

But I wasn't always so well-credentialed. A decade ago, I was just a suburban San Diego teen living vicariously through photoblogs and posting on indie rock fan forums. It was in one-such forum—a Yeah Yeah Yeahs Livejournal fan club, to be specific—that I met a pretty and cool girl who lived half an hour away. She spent a year convincing me to meet her in person and when I finally did, surprise, she was just actually a pretty and cool girl who lived half an hour away. I know this is probably awful advice but as a 16-year-old boy I met a stranger on the internet and it worked out great! But that's not the story here.

Summer of 2007 was a heavy time. I'd just graduated high school, bloghaus was threatening indie rock's hegemonic grip, streetwear was entering its neon all-over print phase, and every week pictures of the coolest underage drinkers in Southern California ended up on The CobraSnake. When Mark the Cobrasnake posted that the site's young starlet and scene "It Girl" Cory Kennedy was going to have a garage sale—featuring a special guest appearance from Uffie ("Pop the Glock" was big at the time)—my girlfriend and I knew we just had to go. So we made the three-hour drive to Santa Monica to see these minor celebrities in real life. The actual garage sale was radically uninteresting, and the people we'd seen on the internet were just standing around on the lawn, talking to their parents. We quickly learned the valuable lesson that people who look cool in pictures are often just good at looking cool in pictures and usually look like they're dressed aggressively weird in real life. We left, went to Supreme, and then drove home. Any disappointment we felt about the garage sale was totally outweighed when we ended up in the background of a picture on the Cobrasnake later that week, which I've saved for posterity. I've never told anyone about any of this.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Things You Learn Working Retail During the Holidays

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Photo via Flickr user Frankie Leon

I'm no stranger to poor decisions, but even I should have known better than to apply for employment at a well-known toy store, just in time for the winter holidays. Seasonal employment in the retail and service industries happens most around this time of year—it starts a little before the holiest holiday of them all, Black Friday, and ends not long after New Year's. Sometimes, the temporary hires turn into permanent employees, but there's no guarantee, and companies usually just want extra staff to handle the obnoxiously large holiday shopping crowd. It's probably easier to get hired as a seasonal employee, but that doesn't mean the job itself is easy.

There are lots of horrible things about the holidays, and they all seem to converge at the mall. As an employee, this can make an already-awful job an actual nightmare. The winter season brings with it more customers, more complaints, more despondent coworkers, more pressure from the boss, and even more shitty music, playing on loop throughout your shift. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans plan to spend an average of $830 on Christmas gifts this year—almost $100 more than last year, and higher than any year since 2007—and those customers will shred every bit of your sanity in order to conduct this holiday shopping.

Other than the few obvious pluses—like, you know, getting a paycheck—working retail through the holiday season is torture. Here's why.

There is No War on Christmas, But There Should Be

If you're a complete asshole, this might seem controversial, but it's true. In America, Christmas will always be king. Growing up Jewish, my family didn't celebrate Christmas, so I never had the opportunity to truly experience the kind of extreme consumerism Christmas shopping entails, as we wisely avoided shopping around this time of year. So my first true experience in a mall at Christmastime was during my first holiday job, at a toy store inside a giant mall in a suburbs of Los Angeles.

Everything inside the store was decorated wall-to-wall with Christmas flourishes. Even if nothing explicitly said "Merry Christmas," the message was still there, and the attempts at making people of other faiths feel included were dismal. For instance, branding a small toy as a "holiday" stocking stuffer, as if the tradition of hanging long socks by the fireplace is used for anything other than Christmas, does not count as inclusion. Occasionally, customers and employees would wish me a "Happy Hanukkah," obviously with no clue that Hanukkah had come and gone weeks prior.

Even if you are a person who celebrates Christmas, it's nearly impossible to withstand the holiday spirit for long. Every store in the mall plays horrifically infectious Christmas songs nonstop, on a loop, throughout each shift. Think of it this way: If you're a person who does give a damn about Christmas and even you get sick of hearing those cheesy tunes about sleigh bells, jingle bells, and whatever other kinds of bells involved in this holiday, imagine being someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas. By the end of January, I was ready to confess to crimes I had never even committed.

Related: Ten Songs Ruined By Retail Playlists

Photo by Flickr user Susam Pal

The Customers Will Not Be Jolly

This shouldn't come as a surprise, but the holidays make people more stressed out than usual, mainly because we are forced to spend time with our families, those horrible people who love us most. By extension, this stress turns customers into trolls.

I experienced this most while working at a Starbucks inside a Macy's, in the heart of San Francisco's downtown shopping district. Heaps of stressed-out customers came in demanding peppermint mochas and pumpkin spice lattes with extra shots of espresso, frustrated by how long they'd been shopping in the mall, and even more frustrated over how long they had to wait in a line that is obviously going to be long because it was almost Christmas, and they were in a goddamn department store like everybody else.

The idea that Christmastime brings people peace and joy is bullshit as far as I'm concerned. While working at the toy store, I once watched a grown woman take a plush doll away from another woman's child because it was the last one of that kind in stock. It wasn't the last plush doll, mind you, it was simply the last one of that particular cartoon character in this particular store. The cries and screams that ensued from that incident seemed to signal that the end was near. Not the end of the season, but the end of humanity.

Related: Photos of Christmas Decorations in Depressing Places

You Will Start to Hate Children

There is no better way to convince teenage girls not to get pregnant than to make them work at a toy store, particularly during the holidays, when children are worst of all. This job taught me a lot about children. Primarily, that they are ridiculous noise machines capable of exuding a plethora of high-pitched slobbery screams, knowing their supposed masters will succumb to any demand in order to make it stop. I was amazed at the audacity some of these young children had ordering their parents around. The only plus side to all the screaming was that it often drowned out the sounds of overly-repetitive Christmas music.

MORE IS EXPECTED OF YOU IN A SHORTER AMOUNT OF TIME

Because seasonal employees are just temporary, companies usually don't invest as much time training them. During my stint at both the toy store and the Starbucks, my training was shorter and less one-on-one than it had been for other employees. That said, you're still expected to know how to do nearly everything, even after working just a few shifts.

In both retail and service jobs, there is a right way and a wrong way to do every single thing—to fold clothing, wear your uniform, stock products, put milk in a refrigerator, and so on. As a barista-in-training at Starbucks, I was the only new hire who was never able to pass the certification test required of me to be allowed to make drinks unsupervised. I knew how to make every beverage, because they are all nearly identical (yes, you are paying over $5 for what is mostly a cup of hot milk), but I could never get the order of when to put the espresso, when to pump the syrup, and when to pour the milk. The order of these things was of utmost importance to management, even though every coworker who had managed to pass this test before me admitted that the order really doesn't matter as long as you get it all in the cup.

And while training is intense, it doesn't help that there's an unspoken hierarchy among full-time employees and the new seasonal hires. Our purpose is to help make things easier, but it always felt to me like we just made things worse. The regular hires become responsible for us in a way, like we were baby ducks pathetically following them around, begging for help and guidance. Not only were most of us annoying, but the reality is that there wasn't much desire to bond (on both sides) when everyone know the likelihood of having to work with one another much longer is slim.

YOU'RE WORKING A LOT OF HOURS, BUT WITH NONE OF THE BENEFITS

Seasonal employees really get the shit end of the employment stick this time of year. Temporary hires don't have the luxury regular employees get when it comes to asking for certain shifts to be changed or covered, even when you request specific time off. You'll also be working 34 hours every week, which is just one hour shy to be considered a "full-time" employee. This means you get to work a minimum-wage job you hate without being entitled to any sort of insurance, paid time off, or other benefits from being an employee. Also, I hope you're cool with working overtime, which you will be asked to do all the time but will somehow still not make you eligible for full-time employment.

You Will Have to Work on Christmas

Obviously I didn't give a crap about that, but it wasn't like only the Jews were required to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For my co-workers of the Santa faith who had to work alongside me on both those days, it felt like a sad scene in a Lifetime movie. I could see their sorrowful eyes gazing in the distance, wishing they were eating the Christmas ham and singing carols by the grand piano with Michael Bublé. I simply longed for my bed, TV, and some pizza, which I believe is just as joyful as Christmas. But I'm no expert.

PEOPLE TAKE SALES REALLY SERIOUSLY

You know how most sane people avoid malls like the plague on Black Friday, or the week before Christmas? As a retail employee, these are basically your moments of bravery and humility. Time to zip up your Hazmat suit and jump in.

The absolute most terrifying instance during my holiday seasonal employment was working Black Friday. My shift started at midnight, and I remember very clearly getting off the subway at around 11:00 on the night of Thanksgiving, walking in the direction of where I was to spend the next eight hours, and already feeling suffocated by the people camped outside of Urban Outfitters waiting for the clock to strike midnight so they could trample one another for a 20-percent-off sweater. The way in which all those bodies polluted the sidewalks made me feel a deep despair for humanity.

Every year I worked Black Friday, I witnessed the same thing: Grown-ass men and women, many of whom had more money than I will ever have in my lifetime, fighting each other for worthless products. That's when I learned that there really is no justice, only sales.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

Inside the World of Professional Shoplifters

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Collage by Marta Parszeniew

Plenty of people have indulged in some sort of shoplifting. The onion scam at a supermarket checkout, a drunken dine-and-dash, a felt jester hat nabbed from one of those shops at Glastonbury made out of metal poles, bunting and dreamcatchers—it all counts. But while most amateurs tend to give up the game around the time they hit puberty, or at least once they're old enough to pay their own bills, for others it can become a full-time career. And around the holidays, those professional shoplifters are known to considerably step up their games.

Throughout her 45-year stint as a shoplifter, 54-year-old Kim Farry says she made £2 million a year. "Because you're not a shoplifter, you couldn't imagine that I could go into a shop and take two grand's worth at a time," she tells me. "It was a living, it was my job. I didn't look at it like I was doing anything wrong, and I think that's why I got away with it."

Nicknamed Britain's "Shoplifting Queen" by the tabloids, Farry first got into five-finger discounts at the age of nine. "I got caught and cautioned for a Marc Bolan badge when I was 11," she tells me. "My dad used to say, 'You want to give it up, you're no good at it, stop thieving,' and I used to think, You should look after mum and I wouldn't have to."

Shoplifting is a crime as old as retail itself. From ancient Egypt to the Roman Empire, where the punishment for stealing could be a death sentence, through to the scammers and pickpockets of 16th century London, people have always stolen goods from shops, whether out of necessity or just for the thrill of it.

By the early 19th century, shoplifting was no longer a crime punishable by death in the UK and had, according to Kerry Segrave's Shoplifting: A Social History, largely become the pursuit of women as well as men. South London's all-female shoplifting gang the Forty Thieves, founded in 1865, were responsible for the largest shoplifting operation the UK has ever seen, fleecing shops out of thousands of pounds by hiding goods in clothes specifically designed for thievery.

