An Ontario zoo owner and animal trainer who gained minor infamy after calling a baboon a cocksucker on live TV in August is now being accused of "viciously" whipping a young tiger, and he's shot back with a half-hour YouTube video denying the allegations.

In a post on its website, animal rights activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said an eyewitness filmed Bowmanville Zoological Park owner Michael Hackenberger whipping a Siberian tiger approximately 20 times in a row during a training session at the zoo. Part of the accompanying video, titled "Hollywood Animal Trainer Viciously Whips Young Tiger" (Hackenberger trained the tiger used in Life of Pi) shows a tiger on a leash with a trainer in an arena. Hackenberger appears to strike the rear of the tiger twice with a flexible rod, at which point the animal lies down on the ground and rolls on its back. A whipping sound can be heard 17 more times before the trainer orders the tiger to get up. Hackenberger can also be heard swearing at the tiger.

In the post, PETA claims the "young tiger was so traumatized that he involuntarily emptied his anal sacs, a fear response in big cats."

In another part of the video, Hackenberger, now sitting outside, says he likes "hitting him in the face," and how striking a tiger's paws while they're against a rock makes them sting more.

"If we'd been running a videotape the whole time you were here and you did a 45-second montage of the times I struck this animal, PETA would burn this place to the ground," he says, apparently unaware that the witness, has, in fact, been filming.

PETA ended the post urging readers to sign a petition to never support using animals in entertainment.

The Ontario Society for the Protection of Animals and Canada's Accredited Zoos and Aquariums are now both investigating the alleged whipping. The OSPCA can lay charges if it believes animal abuse occurred, while CAZA can revoke the zoo's accreditation.

But Hackenberger isn't taking the accusations lying down. The zoo owner posted a 31-minute, uncut, unedited video on YouTube entitled "Our Response to PETA's Lies." In the part rant, part debunking, Hackenberger apologizes for swearing at the tiger, but then goes on to tell viewers about the importance of training animals in captivity to keep them stimulated ("The biggest problems we have in captivity are bored, obese animals," he says).

The camera then pans left to reveal the same trainer and tiger from the PETA video standing to the side, and, rod in hand, Hackenberger explains that he didn't strike the tiger repeatedly, but was hitting the ground and using the sound of it cracking to get Uno's attention. He then demonstrates it.

Throughout the video, Hackenberger plays back the PETA video on a laptop, pauses it, then explains what he was apparently actually doing. He also claims the clips of him talking about striking Uno were taken out of context.

Hackenberger ends his video with a challenge for PETA to release the rest of their video tapes and jabs the group's record of euthanizing animals at its shelter.

"Really? Got to hand it to you PETA, you've got balls. And you're hypocrites... Don't tell your lies, release the rest of the tapes," Hackenberger says to the camera. "...I thank everyone for their kind attention. There's going to be a shitstorm over this, I know it."

PETA has not responded to the challenge.

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Screenshot from 'Home Alone' (1990). Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox/John Hughes Entertainment

Macaulay Culkin has spent the past few years on tabloid deathwatch. Never far from his new face: a picture of him at age 9, in his trademark role, screaming at that mirror, clean as a god. To reinforce this contrast, the Daily Mail reported that "people who know him say he's worlds away from Kevin MacCallister." Tragedy aside, it feels appropriate that the so-called face of my generation should now be so contorted. Culkin remains a fitting poster boy for our indulgence, just as the film that made him might be seen as a signpost of our miseducation, a standout example of the kind of bullshit we were raised on.

Like its star, Home Alone hasn't aged well. At least that was my sense revisiting it 25 years after the craze. It didn't take me long to realize that this was a political judgment. You see, upon closer inspection, the tale of a rich kid taking on the lumpenproletariat is rather obviously a work of right-wing propaganda—a libertarian parable, The Fountainhead for Generation ADHD. This was no accident.

The film went into production in early 1990, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Quite a time this must have been for a lifelong Republican and geeky Reaganite like John Hughes, the film's brainfather: a spell of great ideological security. As an A-list conservative, he was part of a rare breed in Hollywood, and through most of his career he had tread rather lightly. Hughes was known as a pragmatist, above all else, a masterful panderer. He transitioned to film from advertising in the late-70s and by the mid-80s had mastered the teen flick (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) causing Time magazine to anoint him "spookily in sync with the swooning narcissism of adolescence." In the early 90s, he proved himself equally adept to the narcissism of children—a purer narcissism.

Hughes's teen films bear only subtle traces of his political attitudes, as Michael Weiss noted in Slate a few years back: an obsession with class differences, a preference for new money, and the usual celebration of the individual. He was careful not to inject his views in a way that might alienate viewers. Sometimes this self-censorship happened in the editing room, like the speech Hughes cut from Ferris Bueller ("Be careful when you deal with old hippies; they can be real touchy"). Such an overt expression of his attitudes would have been inappropriate: Conservatism doesn't come naturally to teenagers.

Children, in this respect, are a better fit—they tend to be fairly reactionary. They usually despise regulation, entertain fantasies of self-sufficiency, fear what they don't know, enjoy weaponry, hold firm to their superstitions, and hate nothing more than seeing their cake equally divided. Hughes's libertarian bent was particularly well-suited to children of the 90s, raised on a twin regimen of neglect and placation. It's a matter of statistics: Children of this era were home alone in unprecedented numbers, spent a quarter of its waking hours watching television, and was as a result the most entitled generation of infant consumers in recorded history—hyperactive, disobedient, and product-savvy. With this audience in mind, it comes as no surprise that Hughes saw fit to produce his most ideological work.

Hughes's close friend, National Lampoon editor P. J. O'Rourke, said as much about Home Alone in a 2010 interview, after Hughes's passing: "[The conservatism in his films is] there for those who care to see it. Home Alone is all about self-sufficiency, freedom, and responsibility, basically." Watching the film with O'Rourke's hint in mind, it isn't hard to identify the contours of parable.

The film starts with a rebellion against overregulation. Fed up with his siblings' teasing and mother's nagging, Kevin, the runt of the clan, starts a fight in front of his extended family. Ordered into the attic of the family mansion, he prays for them to disappear overnight. And they do, on a flight to Paris. By the time they realize their mistake, mid-trip, their youngest is already scouring the house for the best time possible. We see Kevin jumping on his parents' bed, tossing popcorn in his mouth, watching violent movies, shooting his brother's BB gun, sledding down the staircase—all the things reasonable caregivers would forbid. At the beginning of the film, Kevin is helpless, a welfare dependent, but the lifting of the nanny state allows the fruition of his full creativity.

A sense of responsibility follows. After the initial excesses, Kevin decides to live like a responsible homeowner. He does laundry, he shops—but unlike the adults in the film, he enjoys himself. His imitation of adulthood is, by all indications, better than the real thing. He runs his mother's errands with a bachelor's sense of autonomy. But that autonomy is fragile. He's only eight, after all, and adults interfere where they can. A policeman tries to bang him up for an accidental theft; a snoopy cashier inquires into his home life. Kevin evades them all. From opening scene to the final credits, he outwits every adult that confronts him. This was populism for children.

Culkin reprising his 'Home Alone' role in 2015.

