"We like you. Do you want to come to the desert with us?" two young men ask.

I had met them moments earlier in the bazaar in Yazd where they'd recommended a nearby restaurant. Our brief conversation had prompted an offer to take me to the desert. Of course I say yes. I am not exactly sure what this invitation entails but I will soon find out.

That evening I am picked up by a group of eight Iranians in a large 4x4. They are aged between 25 and 35, attractive, well-dressed people. The women wear loose head scarves. Half of them speak English with me, the other half smile and pat me on the back.

I squeeze into the backseat next to the food supplies and a qalyun—an Iranian tobacco pipe. The group is excited and, as we fly along a desert road, they sing loudly and joyously. Music blares from the stereo and there is a feeling of freedom that cannot be fully appreciated by a person from my context: Living in Australia, I had never had my right to party restricted. Despite all this, I'm tight with nervous adrenaline. I'm not sure if what we are about to do is legal.

You've probably read about the Islamic Republic of Iran's strict laws and customs governing dress codes, socializing with the opposite gender, live music, art, and creativity, alcohol, and parties. Booze of any sort is not legally available. There are no official nightclubs or bars. In May 2014, a group of young Iranians were arrested after a video of them dancing to the Pharrell Williams song "Happy" was uploaded to Youtube. The video was condemned by the government as "a vulgar clip which hurt public chastity," and the offenders were given 91 lashes and sentenced to jail time.

Despite stories of persecution like that, I had heard that some young Iranians risk arrest just to cut loose for a few hours. That's exactly what this group of friends was about to do, with me in tow.

The car stops at a nondescript point beside a long stretch of sand dunes. Reza, the driver, eyes the sharp, sandy slope and steps on the accelerator.

"Watch out Marc Antony," Sara shouts at me.

The car whips up the incline. My head flies backwards as my body lurches forward and I can feel a crack in my neck. The Iranians are screaming with joy and fear and adrenaline and the car is firing up the slope and I've fallen to the floor. Then the car is on the other side of the slope and skidding across flat desert and the Iranians are cheering. The moon is high and full, and the sky is turning hues of red and orange and purple. We rattle and bump and fishtail across the desert plain until we reach a lake that is swarming with hundreds of diving swallows. The sun is setting and I am entranced by the shifting temperature of fading heat, warm sands, and cool night breezes.

As the sunlight fades we start a fire in the heart of the desert. The girls shed their chadors, and shake loose their beautifully-maintained hair. They change into sleeveless tops and tights, and it feels strange that I'm allowed to see them like this. Home-brewed arak and non-alcoholic beer is served in plastic cups. Sara and Reza sing in sonorous wails. Those of us feeling the effects of the alcohol start to dance.

Sara and Reza are a couple and they are enthusiastic to talk to me about their country.

"My father will not allow me to have a boyfriend," Sara says. "I only met Reza through my friend. He is her cousin and I met him at her family outings. It is very difficult to meet people."

They are passionate about their Persian history and are proud that Iran has maintained a Persian culture despite centuries of different regimes, religions, and ethnicities ruling the country. Neither of them are happy with modern-day Iran. Sara is disdainful of the treatment of women for many reasons, including the chadors.

"It is too hot in the summer with this," she tells me, pointing to her discarded scarf.

Reza speaks of the mandatory two years of military service Iranian men face after they turn 18: "Everyone tries not to. I am sick. I got a doctor to say so." He taps his head, implying he faked a mental illness, and shows me the scars on his upper arm that were part of his story.

"We want to leave Iran and go to Europe or America," Sara tells me. "There is only opportunity in Iran for people who follow the government and the strict religion. We seem to be going backwards."

Reza agrees with her. "We would like to travel but we are on a list of countries whose citizens are likely to overstay visas or try to stay in a country," he says. "We can't get visas anywhere."

It is not the first time I have heard this in Iran. Many Iranians I met expressed their desire to travel outside of the country and their frustration at not being able to. Sara and Reza are both studying engineering and German in the hope that education will take them abroad.

It wasn't always like this. Sara and Reza would only have to talk to their parents to hear about a much more liberal Iran, before the revolution of 1979. Nowadays, within Iran, there are many who still support the conservative Islamic theocracy, but there are also sections of society who want reform. However, the ruthless way the 2009 freedom movement was suppressed has left reformist Iranians convinced that there will never be change in Iran.

Related: Watch our documentary 'Inside Iranian Cinema'

I am left with the impression that Sara and Reza feel trapped within their own country. They want reform but they don't know how to achieve it, and they want to be free but they can't leave.

Headlights emerge over a blackened sand dune and I am convinced it is the religious police. It turns out to be more revelers. One of the new cars has a powerful stereo system and we all start to dance to electronic versions of Iranian songs. The majority of people are not experienced drinkers so it doesn't take much for them to be rolling drunk.

It would turn out that this evening wasn't my only chance to party with Iranians. During my trip, I would be invited to two weddings, segregated by gender, where it was common for the men to be drunk on arak supplied by the host. I would be offered hashish and opium and get drunk on alcohol bought from "dealers." I learned that within Iran, there are a huge number of different ethnicities and religions, and that attitudes towards customs and laws can often be defined by these different social groups. Iranian lives can be governed as much by the judgement of their family and society as the fear of the police or the government. However, in every city I traveled to there were opportunities to escape these laws and traditions. It very quickly became clear to me that many Iranian citizens lead two lives: one public and one private.

As the party dies down, we sit around the campfire and drink coffee. Reza has his head in Sara's lap and she strokes his hair. I think about how society can try to restrict freedoms but people find ways to circumvent laws and traditions that prevent them from being happy. I think about these people and their desire to be social and to be in contact with each other; their affection for each other and for me. I am kissed on the neck and touched and hugged and everyone is happy just to be free and in the desert and away from what they believe is an oppressive society. I think on the risks they have taken to be together tonight and how it must enrich their appreciation for the little things in life.

Mark Isaacs is the author of The Undesirables, which chronicled his time working at Australia's refugee processing center on Nauru. Read more of his writing on displaced peoples here.

All photos courtesy of Amy Casselman

On December 7, 2015, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments for the Dollar General Corporation v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, a case occasioned by the sexual assault of a 13-year-old Dollar General employee by his employer. While the Supreme Court doesn't often hear sexual assault cases, this one has a twist: The victim is Native American, and the assailant is white. The Dollar General store sits on the Choctaw reservation, land considered Indian Country (the legal term used by the federal government) and the legal question is whether tribal courts here have the civil jurisdiction to try non-Native individuals who commit crimes there. Many Native people and their allies fear the Supreme Court's verdict could render tribal sovereignty even more precarious than it already is.

No one knows this better than Native women who are survivors of sexual assault. Eighty percent of the reported sexual violence against Native women is committed by white men, who do so with virtual criminal impunity because, with very few exceptions, they cannot be tried in tribal courts. Federal authorities have the authority to step in for serious crimes, like rape or murder, but often decline to prosecute crimes that have been committed in Indian Country. This jurisdictional black hole has created a climate that many describe as "open season" on Native women on reservations.

Amy Casselman, a former case worker for the Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada, has authored a forthcoming book on the subject: Injustice in Indian Country: Jurisdiction, American Law, and Sexual Violence Against Native Women. I spoke to her to find out why Native women have been left so vulnerable, and what can be done about it.

VICE: What motivated you to write this book?
Amy Casselman: In 2009, I had the honor of meeting a woman named Lavetta Elk who in 2003 was assaulted near her home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by her Army recruiter Staff Sergeant Joseph Kopf. By strategically choosing to assault her on Indian land, he leveraged his identity as a non-Native person to get away with his crime. This is the reality for many Native women because the jurisdictional law that covers Indian country privileges non-Native people who commit crimes specifically against Native people. In Lavetta's case, because she was Native and Kopf was non-Native, the tribe couldn't prosecute him. The federal government then declined to prosecute. The US military investigated and found that Kopf had in fact sexually assaulted her, but they never prosecuted him. They never even discharged him from the military. As the result of the jurisdictional mess in Indian country, Lavetta was told that there was no justice to be found for her.

Despite this, she did not give up. Instead she aimed higher, and sued the US government for reparations based on treaty rights and won, culminating in one of the most significant legal victories for Native people in recent history. But remember, despite this, her assailant did not pay for his crime—the United States of America did, and Kopf is still a free man.

"Indian country is the only place where race becomes a de jure factor in criminal prosecution." — Amy Casselman

That's horrible. How did we get into this mess?
The biggest turning point was in 1978, when a US Supreme Court case called Oliphant v. Suquamish was decided, effectively racializing jurisdiction in America. The Court ruled that no tribal government has criminal jurisdiction over non-Native people. This case stemmed from an incident where Mark David Oliphant, who had been living and working on a reservation, assaulted a tribal police officer. He didn't think that he should be held accountable because he was white, and the Supreme Court agreed with him. Since then, Native people have not been able to prosecute non-Native people.

Tribal police officers will tell you that if they see some white person steal something from a store right in front of them, the only avenue they have to seek justice is to forward a report to the US Attorney. The FBI's not going to come help track down the guy who stole a carton of cigarettes or whatever. Oliphant v. Suquamish created a massive jurisdictional void. Now, Indian country is the only place where race becomes a de jure factor in criminal prosecution. Of course, criminal justice in the United States is very racialized, but there's no law that directly states, "If you're black you're going to get a harsher sentence." It's not actually written in the law. But because of Oliphant, there's literally a law that says, "If you're white, you cannot be prosecuted by tribal governments, the most local and effective criminal justice systems in Indian country."