By the 1960s, shoplifting had been rechristened as a political act. In 1971's The Anarchist Cookbook, William Powell wrote that "shoplifting can get you high," while in 1970's Steal This Book Abbie Hoffman declared that "ripping off is an act of revolutionary love." You get the idea; shoplifting was seen as a fuck you to the capitalist system—an ethically-defendable crime. Contemporary counter-cultural groups like the Spanish anarchist collective Yomango (which translates as "I Steal") continue this tradition of ideological shoplifting, distributing their pickings from global corporations to wider society.

These days, in order to keep shoplifters at bay, retail stores adopt a range of security measures. One of these is the store detective. While you're probably never further than half a mile from one of these plain-clothed patrollers in any British city, most will never be aware of their presence.

John Wilson* has first-hand experience of the ins and outs of the role. "I worked as a store detective for over eight-and-a-half years. I worked everywhere from low-end to high-end. Armani, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Calvin Klein, all the blue chip names," he tells me. "I also worked all over South London. Brixton, Streatham, Lewisham, Camberwell, Tooting, Balham, Malden, Sutton."

According to Wilson, detectives are often expected to catch a daily quota of shoplifters. "A good store detective would have an arrest rate of one every one-and-a-half hours, but in Brixton, if you didn't have one within the first ten minutes of starting, then it was going to be a bad day," he recalls. "People would be nicking drug-related stuff like duvet covers. We used to have a pub on the corner in Brixton, and if it said 'roast beef' on the menu, then I knew what had been nicked. The druggies would take it the landlords."

Money is an obvious motive for many shoplifters, but for some, the act of stealing itself is seemingly the main attraction. According to a study cited in Rachel Shteir's 2011 book The Steal, Americans with incomes of over $70,000 shoplift 30 percent more than those who earn up to $20,000. Wealthy celebrities have been charged for shoplifting. There are plenty of accounts online from people who definitely could have afforded to pay for something, but simply chose to steal it instead.

A range of counseling services are available for those with shoplifting compulsions, though little research has been conducted into their effectiveness. As for why these compulsions develop, Barbara Staib of the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention in the US told the BBC, "Some people are trying to find solace in shoplifting. It gives them the 'rush,' a 'high'—it can be a relief, if only a temporary one, as they suffer remorse afterward, when they get caught." Conversely, in the same BBC article, Canadian psychologist Dr. Will Cupchik argues that shoplifting has nothing to do with a "rush," but more the need to fill a void in the subject's personal life.

Kim Farry. Screen shot via YouTube

Whatever the explanation, Farry can relate. "I was addicted to it," she says. "As soon as the shops were open, I was out there until they shut, driving from one town to the other. People used to say to me, 'How the fuck do you do it?' And I'd say, 'I taught myself. I'm not about to tell you.' It's an art. It's not just about going in and throwing it in your bag."

To counter pros like Farry, Wilson employed a gamut of tactics to blend in with the general public. "If customers were coming in wet because it was raining, you'd disappear outside the store to get yourself wet," he explains, adding that once he'd detected a suspect he'd follow them around the store, careful to observe their every move. "You've seen them approach, collect, and conceal the item, then you'll let them wander out. One step outside the door and you introduce yourself as the store detective," he tells me. "It can be dangerous. I never used to run off down the street unless I had backup with me."

According to Wilson—and perhaps unsurprisingly—it was the professional shoplifters who were the most difficult to deal with. "The hardest ones to catch are the ones that come in groups. Obviously a store detective working on their own can only observe one person," he explains. "A lot of people are using de-taggers these days, but if you catch them with that, they're obviously going equipped to steal—that's a bigger deal."

Depending on the severity of your shoplifting, and how many times you've been caught, punishments in the UK can vary. Best outcome: you'll get a slap on the wrist and banned from the shop. Worst: a custodial sentence. After a total of 30 convictions for theft and five stints in prison, Farry tells me she's finally decided to put a stop to the shoplifting.

"This year has been the longest time I haven't done it, apart from when I've been in prison," she says. "I feel like a big weight's been lifted off my shoulders, but I've still got a long way to go yet with the addiction. I've got six kids and five grandchildren. I've got no money or presents for Christmas, but the kids say, 'We don't care, mum, we're just so happy that you're doing what you're doing.'"

Despite the "Shoplifting Queen" hanging up her specially-designed stealing stockings, it's clear it's a crime that's not going anywhere; last year, offenses were up 6 percent from 2013, and police nationwide have recently issued warnings about the imminent rise of shoplifting incidents in the run-up to Christmas. It's something people from all walks of life do, because it's about the most immediate, accessible crime there is: walk into a shop, find something you like, pocket it, and walk out.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's without its consequences. John Wilson may have called it a day on the store detective front, but there are many others out there like him. Plus, just because he's no longer being paid to nab shoplifters, doesn't mean he can't do the odd bit of freelance work when it presents itself. "Every now and then," he says, "I nick someone just for the fun of nicking someone."

* John Wilson's name has been changed to protect his identity.

Follow Maya on Twitter.

We Asked People How They Discovered Their Sexual Fetishes

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Photo via Flickr user Hubert J Sanford

Throughout history, people have been turned on by things beyond just other peoples' junk. From the common interests, like bondage and role playing, to the more obscure ones, like watching people slowly sink into quicksand, there are fetishes for just about everything.

I, for example, get off on using dildos on others. Looking back, I'm pretty sure where this particular fetish came from: I was 14-years-old and my best friend was spending the night. We were watching Mel Brooks's Dracula, Dead and Loving It and talking about sex—specifically, anal sex. I was pretty sure I would enjoy anal, but I got the sense my friend wasn't quite there. Eventually, he found a Dennis Rodman doll I had received as a gag gift and the next thing I knew, we were sticking that Dennis Rodman doll up each others butts, which then lead to us using our own organic Rodman dolls.

If you look to the research, most fetishes are defined by childhood experiences like this one. The defining moments aren't always so on-the-nose, but there's often some connection between early arousal and the object in question. One study, from the 60s, details a guy whose leather fetish stemmed from an early childhood experience with his uncle's shoes: "I was home alone and saw my uncle's new penny loafers. I went over and started smelling the fresh new leather scent and kissing and licking them. It turned me on so much that I actually ejaculated...and have been turned on ever since."

If this is the case, I wondered what kind of experiences led to peoples' interests in scat, incest role playing, or domination? Did they have an "aha moment," as Oprah would say? And was it immediately followed by an orgasm? I asked a few fetishists to find out.

Scat Fetish

George (not his real name) understands why scat play, the act of incorporating defecation into sex, isn't for everybody. But for him, it's the "most intensely intimate thing imaginable."

"We all spend the first two or three years of our lives having our mothers and fathers shame and condition us around it," he said. "For 40-some years of my life, it never occurred to me as something that could be hot." But then, something changed.

"I knew I loved rimming from when I first tried it at 18. For the next 25 years, rimming was my biggest turn-on. Early on, that seemed really envelope-pushing. It was hot to feel like I was doing something more dirty than most. Nowadays, plain old rimming is no big deal."

George's "aha moment" came when he met a guy online who shared some private videos with him.

"In one, he turns his back to the camera, crouches in a bathtub and takes a shit. Then he turns around with a big grin on his face and picks it up. He starts smearing it all over himself very sensually. Then he takes a very phallic-shaped piece of it and starts sucking on it as if to give it a blowjob."

George says that he "went numb" watching the video. "It was like my body temperature went hot and cold at the same time... For the next six months, I kept trying not to watch those videos, then would give in. It reminded me of the shame and horror I would feel after masturbating to the idea of guys way back then during puberty. Now, in my 40s, my sexual interests were suddenly taboo and 'dirty' again."

Eventually, George started experimenting with himself, using his own defecation. Continuing to be aroused, he found others in online communities that shared his interest.

"You're dealing with something that was just inside that person. It's like saying to a man, 'Show me the part of you that's considered most filthy and embarrassing and shameful and objectionable and I'll relish even that.' Some of the experiences I've had engaging in scat play with other guys were just about the most vulnerable and yet sensually animalistic experiences I've had," he said.

"There are times now that I truly wish I could turn a switch and no longer be turned on by scat. It would make my sexual and romantic life a lot easier. But at the same time, I know that one of the reasons things like this become so taboo is because they're so powerful."

Watch: Cash Slaves: Inside the fetish for "financial domination"

Panties AND PEGGING Fetish

Lance Hart, 36, produces, stars, and directs films for his own website, PervOut.com (obviously NSFW), in addition to occasionally appearing in films for other fetish-oriented websites like Kink.com. Within the porn world, he's probably most famous for female domination, where women abuse him, force him to wear leggings and stockings, and then peg him.

Long before he started doing porn, though, Hart was "excited by the idea of panties and nylons. I knew of anal play too, and it excited me, but at the time I was too young for sex."

As he got older, he started telling his girlfriends about his nylon and panties fetish, but not anal. "I was worried they would go and tell their friends," he said.

In order to fully realize his interest in anal, he hired a female escort for his first experience getting pegged. Afterwards he said, "I felt a new kind of horny that I thought might be available, but never knew for sure. It opened a door to lusting outside of the box."

If it weren't for that experience, Hart said he would never have been open to working for SeanCody.com, a gay porn website featuring mostly straight male performers, which led to his successful career in fetish porn.

"Being honest with myself about what turns me on has given me so much, I've gained confidence in my sexual strength as a man. I no longer question my sexual strengths with women. I just know how to be myself in bed, and that's changed everything in terms of how I can be with a partner."

Denial and Teasing Fetish

Mindi Mink, 47, is an adult film performer with a fetish for teasing and denial. As a kid, she remembers playing a game that set the foundation for her fetish.

"I had a friend at school who would come over for slumber parties, and we would make a game out of tickling each other, or stroking one another," she said. "Whatever the game was, it would always end up with one of us having to gently stroke one another—not in a sexual way, but rather on the arms, or legs."

At the time she didn't associate this with a sexual feeling; it was just something that she liked and felt good. It wasn't until she had her first sexual relationship with a woman that she connected her arousal to this type of sensual stroking, and realized she had a fetish for denial and teasing.

"This woman was queen tease and denial. She would sensually touch me and then stop, even though I would beg her to continue, she would say, 'No, you're not ready yet.' But when she did finally finish me off, it was the most intense orgasm of my life," Mink said.

Since then, her orgasms from tease and denial have been off the charts.

Urine Fetish

Mark (not his real name) is a 53-year-old native to Los Angeles. He enjoys sex in public bathrooms, but he says his true fetish is for the smell of urine.

"I was a bed wetter and enjoyed how it smelled in the mornings," he said. "I'd have morning wood and would jack off right away from the stimulation of the odor."