The story emphasizes its hero's goodness and superiority whenever possible, so justifying an immense self-righteousness. He's the only charming character in the film, the most smart, free, and, crucially, clean. A famous scene shows him following a meticulous regimen of preening methods, culminating in burning aftershave; the burglars, meanwhile, have a van-ful of expensive commodities but don't take the time to wash the crud from their fingernails. It's interesting to contrast the aftershave scene with the most famous scene from Hughes's next film, Curly Sue (1991), a near-perfect inversion: Sue, a street kid, is soaped and shampooed by her adoptive mother as part of a broader civilizing process. Hughes was a master of unsubtle appearances—in some of his early teen movies, the camera literally crosses the train tracks. The class of his characters often reflects in their hygiene. Lower middle-class characters in Home Alone, like Uncle Frank, look slightly disheveled and wear dusty sweaters. The poor are downright filthy.

Hughes had a weakness for "the Reaganite gentry," according to Weiss. It is for this reason, presumably, that the hero of Home Alone comes from new money. We learn this in a particularly contrived scene: Sitting in first class, on their way to Paris, Kevin's father reminisces that the only vacations he took as a child involved driving the family Dodge to visit his grandpa in some backwater village. Uncle Frank sits one row ahead of them with his wife, complaining and stealing saltshakers. Their combined gaggle sits in tourist class. Kevin's dad is paying their way. The sequel—in keeping—would introduce us to the insanely generous owner of a major New York toy store. In this world, philanthropy takes the place of social services. Noble members of the underclass, the street cleaner in Home Alone and the pigeon lady in the sequel, are content with what little they have, and subsist off religion and classical music, respectively. The burglars burgle because they're virtueless fools. The society depicted in Home Alone is experiencing the opposite of class struggle: Everyone gets what they deserve.

Libertarian views are taken to their logical extremity when the wet bandits take their class envy to the MacCallisters' suburban mansion. Kevin cocks his shotgun: "This is my house, and I'm going to protect it." The burglars hold crowbars, crude weapons. Kevin has set up an array of surgical traps, apparently designed more to hurt and humiliate the burglars than to incapacitate them. The list of traps include: a BB gun ambush; icy stairs; a scalding-hot door handle, branding the family M into one burglar's palm; tar and feathers; industrial glue, a four-inch nail, and Christmas ornaments to the bare feet; a blowtorch to the head; an iron to the face; and a pipe to the face, which elicits a gold tooth. Escaping from the two lunatics, Kevin does something tremendously odd, because of the time at which he does it: He calls the police. The whole routine was unnecessary. This is textbook sadism, or, as far right-wing movements have described it in the past: "creative violence for its own sake."

Luckily, the "Wet Bandits" are the kind of evildoers one can mash up without arousing too much concern. They are a subspecies of human: One could hardly imagine them performing basic homo sapien tasks: raising children, hunting, or gathering. Their IQs combined roughly add up to his. They are tri-staters, slightly ethnic, Jewish and Italian; Kevin is Midwestern elite, gold on porcelain. Harry and Marv pursue Kevin in their van halfway through the film, but call off the pursuit when he runs into a church. ("I am not going in there." "Me either.")

Aside from one reviewer at Entertainment Weekly—"a sadistic festival of adult bashing!"—critics at the time didn't seem too bothered by this unnecessary brutality. Many described it as "cartoonish." The adjective cartoonish, in this context, connotes no blood, unrealism, an element of humor—no more distressing than the violence we are acquainted from cartoons. One wonders whether this is a judgment purely of the quality of violence, or also of the people subjected to it. If Kevin's mother stepped with bare feet on Christmas ornaments, the violence would hardly be described as cartoonish.

Hughes reproduced more-or-less the same villains for later productions (Beethoven 1 and 2, Baby's Day Out, Dennis the Menace, 101 Dalmatians) and subjected them to similar humiliation. Family Action became his thing. He learned from success. Home Alone's violent crescendo, along with its adorably self-righteous child populism, was its primary draw. It was also an innovative response to an imbalance in supply-and-demand: Millennials had seen plenty of violence on television, much more than the recently-introduced PG-13 rating would allow us to see in the theatre. Problem Child, perhaps the most cynical film ever, tried to fill this niche a year before—but with a lesser child star and none of Home Alone 's gloss. These embellishments allowed Home Alone to become a mass phenomenon.

"The kids imitate the movie all the time," a postal clerk from Braintree, Massachusetts, was quoted in the Boston Globe. "They relate to it. He's cute—the kid in it." The Roanoke Times captured the scale of this imitation, asking, "What kid out there hasn't tried to imitate Macaulay Culkin's famous hands-pressed-on-cheeks scream from the movie Home Alone?" One kid in Kentucky reportedly took the shtick all the way: "As officers entered the house in which the boy lives with only his great-grandmother, they had to dodge 12-inch nails, open scissors, and a vat of concrete triggered by trip wires... doorknobs covered with lard and pieces of glass... steps that were soaped or greased or contained protruding nails."

During his advertising days, Hughes represented Big Tobacco. He knew how to redress a potentially controversial product. Home Alone was his master-contrivance. Exciting children while reassuring adults, it aced the calculation that underlies every successful blockbuster—appealing to the masses' elemental senses without offending their sensibilities. At a time when rap music's effect on the young was being hotly debated, Home Alone was recognized as a family movie, which sounds like a genre but is really a certificate of agreeability. FX vice president Chuck Saftler summed up this ubiquitous appeal quite nicely, when his network decided to run a 24-hour marathon of the film on Thanksgiving in 2009: " a movie that can appeal to everyone in the house... the marathon airing allows distracted viewers to zone in and out of the TV while celebrating with others."

This was a remarkable achievement on Hughes's part. He wrote a film that was as American as apple pie, but also as American as a childhood shooting spree. And that makes Home Alone, a monument to an era when America was still blindly in love with itself and its mythologies, worth revisiting. In the words of some corny old white dude: They don't make 'em like they used to.

Leon Dische Becker is a writer, editor and translator currently living in Los Angeles. You should consider following him on Twitter and maybe even Instagram.

Naturally. Image via Flickr user Spend a Day Touring, LLC.

Six people are facing jail time after a Saskatchewan teen was kidnapped by three guys wearing animals masks, tortured in a theatre basement and buried alive in a shallow grave over a $100-drug debt this past summer, according to an agreed statement of facts presented in a North Battleford provincial court earlier this month.

On June 3, the teen in question was walking from the Don Ross Community Centre North Battleford (about 135 km northwest of Saskatoon) when "a vehicle pulled up and three guys in animal masks got out," the CBC reported. In a scene that could probably make the cut in any crime show, the guys then put a bag over the teen's head, stuck him in the vehicle, then drove him to the Capitol Theatre building, where his hands and feet were bound.

Affluenza teen Ethan Couch looking affluent. Photo via ABC Chicago

Earlier this month, Ethan Couch, the teen known nationwide as the "Affluenza Teen," stopped reporting to his parole officer and was deemed missing in Texas. Couch famously ducked prison after killing four people in 2013 while driving drunk, partly because his shrink said he was a spoiled brat and didn't know any better.

Authorities now believe he may have fled the country with the aid of his mother.

Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson has suggested a video posted to Twitter that showed a smiling, partying Couch playing beer pong with his bros—an apparently brazen violation of parole—spooked the kid into thinking his freedom might soon be compromised. The tip line set up by the Anderson's office has apparently been blowing up, aided in part by the intense media spotlight on Couch. Last week, a Wanted poster for the teen was issued, and $5,000 is being offered for information leading to his arrest.

All of which is to say authorities very well may smoke this dude out of his hole soon.