How did this decision affect women in particular?
Reservations became hunting grounds. In researching my book, I would go into the dark corners of the internet and find chat rooms where rapists and pedophiles would talk to each other about how to commit crimes. One forum was called "How to rape a woman and get away with it." Something that repeatedly came up was the suggestion that if you're not a Native person you should specifically target a Native people on reservations because you can do whatever you want there. A tribal police officer could even be present and they couldn't touch you. They couldn't do anything. This creates a lot of different types of crime—drug production, drug trafficking, human trafficking—but the people who disproportionately feel this sense of predation are Native women. Sexual assault in the US is an overwhelmingly intraracial crime, meaning that rape happens overwhelmingly between two members of the same race. Native women are the one statistical anomaly.

In the book, you talk about how the racist assumption that Native people are incapable of governing themselves perpetuates the problem.
Yes. Chuck Grassley, a Republican Senator from Iowa, has been one of the most vociferous critics of extending any jurisdictional authority to Native people. He spoke at a town meeting in 2013 where he said that on an Indian reservation, the jury is going to be made up of Indians, so the non-Indian doesn't get a fair trial. It's the exact same argument that people were making in the 1800s, that Native people are incapable of justice, and unfair, and that non-Native people should never have to be submitted to these so-called savage, backward tribal justice systems.

In response, Indian Affairs attorney Ryan Dreveskracht stated, "Unfortunately, certain Republicans are singing the old song of unsophisticated tribal courts and uneducated tribal judges... I say, if you don't trust the ability of tribal courts to be fair and just, don't go to the reservation and rape women—but that's just my take." I think that pretty much sums it up.

Watch: Cursed by Coal: Mining the Navajo Nation

Has the legal system always been like this for Native Americans?
Prior to European contact, Native communities had efficient, fully-functioning criminal justice systems, and those systems were centered around the experiences of Native women. The first written record of a law in the Creek Nation in 1824 essentially said that justice is whatever the woman wants. How does she see justice? What does she want to see happen? Sometimes that would be banishment from the tribe. I came across one case where a woman who was assaulted decided that they were going to hold the man down in the middle of their community and every woman was going to come and sit on his face because it would bring so much shame to him that he would never be able to hold his head high. So imagine if we flipped justice in that direction. Not every woman who's assaulted wants to see their perpetrator incarcerated. Not everyone wants to go on a stand and re-live their experience publicly.

Right, because taking the stand can be harrowing. Isn't that precisely what prevents so many non-Native women from coming forward to report assault in the first place?
When it comes to addressing violence against women in general, the criminal justice system we have today is totally broken. It only functions at the point of crisis, after the assault has happened. That's not really justice in my eyes. Justice would be preventing it. Rape culture normalizes sexual violence, but it also focuses on the experiences of the perpetrators rather than the experiences of the victim. Often times when you see high school boys accused of rape it's all about, "Oh, they were such promising students and they had a scholarship for football, and now their lives are ruined." What about the survivor? Don't you think her life might be affected by this? The system doesn't work for white women, so why would it work for Native women?

With cases of sexual assault, it's often the woman who is put on trial. She has to prove that this actually happened. It's the only crime where the victim has to prove that a crime happened. That doesn't happen if your wallet gets stolen. I think that at the end of the day we need to believe women. We need to trust women. We need to look for solutions that center women, that center the people who have themselves experienced violence. It's not anyone's place to be prescriptive about what justice looks like for other people.

The book quotes Native journalist Mary Annette Pember, who responds to the statistic that one in three Native Women will be raped within their lifetime: "I and all the Indian women I know want to know, however, who those other two women are who haven't been assaulted—because we've never met them. The truth is that it's been open season on Indian women for a very, very long time." Have you found that this is something that's mostly just accepted as a fact of life?
Nobody in human history has ever passively accepted their own oppression. People have always found ways to resist. In my experience, Native resistance has taken two forms. One is to work within the system and one is to work outside of the system. In my book I refer to Chela Sandoval's theory of differential consciousness and also Kevin Bruyneel's notion of a "third space of sovereignty." Often we're presented with binary options, but in reality if you want to make changes in the world, why wouldn't you try as many avenues as you can? Native women can and do strategically navigate colonial structures as a way to ultimately subvert those structures. You don't have to wait for the federal government to fix the problem. There's this idea that the federal government either gives things to Native people or it takes them away—they give sovereignty or they take it back—but the Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred argues that sovereignty is inherent. Nobody can give it or take it away. It would be as if I said to you, "OK, you can never be happy again. You can never smile." It's inherent, right? I can't take that away from you. And its from this place that many Native women frame their activism—from a place of inherent strength and sovereignty over their own lands and their own bodies.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?
This book isn't about making anyone feel guilty or bad, but rather about the introspection that in my opinion all Americans have to engage in. George Lipsitz, a giant in the field of Ethnic Studies, once told me that being born in America is like entering the scene of a crime. It's bloody. It's messy. It's traumatic. And you had nothing to do with the crime, but now that you're in it, you have to decide what you're going to do about it. Are you going to try to understand what happened? Are you going to try to ignore it and pretend that nothing happened? Or are you going to fight for justice? And I think that each of us as Americans at one point consciously or subconsciously has to make that decision.

No one wants to have to contemplate the ways in which your life as you know it exists because of someone else's oppression. Or if you're Native, you don't want to think about how you are one of the few survivors of one of the most massive campaigns of genocide in world history. But if we don't do that work, then we're choosing to walk away from the crime scene and pretend that it didn't happen. And I can't live my life like that.

Dear readers,

It's hard to believe it's been 21 years since VICE first launched as a small punk magazine in Montreal. In the past two decades, we've grown from just three guys making a zine to a global media network operating out of 30 countries. As of next year we'll even have our own cable channel: VICELAND.

But the magazine has always been the heart of VICE. It remains the home of the most in-depth and thoughtful work on the most important topics the company covers. I think we ship out a great issue each month, but there's always room for growth, right? Which is why we've decided to do a global redesign of the magazine—coinciding with the company's 21st anniversary.

So what will change? While we will continue to collaborate with some of the best writers and artists out there, bringing you the long-form features, ground-breaking photography, and captivating fiction VICE has become known for, we'll use this opportunity to usher in a big increase in cultural coverage as well as new voices and columnists examining sex, finance, and much more.

Our digital channels will also become increasingly involved, with space carved out for them to discuss the latest in music, science, technology, women's issues, and more. Finally, we'll overhaul the magazine's overall look and feel.

I'm really excited for the chance to build on what VICE has become and make the magazine even better.

This means we'll take a brief hiatus this January and February so that we can focus our attention and resources on the redesign. We'll debut the new issue in March 2016.

I feel lucky that we have such a loyal fan base, and I can't wait to reveal the final product.

Thanks for your patience!

Best,
Ellis Jones, editor-in-chief

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

When I was a child, comprehending heaven and hell was absolutely impossible. In many ways, it still is. I'm sure religion is comforting, but in my experience it doesn't seem to equip you with effective tools to deal with real loss. That germ of an idea—a child struggling to comprehend what will happen to her parents in the afterlife—is the basis for Stephen Irwin's fucked-up animated fairy tale entitled The Obvious Child (not at all related to the abortion rom-com or the Paul Simon song).

The short opens innocuously enough, with an animated little girl and bowtied bunny set to calm, operatic strands, but Irwin makes it soon clear that his film is not your standard G-rated fare. Suddenly we are shown the girls' parents yanked apart, their limbs strewn about, rotting beside a tree. "Why won't they go to heaven?" the little girl asks God, who in this film a glowing, floating sphere referred to as "the Big Head." Thus begins her descent into madness as she attempts to get the Big Head to help her, while he diffidently declines.

The look of the film is dark and lush, filled with storybook images that appear distilled in acid. Utilizing a mix of practical, handmade sets, 2D-drawn characters, and 3D-compositing with a wicked sound design, Irwin creates a literally upside-down universe where God's a jerk, but rabbits, both fake and real, fuck everything they touch. One such rabbit, who witnessed the carnage and who narrates the film in a glitchy computer-to-speech voice, spells out the frightening story of moral and philosophical conundrums: When God isn't going to help you, you've got to help yourself—even if that means tying balloons to your parents body parts to float them up to heaven.

The Obvious Child premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and won the Silver Dragon at the 54th Krakow Film Festival (Oscar qualifying). For those interested, Irwin also made a surprisingly uninformative "Making of 'The Obvious Child'" for what I assume were "kicks." You can check out the rest of his work on his website.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

All images by author

In late September, Medicins Sans Frontiers invited me to document their work in Domiz camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. Run by the UNHCR, Domiz is home to over 40,000 mostly Kurdish Syrian refugees. Over five days, I drew MSF's maternity clinic, where they helped 660 mothers give birth in the first half of 2015, as well as their mental health groups and community outreach. As I worked, the Syrian refugee crisis dominated the news. Countless refugees would start their journeys in Domiz. In collaboration with MSF, I drew portraits of some of these families.