From that childhood moment, Mark's arousal from urine grew. As a teen, he remembers becoming aroused by the smell of a locker room. "It wasn't the guys that turned me on, but the smell of the guys. The smell of pee."

At 17, after performing oral sex on an older man in a public restroom, Mark says, "It gave me a high, I came without touching myself."

Today, Mark continues to have sex in public restrooms, even though he's been arrested for public sex in the past.

"Part of is danger, and another part of it is being used. The smell of piss stimulates me, just like smelling fresh baked bread fresh from the oven does, or taking a deep whiff of a rose, or someone's sweat."

Follow H. Alan Scott on Twitter.

All the People You Want to Avoid When You Go Home For the Holidays

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"Wow, it's been so long since I've seen you! Want to go for a drink?" Back away slowly or this could be you. Photo via Flickr user Chanel Beck.

It's easy to romanticize the concept of growing up amongst a population of 10,000 when you've moved away and have been living in a major city for a few years. You might even forget that you used to commonly refer to your hometown as an incest-ridden hellhole. Take, for example, when you're having a panic attack about how delayed public transit is on your commute to work during an Uber protest: fantasizing about moving back there to live a simple life where rent is under a grand and you own a car can feel like the aftereffects of a lobotomy. Don't be fooled: it still sucks, and you'll remember that as soon as you start having awkward run-ins with your past. Here's the people you'll want to avoid when you go home (and probably won't).

Your Ex While you're trying to get so drunk you forget where you are, you run into one of your ex's best friends. Forgetting all those times your ex sent love letters to your parents' house long after you broke up or showed up at your dorm building uninvited, you retrieve his new phone number from this dude. When you text him, he immediately answers you and asks if you're drunk, to which you reply, "No, of course not, I just miss you!" Next thing you know, you're sitting on the twin bed where you lost your virginity at his parents' place smoking his weed, listening to Modest Mouse, and watching him as he attempts to hold back tears.



Are you sure you want to run into that girl? Side eye says no. Photo via Flickr user Bennett.

The Porn Star You used to go ice-skating, smoke weed, and take MySpace selfies together after school. Now, she is in your hometown's only try-hard hipster bar spilling Malibu rum cocktails on the floor and telling you about her latest BDSM shoot in which she was hung from the ceiling and penetrated in several orifices. You ask her where to get cocaine, to which she replies, "Hehe. I don't know, I never pay for that shit, I only get it for free!" OK.

The White Guy With Dreads He's one of those guys who's always been in a jam band and inexplicably has dreadlocks even though it's 2015. He's worked at the same coffee shop for the last 10 years. When you run into him at your friend's rundown split-level apartment while seshing with one of the only other alternative people left in town—in a dwelling wherein everyone smokes cigarettes inside and you've been offered bath salts before—you observe him scraping resin out of a bong that looks like it hasn't been cleaned in several years. After, he'll play hand drums to any song that comes on, regardless of genre and the fact that no one ever asked him to do so. When you get back to your parents' house later that night, you'll wash your hair at least three times, but it will be days before you get that smell out.

You do not want to end up here. Photo via Flickr user Nate Grigg.

Best Friend's Little Brother There was that one time you accidentally hooked up with him after drinking nearly half a bottle of peach-flavoured Ciroc, but shit's been pretty consistent with this dude for the most part: no matter what occasion, he's sitting in his bedroom with his cat yelling aggressively into a headset while playing first-person shooters. He's never had a job or a driver's licence, and his highest accomplishments in life are getting Twitter famous for taking selfies with girls' asses and helping you get a bag of white mystery powder that gave you a week-long sinus infection.

Don't take the shot. It's a trap. Photo via Flickr user BluEyedA73.

Your Worst Enemy from High School When you were a teenager, this girl did everything she could possibly do to ruin your life, including spreading rumours about you having an STI, regularly breaking up your friendships, and fucking your boyfriend who she hooked you up with in the first place. She got into that university theatre program you had your heart set on before you truly understood what student debt was, and last you heard, she was supposed to be on one of those reality shows for wannabe Broadway actors. Now she's an alcoholic, supports herself with a sugar daddy, and when you run into her at the only bougie martini bar in town, she acts like you're friends.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Honour Roll Student She was the girl you sat at lunch with who wore glasses, had the highest grades, and possessed the most innocence, always scolding you for skipping class. But in the years since you've seen her, she's apparently discovered MDMA. Now she's dancing like an inflatable tube guy on the bar wearing a crop top and her eyes are rolling back in her head. She doesn't even recognize you when you make a half-assed attempt to say hi as you pass her on your way out of the place.


Yeah... Photo via Flickr user Bennett.

The Ex-Convict He may have been arrested a few times, but in your heart, you know he's a good guy. Besides, he's way more fun to hang out with than the rest of the people left in your hometown. Even though all his friends have kids now, you can always count on him if you want to have a good time. He took you to your first strip club: it had a dirt floor, a BYOB policy, and a mechanical bull. If that's not friendship, I really don't even want to have friends. That being said, the last time you hung out, you ended up breaking your left hand in a bar fight he started with an ex-cellmate.

The EDM DJ He was a bassist in an alt rock band back when you used to have gym class together, but like the majority of those born in the 90s, he suddenly discovered EDM sometime between graduation and now. When he adds you on Facebook after running into each other in the grocery store, you see a selfie of him with deadmau5 and a bunch of girls in rainbow faux-fur bikini tops; you end up deleting him a couple months later because he won't stop sending you event invites to club nights in Denver.


*promptly vomits* Photo via Flickr user Chanel Beck.

The New Girlfriend Oh great, your friend from home has a new girlfriend. While you pretend to be excited for him that he thinks he met his soulmate, the idea of gouging your eyes out with a spoon seems slightly more appealing than trying to make small talk with this girl. Apparently you went to high school together (so she says), but despite your abysmally small graduating class size, you cannot remember ever seeing her before. Being one of five people left in town who can be considered "alternative," sometimes you just end up together by default. Next time you're home, she'll be pregnant with their spawn. Grats!

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Remembering the Hipster: Defining 'Hipster'

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Enough time has passed since the world was at Peak Hipster for us to look back at it as a movement, or a craze, or a meme, or whatever the fuck it was and try to take stock of what it all meant, if anything. So this week we're doing exactly that in a short collection of stories.

Hipster, as a term, is notoriously difficult to define. Mainly because it doesn't really mean anything. There was definitely an easily definable hipster style to begin with (non-prescription glasses, tote bag, fixed gear bike, etc.) but, much like if you say your own name 100 times in a row, it eventually lost all meaning.

Like "witch," "communist," and "basic," "hipster" became an indefinable word you could use to smear The Other. Ride a bike? You're a hipster. Listen to music? You're a hipster. Drink coffee? Hipster. Don't drink coffee? Contrarian hipster. Nobody was safe from being called a hipster, and nobody wanted to be one.

"Hipster" has become like pornography: You know it when you see it, but it's impossible to define.

In order to better understand what the term meant to the people who used it, I created the above word cloud. To make it, I took around 120 different definitions of "hipster" that I found around the web (mostly from Urban Dictionary and Yahoo Answers) and fed them into a word cloud generator. After taking out all of the non-relevant words ("and," "the," "him," etc.), this is what I was left with.

I guess the main takeaway is that hipsters valued jeans above everything else? But also that they went to college, read books, lived in Williamsburg, liked obscure things, hung out at Starbucks (??), drank PBR, did stuff ironically, ate vegetarian food, and used Apple products.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

We Spoke to the Indigenous Protester Who Called the Paris Climate Conference on Its Bullshit

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This is how you respect Brad Wall's authoritah. Photo via Erica Violet Lee.

Erica Violet Lee's tongue became a signal of resistance at the Paris Climate Conference.

The 25-year-old Nehiyaw (Cree), philosophy student from the University of Saskatchewan pissed off a lot of people in her home province after she posted a photo online where she playfully stuck out her tongue at Premier Brad Wall while they were at a celebration for Canadian delegates at the Canadian Embassy in Paris. Lee was part of the Canadian Youth Delegation at the Conference of Parties (COP 21) where, for the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations, world leaders actually crafted a historic agreement on climate change with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

It was a completely different experience for Lee, who grew up in inner-city Saskatoon where she saw the effects of colonization everyday. She refused to accept ingrained prejudices, becoming the driving force to change her high school sports team name from a racist stereotype to the Red Hawks and was involved in Idle No More. She's not afraid to call bullshit, and that's exactly what she did in Paris.

After posting the infamous tongue photo, Lee started to get threats online calling her a whore and a slut to which she responded on Facebook saying, "think of my photo as counting coup."

"I don't have a chance in hell at taking on the power, privilege, and resources of governments and corporations. Not in the venue of a ritzy celebration for Canadian officials. Not when there are gendarmerie (military police) with rifles and riot gear lined up along every wall. Not while the format of this conference is designed to be a photo op for 150+ world leaders, designed to keep people like me out."

On December 3, Lee, along with her youth delegate counterparts, stood in front of the international media and protested Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his platitudes instead of action. Holding signs which read "youth want to be heard, not just seen," Lee argued they deserve more than photo ops with Canadian government and that youth aren't just props.

VICE spoke to Lee in her final days at the climate summit to talk about using her platform to point out hypocrisy.

VICE: How did you get involved with the youth delegation?
Erica Violet Lee: I heard about COP 21 and talked to some of my friends who work with Indigenous rights and environmental rights, we were talking about the need to get Indigenous people to Paris, to be involved in this type of negotiations. The Canadian Youth Delegation was one of the groups that was offering accreditation, passes into the negotiations. Normally I wouldn't identify as Canadian anymore since my work with Idle No More and thinking about what it actually means to consider myself Indigenous to this space in a colonial country, but I decided to come with the Canadian Youth Delegation.

What were your expectations before you went?
I have no idea. When I started reading about COP 21 and the United Nations climate negotiation spaces I was thinking this is the highest level of importance in talking about making legal the rights of indigenous people and it's one of the best platforms and opportunities we have to ensure that our sovereignty is respected, to ensure that the world isn't destroyed by corporations and greedy governments.

To sit in these negotiations with countries from all over the world is strange and it's totally different scope than anything I've ever done before. I find it overwhelming but was also feeling pretty excited to be here just realizing what a privileged position it is for me to be able to come from inner-city Saskatoon and to try and represent people who these spaces aren't meant for. The United Nations is such an elite space and I realized there are people who have spent their whole lives negotiating in United Nations sessions. But understanding too that even the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People hasn't been fully implemented in a meaningful way even though Canada is a signatory. So, in one sense it's the peak of power in the world but in another sense it's still not enough and it does nothing for us on the ground so far.