For how they're likely to do that, we hit up Dave Cohen, or "Double O" Dave—a private investigator with 25 years experience under his belt. With investigative branches in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, Cohen's business has a few different divisions, but his "deep skip-trace unit," he tells VICE, stays quite busy, and is a vital part of how he makes a living. "I've been helping find people who have disappeared like a fart in the wind for 25 years now," he explains while driving from Texas to Illinois for the holidays.

Cohen is from Chicago originally, and got his bachelor's degree in criminal justice from the University of Phoenix after a stint working in Naval Intelligence. He never served as a police officer, and instead went straight into PI work. "To be a cop, in my opinion, they generally hire guys that are less intelligent because they're looking for robots," says Cohen, a self-confessed nerd and math wiz.

"The first thing I do when someone brings a missing person case to me is ask about 50 questions," Cohen explains of his method. "Intimate questions. Questions designed to get into the mind and body of the person who has disappeared. You really need to understand their life. What did this person do for a living, do they drink, what kind of food do they like, what kind of games do they play, are they an extrovert are they an introvert?"

Based on Couch's past, we clearly know he likes to drink. And based on his age and past hubris, Cohen believes his possible use of social media and phone records may lead to his ultimate capture. "These kids, they can't not send a million texts a day," Cohen says. He also believes the same "affluence" that helped Couch avoid prison may lead him into the arms of the law, and that his possible arrogance may drive him to make a dumb move like turn up at another party, call or text someone he shouldn't, or even brag about being on the lam.

"I just investigated a guy who was selling drugs out of an ice cream truck to minors," Cohen says. "I found him because he was still using Twitter to promote his supposed rap career. People are who they are, even when it's better for them not to be."

Between the Sheriff's Department of Tarrant County, the Texas Rangers, and the FBI, the Law has an incredible amount of resources available to go after Couch. At their disposal, according to Cohen, are phone records, current DMV registration, camera systems, among other things. If, as Sheriff Anderson speculated last week, Couch has fled the country, they will have access to every flight manifest of every plane leaving the ground, which they can search easily. Beyond that, "You can't leave or come into the United States of America post-9/11 without swiping a passport," he says.

Cohen suspects that the agencies on the lookout have no doubt already contacted airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration with the command to be notified immediately if the teen or his mother scan a valid passport. He dismissed the idea that their wealth could make it easier for the two to obtain a really great fake passport, as falsifying federal documents tends to carry a stiffer penalty than the parole violation, and the kid clearly isn't one for taking punishment. "Too risky," Cohen argues. (The latest reports suggest that, if and when he is recovered by police, Couch will only face charges for violating his probation.)

Couch's mother, Sheriff Anderson has already speculated, will likely be charged if it is found that she harbored or helped her son allude authorities in any fashion. But according to Cohen, it's the boy's father who may prove key to bringing this teen prick to justice.

"You monitor those closest to the kid day and night. You sit on them. You monitor his calls, and trail him. They will have contact with him eventually," Cohen says. "When they do, game over."

Illustration by Freya Morgan

I know it's not the done thing to say, but Christmas is great isn't it? Even if you're not into the whole nativity story with those three wise men, the Star of Bethlehem, and the inexplicable whiteness of all the protagonists – even then, you're still probably enjoy indulging in an occasional festive latte, or momentarily feeling the weight of your heart lift the first time Mariah belts out over Target's in-store radio. Religious or not, Christian or nay, Christmas spreads a message of peace and love and family that even Scrooge and the Grinch and my entire extended Jewish family seem to have worked their way behind.

Except what about the Satanists? How do we always forget about the Satanists? I mean religions get forgotten all the time. Zoroastrianism, that's a much-neglected religion; Rastafarianism, similarly, never really recovered from Rastamouse. But Satanists – Satanists worship the devil. That's not one of the religions to go forgetting in a hurry. When humanity falls by the wayside and Lucifer stands cackling over our bodies, we'll remember the Satanists then, that's for sure. "Why didn't we ask the Satanists what they're doing for Christmas", we'll ask from our shallow charnel-pit, and John Wait, ordained pastor and regional manager of the UK-based Church of Rational Satanism will look down at us and say "You did, in that VICE article, the one no one read about what Satanists do for Christmas". And we'll cry, oh how we'll cry, as the waves crash in and the locusts swarm.

VICE: Hi John, so you're a member of the Church of Rational Satanism. Can you explain a bit about what that means, for the uninitiated among us?
Well Satanism as a broad church is an atheistic view, with a little bit of a jokey nod towards the Abrahamic religions through the rituals and everything like that. The Church of Rational Satanism or CORS, which I am a part of, just prefers a less ritualistic and antagonistic version of the same Satanic philosophy – self-betterment and a more self-aware version of life. We have a few particular beliefs like the 90 percent - 10 percent thinking, but apart from that we're pretty similar to other Satanists.

OK. I'm going to assume Christmas – the celebration of the birth of the son of God – probably isn't one of your favourite festivals right?
Well I can't speak for everyone in the Church, but speaking personally and from the people I know and have talked to, none of us actually have a problem with Christmas; we recognise it's not a Satanist festival but we don't have anything against it.

So the celebration of the birth of Christ, that's fine with you?
Well realistically Christmas is about as Christian as my big toe. Even though it's ostensibly about the birth of Jesus, most of the traditions are actually nicked from pagan festivals far predating the birth of Jesus. So, unless you're going to Church or going carolling, I don't think there's much very Christian about it. Like, even the Christmas tree is a pagan thing, if you actually look in the Bible it says you're not allowed to decorate a christmas tree, so it's not very Christian at all.

So will you be celebrating Christmas this year?
Yeah, I mean it's not a Satanist festival, but I recognise it as an important time to be together with the family and we do it because it's nice for the kids.

What exactly does a Satanist do at Christmas?
Well, we'll probably open our presents in the morning, then have Christmas lunch. My dad's not very well at the moment so maybe we'll go and see him in the afternoon if not on Boxing Day. After lunch we'll probably watch a few films and then go for a walk before tea – if it's really nice we'll go to the beach and have tea on the beach... Not very frightening is it?

No not very frightening at all. Where are all the skulls and devil horns?
The dark aesthetic is important to some people but not everyone does it. I don't do the dressing up or the ritual – I get what it's for and I appreciate the benefits – but I'm at a time in my life where I don't think it's necessary.

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What are the benefits of dressing up then?
Basically the ritual chamber and all that dressing up stuff is a psychodrama, it's a way of expressing and removing frustration and anger from yourself as well as just having fun. Some people like to dress up and light candles and bang gongs. For me a ride on my bike does exactly the same thing. It clears your head, gives you time to think and puts all the bad shit away.

So it's not about freaking people out?
Of course it's meant to be provocative otherwise we'd call ourselves atheists. In the Bible, Satan was another word for adversary and that's an idea we play with. The problem we get is people take adversarial to mean you have to argue with everything anyone says. That's not what it really means, it's about looking at the bigger picture and thinking about what's really going on and behaving in a way that is responsible without kowtowing.

OK so would it be accurate to say you're not anti-Christian, you're anti-God?
We're not anti-anything – like an atheist isn't anti-God, he just doesn't believe in a god. That's what a lot of people don't get about Satanism, we're basically atheists, we don't worship anything.