After a day in Domiz, its easy to see why most residents longed to leave. Refugees live mostly in tents or cinderblock shacks (though I saw one made solely of tin). Schools are overcrowded and limited. What few jobs exist pay little. Due to funding shortfalls, food rations given by NGOs have been slashed. Yet those who lived there did their best. Some grew gardens. One man I met ran a business faux-finishing the shacks to look like stone. In the dust, a wide variety of shops blossomed: wedding dress rentals, satellite dish repair shops, cafes offering massive portions of hummus. The woman running a tiny convenience shop refused to let me pay for a bottle of water. It was a hot day, she said. When power fails, as it does six hours a day, the heat can drive one to madness.

Those who live in Domiz may have been born in villages in the Kurdish parts of Syria, but many of them spent their adulthoods in the great cities of Aleppo and Damascus. I met an aeronautics engineer and the former owner of a chain of souvenir shops, a high-end waiter and a graphic designer who built a small studio in which he painted women representing Kurdish freedom. Countless doctors, nurses, and community health workers at MSF were themselves Syrian refugees.

I visited eight families who were planning to make the trip to Europe. Though each of their stories were different, each of these visits began the same. A young person would brew us coffee, served in frail, lovely cups. One of the parents would say they'd made the decision to leave. They knew the risks. They read the news of course —some had neighbors who had drowned in the Aegean. They'd tell stories of selling all their possessions to afford the smugglers fees, of following cousins across Europe via messages on WhatsApp, of asylum applications, of daughters who wanted to be doctors and sons who missed their soccer teams in Qamishlo.

For all its legal importance, refugee is a flattening word. It strips individuality away, bearing instead images of the huddled, weeping mass. Refugee evokes pity, and pity is a corrosive thing. In her essay, "We Refugees," the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, "We fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies." Arendt, a refugee from the Nazis, knew of what she spoke.

When these families decided to take the trip to Europe, they were choosing many things, but one was an individual destiny. They would not wait passively in a tent for geopolitics to decide their fate. They would take matters into their own hands. Theirs was a longing to live.

I asked one woman what she would bring with her to Europe. She looked at me, smirking slightly at my thickness.

"As a souvenir," I asked. "To remember."

"I left all my memories in Syria," she answered.

Molly Crabapple's book, Drawing Blood, is out now. See more of her portraits below.

Dirty-ass lethal injection bed. Photo via Ken Piorkowski via Wikimedia Commons

Over the summer, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of a controversial lethal injection drug, midazolam, in the case of Glossip v. Gross, by a 5–4 margin. The ruling drew its name from Richard Glossip, the possibly innocent 52-year-old Oklahoma man who has evaded execution despite many attempts by the legal system to kill him after he was convicted (for a second time) of orchestrating his old boss's murder in 2004. Along with two other inmates facing execution, Glossip sued the state, claiming midazolam—part of a three-drug cocktail used to execute inmates in Oklahoma—"fails to render a person insensate to pain," was cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore violated the rights granted to them under eighth amendment of the Constitution.

In a scathing dissent of the court's decision, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer questioned the very constitutionality of the death penalty, and wondered if it still had a place in the increasingly progressive place we call America. The annual year-end report from the Death Penalty Information Center for 2015, which dropped Wednesday, suggests it does not—and that our national appetite for execution is at an all-time low.

"A majority of states have either abolished the death penalty altogether or haven't carried out an execution in more than a decade," Robert Dunham, the center's executive director, said in a statement. This fact, along with a downward trend in executions, death sentences, and public support for the death penalty provided further evidence of an emerging national consensus against capital punishment.

This year, states have carried out 28 executions, the lowest total since 1991, the report found. Only six states conducted any executions at all, and just three—Texas, Missouri, and Georgia—accounted for 86 percent of all executions in the US.

New death sentences also shrunk, and were dropped by a third off of last year's already-historic low.

In their dissent, Ginsburg and Breyer were onto something: Public support for the death penalty also fell this year. The 2015 American Values Survey found that a majority of Americans—albeit, a narrow margin, 52 percent—now prefer life without the possibility of parole over the death penalty as a punishment for people convicted of murder. Perhaps that's because six more men and women were exonerated from death rows in 2015, raising the total number of death row exonerations since 1973 to 156.

Executions were put on hold by courts in some states as problems with lethal injections continued to plague the execution process. Oklahoma stayed all executions to explore why the state used the wrong drug in one execution and nearly used it in another. Ohio postponed all executions until at least 2017 because of the unavailability of lethal injection drugs.

In February, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf joined governors in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington by imposing a moratorium on executions in his state over concerns about the application of the death penalty there.

You can read the entire Death Penalty Information Center year-end report for 2015 here.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

All illustrations by Meaghan Garvey

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.

These days, you could be a Juggalo in a Garth Brooks tribute act and someone will still accuse you of being a hipster. In fact, perhaps the only genre of music you can be into without someone, somewhere, accusing you of being a hipster is metalcore, and even that's iffy. This is because the term "hipster" denotes an identity that's hard to nail down, but is probably negative and definitely disingenuous somehow(i.e., two dudes can be wearing the same Bad Brains T-shirt, but the one you like and think is "for real" is a punk, and the one you think is a filthy hobbyist is a hipster). Bad faith and trend-hopping is the default assumption in music, because god forbid anyone like anything ever.

Bear in mind that we're fans of pretty much all these genres (many of which probably aren't actual genres at all), but our fondness for the music and acknowledgement that the term "hipster" is mostly meaningless will not, cannot stand in the way of our need to document them as the purview of The Hipster, and make cheap jokes at their expense.

This list is purposefully not comprehensive. True to the spirit of hipsterdom, we embrace arbitrary exclusivity and louche laziness. Enjoy!

Acceptable Country
Years Active: 1968-Present
Defining Artist: Sturgill Simpson
In the years before and after alt-country (see below), we just called this type of music "Gram Parsons," but anyone with liberal politics and conservative views on mixing slide guitars and synths is encouraged to apply. More critics have died fighting over Kacey Musgraves than all the lives lost during all the Hundred Years War combined.

Acceptable Emo
Years Active: 1990-1998
Defining Band: Antioch Arrow
Pre-screamo, before "emo" denoted college-rock misogyny with prog gestures and gross guitar tones; "smart" hardcore meant pants so tight, belts so white, and lyrics so willfully obscure that it was like Lord Byron himself rose from his mausoleum to scold you for slam-dancing and wearing suede kicks.

Acceptable Pop
Years Active: 2010-Present
Defining Artists: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift
Some day a few years ago, maybe it was a Tuesday, we all woke up, shook the artisanal fairy dust out of our hair, and decided that mainstream pop music was not as bad as we'd assumed all along, but was in fact good. Perhaps it was because we realized Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds was sort of like LCD Soundsystem if James Murphy was singing about his dick. Or perhaps it was because Diplo finally got so famous we had to admit he was mainstream. Perhaps it was because of nothing at all. Regardless, on that fateful day, music nerds made a secret pact that, every few months, they'd claim some random, mercenarily constructed teen-pop album was actually high art, and we've been cursed with an avalanche of half-assed thinkpieces ever since.

Acceptable Pop-Punk
Years Active: Jersey-Present
Defining Artists: The Menzingers, pre-out-of-fashion Gaslight Anthem
Hardworking Bruce-ian ballads about working in the Miller High Life mines and daddy being a hard but fair man. And cars, so many cars. Everybody misses kissing you on a rooftop, drunk, the moon hitting your Off with Their Heads hoodie just so. Much like Gym Hardcore (aka non-hipster hardcore) could not exist without betrayal and brotherhood, without kissing on rooftops in the twighlight of our youth, there would be no Acceptable Pop Punk. Everybody involved in this scene is impossibly nice.

Alt-Country
Years Active: 1990-1994
Defining Artist: Uncle Tupelo
Hipsters of a certain age used to be really into Uncle Tupelo, but haven't listened to them in so long that they'd probably have to Google "Wilco guy first band" to remember the name.

Alt-Rap
Years Active: 1999-2010
Defining Artist: Aesop Rock
Listening to dudes rap polysyllabically about skateboarding out of an alien's amniotic sac on Jupiter only to find out they've been dumped has never been cool, but there was a time before the internet flattened the divide between hip-hop's under- and overground when there genuinely was a rap scene three or four parsecs left of center. Alt-rap was born when Eminem dissed Cage on the Slim Shady LP, it died when El-P shuttered the mighty Def Jux, and it died again when I couldn't figure out how to shoehorn Rhymesayers and anticon references into this paragraph.

Here's what ketamine looks like mixed with water and left to dry. Image via

Ketamine is more than a recreational drug. The World Health Organization (WHO) lists ketamine as an essential medicine for its use as a cheap and efficient anesthetic. Its administration requires no electricity, oxygen, or even trained anesthetists, making it a particularly useful pharmaceutical in developing nations. In many countries, ketamine is one of the few modern surgical tools at hand.

This is why last week WHO announced that they wouldn't support increasing international restrictions on the drug. This is the fourth time since 2006 WHO has made this recommendation, and the fourth time in that period the Chinese government has called for ketamine to come under the same regulatory framework as Xanax or Valium.