You've mentioned the UN is a space not meant for you, so how does it feel being in that space?
Strange but exciting because I want to be able to bring all of the stories I've heard over the past few years working with Idle No More and working with different communities across Canada and the world. You hear so many stories of people who have lived off their lands for decades and centuries, who can't eat the fish anymore because they're covered in cancerous tumours. Those people who can't drink their own water out of the streams that their ancestors drank out of for centuries. So those are the kinds of stories that I wanted to bring here.

Something else I found out in the United Nation spaces is that there is a real tokenization of Indigenous people. Like there is a very select few who are repeatedly held up, while a lot of voices are excluded—particularly those of us who come from poverty or smaller communities, or especially prairie communities. We are not held in esteem, we are not allowed access to many other spaces that other people might be.

Protest signs at Paris. Photo via Erica Violet Lee.

A lot of people from other countries have an idea of Canada as idyllic, what do they think of the stories you are bringing from the Indigenous communities you've been to?
That's a rhetoric that we've heard over and over and as the Canadian Youth Delegation. We have been trying to disrupt that because Trudeau gets on the platform and says, "Canada is back." So what does it mean when we say that Canada is back? More than anyone, the folks who work with Idle No More understand the damage that Harper and the Conservative government did to us and did to the land in the past decade and the fact that we are still not out of that. It will take decades to recover from what happened just with the destructiveness of the policy and the rhetoric that they were spewing. But also recognizing that the Liberal Government is already doing a lot of the exact same things but under the banner of "a good Liberal Canada."

We were able to meet with the Minister of Environment's staff ... It was really hostile and mostly what the Liberal Environment Minister staffers were saying was, "We need to have something that benefits everyone," and wanted us to use the hashtag #allinthistogether, which includes for them having Enbridge, Cenovus, Suncor and all of these companies that are destroying our lives at the table.

The fact that pipeline projects and tar sands projects are going forward is a violation of treaties and our fundamental rights, so we are not ready to negotiate or reconcile with extractive corporations.

What made your group decide to protest at COP 21?
Well, the weirdest part about the United Nations and the climate forum is that you have to fill out an application to protest. You say: this is our protest, this is the exact space it will take place in, this is the exact time it will be, this is our messaging. You are not supposed to name a country, you are not supposed to name a politician or a person, you are not supposed to name a corporation or a company. So, basically, even that protest we did, we had to fill out an application for it and we ended up getting scolded for it after because we weren't clear enough in explaining what our message would be and the fact that we named Canada as a country was a problem.

I'm thinking a lot about protest and disobedience and the ways that, even within the United Nations space and the atmosphere in Paris, disobedience and protest are turned into props as well. They say we are allowing you to dissent but you have to do it within these strict confines. I think it was still a great action but I guess a lot of it too, is that it still feels orchestrated by these massive powers.

What kind of response did you get from it?
It was a good response. When you do a protest in a space like that there's tons of media coverage and tons of people supporting us. But it was, like I said, it feels tokenistic and I have been struggling with finding ways with actually disrupting the power structure from within it.

When you are in a place like the United Nations and you have to fill out a form to have a protest, is that really taking down the system? So many people talk about getting involved in politics or getting into the system to change it from within but so often I have seen those people become coopted and really comfortable with the system.

With the Youth Delegation, did you feel like you were expected to be a prop?We have really been pushing back against that. We are the only Canadian Youth Delegation here. Trudeau wouldn't meet with us, wouldn't even acknowledge us. Meanwhile he is tweeting about the youth and taking pictures with people.

So 'tongue-gate' and Brad Wall. How was it in that room and what made you decide to take that picture?
We were at this celebration for Canadian delegates which was at the Canadian Embassy on a really fancy street in Paris. It's this big beautiful building.

Even just walking through Paris as an Indigenous person from Canada and recognizing all of this, the reason that Europe is so wealthy is because it stole land, it stole people, it stole objects. So it's just being in this space as an Indigenous person, and one of the few Indigenous people there, and seeing all of this power in one room.

We were just standing there, as young people, and thinking, how do we even start to do something that will translate to change? We've already learned that in most cases you can't just go up to these people and talk to them from your world view because they just don't understand. They see it in terms of dollars. They see it in terms of profits and of economy. So we just stood there overwhelmed and frustrated at the situation we were in.

It's like... coming face to face with all of this power and realizing that nothing I could say in that moment will change the power structure that is propped up.

It wasn't actually a selfie. It was my friend taking the picture. But people think of youth as shallow and, "Oh let's just take a selfie," but it was just the only reaction I had at the time to stick out my tongue. I had no idea it was going to get so much attention. I thought it was really funny the reaction for people saying, "That's all she can do?" At the same time people don't usually listen to my words as an Indigenous woman, as a two spirit person, they are more interested in calling me disrespectful or calling me juvenile.

Anyway, Brad Wall was in the room schmoozing with a bunch of oil executives and selling away our province. I thought of all of the people that I work with everyday in my community who are saying we can't have nuclear storage facilities in our communities up north, we can't continue to lose all of our land to pipelines and to oil industry. And recognizing the real human and land costs of these policies and these deals he's so casually making while sipping champagne in Paris.

Do you think the act of resistance becomes more threatening when it comes from an Indigenous woman?
So often in Canada and all over the world too—I've experienced this in Paris at COP—people are fine with images of Native women standing around in regalia, or powwow dancing, but they don't actually want to hear our voices. They don't want to hear us being political and calling out the colonial violence that we face... They just care about us as props, as a way to uphold this vision of Canada as a multicultural country that they want to believe exists, that for us still doesn't exist.

You speak about the colonial violence that Indigenous women face, so were you shocked by the violence you faced on social media?
I don't think I'm shocked anymore just because of how common it is. I got called a cheap whore—that was kind of interesting. It's always interesting when it's sexualized, and so often the critiques and the attacks we get as Indigenous women are to call us a whore, to call us a slut, all gendered and sexualized insults. So much of that goes back to the way Indigenous women are viewed as conquerable. The key part of the narrative of Canada and conquest, is that Canada wants to view us as property, as something that can be taken, as something that can be controlled. By resisting and fighting back and not being silent, we disrupt that and it really unsettles people.

One of my friends in the Canadian Youth Delegation used the hashtag #upsettlers meaning when settlers get really upset because Indigenous people aren't being silent.

So what have you taken from the experience at COP 21?
Well we are looking at the text at one of the agreements and seeing countries, the EU, remove the rights of Indigenous peoples from the document text, which is a huge problem. They actually took out the rights of indigenous peoples form the climate change document they produced here so people are trying to get it back in right now.

So I guess it's recognizing that what if our rights as Indigenous people aren't protected anymore in the climate change protocols that come out of Paris? What does that mean? I think that's a big step back. I think, more than anything, this has reaffirmed my belief that the most important and revolutionary organizing around indigenous people's rights, migrants, racialized people, women, all takes place in our communities and doesn't come from the top.

But I also found that there is a lot of power in being an Indigenous young person and mostly that power comes from a recognition that I don't have anything invested in this system so I don't care if it falls. Frantz Fanon, an Algerian French philosopher, talked about that saying those of us who have the least invested in these systems, who constantly face violence from colonial countries, we have the most to gain from toppling these structures of power.

What is the strangest moment you have had so far?
Just the the banality of sitting in negotiations as men in suits—it's overwhelmingly men in suits—look at screens of texts and casually say, "I think we should take rights of Indigenous people out because whatever..." Just realizing what a disconnect there is from sitting in a room and going over a text and striking out the rights of millions of people in the planet... Realizing that disconnect from the grassroots struggles and trying to get get people to recognize our humanity, when they are going to strike it out with a pen in a minute.

It's just the weirdness of going from the climate negotiation space where they just took my rights as a human being out of a document, now I'm going to go eat a chocolate crepe because it's going to make me feel better. International policy negotiations are kind of like living in sci-fi world but it's reality.

I guess my biggest thing I've been thinking about in all of my activism, all of my years of working in communities, is that we need to stop being obedient to people who don't care about us. We need to recognize the seriousness of this struggle. This isn't a game. That's what I've learned talking to some of these big, important people is that they think it's politics and they can walk away from it when they leave the conference room, but that's not the case.

This interview has been edited for style and length.

Follow Geraldine Malone on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: Watch Killer Mike Interview Bernie Sanders in an Atlanta Barbershop

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Read: Can Killer Mike Help Bernie Sanders Win Black Voters?

Run the Jewel's Killer Mike has been a vocal supporter of presidential hopeful and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for a while now. He gave an impassioned speech at a Sanders rally in Atlanta last November, saying that he "truly that Senator Bernie Sanders is the right man to lead this country."

While Mike was with Sanders in Atlanta, the pair got some soul food at Busy Bee and then headed over to Mike's barbershop to talk about heath care, drug policy, the economy, and Sanders's socialism, among other things.

Mike released video footage of that chat on Tuesday morning, a six-part video series on YouTube called "Talking Shop with Bernie Sanders." The videos are called "Economic Freedom," "Social Justice," "A Rigged Economy," "Free Health Care: It Ain't a Big Deal," "This Country Was Started as an Act of Political Protest," and "Democrats Win When People Vote."

Watch them all above, and keep an eye out for Mike's sweatshirt with the RTJ logo designed by VICE's esteemed art editor, Nick Gazin.

A New Report Shows the Jail Population Is Growing Fastest in America's Least Populous Counties

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Photo via Flickr user my_southborough

Inside the historic Woolworth Building in downtown Manhattan, a dozen floors up from its impressive All Gold Everything No Tourists Allowed lobby, Chris Henrichson speedily directs his mouse across a map of the United States, hovering his cursor above various counties. When he does, an info box pops out, which helpfully tells you the name of the county you're looking at. Beneath that is a percentage, often preceded by a plus sign, and the option to "Click for details."

We're in a conference room in the Vera Institute of Justice, where Henrichson serves as director of the Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit. He's also the lead and author on its latest project, In Our Own Backyard: Confronting Growth and Disparities in American Jails, a comprehensive, immersive, and interactive undertaking that shows in eye-opening clarity just how massive the American jail system—a separate beast from the prison system—has become. But the report doesn't just show that jail populations have grown, but also pinpoints exactly where.

Made public Tuesday, the report on Incarceration Trends took Henrichson and a sizable team at Vera, whose stated mission is "to make justice systems fairer and more effective through research and innovation," six months and thousands of man hours to complete. In that time, they analyzed all 3,000 US counties and the jails within their borders using info from every Census of Jails from the Bureau of Justice Statistics taken since the 1970s. Vera's resulting report represents 14 million pieces of data, and in the sprawl a few very red flags emerge, some of them surprising, others starkly depressing.