Yeah because I think people assume from 'Satanism' that you worship the devil?
No, that's just the antagonistic bit of it. Calling ourselves Satanists is about exploding this simple duality between good and evil, God and Satan. It's simplistic and deterministic. I believe I am my own god, and that's so often taken out of context but what I mean by that is I'm in charge of my own destiny and I'm responsible for my own actions and those of people around me. I don't have to wait on any external deity.

Isn't the point of an omnibenevolent god kind of aspirational though? To make people strive for something bigger and better than themselves?
Well yes but I think it's also quite defeatist. My daughter's school did an alternative nativity play this year based on the story of the matchgirl. My daughter played the lead role and basically the story is this girl was trying to sell matches on the street and life was miserable and cold and then she died. And we're supposed to rejoice... What the fuck is that all about?

I've never heard of that story.
I'm not going to stop my kids participating because of my religion and what they do is entirely up to them, but it seems like a bloody weird thing to be teaching our kids: if life is miserable being dead is better. I have a problem with people that don't live the life that they've got because they think there's a better one waiting.

Are you scared of death?
No and I don't think you need to believe in life after death for that. I had surgery in June which resulted in four aneurysms. Was I scared? I was scared of not seeing my kids. But was I scared of dying? Not really – you don't know anything do you. I live my life while I'm alive, I won't worry about what happens when I'm dead, and I think if more people lived in that sort of way there would be a lot less pain and violence in the world.

So recognizing you are your own god brings you freedom from this sort of externalised worship?
Yeah. People assume as a Satanist I'm a party animal and a maniac but actually the freedom allows me to have time doing what I want to do, and what I want to do is spend time with my family, go to the beach, ride my motorcycle, do normal things that normal people do. We just take responsibility for it.

OK so you say you don't worship anything, but (curveball here) what if I were to say Christmas wasn't the worship of a Christian god, it was the worship of another god: the god of capitalism?
Very good. Maybe you're right, and to be honest if we didn't have kids maybe we wouldn't do Christmas for that reason. But the way we do Christmas is about family and spending time together. Some of the other churches will tell you that Satanism is about indulgence but we don't particularly subscribe to that. I would say we do everything in moderation because from a pragmatic point of view there's no point in indulging in things that would ultimately cause harm to you or others. Christmas to us is about enjoyment, moderate indulgence and sharing time with the family.

Thanks John, Merry Christmas!

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Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki's HBO miniseries The Jinx made a pretty solid case that extremely creepy real estate scion Robert Durst had a hand in multiple killings. And next summer, the 72-year-old will finally have to deal with a murder charge for a 15-year-old incident in California, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

The New York Times reports that Durst will be extradited to Los Angeles by mid-August 2016 to stand trial for allegedly shooting his friend, writer Susan Berman, back in 2000. Durst has been jailed in Louisiana since March on a weapons charge, for which he apparently reached a plea deal.

The Jinx hypothesized that Durst murdered Berman because she was considering speaking to cops about his alleged role in the disappearance of his wife in 1982. Berman was found dead in her home with no sign of forced entry.

Durst's lawyers maintain that he's innocent, regardless of the whole hot-mic bathroom rant that closed out The Jinx.

"Bob Durst didn't kill Susan Berman and doesn't know who did," Durst's lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, said in a statement Tuesday. "He is eager to go to trial and prove his innocence."

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Diliff

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of the world he lives in. We hope it helps you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you anything is scary about Christmas itself. The occasional bizarre crime aside, Christmas is usually eight hours of food and arguing with your family, interspersed with the occasional disappointing gift exchange. For most people—myself included—it's much more pleasant than that. But for me, there's a big downside to Christmas, and it's all the time spent on the road.

I was born and raised in the suburbs outside Los Angeles, and now I live in Los Angeles proper. The advantage is obvious: I don't have to use my vacation time to see my family during the holidays because they're 40 miles away. The disadvantage: Those are 40 of the world's shittiest miles. Driving them during Christmas means being on the road during a time that is, according to data from the federal Department of Transportation, the second deadliest time of year.

While there seems to be a heightened danger of road deaths around this time, is it more important than usual to watch out for drunks? There are inevitably some high-profile holiday accidents, like a devastating road disaster last Christmas Eve in Las Vegas in which alcohol was allegedly a factor—but do the statistics back up the notion that the most wonderful time of the year is also the most hazardous?

"People need to remember that motor vehicle crashes do occur, and so do serious injuries and deaths from them," Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told me.

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Back in 2005, the IIHS released "Temporal factors in motor vehicle crash deaths," its most comprehensive—and most recent—analysis of which days of the year see the most accidents, and whether the drivers responsible are sloshed. According to the report, which compiled data from 1986 to 2002, one of the deadliest days was yesterday, December 23.

As you may have heard, the fourth of July and the day before are the biggies for DUI deaths, with an average of 161 and 149 deaths respectively, according to the report. But they're followed by December 23 at 145 deaths. When you fiddle with the data to exclude the deaths of pedestrians, December 23 is the second deadliest day of the year, and Christmas Eve rises to spot number five. When only pedestrian deaths are considered, Christmas Eve vanishes from the list, but New Year's Day becomes the deadliest day of the year.

However, it's not entirely clear that drunkenness is the problem around Christmas. According to Lund, "On the holidays, two things happen: One is you get more partiers, so you see an increase in alcohol-impaired driving, but you especially get an increase in travel."

What that means is that though alcohol is a factor in crashes on New Year's Day, the spike in deaths around Christmas is likely at least partly due to a spike in the number of cars on the road.

The paper does point out that as a pedestrian walking around in the days surrounding Christmas, I have heightened odds of running into trouble, especially if I'm the one who's drunk.

"The fact is that one of the reasons pedestrians get hit on holidays is because they're impaired themselves, and they're not really keeping a good lookout, or they're busy talking to friends and celebrating, and they step off the curb at the wrong time," Lund told me.

One thing Lund stressed is that the data was collected over a decade ago, and things have changed for the better.

"Over the recent decades, we've greatly reduced that problem," he said. "I think when we wrote this paper, the average number of deaths per day was over 100 on average for the year. Now we're down to around 90 or so, so we've made great progress in making the roads safer."

So thinking selfishly—yes, it does seem like I'm at a slightly higher risk than usual for an encounter with a drunk driver during the holidays. It also sounds like I should think twice about getting shitfaced after work tonight and taking a walk downtown. And if there are more drunk drivers than usual out there, there are some things you can do to stay safe: Stay away, don't bother them, and when it's safe, let someone know they're there. (Think of them like bears.)

Really, the risk comes from drunk drivers that surprise you. That's exactly why, whenever possible, any sane person already knows to keep away from places like bars at times like closing time on New Years Day.

Or as Lund put it: "The issue here is that around holidays one needs to be extra careful, and there is extra exposure, because there is some partying going on. But you really need to be careful every day."

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Drunk Drivers During the Holidays?

2/5: Taking Normal Precautions

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo still via The Dark Grey Market.

A member of the Canadian Armed Forces is outraged after Air Canada refused to let him on board his flight because he was carrying medical marijuana, for which he had all the right paperwork.

Michael Korchak, 25, was trying to board a flight from Halifax to Burlington, Ontario last week to get home home for Christmas. Korchak, who suffered an injury while on duty and is in the process of receiving a medical discharge, has a medical marijuana prescription to treat his chronic pain.

He arrived at the airport three hours early with his prescription, which was OK'd by the RCMP and the Canadian Airport Transport Authority, but evidently that wasn't good enough for Air Canada. Airline attendants refused to let him on board unless he chucked out his $100-worth of medicine.