It's currently up to individual countries to police the recreational use of the drug. But the Chinese government has long wanted ketamine listed under the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 treaty. Last week they took their case to the 58th UN Commission of Narcotic Drugs (CND) held in Vienna, but their submission fell on deaf ears. The representative for China later issued this somewhat eccentric response, acknowledging respect for WHO's stance on red meat, but not their regard for ketamine. "I am seriously considering whether I should eat more white meat or become vegetarian... but in regard to ketamine we believe WHO needs to be cautious."

The issue for China is that ketamine is the nation's recreational drug of choice. While western countries are battling methamphetamine, it's estimated 99 percent of all illicit ketamine seizures are made in China. There are a few reasons for this but the underlying impetus is price.

"Compared to methamphetamine and heroin, K is rather cheap," an anonymous member of the Public Security Bureau in Dongguan told Motherboard in 2013. Indeed, a cost comparison by CNN valued ketamine in China at around $13 a gram while coke was $103 a gram. This is a huge difference attributed to how easily local drug cooks can access ketamine precursors, whereas other drugs still require some level of importation. And then there's the fact that ketamine seems to enjoy less social stigma. "The general public is unaware of the dangers of K," claimed the public security member. "Many believe this drug isn't addictive, and have the misunderstanding that it's not harmful to your health."

Over the past decade China has become famous for manufacturing research chemicals sold as synthetic drugs overseas. The labs producing these drugs are legal under Chinese law, but unlicensed production of ketamine isn't. Accordingly Chinese police last year seized 7.85 tons of black market ketamine from over 500 laboratories. This was a 122 percent increase on seizures from 2013.

Despite this crackdown the spokeswoman for the World Society Federation of Anesthetists (WSFA), Niki O'Brien told VICE that ketamine is a low priority for law enforcement internationally. "Ketamine is the most popular recreational drug in China and a small number of neighboring countries," she said, "but it does not cause significant social harm on a global scale."

This is the reason so many doctors are reluctant to see access to ketamine hampered. China has responded by softening their original push to list ketamine as a schedule I drug, down to a schedule IV listing. Other drugs that receive a similar scheduling include benzodiazepines and long-acting barbiturates.

According to Dr. Rob McDougall, member of the WSFA and Deputy Director of the Department of Pediatric Anaesthesia and Pain Management at the Royal Children's Hospital, any restriction on ketamine will prohibit use. "The evidence is that once you start controlling drugs at an international level it's difficult to maintain a legitimate supply and that's a real concern," he told VICE.

For China, the real problem seems to be that their legal system struggles to permit their enormous output of research chemicals, while restricting the manufacture of ketamine. This seems to be why the WHO has recommended China maintain domestic control measures instead of enacting international regulations; effectively saying it's not our problem.

As Dr. Rob McDougall told VICE "If you took ketamine away from , in some places 70 percent of the patients that go through the operating theaters wouldn't receive any anesthesia agents at all. This is a global health problem."

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To many, "Eskimo Identification Tags" looked and felt like dog tags. Photo via the author.

"Well, my name's Jennifer Qupanuaq May...but apparently in the eyes of the government I'm still E8-2571," she says with irony.

The 33-year-old Inuk woman from Kuujuuaq, Quebec, is referring to her Eskimo Identification Number, a long-forgotten government program that ran for decades in the North—all the way to the 1980s in some parts.

Every Inuit was issued a number, the first letter and number indicating the region where they lived, the last four digits, a personalized number. The goal was to facilitate the administration of social and medical aid. The government thereafter addressed them as such, often dropping their names altogether in written correspondence. According to some accounts, children were asked to call out their disk number at school rather than a name.

When the program was introduced in the early 40s, Inuit still lived as nomads; they didn't carry wallets, didn't write, and only spoke Inuktitut. Because of this, the number had to be worn at all times on a small leather or copper disk around the neck. To many, they looked and felt like dog tags. The program was dropped in the 1970s (1980s in Quebec), after an Inuk member of the Northwest Territories legislative assembly decided he no longer wanted to be known as W3-554.

Sometimes, you might be really sleepy and think you need to nap in your car. But if you're an alleged criminal, maybe don't. Photo via Flickr user David, Bergin, Emmett and Elliott.

A 31-year-old man is facing multiple charges related to possessing illegal weapons and drugs for the purpose of trafficking after Regina police found him passed out in his car at a red light Tuesday afternoon. Christopher McDougall was found inside the driver's seat of his car having a nice snooze at the edge of an intersection after police and EMS responded to a call reporting a man who appeared to be injured or sick.

When police arrived to the scene, they say they found McDougall's car riddled with all kinds of illegal stuff. While the details of what was found is not currently public, Regina Police told VICE McDougall is facing a myriad of charges on possession of weapons while violating parole, possession of a concealed weapon, and possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking.

Police also recovered stolen property that was related to a break-in the previous evening, but could not tell VICE exactly what the property was.

McDougall, who probably had the worst wake up call in his life (he failed to provide a breath sample, too), gave himself up to police without resistance.

Les Parker, media development officer for the Regional Police Service (RPS), said that it's hard to narrow down exactly how many weapon seizures there are each year, but did note that it's not irregular to catch people carrying illegal firearms and concealed weapons.

Of course, Parker noted it is "very strange" to find alleged criminals passed out in the middle of intersections with the evidence lying all around them.

"This is pretty unusual, just from my experience. I haven't heard of anything like this where we arrive to somebody passed out or unconscious in a vehicle and, y'know, there they are, with a whole bunch of stolen property, illegal substances and prohibited weapons," he said.

"It's not an ordinary thing to see, to say the least."

McDougall is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday morning.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

All images by author

Ai Weiwei is currently in Melbourne for the National Gallery of Victoria's Andy Warhol I Ai Weiwei exhibition, which opened over the weekend. As hundreds of journalists and critics scrambled to take his photo at the exhibition preview, Weiwei watched on looking bemused and modest. As an aspiring artist living in 1980s New York, he admired Andy Warhol. To be billed alongside the pop artist, he told NGV director Tony Ellwood, "is like a dream."

This is only the second international showing of Weiwei's work that he's been able to attend in person, following the Chinese government's confiscation of his passport in 2011. Hype started to spread last month when the artist announced on Instagram that Lego had refused to provide him with the plastic bricks he required to build one of the exhibition's planned installations. The Danish company said they didn't want to be associated with political art, despite Weiwei having used Legos in previous work, like when he created portraits of 176 political prisoners using Legos at a show on Alcatraz Island earlier this year. A post on Weiwei's Instagram suggests that Lego's refusal to provide him with their product for the NGV installation is linked to protecting their commercial interests in China. Not able to get his hands on the real deal, the installation is composed of replica building blocks made in China.

Called Letgo Room, the installation is a four-walled tribute to Australian human rights activists including Rosie Batty, Stephen Hogan, Michael Kirby, and Rosalie Kunoth-Monks.

We spoke with Max Delany, the exhibition curator, about building blocks and political dissidence.

VICE: After Lego refused to provide Weiwei with the building blocks, an international social media campaign saw hundreds of people donating Legos for art's sake. Did any of these donated Legos actually end up being used for Letgo Room?
Max Delany: No, the Lego donation is for a separate project. When Lego wouldn't provide material for Letgo Room, we had to seek other alternatives. Letgo Room has been made only from plastic building blocks manufactured in China.

I'm seeing the irony there.
It did work well in terms of China being a production center for the rest of the world, and this whole idea of the copy and the fake.

How many Lego donations did you end up receiving?
We did actually collect a whole carload—the seats were submerged—and that will be sent to Weiwei's studio in Berlin along with Legos from other international collection points. It will be used in a new work in the future, which will focus on political art and freedom of speech.

That's the focus of Letgo Room as well, isn't it?
Yes. Letgo Room is an installation, almost a constructivist installation, which Weiwei has referred to as a "temple" devoted to Australian subjects who are all well known as activists or champions of human rights and freedom of speech, and also freedom of information. It represents a cross section and various cultural contexts—from grassroots community activism, to eminent figures who are engaged in international human rights law. It includes people such as Julian Assange, who is obviously devoted to freedom of information on the internet, to Indigenous activists such as Gary Foley.

Lots of women, too.
Some fascinating and extraordinary women, and also the gender nonspecific activist Norrie May-Welby. Other figures include Gillian Triggs, who has been very involved in the Human Rights Commission.

It strikes me as a generous work. Weiwei would have had to have conducted a lot of research into Australia's history of human rights.
We consulted a wide range of academics and human rights organizations, community groups, activists, and artists to put together a long list for Weiwei to consider. Then it was up to him to compose the installation, and to focus on a shorter list of subjects. He sees a connection to the people he chose; those who are engaged with the more profound questions of our time.

It's a huge piece. How hands-on was Weiwei in putting it together?
The design came from Weiwei and his studio. A series of templates were established, but it was really developed in Melbourne. It involved almost 100 volunteers, a number of our staff members, and colleagues from Weiwei's studio. But it really came down to the volunteers—mostly art students and the general public. It was a profoundly engaging process, done only over a period of two weeks, which is an extraordinary feat considering there were over two million building blocks.

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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.

Last October on JSTOR Daily, a mysterious researcher named Chi Luu ran a story called "More Hipster Than Thou: Is Vintage Language Back in Vogue," a "decidedly unscientific investigation" into whether or not hipsters have recently brought old, outdated language back into style. The study honed in on a recent mathematically-tracked resurgence in the use of the words smitten, bespoke, peruse, dapper, parlor, vintage, perchance, mayhaps, amongst, whilst, amidst, unbenknownst, thou, thy, thee, hath and ere.