These days, more people are booked into jails and their stays are longer. What were nine-day average waits behind bars in 1978 now average three weeks. And while it's often the large jails that grab the most attention from media and policymakers, the report shows it's mid-sized and small counties where jail populations have exploded over the past 45 years, increasing 4.1 times in mid-sized counties and 6.9 times in small ones. Large counties also saw growth, but it was comparatively small: by a factor of 2.8. On any given day in 2014, those large counties saw an average of 271 inmates reside in jails per 100,000 people between the ages of 15 and 64. In small counties, that number was 446. Out of the just over 11 million inmates cycled through the American jail system in 2014, nearly five and a half million were incarcerated in small counties, compared to just over two million in large county jails.

Numbers like that begin to make more sense when you begin clicking on various small counties on the interactive map and see that places like, Jefferson County Colorado, experienced 614 percent growth since 1970. Or that another relatively obscure spot Stearns County, Minnesota saw a 5368 percent increase over the same time.

Other takeaways: In mid-sized and small communities, African Americans have the highest incarceration rates, and they make up nearly 40 percent of America's jail population despite comprising just 13 percent of the general population. The report also shows that female incarceration rates have blown through the roof, particularly in America's smallest counties. "Since 1970, there has been more than a fourteen-fold increase the number of women held in jail," the report states. "From fewer than 8,000 women in 1970 to 110,000 women in jails in 2014."

What LA Kids Did When a Bomb Hoax Shut Down Their Schools

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All photos by the author

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District canceled school across the entire system, a virtually unprecedented move taken in response to email threats sent to school officials in both LA and New York. The threats, which mentioned teams of jihadists moving in on unidentified schools with explosives, machine guns, and nerve gas, were later determined to be a hoax—but not before the city's Department of Education abruptly released 640,000 kids across Southern California. (New York officials determined early on that the threats were fake and kept schools open.)

"It was not to one school, two schools or three schools. It was many schools, not specifically identified," LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines said in a press conference early Tuesday morning. "I am not taking the chance of bringing children any place, into any part of the building, until I know it is safe."

And so, for the first time in recent memory, school in LA was called off—a move that caused major headaches for a whole range of reasons. LAUSD is the second largest school district in the country, with approximately 900 schools and 640,000 students across 720 miles. Given that Cortines decided to cancel school just a few minutes after 7:00 AM, hundreds of thousands of these students were already en route, or even at school, by the time they found out about the closure.

And though LAUSD is huge, it's not the only school district in the area—several parts of LA, including Compton, Beverly Hills, and Burbank have their own school districts, which led to a good amount of confusion over which schools were open and which were closed on Tuesday. Local hip-hop stations like KDAY and REAL 92.3 served as de facto information hubs, informing listeners which schools were open and closed, and sometimes even calling schools on-air to confirm.

Cedric Wright and his two sons

For many parents, the school closings meant making auxiliary plans for their kids that day—calling in grandparents to pick kids up, taking off work themselves, or simply letting their kids go free and hoping for the best.

"My kids are losing their education," said Cedric Wright, a father of two six year-old boys who told me he was lucky enough to have the day off Tuesday. Wright lives in South Los Angeles, where several schools were closed. When I spoke to him, he was at a playground near Hoover Street, supervising his children as they played. "A lot of parents were devastated," he said, when they found out school was canceled, because that meant they'd have to take time off from work.

"It's a domino effect," he added. "If we can't provide for our households, then our kids can't get their education."

Nearby, an older woman was playing soccer with a young boy—her grandson, she told me in Spanish, explaining that her son had called her and asked that she pick the child up from school due to the bomb threat. He works in North Hollywood, she told me, and couldn't get back to pick the boy up in time. Some of the children at the playground appeared to be unsupervised. I asked her if she knew who they belonged to. She said she had no idea.

"Curtis," "Sloth," Chris, and Carlos

For older kids, the closings were more like a snow day, although most Angeleno students have likely never experienced one. A group of teenagers—who introduced themselves as Curtis, Chris, Carlos, and Sloth—said they weren't in school anymore, but that they'd all heard about the threats. "It's crazy scary," said Carlos. "It was all over Facebook," Sloth added.

Among kids and adults, there seemed to be a good amount of confusion about what was actually going on. One mother I talked to told me in Spanish that she didn't know anything about school being closed, and had her elementary school-age son talk to me. He'd seen that school was canceled on TV, he said.

Other kids told me they'd only found out school was canceled from friends. A group of teens who attended high school outside of LAUSD told me that their principal had decided to let kids leave early due to the threat, but as far as they knew, the school hadn't closed. Another kid who attended school outside the district said he'd used the threat as an excuse to skip school, telling his parents that his school had been included in the closures. (Later, when I asked to take a picture of him and his friends, he told me "no" and rode away on his skateboard; his friends then shrugged at me and got on their skateboards too).

Some Hawthorne teens who snuck into a nearby skatepark after getting let out of school early because of the LAUSD bomb threat.

The bomb scare turned out to be just that—a scare. The emails were sent from something called Cockmail, a stunt email server and "meme sewer" affiliated with 8chan, an anonymous message board used, in part, to post content that's been banned by 4chan. Cock.li's founder, Vince Canfield, confirmed Tuesday that he'd been subpoenaed by the NYPD for information related to the school threats. He also suggested there may be a larger takeaway from the day's events:

Later in the afternoon Tuesday, I headed over to Fairfax Avenue—a streetwear hub and popular teen hangout that's also close to a couple middle and high schools. I asked two employees sharing a joint outside the boutique the Hundreds if they'd seen more kids than usual because of the bomb threat. They told me they had no idea what I was talking about—and sure enough, the store was empty. Supreme, usually another teen hotspot, was pretty empty as well.

"One of our kids that comes by regularly came by," said Ricky, a manager at The Kayo Store, which features an indoor skate spot, told me. "We were like, 'Hey, how come you're not in school?' 'Oh, there was a bomb threat. A big mob of kids are on the way over to skate the park.'"

I asked Ricky if he felt like a babysitter sometimes. "More like I work at a daycare," he joked. "This is the first place parents call to see where their kid's at."

By the time school would have been letting out Tuesday afternoon, city officials had officially declared that the threat was not credible—a conclusion New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton had announced hours before. De Blasio even joked that whoever sent the emails might just be a fan of Homeland.

But if LAUSD's decision to shut down was an overreaction, it was perhaps an understandable one in a region that's still recovering from the mass shooting by Islamic State–loving terrorists in San Bernardino less than two weeks ago.

"It is very easy in hindsight to criticize a decision based on results that the deciders could have never known," Charlie Beck, the current LAPD chief, said at a follow-up press conference Tuesday. "All of us make tough choices... These are tough times. Southern California has been through a lot in recent weeks."

Follow Drew on Twitter.

What We Learned from the Last Republican Debate of 2015

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After Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate, Americans—at least those who have mustered the strength to make it this far—will have viewed nearly 15 hours of insane Republican Kabuki theater, devoting time and sanity that we will never get back to watching five episodes of what has become the worst show on television this fall.

The media—and the CNN moderators in particular—stressed that Tuesday's debate, more than any of the others, was important: the grand finale before the real election year; the "Christmas dinner" debate, as moderator Hugh Hewitt put it dramatically—the one American voters will be talking about when they decide to torment relatives on Jesus's birthday. Because, you know, 'tis the season.

At this point, though, it's hard to imagine that anything the candidates said Tuesday night will change much over the next 45 days, before the first voters cast ballots in 2016. So as much as CNN execs wanted a " slugfest" for its ratings, in the end, Tuesday's debate was basically an end-of-year branding event for the Republican presidential campaigns—which was just as scripted and boring as it sounds, even if the debate was supposed to be about Radical Islamic Terrorism and other threats that scare voters in the night.

For most of the candidates, the CNN debate provided one last chance to keep their campaigns above water for another few weeks, before the inevitable drowning in the Iowa Republican caucuses in February. It was also the first debate where the GOP finally seemed to take seriously the idea that Donald Trump could be the party's presidential nominee, and watching that realization dawn on the rest of the Republican candidates Tuesday night made for some Apprentice-grade TV. Here's what we learned.

Donald Trump

What he needed to do: Avoid revealing the elusive Achilles heel that neither his Republican opponents nor the media have been able to find.

What he did: He called the undercard debaters "good guys." He called Bashar Al-Assad "a very bad guy." He said (again) that he'd build a wall, and that he's already built a great company. He talked about his "ah-mazing" poll numbers. He made fun of Jeb!, and made ready-to-GIF faces anytime someone else dared to question the Trump juggernaut. And he swore he wouldn't run as a third party candidate, coming full circle from his first debate appearance, and backtracking on threats he made as recently as last week.

At this point, though, no one—least of all Trump's current party—seems to know if this is a good thing, or a bad thing, or if it even matters anymore.

Ted Cruz

What he needed to do: Cruz's whole campaign strategy has centered on not attacking Trump, and instead holding out for the once-presumed to be inevitable day that the Trump Wave died out, leaving a trail of white male conservatives for one Senator Cruz to swoop in and scoop up.

But this past week, as Cruz soared to first place in Iowa polls, word got out that his campaign's self-imposed gag order had expired: in leaked reporting from a private meeting, the Texas Senator questioned the GOP frontrunner's "judgment"—and while you can hardly call that insult, Trump took it as such, firing back that Cruz was a "little bit of a maniac." So going into Tuesday's debate, Cruz was positioned as Trump's freshest target—all he had to do was hold The Donald off.

What he did: Cruz is obviously a solid debater. The Princeton debate champ is sharp, and he knows how to speak to his base. How else do you explain starting a closing statement by staring at the camera and just saying, sternly, "judgment"?

But that performance only works the first couple of times. Cruz on Tuesday night was a repeat of Cruz every other night, linking every misstep in recent American history to Barack Obama and his liberal buddies, and repeating the words "Radical Islamic Terrorism," regardless of what he was supposed to be talking about. At one point, he even awkwardly dodged a question about killing innocent women and children in war.

The highlight of Cruz's night, though, was a lively fight with his fellow 44-year-old Cuban-American senator, Marco Rubio, over an immigration bill that died years ago. It was a surprisingly substantive debate, tackling policy details on the complex issues of border security, legal immigration, and who flip-flopped faster, but by that point in the debate, everything was already starting to blur together into one giant, hour-long sound byte. And in some ways, that's just what Cruz is: an extended sound byte running for president.

Marco Rubio

What he needed to do: There is still a roving pack of Republicans somewhere out there in Florida who believe Rubio will be the party's candidate: young, handsome—and Latino!—he's the GOP's Bill Clinton in 2016, but without the saxophone and the Big Macs. On Tuesday night, Rubio had to live up to that small hope, and show he could yank the party out of the Age of Trump and into that "New American Century" he's always talking about.

What he did: Anything but that. In my notes, I jotted down less about what Rubio said than any other candidate besides Ben Carson (and believe me, that's saying a lot). And that's because he didn't have much to offer on Tuesday night. He never truly went after Trump, sticking to safe attacks against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—who basically became the same person during this debate—in every response he gave. If Rubio wants to be the young, energetic one, then he should probably start acting, you know, young and energetic.