Korchak told the Toronto Sun the situation worsened when he tried to reason with staff—he was told he was being difficult and that he was at risk of being kicked out of the airport by security.

"They were incredibly rigid and not at all discreet. All of this happened at the gate. More Air Canada employees kept showing up. By the end, there was a crowd of 10 to 12 of them. They're staring, they're whispering. Eventually, I'm told if I don't drop the issue they're going to have security remove me from the airport."

Korchak said he opted to fly Porter, which gave him no issues. As of Wednesday he still waiting on a refund for his flight from Air Canada.

Air Canada has since issued an apology and said it's updated its policies to allow for buds, as opposed to just cannabis in pill form. But Korchak has filed a complaint with Transport Canada, saying the experience was "humiliating."

"Clearly, the stigma (around marijuana) is still there. I don't think if I was a diabetic with insulin I would have been treated the same way."

The incident is yet another argument for why weed should be easily available in all its various forms.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Ahhhh!

2015 was a great year for fear. It's the year that ISIS, the world's designated global baddies, went truly international, leaving most of us so terrified of imminent slaughter by gun-wielding fanatics that we frequently step out into traffic in our paranoid daze. Meanwhile outright personality-cult fascism returned triumphantly to western politics in the gaudy, bewigged form of Donald Trump, and the seas continued grow higher and hotter and more acidic, swirling into a toxic sludge swelling to surge over all dry land. Be afraid: The world is ruled by monsters and idiots, and it's slowly falling into the sun.

Reactionary politics have always run on fear: fear of the foreigner, fear of the neighbor, and sometimes even fear of the state. The usual reaction is to encourage us to be less afraid. But as the nights grow long and the year coughs along, defeated, to its death, we might be right to be fearful. The real question is whether we're afraid of the right stuff. The last year has seen all number of plots and horrors: Some of them were screamed from the headlines; others, for any number of reasons, didn't. Here are some of the others.

A GENETICALLY ENGINEERED COW MIGHT LEAD TO THE END OF THE WORLD

A red heifer. Photo by Cavans Waterloo Bea

It's no secret that some of the more spittle-flecked sectors of Israeli society have some interesting architectural plans for the al-Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem: They want to tear down Islam's third-holiest site and replace it with a rebuilt Jewish temple, thereby sparking riots, wars, and/or nuclear Armageddon.

The recent escalation of violence in Palestine was in part sparked by the increasing numbers of religious Jews visiting the complex to pray—this despite the fact that doing so has been expressly forbidden by a number of rabbis, as visitors may end up accidentally desecrating the former site of the kodesh hakodashim, or the Holy of Holies.

According to Biblical law, one can only enter this place after being ritually cleansed with the ashes of a pure red cow, without any spots or blemishes, or a single hair of any other color. For 2,000 years, this animal—a necessary prerequisite for any rebuilt Temple—has not been found. This might be God trying to avert a catastrophe, but some Jewish extremists are trying to force things along if the Almighty is unwilling: They've set up a crowdfunding project to selectively breed the Cow of the Apocalypse. With the Middle East more blood-soaked and furious than ever, the thing that could finally finish the whole planet off might right now be contentedly mooing in a farm somewhere in the Negev. Fear the cow.

BRITAIN IS SLOWLY TURNING INTO A CARTOON DICTATORSHIP

Photo via Wikipedia

The UK has always looked like a banana kingdom, a caricature of incompetent tyranny—it's some combination of the constant piss-drizzle, the sheer squinty-eyed joylessness of the people, the ant-bitten decay of the institutions, and the occasionally armed ethnic squabble in the peripheral territories. No matter what they claim, the British were never really made for democracy. This might be why the imminent overthrow of its barest formal remnants has attracted so little attention.

2015 was the year that the military started to really put some pressure on British political life. In September, a "senior serving general" told the Sunday Times (anonymously, of course—in the end these walking beefsteaks with thousands of guns at their disposal are just as cowardly as your average Twitter egg) that should Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister, the "general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardize the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that." In other words, a military coup.

It's not just the opposition that's in the generals' sights: this was shortly followed by a public revelation of the army's distaste for PM David Cameron and their unhappiness at his defense cuts (now rolled back, of course)—armed forces openly briefing against elected governments. Unlike the contemporaneous pig-fucking allegations, the background and motives for this story never became an object of much general discussion. Consciously or not, this is probably because we want it to happen: We'll pretend not to notice, right up until the tanks are lined up firing shells into the Palace of Westminster, and after that we'll just get back to our lives, safe under the strong hand of the junta. It's what we always wanted.

COPS ARE TAKING OVER CLASSROOMS

Photo via Wikipedia

Of course, we think we know what a dictatorship looks like: thought police lurking behind every corner, people snitching on their neighbors, words we're forbidden to even speak. And all of this is happening too: in particular, it's happening in the schools. This month, a 12-year-old boy in Oxfordshire was taken out from a classroom and interrogated by uniformed police after posting plans to picket David Cameron's constituency office on Facebook. This young security threat had been radicalized by plans to close down his local youth center.

For kids of Muslim background, this kind of thing is particularly pervasive: Earlier in the year, a 14-year-old was snatched from his lesson for merely saying the word "terrorism" in a classroom. (Actually, it was a French lesson, and he was talking about environmental groups, so the term he used was "l'ecoterrorisme.") Under the government's Prevent strategy for combating domestic extremism, teachers, and community leaders are encouraged to report on any signs of radicalization among young people, including wearing different clothes, losing touch with friends, and expressing opposition to UK foreign policy. They're being drafted in as part-time cops in an all-out war against angsty teens. Never mind your flashy young-adult films: the grim futuristic dystopia is already here. We're living in it. You just didn't notice.

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.

Shane MacGowan in his living room in Dublin. All photos by Mark McGuinness

It's the Saturday before Christmas and Shane MacGowan, the singer and songwriter most famous for being the toothy face of the Pogues, is lying on a sofa bed in his living room in Dublin, holding an electronic cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey in the other. On one chair next to him stands a half-drunk bottle of white wine, the dregs of a bottle of Smirnoff, a load of glasses, and an empty Bart Simpson mug. Placed on the other is a pharmacy bag stuffed with boxes of pills.

Over the summer, he fractured his pelvis leaving a studio in Dublin and has barely been able to move since. "It was a fall and I fell the wrong way," he says. "I broke my pelvis, which is the worst thing you can do. I'm lame in one leg, I can't walk around the room without a crutch. I am getting better, but it's taking a very long time. It's the longest I've ever taken to recover from an injury. And I've had a lot of injuries."

If any time of year feels more obvious to visit one of the greatest lyrical poets of his generation, and writer of what is ubiquitously cited as The Greatest Christmas Song Of All Time, "Fairytale of New York," it's probably the week he is croaking out of speakers in every pub, shop, and shitty Christmas party you'll go to. But ostensibly we're meeting Shane to discuss his recent dental surgery, which has transformed his gummy grin into a set of Hollywood whites, the process of which was filmed for an hour-long documentary titled Shane MacGowan: A Wreck Reborn.