That list sounded convincingly like a bunch of words used by some irritating Portlandia character, but it seemed off the mark. Besides, if hipsterdom really has had an effect on language, it would, presumably, be something much bigger than just talking like a high school theater kid.

Read: VICE staff confess the most hip things they've ever done

So we got in touch with one of the leading historians of English words and slang: Indiana University professor of English Michael Adams, editor of American Speech and president-elect of the Dictionary Society of North America. To start with, we ran the ideas in that JSTOR Daily article by him. He was dubious about the connection between those words and hipsters, but he had a whole lot to say about the effect of hipsters on language, and vice versa.

VICE: Is the JSTOR story an accurate peek at the effect hipsters are having on English?
Michael Adams: I think that the fundamental problem with the article—and I think this is a typical mistake—is that it buys into the notion that hipsters are more likely to use slang than other people, because hipsters are cool and slang is cool. A kind of false-transitivity. I don't see where, in any of the data, we see a connection to hipster culture. It's not unusual for a grandchild's generation to pick up a term from a grandparents' generation and use it. The one I heard most recently from somebody was "dig it." Kids saying "dig it," or "can you dig it?" obviously not picking it up from their 1980s parents but from their 1960s grandparents.

If all of hipsterism is working to maintain hipsterism past its time, then it's no longer hip. It's entered into its parody stage.

But would you say these might be hipster words?
"Hip" is an interesting word because to be in-the-know is to be hip. Lots of people want to be in-the-know, and lots of people claim to be in-the-know, and there's an aspiration to be in-the-know, so I think different vocabularies get crossed and muddled in all of that, and it's probably not the coolest of the cool who are using the word "dapper" right now. And "bespoke" is a strange word for a hipster to use, because a hipster is probably not wearing the sort of suit, or the sort of shoes that are bespoke.

Let me give you an anecdote where someone reasonably hip who I know used the word "bespoke" recently: We were at a Halloween event with scary mazes, and he called the VIP scary maze a "bespoke haunting experience." Wasn't that hip?
I suppose it could be part of being hip if it were sort of an ironic judgment on what was going on. Here I am, a VIP and yet I kind of look down on the VIP-ness of the thing, so I'm gonna use this word that's fancy and belongs to people of privilege, and I'm going to turn it on my own privilege in this case with a sense of humor.

So might hipness have a role in bringing words like this back?
This is the way we build up our vocabularies with slang: sometimes we hear things that have a potential cool factor in them. Or we think we can use them that way, so we just do.

If words like "bespoke" and "dapper" aren't necessarily being used by hip people, what else might be bringing them back?
There may be a sort of Junior-year-abroad phenomenon going on there that links to something that's vaguely urbane, or hipster. But I think it can be as much Urban Outfitters as it is a matter of real hipster-ism. I think that the array of words that she has chosen to include there suggests a lack of discrimination. They're not words all of the same category.

It's the knowingness about knowingness about knowing about being in the know.

Let's say hipsters are going around using these words, though. What would that tell us about language?
If they are in fact attached to hipster speech, you may already have the sort of self-destructive parody of hipsterism right there. When hipsters start going around reaching for words like unbeknownst, when they're fortifying the hipster vocabulary with new items, because being hip isn't sufficient to come into a hip way of speaking, then you know that hipsterism is at the stage of overreach. If you have to work at being a hipster, you're not hip. And if all of hipsterism is working to maintain hipsterism past its time, then it's no longer hip. It's entered into its parody stage.

Can't parody be part of the effect hipsters are having on language?
It's very meta. It's knowingness about knowingness about knowing about being in the know. And at a certain point you're just one step too meta above the actual phenomenon for the phenomenon to be working anymore.

What have you observed in language lately that might be connected to hipness?
"Fuck yeah!" as an expression of an attitude that's relatively new. It happened in kind of a hip way. People started to use that phrase, and it's got a complicated history—different sites on the web kinda want to compete over who got to "fuck yeah" first. But it ended up being recognizably part of the Tumblr brand, and all the sites started to sprout up, like "Fuck Yeah, Minestrone Soup!" and "Fuck Yeah, Thimble Collecting!" It's possible to use it because it's already devulgarized, but then, using it in this earnest way is another stage in its devulgarization, so it really changes the status of the f-word to use it in a position like "fuck yeah."

I have to admit I kind of hate this phenomenon. Why does it annoy me to see "fuck" become part of a cliche?
One of the points I make in my forthcoming book, In Praise of Profanity, is that we may be in a very delicate position with profanity right now. It's basically lost its taboo, and it's vulgar, but it's not really very vulgar. There's a point at which, if there's too much parody, or it gets too devulgarized, then it's no longer available for those uses. And it's not available for any of the older truly vulgar uses.

I feel like I need new bad words. Is that some kind of hipster reaction?
If you wanted language to express a dissident point of view, you've used that formerly dissident language enough that you've lost the vocabulary of dissidence. People who started to swear a lot thinking that was proving something may have pulled the rug out from under profanity in the end.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A bloodied Queen Isabella stands in a Montreal park. All photos by Darwin Doleyres.

On Sunday morning, Montrealers jogging or walking their dogs through Wilfrid Laurier Park found a startling surprise: the Queen Isabella memorial, a local landmark since the late 1950s, had been bloodied, paper-crowned, and re-branded. "Guilty of crimes against humanity," read a tag on her back.

Nearby, a makeshift plaque outlined these crimes, in French: "Genocide of 80 millions Latin American Indigenous people; annihilation of 1 million Taïnos; generalisation of slavery in Spanish America and the systematic destruction of pre-colombian cultures; expulsion of 200,000 Spanish Jews along with forced conversion, rapes and systematic massacres; ethnic cleansing of Grenada and the expulsion of its 300,000 Muslims; and, finally, the creation and application of the Spanish Inquisition."

Quick history lesson: Queen Isabella of Spain—aka Isabella I of Castile—is the woman who funded Christopher Columbus's exploration of the Americas. She was also a devout Catholic famous for her occasionally murderous intolerance of Jews and Moors.

The person behind the Carrie-ing of the statue spoke to VICE to explain their actions. Here's what they had to say.

VICE: Why this statue?
Artist: It's a very shocking statue to me. In today's world, she's a criminal against humanity. She's known to be one of the most harsh and cruel rulers of Europe. She created, with her husband, the Spanish Inquisition, which was a very violent way of oppressing everyone who disagreed with the monarchs and the Church. She is known to have killed and expelled all the Jews of Spain in a very very very violent manner, and is also the one who sponsored Christopher Columbus to do his famous discoveries.

After that, everything that was done by Christopher Columbus was done in her name. She had all the power and drove everything she did through her vision of her faith and was not a kind ruler. She has a violent history and a ton of blood on her hands and I find it extremely shocking in North America that in we would honour such a woman, especially given the values we're trying to promote as Canadians. When we see Justin Trudeau get his relationship with First Nations to better grounds, you have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we have all these things that we're trying to do, understanding there's a very painful past, and then at the same time we have a bust of this bitch? Makes no sense to me.

It's adding insult to injury. We can't undo what is done, history is what it is, but we don't need to have this statue here—there are better women to honour. She's not a woman to honour, she's not one to represent women, she's not one to speak for our values.

One of my friends said something funny, he said it's almost like having a statue of Hitler in Israel. If I was native I would be so shocked to see her in this park.

I'd personally never even heard of this statue. Who put it up?
It was offered in 1958 by the Embassy of Spain to the City of Montreal. But honestly, thank you but no thank you Spain, this is not what we want to keep from you. It's like if history went a different way and Germany went to Poland and offered them a bust of Hitler.

Most people don't know who she is. People know Christopher Columbus a little bit but she's the one who sent were treated.

But I think we need to understand the whole system that was behind him, and that was her. And in order to create a proper society with proper values, we have to debunk certain ghosts, certain skeletons and make sure that we don't honour them. Again, we can't change them, but we should honour another woman, not her.

A makeshift plaque outlines Queen Isabella's "crimes against humanity."

Why do it like this?
Because I wanted to bring attention and honestly, I feel it's the least I could do because I feel so aggressed every time I see her. It was my anger speaking.

What do you hope people feel when they see this?
I hope they feel disgust. I want them to be like, why is this lady here, why is it that we have this statue here, it makes no sense, it's crazy.

Do you think the city should take it down?
I personally think so, but at least I want people to be outraged by it.

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

My night at Derek's place. This is him showing off the contents of his basement fridge. All photos by the author

When I was traveling the US a few years back, I met a guy in Kentucky who claimed to eat nothing but raw meat. As Derek Nance explained to me, he'd grown up with a mystery stomach ailment that persisted until he turned to a particularly hardcore variety of a paleo diet. Once he started eating nothing but raw flesh—scarfing down internal organs for vitamin C and noshing rancid scraps to boost his immune system—all his problems faded away. He'd even started brushing his teeth with animal fat. So I wrote this article on my night with Derek and his vegetarian girlfriend (seriously) and went on my way.

It's now been a few years and I was wondering about Derek. I gave him a call and it turned out he'd just finished a sort of meat tour through Europe. He said European meat sucked, so we talked about good meat, internet attention, and how my article lost him his job.