Jeb!

What he needed to do: Avoid dying a slow political death on national television.

What he did: Survive—at least, for now. Bush was one of the more animated performers of the night, seizing every chance the debate moderators gave him to spar with Trump, who he called a "chaos candidate," venting, in his own Jeb! way, the pent-up anger he has toward to brash billionaire who destroyed—and humiliated—his once all-but-assured ascent to the GOP throne.

Ben Carson

What he needed to do: Who knows?

What he did: Honestly, Ben Carson is just fun to watch. This is someone who, it's safe to say, will not be leading the free world anytime soon, and we, the people, are left trying to figure out why he ever joined this shitshow in the first place—which, as it turns out, can be a fun debate drinking game. On Tuesday, Carson described his ISIS strategy like he was playing a Call of Duty game, and started his first response off with a moment of silence for the San Bernardino victims—a sudden moment that lasted all of three seconds. And naturally, he blamed a lot of things on the fact that we're all too "PC." Carson was like that guy at the party who is so high that every word he says and gesture he makes seems scripted by some almighty comedy writer. Except when he talked about children's eyes in response to a question about killing innocent children—that was some seriously twisted shit.

Carly Fiorina

What she needed to do: Get relevant.

What she did: In the second debate, Fiorina made headlines for becoming Trump's de facto adversary, as she defended herself against his harsh remarks that her face wasn't fit for the White House. Since then, though, her significance in this race has basically evaporated, and she continued that journey into political purgatory on Tuesday night. Her redundant attacks on Hillary seem to be aimed solely at reminding viewers that she, too, is a woman—a novelty in Republican politics, but not one that bears repeating that many times over 15 hours.

For some reason, the former Hewlett-Packard executive fancies herself some kind of reigning neocon—and she gained a bit of traction by listing tech products that law enforcement agencies have had trouble tracking—but was fuzzy in explaining what she would do to fix that, or why, for that matter, she thinks she's more experienced than a former Secretary of State when it comes to foreign policy.

Chris Christie

What he needed to do: After months of pouring virtually all of his campaign's money and resources into New Hampshire—and basically moving there himself—the New Jersey governor has managed to rise to second place in the early primary state. Sadly, New Hampshire now seems to be the only place where anyone likes Chris Christie. Having alienated his home state Republicans with his devotion to a 2016 presidential run, Christie had to convince the rest of the party not to hate him too.

What he did: In classic Christie fashion, he dropped the 9/11 card. And the children card. And the "I was a federal prosecutor" card. He dropped every card in his deck of tears, and also somehow managed to call the sitting president a "feckless weakling" after declaring that a Christie White House would basically launch World War III. That's not to say that any of this was successful—in truth, Christie probably scared more people than he convinced. But Republican voters sometimes go for that kind of thing.

John Kasich

What he needed to do: Tone it down from the last debate, in which he was widely panned for talking louder than anybody else, and generally being a whiney RINO that no one will ever remember ran for president.

What he did: When Kasich began his opening statement by claiming that his 15-year-old daughter hates politics, I cringed. Then, when he said that the Paris conference, which just produced one of the most significant climate change accords in history—a treaty that many scientists are saying could save mankind, at least temporarily—should have focused instead on the War on Terror, I shook my head in shame. We have lost John Kasich, once and for all.

Rand Paul

What he needed to do: Try not to come across as the slightly weird guy whose actually reasonable statements during the debates get drowned out by an overall impression of weirdness. In other words, try not to repeat his father's entire political career.

What he did: Paul appears to have a remarkable capacity for remembering Senate votes—and has spent quite a but of time devoted to this task. I mean, this is a guy who filibustered both the Obama administration's drone policies and the renewal of the Patriot Act, talking about arcane federal privacy laws for literally hours on end. On Tuesday night, he attempted to throw some of legislative trivia at his opponents, highlighting the other GOP candidates' voting records and ideological missteps.

But Paul tripped up in explaining just where these other Republicans went wrong, at least in a way that would be comprehensible to an average conservative voter. And that, perhaps, is Paul's problem: He is too serious in an election dominated by hyperbole, and hoopla, and too much of an ideologue to make real sense as a presidential candidate.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.


Corey Olsen Turns the Mundane into Art with 'Garage Still Lives'

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Corey Olsen's work has been featured on VICE before, when we highlighted his intentionally bland depictions of every day life in a small fishing town. He celebrates disposable culture like no one else, a theme that has manifested itself again in Corey's new seriesGarage Still Lives,where he finds the magic of rusted paint rollers, Pokémon cards, and more—making them into thoughtful compositions. The project will be shown at the artist's first solo exhibition January 9 at Manhattan's Julie Saul Gallery along with Zeke Berkman's early still life work. VICE got an exclusive premier of Olsen's favorite selects below along with a statement from our pal David Brandon Geeting:

Somewhere among a tedious hardware store display window, a five-year-old's depiction of his parent's garage, and the sort of "do-what-you-can-with-what-you-have'"installation art of the moment are Corey Olsen's Garage Still Lifes . A self-described "time capsule" filled with "a bunch of crap that was meant to make sense together but doesn't to an outsider," Olsen's garage yields images that are unconcerned with utilitarian order. On the contrary, the pictures beam with crafty solutions, mischievous combinations, and the type of nostalgia that makes you smirk more than jerk a tear. Rusted paint rollers balanced on a green grate, a Pokémon card roped tightly to an ancient can of gasoline, a sheet of graph paper sprinkled with fuses and frustratingly small parts that only your dad would understand—these relationships won't subsist and they weren't meant to. But for the camera, Olsen's curiously constructed, free-thinking, wisecracking exhibition thrives in full color. - David Brandon Geeting

Garage Still Lives by Corey Olsen will have its opening reception Saturday, January 9 from 5 to 7 PM at Julie Saul Gallery, 535 W 22nd St # 6F, New York

You can view more of his work here.

A monograph of the project is available from Silent Sound Books, a new publishing company run by photographer Coley Brown.

Republicans Are Right to Want to Keep Canadians Out Of America

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Drake on his way to the US-Canadian border. Still via "Started From The Bottom."

Today, American Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson had a suggestion in a last-ditch attempt to boost his place in the polls: that the US should deploy soldiers to the border it shares with Canada as part of his plan to protect from terrorism. It's not the first time an American politician took interest in protecting the US from its neighbour to the north—there was also that one time Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker suggested building a wall along the border. As an American living in Canada, I know exactly which kind of Canadians the US should be keeping out.

Hockey Moms

Hockey bros (of which there are definitely none at VICE Canada) roam across this land the way Canadian geese do, squawking loudly and shitting over everything. But you know what is behind every hockey bro? A hockey mom. Yes, the one who gets up at 5 AM to take her little warrior to the rink and convinces him that he has a chance of making it the big show. The hockey mom can be found from coast-to-coast-to-coast screaming at teenage referees and bullying volunteer coaches into giving little Johnny a bit more ice time. The last time a hockey mom was spotted in America, she was named Sarah Palin and ruined the GOP for a decade. Hockey moms need to stay in the north, behind the wall.

Heritage Bros

Even though they live in urban centres, these guys look like artisanal lumberjacks and spend $200 on custom hand-carved axes for that one weekend they "rough it" at their lake cottage. They also buy fancy oils infused with whatever bergamot is good for their luscious beards and will spend stupid amounts of money on anything made with wax cotton and saddle leather. If we're going to deploy soldiers to the US-Canadian border or build a wall, we should start with the crossings right along the Pacific Northwest to keep these dudes out. You know damn well they aren't going to claim that axe they just bought in Portland when they come back through customs.

Rig Pigs

Albertans in general are like pseudo-Texans. Why have a cheap imitation when you can have the original in all its racist, pro-gun glory? When it comes to rig pigs, these guys are making six figures by the time they're in their 20s and blowing it on tricking out their F-150s, Tony Montana-sized trays full of cocaine, and throwing toonies at the genitalia of exotic dancers.

"Snowga." Photo via Flickr user Ada Juristovski.

Rich Assholes from Vancouver

Anyone who can afford their own place in Vancouver is probably one of these. You'll find them in every corner of the city, sipping their $15 gluten-free organic "green" shakes in Kits; running the seawall downtown in $200 Lululemon pants, stopping every so often to Instagram a shot of the ocean with the hashtag #ilovemycity; selling million-dollar "Railtown" lofts that have taken the place of social housing once earmarked for the marginalized communities Vancouver loves to ignore. Allow enough of these bougie pricks into America, and soon your roads will all be bike lanes and you'll be faced with a Westboro Baptist Church-like protest every time you eat red meat in public.

Racist French Canadians

Between Quebec being one of the strongest supporters of the bullshit hijab ban in Canada and the fact that blackface is still a thing there, we're pretty sure as Americans that we don't need any additional racists in our country—we've got that down! Besides, we don't speak French or give a shit about poutine since we have chili cheese fries. Au revoir, assholes.

Prairie Kids

A friend who grew up in Manitoba once told me the highlight of his teenagehood was going to Minneapolis. If that's the only part of America these poor children have access to, what the fuck is the point?

Successful Canadian Musicians

Drake, Grimes, Carly Rae Jepsen, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Neil Young, (most of) Arcade Fire... Need we say more? For fuck's sake, six out of ten top spots on on the Billboard 100 right now are held by Canadians. We need to protect ourselves or forever be left in this shameful shadow cast by Canadian talent.

Look at these assholes. Photo via Flickr user Michael Gil.

Canadian Geese

These assholes come into our country without proper documentation simply because they can't handle how cold it is back home and then they shit everywhere. And they don't shit your average shit by the way—each bird drops like one pound per day of excrement that is literally toxic and pollutes water supplies.

White People Who Use Patois

Just because Drake does it, it doesn't mean you can.

Nova Scotian Lobster Fishermen

These dudes are so serious they would kill another man over the meddling of a lobster trap. Do we really want that kind of person on our precious non-violent land? While we're at it, Canada, you can have Maine, because I'm pretty sure the same types of monsters are fishing the waters there.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Edit note: an earlier version of this article stated that five of the top ten spots on the Billboard 100 were held by Canadians, but it's currently six. Canadians are even cooler than we thought!

DAILY VICE: Daily VICE, December 16 - Philippines Crystal Meth, Nazi Gold Train, Holly Herndon

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Today: Inside the dangerous world of crystal meth in the Philippines, the search for a Nazi gold train treasure goes cold, the wild lives of a sobriety coach's high-flying clients, and Holly Herndon helps build the foundations of a post-internet music dat…

If You Accidentally Break the Law, Are You a Criminal?