If there's one thing that's shadowed Shane's career more than "Fairytale of New York," it is his constitution for drinking and hard drugs. A "wreck," however, feels a bit harsh. "Nah, the title was my idea," he says. Shane's wife of 30 years, the writer Victoria Mary Clarke, is sitting on the sofa next to him. "I wanted to call it 'A Fairytale of New Teeth,'" she says, "but he didn't like that." He gives us a grin. The color, he says, is A1—"the brightest white it's possible to go," which, under Victoria's orders, were based on Michael Fassbender's. "There was a picture of him on the cover of Tatler Man, and I just said to the dentist—do you think Shane could have teeth like that? And he said no problem."

Shane and his wife, Victoria

Unlike Fassbender, Shane insisted on having one gold tooth. "I went to the Greek islands years ago on holiday and I was really impressed with the Greek fishermen. I drank a lot with them," he says. "They had really rotten teeth but they all had one gold tooth—that was their bank account. If they were ever stuck for money they had gold in their mouth."

By the time the film came to be made, Shane's face was, he says, "falling to bits... I looked awful."

"It was," adds Victoria, "but you do look nice now."

"I don't know," he says.

"You do," she says again. And gets up to make sure his pillows are straight.

It's often said that if it wasn't for Victoria, Shane might not be here at all. Today, she moves around him constantly, making sure he is comfortable, fetching him drinks. When she shifts over to the sofa bed to have her photograph taken with him, Shane perks up—and he's the most animated I see him.

"I'm not going to be eating Christmas dinner, I'll tell you that... I can't stand all that sort of stuff."

The couple met, they tell me, at the now-closed Royal Oak pub in Temple Fortune, north London, via their mutual friend Spider Stacy—the tin whistle player in The Pogues. "We swore at each other," says Shane.

"No, I told you to fuck off, you didn't swear at me," Victoria snaps back.

"You told me to buy Spider a drink."

"Well, it was his birthday and I'd run out of money," says Shane.

Victoria was 16 at the time. She'd just moved to London from Ireland. Her and Shane didn't start dating straight away, but instead entered a kind of old-fashioned courtship that was quite uncommon by the mid-80s. Shane would pay for her to get a taxi home from Pogues gigs, and they'd go dancing at Northern Soul clubs and watch late-night horror films. "We'd go to the Scala in Kings Cross and see like George Romero and Creepshow and Night Of The Living Dead and all those zombie films," she laughs. "We did like to stay up all night. We loved eating in restaurants, too. For a really long time. One time we stayed at the same table in a Greek restaurant for 13 hours." Thirteen hours? "The waiters were really nice, you know. They would come and say, 'Would you like dinner now?' And then we'd have the next meal."

Shane was born in Kent on Christmas Day, 1957, but he spent most of his early years living with his mothers' family in Tipperary. "It was like growing up in pub, it was brilliant," he says. It was busy, full of music, books, and the occasional IRA man, as his family offered their home as a safe-house for republicans. He was an avid reader—Joyce, then Burroughs—and won a literature scholarship to London's Westminster School. "I was smart," he says. "I did A-level English when I was 13 years old. But I was busted for drugs, dope, pills, and acid, and kicked out. I didn't try to fight it. I didn't really want to go." Punk was kicking off, so he got a string of laboring jobs, shifts working in pubs and also worked at a record shop.

In December 1976 he put out a fanzine called Bondage with the Sex Pistols and the Jam on the cover. "Sniffin' Glue, the most famous fanzine at the time, cost 10p," he says. "I charged 30p for mine. I made a pretty packet out of it—I gave up my job. I never got around to doing another one, though. I was 18 years old—I had gigs to go to, clubs to go to, girls to go out with."

"The Pogues just got a bit sick of each other. We're friends as long as we don't tour together. I've done a hell of a lot of touring—I've had enough of it."

He formed the band Pogue Mahone in 1982, named after a Gaelic phrase meaning "kiss my ass." They were a hybrid of punk and traditional Celtic folk that sounded unlike anything that had gone before it. By 1984, the band had morphed into the Pogues, signed to cult punk label Stiff, supported the Clash on tour, and put out their debut album—Red Roses for Me. Victoria remembers attending the bands early gigs: "I came from a place that was really quite reverential about Irish music. When I saw the Pogues for the first time I was shocked. I thought they were totally taking the piss. It was crazy. Everyone was throwing chairs and throwing drinks. It was dangerous, for the band as well as the audience."

The band's seminal second album was 1985's Rum Sodomy & The Lash. Produced by Elvis Costello, it is a flawless collection of craggy balladry and raucous abandon. In 2013 Johnny Depp called Shane "one of the most important poets of the 20th century." Listen to "The Old Main Drag" and "Pair of Brown Eyes" from this album and it's hard to disagree with him.

The Pogues' great success came in 1988 with their third album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God. It featured "Fairytale of New York," Shane's duet with the late Kirsty MacColl, the daughter of Ewan MacColl, whose song "Dirty Old Town" was famously covered by the band. How does he feel when he hears the song now? "Bored," he says. "It's nice to hear Kirsty sing." He pauses for a second. "It's a great record—I can be objective enough to hear that it's a great record. We all know that we made a great record. We were a great band."

Shane's Christmas tree

The Pogues got together in 2013 for a one-off Christmas tour, but since then have been quiet. Are they no longer active? "We're not, no," he says.

Shane was fired from the Pogues in 1991 as a result of his drinking. They carried on with various replacement frontmen, including Joe Strummer, but eventually fizzled out in the mid 1990s. In 2001 they reformed, something Shane freely admits was for the money. "I went back with Pogues and we grew to hate each other all over again," he says.

"You don't hate them!" Victoria says. "Every time people print that you hate them they get upset."

Shane retracts that last bit: "I don't hate the band at all—they're friends. I like them a lot. We were friends for years before we joined the band. We just got a bit sick of each other. We're friends as long as we don't tour together. I've done a hell of a lot of touring. I've had enough of it."

Shane spends most of his time these days in this red brick terrace. On the front door hangs a Christmas wreath, there's a spindly tree in the corner with a card of Prince William and Kate Middleton on top and a painting of Che Guevara draped in tinsel. Above the fireplace is a mirror with "Fuk U2" scrawled on it. He's known the band since they started, and even went to see them in Dublin a few months ago in his wheelchair. He stayed at the party until 5 AM.

I ask Shane how he will be spending Christmas this year. "Well, I'm not going to be eating Christmas dinner, I'll tell you that." Not even with his new teeth? "No, I can't stand all that sort of stuff. I don't like Christmas—I think it's gross. And I'm not eating much, even with the teeth." So you're not doing anything at all, then? "You are!" says Victoria. "You're having dinner at your sister's. But he's vegetarian, so it's not turkey." Suddenly Shane pipes up, disapprovingly. "I'm not vegetarian!" he bellows, almost spitting at the suggestion. "I just went off it. I ate meat all my life. Most of my early life growing up on a farm in Ireland, I ate bacon, cabbage, and potatoes. I ate what I was given. I'm not a vegetarian, I just don't like lamb. I don't mind the odd steak."

Did having a birthday on Christmas day piss him off as a kid? "It was the 50s and 60s—there was no money—people got pairs of socks for Christmas. The last thing you worried about being born on the same day as Jesus Christ was that you got one load of crappy presents instead of two loads of crappy presents," he says.

So what's next then for Shane MacGowan? "I want this to get better," he says, pointing to his injured pelvis. I ask if he'd ever consider writing fiction like his friend Nick Cave, with whom he collaborated with on a 1992 cover of jazz standard "What a Wonderful World."

"No," he says. "Real life is far more interesting." I guess if you're Shane MacGowan, it is.