VICE: Hey Derek, you're still eating raw meat?
Derek Nance: Yep, I've even found a few people who can keep animals for me. I barter, trade. Sometimes I use Craigslist.

But last time we spoke you were working as a butcher?
I was, butchering for farmers. But after your article came out, this German TV show wanted to film me on the job. And the farmers were country people and afraid of the negative publicity. I called in one Monday when the German TV troupe was with me and my boss was like, "Here's your check, you're done." I was only getting paid minimum wage anyway. I was just there to learn.

Sheep's head is a bit like a dessert.

I'm so sorry to hear that!
No I'm glad how things turned out. It started with Facebook. I didn't know the article had been published but I was getting all these foreign people from all over adding me, who I'd never met and didn't know. Then I got not only phone calls but offers. There's several documentaries now, it was just outrageous. I did a series called A Million Ways to Live, and featured the raw meat diet. The BBC, too. I also got an offer from Galileo, an internet variety show in Germany. They came over here and bought me a ram, but it got loose and we lost it.

That's insane. I don't think either of us expected that reaction. So tell me how you're doing now. How was the meat in Europe?
Well I'm in Kentucky, it's the bluegrass region. The soil here is good and the taste of meat is far and above anything in Europe. I was under the impression they have higher food standards over there but actually, it's sort of a police state. Like in England you can't get lungs anymore, even though traditional haggis is made with lungs, they don't let you have them. I was trying to find animal fat, because my diet consists of a lot of animal fat, but everything there is super lean. I trekked around London, finally found a halal shop, and they were trimming all their fat off. I tried to buy the fat but he was like, We don't sell fat, it's trash. Finally I insisted and he gave me a little bit, but the taste of it wasn't so good.

Throwing back some organs

Can you describe how it tasted differently?
Low-quality meat has an element of sourness that's hard to describe. Grazing animals naturally pick out the types of plants they need to balance themselves. But most animals don't get to forage and only get one or two kinds of grass. This overburdens their organs. I've tasted these cows and they just don't taste good. I'm really particular. I eat animals that have a good clean pasture to forage from, a variety of species that they can choose from.

I understand you also went to France to meet one of your heroes?
Yeah, meeting Ingre was my primary mission. She's from Norway, 38 years old, and she's been on this diet for about nine years. She's 90 percent carnivorous. She'd go out and collect oysters, get like 100 of them in an hour, and eat ungodly amounts of them. She's absolutely gorgeous, strong, and full of life. Really exuberant qualities.

How does she live?
She lives on a horse farm to get the open air. She doesn't like the artificial life, so she sleeps with the windows open in the open air. She goes for a cold dip in the morning. She eats a lot of fish primarily, fish head smoothies.

Did you have a fish head smoothie?
No, but we did eat some whole fish heads. They were pretty crunchy.

What was the mission? To learn from her?
I'd never really gotten the chance to hang out with any others of my kind. She has this spirit about her, a universe-will-provide kind of energy. There's so much about that spirit that you can't get from an internet forum. You just have to experience it for yourself.

Derek demonstrating his health and vitality. That's his partner, Joanne, on the right.

Do you think you've got some of that spirit?
I hope so. I'm feeling great. Of course there are ups and downs. I have four kids, spend a lot of time trying to take care of them. Plus life on the farm with a bunch of animals, I do get run down. But I recover easily and feel a lot better than I ever did before this diet.

So what's on next year?
We've got a lot to do with the backyard. Make a sauna. Might go to New Zealand or somewhere. Maybe Australia and go after a wallaby. They seem a little chubbier around the waist than kangaroos.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

The canal the City of Winnipeg dug 100 years ago that cut off Shoal Lake 40 from the mainland. Still via Canada's Waterless Communities: Shoal Lake 40.

A Canadian community that has relied on bottled water deliveries for 18 years is taking the first step toward clean tap water.

One of the schools shut down on Tuesday. Photo via Flickr user Joe Wolf

On Tuesday every public school in the Los Angeles Unified School District was shut down thanks to an emailed bomb threat. That morning, Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the LAUSD, held a press conference that was light on details about the nature of the threat, but the gist was that it was serious enough to force the schools to take drastic action. "I am not taking the chance of bringing children any place, into any part of the building, until I know it is safe," he said at the time. Now, you can read exactly what worried Cortines so much.

The full email, first obtained by KABC and KTLA, warns of "something very big" and the threat of bombs in lockers and "an army of Allah" storming several schools at once across Los Angeles. It was sent from the email address madbomber@cock.li.

You can read it in full below.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I am emailing you to inform you of the happenings on Tuesday, 12/15/15.

Something big is going down. Something very big. It will make national headlines. Perhaps, even international ones. You see, my last 4 years here at one of the district high schools has been absolute hell. Pure, unmitigated, agony. The bullying, the loneliness, the rejection... it is never-ending. And for what? Just because I'm 'different'?

No. No more. I am a devout Muslim, and was once against violence, but I have teamed up with a local jihadist cell as it is the only way I'll be able to accomplish my massacre the correct way. I would not be able to do it alone. Me, and my 32 comrades, will die tomorrow in the name of Allah. Every school in the L.A. Unified district is being targeted. We have bombs hidden in lockers already at several schools. They are strategically placed and are meant to crumble the foundations of the very buildings that monger so much hate and discrimination. They are pressure cooker bombs, hidden in backpacks around the schools. They are loaded with 20 lbs. of gunpowder, for maximum damage. They will be detonated via Cell Phone. Not only are there bombs, but there are nerve gas agents set to go off at a specific time: during lunch hour. To top it off, my brothers in Allah and I have Kalashnikov rifles, Glock 18 Machine pistols, and multiple handheld grenades. The students at every school in the L.A. Unified district will be massacred, mercilessly. And there is nothing you can do to stop it.

If you do end up trying to, by perhaps, beefing up security, or canceling classes for the day, it won't matter. Your security will not be able to stop us. We are an army of Allah. If you cancel classes, the bombings will take place regardless, and we will bring our guns to the streets and offices of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Bakersfield, and San Diego.

I wish you the best luck. It is time to pray to allah, as this may be your last day.

I first got a sense of what it means to interrupt violence in early September, at a vigil for a slain teen in Far Rockaways, Queens. The boy, NeShawn Plummer, hadn't even graduated high school when he was shot on a corner late one night while hanging out with friends. He died two days afterward, and detectives eventually determined the attack was likely over a minor dispute Plummer was involved in—gang-related retaliation for an earlier fight.

While elected officials and local activists berated youth violence on the corner where NeShawn was killed—in a terrible coincidence, it wasn't far from where his older brother had been killed three years before—I was approached by two teens from a nearby group called Rock Safe Streets, which formed earlier this year and is dedicated to ending the violence in the neighborhood.

The first teen, almost the same age as NeShawn, told me that she joined the group because she was tired of what she had seen, and kept seeing. "The only time that we come together as a community is when something tragic like this happens," she told me. "But we need to take a deep look at what's going on here. Gun violence is only a symptom of the system.

"It hits home, though," she continued, "when a 16-year-old has to have his life taken away,"

The teens were out on what's known in these groups as a "shooting response." Within 72 hours of a shooting, fatal or otherwise, participants in the program will travel to a crime scene to spread their message by directly talking to neighbors about what had happened. That means stopping people passing by, and even cars in the street. Anything to get the word out that this violence is contagious.

Some see these shootings as sequential—a sort of chain that is interconnected, and interpersonal. One person shoots another, for whatever the reason may be, and a third person decides to retaliate. So the idea here is to stop the disease from spreading: Stop that third person from ever pulling that trigger, and stop the first person from ever picking up a gun. Squash the beef before it turns deadly.

Or, in other words, "interrupt" the violence.

Instead of policing, the approach relies on social capital. Inspired by Chicago's "Ceasefire" model, the hybrid formula of Minority Report-style pre-crime mediation and outreach programs has been rebranded as "Cure Violence," an alternative approach for New York's toughest streets. Not only it is resonating in an era all too comfortable with guns, but also in neighborhoods all too familiar with the sounds of gunshots. And the results of this modern urban project—whether or not it can effectively prevent gun violence—will have larger implications, as over the past two years New York City has experienced the first prolonged uptick in shootings since the end of the 1990s, particularly in a handful of Brooklyn neighborhoods.

In 2014, 14 precincts accounted for 51 percent of all shootings in the Big Apple; 49 percent of all shootings in 2015, as a recent Daily News investigation found, are gang-related—which is to say often the product of petty disputes. Meanwhile, by the end of the year, there will be the 17 "Cure Violence" programs in police precincts citywide.

Save Our Streets (SOS) Crown Heights in Brooklyn was the first to get off the ground, in 2009. When I asked Amy Ellenbogen, the program's director, what she made of Mayor Bill de Blasio calling New York "America's safest big city," she just sighed, responding, "Safe for whom?"

In the first-floor office of the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center, on 256 Kingston Avenue in Brooklyn, a map of the neighborhood is pasted to the wall. It's split into four geometrically identical quadrants, as the community's shape, like so many areas in New York, is visibly rectangular. Local institutions and mainstays are dotted. In fact, anything that serves a social function, from the nearby Albany Houses to the firehouse precinct on Bergen Street, is properly labeled.