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An historic courthouse in Sarasota, Florida. Photo via Flickr user Clyde Robinson

One summer day in 2011, an 11-year old Virginia girl saw her cat stalking a baby woodpecker in the backyard of her father's house. She rescued the bird, and after looking without success for its mother, decided to care for it for a day or two before releasing it, in order to make sure it wasn't sick or hurt.

Later that day, the girl and her mother stopped by a store while on the way back to her mother's house, and because of the hot weather, they carried the bird into the store in a cage rather than leaving it in the car. Once inside, they were confronted by a US Fish and Wildlife Service employee who happened to be shopping, and who informed them that transporting the woodpecker was a violation of the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Chastened, the girl and her mother brought the woodpecker home, released it, and called the Fish and Wildlife Service to tell them they no longer had the animal. However, a few weeks later, the Fish and Wildlife Service employee they'd encountered in the store showed up at the front door, along with a state trooper. The girl's mother was issued a $535 fine and told that she faced the possibility of conviction and imprisonment.

In the end, the Fish and Wildlife Service backpedaled and attributed the citation to a "clerical error." But the incident illustrated the potential unintended consequences of criminal statutes drafted using language that is silent regarding the state of mind of the defendant. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, for example, makes it unlawful to "transport or cause to be transported . . . any migratory bird" but makes no mention of the headspace of the person doing the transporting.

There are many other federal and state statutes that fail to speak to intent, and their numbers grow with each legislative session, creating an ever-increasing risk that people will be subjected to criminal prosecution for innocent actions. Conversely, statutes that lack clarity on intent can also be misapplied in ways that let the guilty go free.

In an attempt to address this, last month, two bills were introduced in the US House and Senate that would require prosecutors to prove a specific level of intent in trials involving federal criminal statutes where the text is silent on state of mind. Like nearly everything in Congress, the bills are controversial: Proponents say an antidote is needed to over-criminalization in the United States Code, which now lists well over 4000 federal crimes; opponents argue that the bills would make it harder to prosecute white-collar crimes.

The core issue underlying the debate is the nexus between intent and criminality. Historically, a crime has been understood to require the combination of both the act itself, called the actus reus, and awareness that the act was wrong, or mens rea. In a 1798 case in England, jurist Lord Kenyon wrote that "it is a principle of natural justice, and of our law, that actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea. The intent and the Act must both concur to constitute the crime." The importance of intent was also widely understood in early American criminal law, which drew heavily on English common law. However, starting in about the middle of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of American criminal statutes were drafted and enforced without regard to intent.

In a now-classic 1933 Columbia Law Review article, Harvard Professor Frances Bowes Sayre wrote that "we are witnessing today a steadily growing stream of offenses punishable without any criminal intent whatsoever. Convictions may be had for the sales of adulterated or impure food,... infractions of anti-narcotic acts, and many other offenses based upon conduct alone without regard to the mind or intent of the actor." Sayre, who coined the term "public welfare offenses" to describe these statutes, attributed to them in part to the regulations made necessary by "the growing complexities of twentieth century life," including the "invention and extensive use of high-powered automobiles... the development of modern medical science... the growth of modern factories... the development of modern building construction and the growth of skyscrapers."

The bifurcation that Sayre observed over 80 years ago between crimes where intent was evaluated and those where it was not is still present today: Minor offenses (and some major ones, including statutory rape and some drug-related crimes) are often treated under a "strict liability" framework in which guilt or innocence is determined based only on the act itself. If you park illegally and get a citation, contesting it by arguing that you didn't see the "No Parking" sign will get you nowhere. For more serious offenses, intent is often at the center of the inquiry. If you elbow someone in the face, understanding your state of mind is the key to distinguishing an unfortunate accident from battery. One change from the early twentieth century, however, is that today there are many more federal crimes on the books that are silent on intent, and that can potentially be prosecuted without regard to the defendant's state of mind.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that a defendant's state of mind should be considered in federal criminal prosecutions, even when a statute is silent on intent. Most recently, in its June 2015 decision in Elonis v. United States, the Court explained that "When interpreting federal criminal statutes that are silent on the required mental state, we read into the statute 'only that mens rea which is necessary to separate wrongful conduct from otherwise innocent conduct.'" What the defendant thinks, concluded the Court, "does matter."

But the Court's Elonis decision stopped short of specifying the level of intent required for conviction, leading Justice Alito to write in a separate opinion that the "Court's disposition of this case is certain to cause confusion and serious problems. Attorneys and judges need to know which mental state is required for conviction under 18 U. S. C. §875(c), an important criminal statute. This case squarely presents that issue, but the Court provides only a partial answer."

Either of the two bills introduced in November, if enacted—and given the incompatible language in the two bills, only one of them could become law in its current form—would address the concern raised by Justice Alito. But the bills face formidable opposition, including from the Obama administration. A Justice Department spokesperson told the Huffington Post that the House bill "would create confusion and needless litigation, and significantly weaken, often unintentionally, countless federal statutes." A White House official quoted in the same outlet said the House bill "would undermine public health and safety, including laws that protect our environment and ensure food and drug safety."

While it's too early to predict their eventual disposition, the fact that the bills were introduced at all will help spur important discussions regarding the role of intent in crime. It is an aspect of the American criminal justice system that hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves, and that will generate a continuing series of important and challenging questions reflecting, to take Sayre's characterization of life in early twentieth century America and add a hundred years, "the growing complexities of twenty-first century life."

John Villasenor is on the faculty at UCLA, where he teaches in the schools of public affairs, law, management, and engineering. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Follow him on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Metal Gear Solid Creator Hideo Kojima Has Left Konami to Launch an Independent Studio

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Screencap from YouTube

I awoke on Wednesday to find not only my Twitter feed chattering away about just one news story, but also a not-quite-unexpected, but certainly arriving sooner than anticipated, email in my inbox: "Press Release from Kojima Productions."

Metal Gear Solid series director Hideo Kojima has been a part of Konami's essential creative DNA since the mid 1980s, but 2015 has seen the relationship between man and company break down, seemingly irreparably. And now that's confirmed, as Kojima-san is leaving Konami to begin again, independently, with his first project at Kojima Productions a PlayStation exclusive that, in his own words, will be "a new and innovative gaming experience." Probably not a belated follow-up to Penguin Adventure, then.

Watch the announcement video below, as Sony's Andrew House quite clearly struggles to contain his excitement.

The very short press release reads as follows:

"KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS announced today that it has officially opened its doors. Lead by award-winning game designer, HIDEO KOJIMA, the studio will begin focusing its efforts in developing products that will push the boundaries in innovation and ignite consumer interest worldwide. Stay tuned for future announcements."

Konami apparently confirmed Kojima's departure just hours before Sony's announcement, according to a number of Japanese news outlets. Also on the move from Konami to Kojima Productions is Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain producer Kenichiro Imaizumi, as well as the director's assistant, Ayako Terashima.

This is big news, to say the least, and a hell of a score for PlayStation, who can now claim console exclusivity on the next games to come from Kojima, SEGA stalwart Yu Suzuki (Shenmue 3) and Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Rez Infinite). Factor in their deal on the Final Fantasy VII remake and The Last Guardian's long-awaited arrival, too, and it looks like the Xbox One, already struggling in Japan, is as good as dead in the region.

Again, look at Andrew House. Just look at him. You can taste his joy. This is what video games can do to a person. Especially when that person now knows they've gone and royally fucked over the opposition.

Kojima's final project for Konami, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, was voted the number one game of 2015 by VICE writers.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: New York Just Struck a Deal to Rein in Solitary Confinement in State Prisons

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Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Read: What It's Like to Take LSD in High Security Prison

New York is poised to radically overhaul the current system of solitary confinement in state prisons, according to a settlement announced by Governor Cuomo's administration and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) on Wednesday.

The $62 million deal stemmed from a lawsuit brought by the group against the Empire State over what it said amounted to inhumane and often arbitrary use of solitary Special Housing Units (SHU) on around 4,000 current inmates, as the New York Times reports.

" is, literally, torture," NYCLU's executive director Donna Lieberman told journalists during a recent conference call. Inmates there typically spend 23 hours in a six-by-ten-foot cell.

The reforms will cap the amount of time most prisoners can spend in solitary at three months, depending on the offense. New York State will also begin to allow more frequent group recreation time and provide some phone privileges to SHU inmates. Officials are also required to quit feeding inmates that heinous food loaf the NYCLU calls "physical torture," and says is used as a form of piunishment. Perhaps most important, the number of people confined to what's usually called "the box" or "the hole" is supposed to drop by about a quarter, though it's worth noting that past reforms like barring the box for pregnant women and those under age 18 failed to make a dent in the solitary population. In fact, it's continued to rise in recent years.

"This will not be the end of the road for solitary confinement reform," said Taylor Pendergrass, the NYCLU's lead counsel on the case, "but we really think it's a watershed moment."

What Does Our Obsession with True Crime Podcasts Say About Us?

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A murder scene. Photo via Flickr

Lately, I've been getting into death. It gets my juices going. I like to unwind with a really grisly murder or, maybe, if I'm having a preposterously bad day, an awful tragedy with a sizable body count.

Don't look at me like that. We're all in the same boat here. True crime has consistently been the most popular genre in books and TV and now, thanks to Sarah Koenig's seemingly unstoppable battleship—the HMS Serial—true crime is now navigating the choppy waters of mainstream podcasts directly into millions of willing ears across the globe. When the second season of Serial fired itself out of the WBEZ cannon last Thursday, everyone got a bit excited. But I'm going to say it early: season 2 is never going to reach the heights of the first one because it's not focusing on a murder. Instead, they've opted for a broad dollop of American army-political naughtiness in the form of the clearly deluded deserter Bowe Bergdahl, who has already admitted to the crimes he's being accused of.

My juices—if you're wondering about the state of them, currently, in terms of what they're up to—are not voraciously overflowing about what is essentially a closed case. Death is such a universal theme that following the podcast's inaugural season up with an American army curio (no matter how fascinating or intricate) is always going to turn off some people. Give us blood. Give us a body. Give us mystery. Like the crowd at a Jacobean revenge play, all we want is to luxuriate in the blood of slaughtered innocents. Don't give me an American soldier who wants to be Jason Bourne and looks like the sort of person who'd knock your drinks over at a bar because he didn't think they fit the ambience of the evening. Give me death.

"The thought that we walk next to monsters every day is what attracts us to true crime," Tim and Lance of the Missing Maura Murray podcast wrote me via email. "To see what humanity is capable of is interesting. It's sort of like looking at a tarantula in captivity. If there was no barrier we'd be hesitant to approach it, but with a pane of glass in between, we would want to get as close as possible to examine it."

What makes the Missing Maura Murray podcast so fascinating to me is that it spawned from a documentary about the "armchair detectives" who were obsessed with Maura Murray, a young American woman who has not been seen since 2004. Lance and Tim basically became the person they were trying to document. Lots of people think she's dead. Others think she ran off and started a new life. Some even think she got abducted by aliens.