Follow Leonie Cooper on Twitter.

Shane MacGowan: A Wreck Reborn will be on Sky Arts on Thursday, December 24 at 10:45 PM.

Image via Flickr user Ubé

The holiday season is filled with fun festive family traditions like caroling, gift-giving, and reckless eating. But the grandest and most time-honored tradition of all is locking yourself in your childhood bedroom and numbing your brain with internet videos until your parents think you fell asleep and decide to leave you alone.

We get it. We'd spend the next 40 years locked in there if we could—safe, warm, surviving on a diet of Nesquick and Nutella. So to help that paralyzing fantasy come to life, we've collected some VICE video recommendations to help you through those desperate Christmas moments.

Meet Mr. Cherry, Japan's Leading Record Holder

Mr. Cherry is a friendly Japanese comedian who breaks word records in hilarious ways. He currently holds 12. Plus, he's incredibly dexterous with his butt. If that doesn't make you want to watch this video nothing else we say will.

Inside London's Hedonistic, Polyamorous Unicorn Movement

Your own student debt and lack of real job will appear pale in comparison to the glitter-filled lifestyle of London's resident unicorn revolutionaries. Watch on as former alcoholic Shaft, who identifies as a free loving unicorn, attempts to bring his "glampede" to the masses and establish a horny, sparkly, utopia.

Thailand's Meth Epidemic and Vomit Rehab

This year you've probably been overwhelmed by waves of friends returning from Southeast Asian travel odysseys boring you with stories of German backpackers. When that becomes too much, come back to reality with some real talk about a monastery in Thailand running a unique methamphetamine rehab program that involves daily group vomiting sessions.

Meet the Albanian Tattoo Artist Working Out of an Abandoned Bunker

Reclusive Albanian tattoo artist and ex con Keq Marky likes to be alone. Spending time with people, he says, gives him headaches. Can you relate? Keq has cut himself off from the world and set up shop in one of Albania's abandoned military bunkers, which were formerly used as propaganda tools under communist rule.

The Real 'X-Files'?

Nothing says "hanging out in your teenage bedroom" like watching The X-Files. Why not make a day of it and catch up with the real life believers and skeptics who inspired the hit 90s show? This documentary follows Joe Nickell, a former magician and paranormal investigator who aims to expose the superstition and pseudoscience that typically surrounds alien sightings. But it's not all Dana Scully-style naysaying—there are interviews with a few truthers, too. It'll make you want to believe.

Follow Katherine on Twitter.

On December 24, 2013, I woke up at 5 AM still wasted from the night before. I proceeded to have a panic attack so severe I considered checking myself into a hospital. I had quit drinking the previous summer but relapsed over the holidays, and spent Christmas Eve having regrettable sex in a karaoke bar bathroom before losing all my shopping bags filled with Christmas presents. In my alcohol-induced early-morning panic, I figured I'd rather spend Christmas in a hospital bed than face my family looking while looking like shit and without presents. As bad as that moment was, it's not unique: Many recovering alcoholics face similar threats of relapse come holiday season.

Relapse in general is common. The Journal of the American Medical Association has put the relapse rate for drug addiction at 40 to 60 percent; stress and being around the drug are common causes. Stress increases over the holidays, as does exposure to alcohol due to the plethora of get-togethers. The office holiday gatherings, the ugly Christmas sweater party, simply getting through several days with family —all can potentially trigger relapse.

For those who aren't in recovery, it can be hard to understand why someone can't just have "one glass of champagne" for a New Year's Eve toast, a cup of family eggnog on Christmas Eve, or a beer with your high school buddies the night before Thanksgiving. "There's nothing wrong with having a glass of wine to celebrate with friends," I remember being told by a loved one around Thanksgiving. At the time I was newly sober, completely uncomfortable in AA, and unaware there were other recovery options, I happily agreed. That night, everything was fine. But it didn't end there. A few weeks later I found myself in another snowy city with strangers choking down a tequila worm and puking it back up into a kitchen pan. Then there was that lurid Christmas Eve morning back in New York, after which I took the train to my family and continued my journey of recovery—pushing through the self-hatred and hangover. It was brutal. But today, I no longer drink, and have found my way through alternative recovery outside the 12-step system.

While I've thankfully made it this far through the holidays, this time of year often involves a struggle with sobriety. "There are a lot of messages over the holidays from the media, and family, and friends, that alcohol is part of the celebration," says Susan E. Collins, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Washington who researches relapse prevention. "It can be particularly hard, especially if someone is early on in their sobriety."

"It's really important to be extra compassionate with yourself over the holidays," Collins adds. "What we know from research is that relapse can be a part of recovery. We're all human and sometimes we do have slip-ups. But the idea is if you can learn from that slip and apply that knowledge in the future. You can get back on board with your goals and move forward."

I recently spoke to three people in various stages and methods of recovery to dig into the dark memories of holiday relapse, and seek wisdom on how they plan to make it through this year.

Subject One
Male, Age 32
Two Years Sober

VICE: Can you tell me a little bit about your sobriety?
Subject One: I go to Refuge Recovery in conjunction with Alcoholics Anonymous. I love AA. I was brought up in AA; my mom goes to AA. The last time I used was September 27, 2013. I'm an alcoholic and I started drinking when I was 12. I got into coke, beer, bars. I got construction, met a girl, and curbed my use for a while. But once I got hurt on the job, I got introduced to opiates.

That'll do it. How'd you get into recovery?
My uncle 12-stepped me, as they say, when I was about 22. He took me to my first meeting in the Bronx. I walked in and sat down and I struggled for a long time. But I stuck with it—it's always been there in my life.

So you had a holiday relapse?
So many of them. Thanksgiving was always a big one for me. Because the night before Thanksgiving you go home and you see all your friends and you want to show off how well you're doing. I would drink a lot and do drugs—usually coke. I'd wake up the next morning extremely hungover. Usually around this time of year, I'd relapse, spend all my money, and wouldn't be able to afford Christmas presents. I remember going home to spend Christmas with the family and needing to have heroin on me so I wouldn't get sick from withdrawal. I also remember a couple years where I wouldn't have heroin on me and would be sick—totally miserable experiences. You're supposed to be there enjoying time with the family, and it's just tragic because they know why you don't have any presents for anybody and you're just vacant. You don't want to be around anybody; you just want to get your dope fix.

How has this year been? You've made it through Thanksgiving.
I didn't go the year before. I went to alcathon [a marathon holiday meeting] instead. I stayed with some sober people and did it that way. This year, however, I came home. I was in a good place and I made sure I had talked to my sponsor beforehand and had a plan. At this point, I'm open about where I'm at with my parents. My brother and my dad still drink, but they drink in the basement. I don't complain about it because it's not in front of my face. I just kind of made peace with myself and where I'm at. It was better this past Thanksgiving.

Did it make your mom happy to see you sober this year?
Yeah, she teared up a couple times. They could see that I'm OK and I'm happy and I'm stable. They see the progress, so that makes them happy and more relaxed. Now Christmas is coming up and I don't feel like such a scumbag.