With borders outlined, the map appears to be military ready—like Crown Heights is being invaded by some foreign force. And, in fact, it does show a block-by-block war of sorts, one that has long plagued this neighborhood that sits below the more notorious "Do-or-Die" Bed-Stuy: the fight against guns.

In many respects, Crown Heights is a battleground. From where I used to live, on Rogers Avenue, on the western edges of the neighborhood, you could almost pinpoint the Iron Curtain of hyper-gentrification moving further and further east. And that ever-encroaching line created a strange dichotomy, particularly because of what existed—or what didn't exist—on both ends.

In the west, you have restaurants, bars, and coffee shops popping up left and right, catering to the wealthy residents of the condos that has greatly overtaken the neighborhood. In the east, this glitzy development is met with a legacy of visceral urban plight dating back to the 1960s: low-income housing, racial tensions between the black and Jewish populations, and, most notably, gun violence.

Crown Heights—like East New York, Brownsville, and the South Bronx—is one of the few areas in New York City that still suffers almost every month from a shooting, either fatal or non-fatal. As of December 6, the 77th Precinct, where the Mediation Center's four quadrants lie, has already seen 29 shootings and 11 murders. It is perhaps telling that the area's annual J'Ouvert spectacle and the West Indian Day Parade, which celebrate the community's Caribbean roots, are pretty much expected to produce bloodshed. (This year, three people were shot, including an aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was killed.)

The deaths can't be attributed to something as simple as a gangland turf war. The on-the-ground organization's work complements the notion that violence here is carried out by a select handful of young men. In the past, you could broker a peace between two warring gang heads, and the killing would often stop—for a while. Now, the disputes are decentralized, more likely to bubble up on Facebook, and break out, as Jennifer Gonnerman wrote in the New Yorker, in the dark corners of housing projects.

Instead of two bombastic characters, you have several, each shooting and killing for their own reasons. So to defuse it, you have to target these "high-risk individuals" as many ways as you can. "It's unpredictable now," David Grant, an outreach worker at Save Our Streets Bed Stuy, a sister chapter, told me. "You don't get a warning."

Prevention in these groups is two-pronged: One is micro ("What happened?"); the other is big-picture ("Why does this keep happening?"). The first aims to halt those minor disputes before they reach a flashpoint, like the one that ended in NeShawn's death—the SOS model, as it's phrased, is "Detect, Identify, Disrupt"; its slogan is "Stop shooting, start living." The second is concerned with what Ellenbogen describes as "norm change," or shifting greater societal trends—socio-economic setbacks, gang culture, structural racism, mass incarceration—ingrained in the system the teenage girl mentioned.

For most of its short history, SOS Crown Heights concentrated on the former. Over time, though, it couldn't hide from the latter.

"I often hear the story where people say, 'Let's clean up litter for the day,' and then go to the river and they're pulling all the garbage out," Ellenbogen told me in her office. "But it just keeps piling up, and nobody looks upstream to see the big pollution plants. Really, you should be organizing to stop the pollution plant.

"I think this program, the way we designed it," she added. "We try to do a little bit of both."

With federal stimulus dollars, SOS launched six years ago from the offices on Kingston Avenue, with Ellenbogen—who had a long history of working with police brutality and local anti-violence initiatives within the Hasidic Jewish community—at the helm. At first, its purpose was to decrease violence and get people jobs. An added financial boost from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention allowed the group to hire more outreach workers and violence interrupters. (It started with just four.)

Then, at the tail end of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration in 2013, the city chose five grassroots sites to test the "Cure Violence" model in neighborhoods where it seemed as if the police were making little progress stemming the flow of guns. SOS Crown Heights was one of them. But the city's new involvement came attached with a key component that officials thought was missing: "wraparound services," or what you offer people once they detach from a life filled with violence. The answer is not as simple as finding them jobs.

The result has been an all-out attack on a vicious cycle that has been spinning for years, where employment is not a one-size-fits-all ailment. At her office, Ellenbogen rattled off the deeper issues at play here. "By the time someone is coming to us job-ready, they've been failed by the healthcare system, the education system; by housing, by law enforcement," she argued. "Maybe the foster care system, maybe the prison-industrial complex. And also, those systems have fed off of them, and they have a complete lack of trust in any sort of system operating for them."

So, for the past two years, as Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration and the City Council has increased their attention and funding (last year, nearly $13 million was included in the budget) for Cure Violence initiatives, SOS has tried to fill that gap. Mental health and therapeutic services, as life in crime-ridden neighborhoods is commonly linked to PTSD and depression, have been made available. And now, you're just as likely to see job readiness workshops in the office as you are mediation training.

When I entered the office on a recent weekday, it was quiet, save for staff members typing, but when I was leaving, a pizza party with high school students had broken out without me noticing. Presentations from community art organizations with internship opportunities were planned for the afternoon. The organization has also recently put on art installations—entitled Arts to End Violence—and parties, which, according to its members, have attracted large crowds in the neighborhood.

"We don't have a badge, we don't have a vest, we don't have a gun," said David Gaskin, the program manager of Save Our Streets Crown Heights, which was birthed at the Center. "So we have to use our influence, our credibility—who we are and who we were known to be at that point of time—just to work towards not even alleviating the situation, which is the main goal, but just bringing the emotions down. Because they're running high."

The norm change approach heavily relies on Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets, which trains teenagers in advocacy work after school. It is a long-term project; an effort to get kids, and eventually their friends, away from life on the corner. But the immediate focus is on the group's original MO: A city-led partnership with the nearby Kings County Hospital allows its members in, so they can speak with victims of gun violence, or their families, about how to prevent anything else from happening.

Of course, they're also out on the block.

"The Streets Team job is to definitely get out there to detect where there's abuse, and where the shooting is coming from," Gaskin told me. "To gauge neighborhoods to see how hot certain areas are."

Gaskin is a perfect symbol of how this process works. The Bed-Stuy native is a former gang member who served time in prison years ago. Once freed, he dedicated his life to preventing violence, but at first, only between his own friends. He eventually got dragged squarely into the project when a three-year-old boy was shot and killed at a playground down the street from his home, a place he took his one-year-old often. Then, another infant was fatally shot in his stroller in Brownsville, because his father had beef with a local gang, Gaskin says.

Although no longer associated with his old crew, Gaskin feared for his son's life just by being there. Soon he was selecting the streets to walk down with a stroller, and was forced to travel to playgrounds in other communities to play with his son without fear. The feeling eventually got to him—"I felt like I couldn't sit in a local park with my kids," he said—so he joined SOS as an outreach worker.

If nothing else, he knew the block better than anyone.

"Kids are not looking at me as David, the SOS worker. Yeah, I'm an SOS worker, but they know me as Brave from Nostrand uniform or without the uniform, that's what certain people refer to me. That's what they know me as. So it's just me, showing them kids who know me a different lifestyle."

As program manager, Gaskin helps arrange squads of young, high-risk adults, who are, or once were, deeply involved in this world of violence, to go out into their own backyards—the hot housing projects, the dice game dens—if they hear of any dispute brewing between people they know. Depending on the circle he or she is dealing with, mediation may require intermediaries, or it may not.

Regardless, these foot soldiers receive 40 hours of training in de-escalation tactics, and a significant portion of their work is networking done beforehand. "They develop contacts in the neighborhood, people who trust them," Ellenbogen explained. "People who know them really well, and will call them when there's something that's brewing, that's heating up, and will just be like, 'Hey you should know that so and so is pissed at so and so.'" (A few outreach workers told me they're used to getting phone calls at 1:30 AM.)

In these neighborhoods, law enforcement, of course, is regarded with a healthy level of distrust. After all, Operation IMPACT, the NYPD's last major anti-gun-violence initiative, was largely halted by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton because it deployed the highly controversial tactic "stop-and-frisk" tactic in high-crime areas. This, Bratton said, eroded the trust gap of police with the community, and was bad for cop morale. So sending in someone who has a reputation already is, in SOS's mind, a better way to defuse whatever's going on. Still, their mission is dangerous, and their identities are kept totally confidential to anyone outside of the organization. For this article, I wasn't allowed to know who they are, and was barred from any specific details of their undertakings. However, Gaskin told me that the beefs he encounters most frequently are over girls, money, and territory.

The group maintains what Gaskin described as a "respectful relationship" with the New York Police Department, which does its own anti-violence outreach, like gun buyback programs. The SOS will share crime scenes with the police, but not internal information, so as to avoid incriminating their own participants. And recently, a new community policing unit has reached out to the Center, looking to hear from its staff, they say.

Sometimes, though, the line between cops and violence interrupters has appeared blurry to those looking to join.

"One guy came in about a year or so ago, and he was introduced to me through a participant. So after like two days, I don't see him," Gaskin recalled. "Then he pops up, but off and on. Then he's totally around now. As the time goes on, I ask him what changed, what happened, and he said everybody thinks that SOS works with NYPD."

"That was the word on the streets for a little while," he continued. "Now he's a fixture in this office."

I reached out to the NYPD for comment, but have yet to hear back. However, in an editorial this week in the New York Daily News, NYPD Commissioner Bratton voiced support for the "Cure Violence" model, arguing that it "combines the pledge of intensive enforcement for crews who persist in violence with a genuine offer of assistance to those who change their ways."