Related: Watch 'The Wolf of the West End'

"I think if we believe the audience can help solve it then it's more real than entertainment, and if we don't believe that then it's all entertainment," they say. It's fascinating listening—it plays out in real time. As the podcast progresses, for example, listeners become informants, townspeople become characters, and troll commenters transform into knowledgeable allies.

I am aware that I am now one of those people. I have spent many hours attempting to convince my friends that Maura Murray simply wandered into the woods and died. I have explored message boards and comment sections—I even listen to the podcast before bed, as if I'm incapable of a good night's sleep without the comforting words of a poor girl's disappearance ringing in my ears. Thanks to these podcasts I can now listen to someone dying once every 35 minutes.

"I don't feel that discussing a murder or disappearance is immoral," says Aaron of the Generation Why podcast, one of my very favorite podcasts that has covered basically every single interesting true crime case that has ever existed across its 159-episode run. "The listeners can learn lessons from the terrible events that have befallen others. When we spoke with Steve Jackson about his book, Bogeyman, I am sure that some people who listened learned just how important it is to keep your eyes on your children. To never leave them unattended even for a minute."

But what if my insatiable appetite for human suffering is, like, a bad thing? Should I just put on the Football Ramble instead? What if this information is slowly rewiring my brain, like the porn theory that says people's preferences just keep on getting more and more niche, so—before you know it—you're jacking off to a man in a baby costume spanking a woman who may or may not be his own father? Does my obsession for death, my lust for blood, mean I'm going to snap one day and abduct someone on a seedy backstreet just off the dazzling lights of Hull's majestic city center? Is an entire paragraph of questions suggestive of my deeply rooted existential crisis?

"When I was an edgy teen I used to think serial killers and tragedy was cool," says Justin of the Generation Why. "Now I'm disgusted by my unsympathetic view and glad I grew up. The fascination for the serial killer morphed into the fascination of how they get away with it, how they are caught, and how the system and media responds to it."

So I could be helping to solve a mystery but I could also be muddying the waters with inconsequential noise. There was that time, for instance, when Hae Min Lee's brother (Hae Min Lee was the murdered high school teen who was at the center of Serial) went on to Reddit to tell them, in a very polite way, to go fuck themselves because "TO ME ITS REAL LIFE." I consistently wonder if consuming and creating these stories profligates a damaging cultural concept—that death is sexy, that murderers are celebrities, that everyone we know is just one awful event away from becoming a media sensation. "The people we could hurt would have endless opportunity to listen," add Tim and Lance of Missing Maura Murray. "If the truth means publicly tearing a family apart we'd have no interest in that. But if the truth is murder and a cover-up, then we're going to publicize it as much as we can to try and help get a new and proper investigation jump-started."

But there's a very real chance that consuming people's tragedies like entertainment is appropriation of the crappiest form. "I absolutely think about it but would never feel shame or guilt," says Justin. '"As much as I want to believe we're informing the public and educating people on the reality of our legal system I can not deny leveraging the entertainment factor." Nobody wants to, actively, take someone else's pain and suffering and turn it into entertainment—I occasionally stop myself mid-episode and wonder, if someone I knew was the topic, what would I feel about this?

Speaking to Aaron, Justin, Tim, and Lance opens my eyes a bit, though. It seems my fear about being either medically ill or an accomplice to hurt is overthinking it. The allure of these podcasts is that they function as brilliant unfinished stories that leave you, the listener, to fill in the blank spaces—we're hardwired to love a good gruesome death as well as mystery. True crime is the combination of both, and there's no way to stop it—because death, tragedy, and mystery belong to no one. "Once a crime hits the news it no longer belongs to private individuals," says Aaron. "The public wants and needs to know more about it. It started with newspapers and television and continues on with podcasts."

Follow David on Twitter.

Meet the Filmmaker Documenting Every British Woman who Died of Domestic Violence in a Year

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Vanessa Engle against the cutting wall in her documentary

"She was my auntie. She was my best friend. She was my daughter. She was my mum."

So begins Vanessa Engle's latest documentary, Love You to Death: A Year of Domestic Violence, a film which seeks to tell the stories of each of the 86 UK women who were killed at the hands of their male partners in 2013. To give a name to every woman who died as a result of domestic violence in a single year.

While it's not possible to fully explore every case, Engle looks in great detail at the lives of several women who were murdered that year. Through testimonies of friends, sisters, mothers, fathers, and young daughters, Engle paints a harrowing picture of the lives of these women, and of the lives left in the aftermath of their murders.

Central to the documentary is a giant board, to which the camera comes back again and again and onto which is pinned the faces and newspaper cuttings of each woman. It remind us repeatedly who these women were, and it makes for sobering viewing.

With over 30 years experience as a documentarian, it's very possible you will already be familiar with Engle's work. Perhaps best known for her projects Lefties, Jews, Women, and Money,this is the first time she has dealt with with such sensitive and traumatic material.

And as new figures are revealed this week that police forces are "nearly overwhelmed" by a "staggering" increase in cases of reported domestic abuse, Engle's documentary couldn't be more pertinent. I spoke to her to find out more about the film.

VICE: What drew you to making a film about domestic violence?
Vanessa Engle: It's been in my mind for a long time. I've been making films for nearly 30 years and I've made a lot of films about the disparity between men and women, so in a way I've kind of revolved around this subject matter a lot. I've always known the statistic that two women a week are killed as a result of domestic violence, but it just suddenly dawned on me that I could do a year of deaths. Domestic violence is such a difficult and frankly off-putting subject for people—even those affected by it—but doing a year of deaths is a proposition which really sparks people's imaginations. There's something so powerful about 86 women in one year. It's such a lot of women, but it's not so many that it's beyond your imagination.

All the women in the documentary are so different—they're of all ages, from every background, every ethnicity. If there's one thing that unifies them it's that domestic violence doesn't discriminate. Did that surprise you?
We all have preconceptions about domestic violence. For example, we might think that those affected are in violent relationships. We might think alcohol and mental health problems are causing domestic violence. And those preconceptions are not wrong, but when you look at the 86 deaths in the film there are just so many other situations and reasons why these men are killing women. I immersed myself in the cases and read all the cuttings—it was a really disturbing experience. There were a lot of old people killed by their long-term spouses. It's so shocking. I wanted the film to somehow reflect the experience I'd had reading all those cuttings and how different they were.

The deaths were all so violent, which was something I found extremely shocking, especially when set against the facelessness and ordinariness of the towns you depict.
I was really, really blown away by the violence. In a way, it's possible to imagine that you might lose your temper and push someone and they fall over and bump their head. Or it's possible to imagine that when you're really, really drunk you could lash out and hurt someone. But there's one case where an 18-year-old has beheaded his girlfriend. Another man cut his wife's heart out—every time I saw the camera pan past that on the wall of cuttings in the film it made my blood curdle. Lee Birch strangled his wife Anne Marie in a field and then he beat her really savagely with a branch. There was a man who poured petrol on his wife and set her on fire in front of her small children. But every street and every address looks so ordinary—it's every house we walk past every day. The banality of those landscapes really struck me, and that was something I was really trying to communicate.

What from the film has stayed with you the most?
I've seen it so many times, but each time I watch it something else strikes me. The never-ending consequences and ripples for the families of the dead women is something that has really stayed with me. They all have such trauma and each time I have contact with them, which I do regularly, it'll be a birthday, or the anniversary of the death, or for the perpetrators conviction. For all of them it's Christmas coming up, or it's their own birthday, or it's Mother's Day and they haven't got a mother. I've never really made a film about trauma before and again you think you know what trauma is, but you don't until you're up close to it like that. I think that the people who took part were really brave to go public on a subject that's so intimate and personal and private. It's not just a film about this hugely important issue of domestic violence, it's also a film about the impact on the people left behind. It never goes away, and I don't think it ever really gets any better for them. I'm amazed by them all and their bravery.

And how do you as a director deal with that trauma and sensitivity of the subject matter. How are you able to gain the trust of your interviewees?
I am a great believer in being very direct with people and of giving them credit to absolutely take their own decisions. I never really persuade people to take part in a program, that's not my job. What I do is explain to them clearly and honestly what it is I'm trying to do. In this film particularly, the proposition was quite clear and it was very clear our goal was to raise awareness of the issue. The people taking part go away privately and make their decision, so by the time we turn up with a camera crew, they are primed and they know they're going to do it. And then I ask my questions as humanely and directly as I can. The contract between me and the interviewees is quite straightforward—they know what they've signed up for and I know what I'm there to do.

You imagine domestic violence to be something that happens behind closed doors, but there are moments in the film where the abuse is both literally and metaphorically out in the world.
People experience terrible feelings of guilt in the aftermath because they think 'Should I have done more? Should I have done something?' But they also feel quite angry about the fact that they didn't know, or that they did say, "For God's sake get out" and weren't heard. At what point do people feel able or have the right to intervene? As well as the huge anguish at the loss of a person you love, there's also guilt and anger. And I think that raises a question for all of us—it's not just when do you intervene, but how. I've known women in bad situations like this and you can say get out, but if they've got kids, if they've got no money, if they've got nowhere to go then it's not easy for them to always just leave.

Anne-Marie Birch with her daughter

There's no getting away from the fact that domestic violence is a gendered issue. Did you think about how men are portrayed in the documentary?
When I told people in the course of making the documentary what I was doing they said, "Oh women are violent to men too, and in the lesbian and gay community there is violence, and in the trans community there's a huge amount of violence. What about these people?" And those people are very important too, and those issues are important, it's just that this film is not about them. In 2013, 154 women were murdered, 86 of them were murdered by their male partners. That's 52 percent. In the same year, 381 men were murdered (there's always more men murdered because men tend to find themselves in more violent situations more often) of whom 12 were murdered by women. That's 3 percent. There's your gender asymmetry. And of those 3 percent of men, what you tend to find if you dig into those cases, is that in a lot of them the women were abused by men and they had finally retaliated or snapped. So even in those 12 cases, women might have been being abused.

In your opinion, what do you think is behind the problem of male violence against women?
There are as many reasons as there are deaths—they're all very different, and I don't have a key to all of them. But what comes out of the film is that there seems to be an issue where men feel they want to be able to control women, or feel they have the right to control or possess them. I suppose it's not rocket science to conclude from that that this is a reflection of a bigger, profound social issue of how men are taught to view women. It's very interesting that some of the men in the film are mentally ill, some have dementia, but even then they still kill their wives. That's how deep it goes in the male psyche—even when you don't know what's going on, you still have an impulse to kill your wife. Some of the men are brutal and have a history of violence, but by and large these are not violent men. These were men who had never been violent before, and this was their first case of violence.

Follow Olivia on Twitter.

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