At the SOS Crown Heights office, there's a running tally that ticks off how many days the neighborhood has gone without a shooting. The last time I was there, the number was 79—a solid stretch of calm in a neighborhood used to anything but. But it's tough to say exactly who, or what, caused it. The effectiveness of prevention is theoretical; in a way, you're measuring what didn't happen. So could it be a larger crime trend at play, or SOS's work on the ground?

Ellenbogen said the group looks to shooting numbers as indicators of their progress. But this, she admitted, isn't always reliable: an outlier situation, where four or five people are shot and killed in one sitting, can skew the statistics. Gaskin, on the other hand, said his benchmark is more human-to-human: how many backpacks they hand out at events, or how many teenagers sign up at one event.

Currently, several institutions are conducting field research as to how successful SOS has been, not only in Crown Heights, but nationwide, as similar programs have launched in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Academic studies cited by a New York City Council task force on gun violence in 2012 suggested that "Cure Violence" models can decrease shootings by 16 to 34 percent per year. A more recent analysis from the Center for Court Innovation, which started the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center in 2002, compared Crown Heights to neighborhoods without SOS or similar outreach, before and after the programs were implemented. While shootings rose in those areas, the 77th Precinct saw a 6 percent drop in shootings; the report also later stressed that funding is directly linked to how well the program does.

Amy Ellenbogen and David Gaskin outside the Crown Heights Mediation Center

So SOS, as it would seem, is winning the battle. At least for now.

The office on Kingston Avenue feels like it's out on the street. During the hours I spent there, people, both young and old, were always popping their heads in. Members of the community, Ellenbogen told me, come by all the time to show their appreciation. "Thank you, SOS, for saving my brother," one sign reads. "And hopefully my boyfriend soon, too." Another shows a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., surrounded by signatures from students. It reads, "I have decided to stick to love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

At a roundtable discussion with SOS staff members—all of whom were older black men, with or without past gang affiliations—I asked if the strategy has ever failed. That is, did they ever come across situations where the the violence simply couldn't be interrupted and someone was shot. Gaskin said yes. While working with SOS, one man in the neighborhood had repeatedly returned to crime, due to personal issues, and was unable to be convinced that it wasn't the way.

"We kept telling him X, Y, and Z was going to happen," he said. "And then, on September 9 of this year, X, Y, and Z happened." But the death of the participant, to Gaskin and others, wasn't seen as a failure of their work, in particular. " failed as a whole," he argued.

"It was a sad moment," a man named Rudy Suggs, who was the subject of a 2012 New York Times story on the group, added. "But an enlightening moment for us. Because soon after, eight of his friends joined us, saying they wanted to prevent this from happening ever again."

These guys were self-aware. Having to single-handedly save someone, while simultaneously confronting larger themes of poverty and crime, is no easy task. "This job has its highs, and it has its lows," Craig Alexander, an outreach worker, noted, with a look of grief. And they know that progress will not happen overnight: "What we're asking people to go against is what, for decades, they've been trying to survive," David Grant said.

But they counted their victories with pride. Suggs detailed a Fourth of July weekend party, where over 50 members from rivaling gangs had gathered, ready to fight, but were soon sent home in peace by SOS members. Another member, Barry Wiles, recounted a Thanksgiving dinner held at the Center this November, where two formerly feuding gang members, who had tried to kill each other in the past, sat down to break bread.

"I grew up in this neighborhood, and these kids, I grew up with their parents," Wiles told me. "So to be able to make sure these kids don't have to go through what we went through..." He paused before continuing. "That's success to me."

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A screenshot from a Hungry Lips video, one of the more controversial ASMR channels around. Image via Youtube

"If you're going to deep-throat phallic objects and play with your tits, make a damn Chaturbate rather than come onto YouTube and represent the ASMR community like this," rails Aaron, a YouTube commenter. This isn't just a rogue troll, but one of many ASMR video viewers who are angered by the erotic subculture emerging within the community. It isn't relaxing, they say, and take to comments sections to let everyone know.

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It's the name given to a well-documented (though not very well-understood) phenomenon in which some people get pleasurable tingles in response to certain stimuli. The stimuli can be tactile, auditory, visual, olfactory, or just anything that works. There are thousands of videos over YouTube where viewers get their tingle on to carefully curated visuals: people slowly brushing hair, folding towels, or some other vanilla activity. But like everything else on the internet, ASMR is now a type of porn, which has purists—who have always claimed to anyone who will listen that their hobby is not a fetish—up in arms.

One particular channel, attracts more critics than most. HungryLips videos all seem to begin with an introduction to the host's new outfits—"I just got this at Victoria's Secret. So cute"—accompanied with some hair twirling, whispering, and gentle stroking of her décolletage. The lighting is soft, her ringlets and lipstick the epitome of femininity, and despite being intensely sensual, nothing NSFW happens next. HungryLips has a different website and Patreon account for that.

A quick sweep of YouTube shows that the ASMR community is divided on the issue of eroticism. One particularly irate HungryLips commentator points out that ASMR artists spend "countless hours making quality videos" only to get harassed as a result of other channels' content. Others accept that more erotic videos are a natural progression of the genre and enjoy—or avoid if it doesn't appeal to them. YouTube user CheekyNinja reasons that there is nothing "ugly or indecent" about sensual ASMR, and that even people who don't like to admit it find ASMR arousing.

One such person who isn't fazed one way or the other is Robin, an ASMR viewer from England. He told me he uses ASMR as a form of pain management. "I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It affects all my body systems and I am in chronic pain," he explained. "I've tried many types of relaxation exercises and ASMR and mindfulness are the only two which work." This is not unusual, as ASMR has been proven to be effective for anxiety, pain management, and insomnia. Robin told me that he has only recently discovered the "erotic ASMR" community, and he finds the videos produce the same response as the more mundane ones. "I don't really give a damn if the video is there as clickbait to a camgirl website, or porn," he said. "What I care about is that it is reducing my stress and anxiety levels, my heart rate and blood pressure."

The ASMR community is relatively new and as such it is still developing. Rolf Osterberg, a Swedish ASMR video creator, compares the erotic subgenre of ASMR to other types of videos (or "triggers," as they are known as within the community) that divide viewers. "I mean, we have everything from vampire roleplay to hairdressers and brain examinations Why not have erotic videos too?" He has a point. The list of videos that viewers use to trigger their ASMR is enormous, and if you apply rule 34 ("If it exists, there is a porn of it") it doesn't seem at all surprising that the ASMR community has incorporated porn. CheekyNinja takes the view that "there are a lot of different types of ASMR, and this is just one of them. If I could give it a name, I'd call it gentleman's ASMR, or ASMR for gentlemen."

For the most part the more well-known, long-time, non-erotic video creators have stayed quiet on the matter, avoiding getting involved with the wars going on in the comments sections. One channel, ASMRpsychetruth created a parody video titled "Vegan Hungry Lips" which was met with a mixed response from viewers. The anti-erotic camp found it funny; many others found it childish.

I spoke to Hailey, who joined the community in 2011. Her channel, "WhisperingRose" has over 99,000 subscribers, and she is seen as one of the more "famous" content creators within the community. "ASMR is such a personal experience, and there's no dictator telling us definitively what it "is" or "isn't," she explained. "It all comes down to personal preferences and as long as it causes the relaxing feeling, nobody can really say anything. It makes it more of an art, and you can't create 'wrong' art."

Hailey told me that since her channel began, she has been objectified sexually by viewers, "simply for being a large-busted woman." She has received "catcalls, threats, and lewd comments" even when she only films from the neck up. For her, the arrival of sexual ASMR hasn't done anything to curb that, or to boost it.

When I asked her about the growing divide within the community, Hailey was hopeful about the future. "People are smarter than we give them credit for," she believes. "Those who are searching for ASMR will find ASMR, and those who are searching for porn will find porn. The best we can do is hope that everyone finds exactly what they're really looking for."

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AIDS activists and others are asked to leave the lobby during a protest highlighting pharmaceutical drug pricing. AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File

Read: Should We Start Worrying About Pharmaceutical Patent Trolls?

Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old hedge fund and pharmaceutical industry guru who alienated large swaths of America by dramatically jacking up the price of a life-saving drug this September, was arrested by the FBI at his home in Manhattan early Thursday morning, as Bloomberg reports.

Shkreli first rose to national prominence when he raised the price of Daraprim, a drug that treats toxoplasmosis, from $13.50 to $750 overnight. The move drew condemnations from across the political spectrum, as well as the scrutiny of Congress, but after briefly suggesting he would walk back the price hike, Shkreli decided to go ahead with it. He even teased plans to acquire the rights to—and significantly raise the price of—another infectious disease treatment earlier this month.

But Shkreli, who bolstered the legions of haters when he paid $2 million to acquire the only copy of the new Wu-Tang album in existence, is not being charged for price-gouging. Instead, the charges, brought by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, are for securities fraud—and closely mirror a lawsuit brought by his former employer, the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin, which ousted him as chief executive in September of last year.

That suit, filed this past August, alleged Shkreli—now CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals—was using Retrophin as a sort of slush fund to pay off investors in at his old hedge fund, MSMB Capital Management.

A press conference was expected to be held later Thursday by US Attorney Robert L. Capers—who just got confirmed by the US Senate two days ago—to detail the charges.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg wrote that Shkreli hadn't listened to the Wu-Tang album yet and "he's saving that for a time when he's feeling low and needs something to lift his spirits." That record might be getting a spin soon.