Subject Two
Male, Age 39
Two Years Sober

VICE: Will you tell me a little about your sobriety?
Subject Two: I started using drugs and alcohol daily by the time I was about 14. The longest I've been sober in a single stretch was six years. My drug of choice just by ease of usability is, of course, alcohol. I always laugh when people say that pot is the gateway drug because alcohol totally is. Alcohol is so insidious. Everywhere you turn it's being glamorized. If you're in AA, they only consider you to be "sober" if you're not using any type of intoxicants whatsoever. But I actually found that cannabis was a big part of my recovery from alcohol. I'm not "in the program" anymore because my spiritual proclivities are not necessarily in line with those of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Will you tell me about your holiday relapse?
Absolutely—it was actually my last relapse, which was two years ago. I was a newlywed and my wife was pregnant with our first child. That certainly added to the stress and there's so much that can go wrong for the holidays, especially for addicts. I'm sure you've heard the pithy aphorism that they throw around at AA where they talk about how alcoholism is a disease of isolation. There are a lot of stupid sayings that they use, but I really do believe that. I think that most of us who are addicts or alcoholics are painfully introverted at our core. The holidays force you in a position where you have to not only interact, but also feign joviality. I think if you're painfully introverted, especially in this society, it's the perfect recipe for disaster.

So what happened?
I was being confronted with not just the normal holiday stress, but I also had a very pregnant wife. Foolishly enough, I was a truck driver and had left the job just because I wanted to be at home. So I wrote this spoof resume and put it on Craigslist, and it was this absurd thing. I just wanted any job. I got a phone call from a wine and spirits distributor, and I took the job like an idiot. It worked relatively well for a few months, and then eventually everything just collapsed on me and I caved.

I went out one night and got absolutely trashed with my boss. Don't get drunk with your boss, even if you're not an alcoholic. It's just a bad idea. When I came home, it was obvious that I was drunk. My wife kicked me out of my house the next morning after driving me to the repair shop where my car was. My son was a newborn at the time, less than two months old. He was in the backseat of the car when she drove away, and that was probably the darkest moment of my life. After that, I did what any person would do: I went straight to the bar. The next three days are still just a blur to me.

How are things this year? Making it through?
This year has been actually great. My son is actually a person now. When he was a baby he was just this shrieking vortex of need. He's hysterical, he's just charming as shit. So seeing him able to enjoy the holidays is awesome. I don't want to fuck that up, and I certainly don't want to have him see my in the condition that I've been in in the past.

What advice would you give to others in recovery on making it through the holidays?
Have a friend or confidant, and I would urge people not to feel guilty about leaning very heavily on the confidant throughout the holidays. I think using some of the blackness that drove you to addiction is a huge thing, at least for me. I just always think about how disappointed I've made my family and my wife, and the potential I have to be a disappointment to my son. That really keeps my head where it needs to be.

Also, overeat! If you have an addictive personality and there's a cheese plate just eat the fucking whole thing. I will fuck up like a pound of fudge so I don't consume anything else.

Subject Three
Female, Age 26
Five Months Sober

VICE: Will you tell me about your relapse last year?
Subject Three: There's a lot of mental illness in AA, and a lot of people that are not high-functioning. AA sort of increasingly became a place where these sorts of cracks in the foundation of what I thought sobriety was ended up. I always thought I had an incredibly higher than other people, so the language in my head, the chorus of voices, was always, "I'm not as bad as the others."

I think it was December 18 and I convinced myself on the way to my boyfriend's house that I wanted to drink again. I didn't want to be sober anymore, and I really didn't want to be sober during the holidays. We traveled to his family's house by bus. Part of my old drinking habits was that I loved drinking while I was traveling. It was one of my favorite things to get a book and have a glass of wine. But this was a fucking Greyhound. I was on the bus until like three or four in the afternoon and no one else was drinking, obviously. I poured it into this plastic cup, and, of course, the cup had a crack in it so wine started to leak out onto my clothes. I was crazy nervous that I was going to show up at like five o'clock smelling like wine. And it just kind of hit me that none of this was really manageable, or normal. It was pretty stupid.

What's your plan this year? You've made it through Thanksgiving.
My family very nicely did a sober Thanksgiving. What am I doing differently this year? Really listening if I have the emotional wherewithal to go to a party. If I feel like drinking, I won't go. It's incredibly easier this time around. I know it's totally fine to be a non-drinking person during the holidays.

Absolutely. What advice would you have for friends and relatives of people in recovery who are spending the holidays with them?
I think you should always ask, "How are you doing today?" You don't ask, "How are you doing?" I think it's a really difficult question to answer in recovery. I think people just need to hear something like, "I think it's really cool what you're doing, and that's difficult, but it's a really cool choice for you"... if it is a good choice for them. I think positive reinforcement of value systems, as well as checking in, being supportive, and listening. I think it's really great and incredible when people don't drink around you, but of course that's kind of a lot to ask for when you're making an individual choice.

If you're dealing with an alcohol dependency, please visit AA.org and NCADD.org for more information on how you can get help.

Follow Sophie on Twitter.

Me making Fashion Santa uncomfortable. Photo via Daily VICE.

When I ran into, and recognized, Toronto's "Fashion Santa" in Liberty Village the other day, he immediately assumed I wanted a photo with him.

You can't blame the guy. Everybody and their mother (emphasis on sexually-frustrated moms) has been hounding him for a selfie, Justin Bieber not excluded. We are all apparently so collectively starved for hotness, that the idea of a trim, centuries-old saint donning Burberry and John Fluevogs is enough to warrant international media attention.

I admit, Hot Santa, whose real name is Paul Mason and real job is modelling, is a good-looking older dude. He's got a chiseled face, toothy grin and a distinctive undercut. Plus, the beard. Being single, I thought, "fuck it" and asked him out. He obliged, almost certainly not realizing it was a date—with me being a journalist and all.

For more Hot Santa date footage, watch Daily VICE.

We met up Wednesday at a cafe in Yorkdale mall, where Hot Santa has been doing his thing this season (e.g. standing and taking selfies with thousands of grown ass men and women who wait hours in line for the chance score more than 20 likes on a single Instagram post). To be fair, or at least slightly less snarky, every selfie taken results in a donation to SickKids hospital.

Before we were even seated, several people bombarded Hot Santa with pic requests. He took them like a pro and then ordered a coffee—he really wanted a cappuccino, he said, but not enough to risk messing up his beard for the cameras.

"Georgia could you get me a napkin, please? I feel like I'm a little shiny," he asked one of Yorkdale's publicists who tagged along during the date to make sure Hot Santa didn't go off brand.

I didn't play coy with Hot Santa, asking him straight up if there was a Mr. or Mrs. Claus in the picture.

"I'm too busy at the moment," he replied. When pressed on this point ad nauseum, he reiterated, "there's no one in my life." But that doesn't mean he hasn't been propositioned.

"I'm not going to lie to you, we get some odd comments," Hot Santa told me. "The popular one is, 'Are you going to slide down my chimney tonight?'" He claims he deflects such advances.

From a dating perspective, one of my concerns was that fame may have gotten to Hot Santa's head, and I told him as much. Not at all concerned with allaying my fears, he said, "I don't think anybody could top this. When you are trending, I think that's kind of impressive. Maybe Kate Moss trends. It's pretty amazing."

He did stress that he's "not here to take the place of any Santa" but also lowkey suggested he's a younger, fitter version of the OG Claus. (Maybe we should think of him as a Santa origin story—like, the Batman Begins of Santa.)

Despite the diva vibes (the man referenced his $1,000 scarf several times), Hot Santa and I do have a few things in common. We both love Rio, live in Parkdale, and are childless. When I asked him what he'd prefer as a treat over milk and cookies, he said "Ketel One . A cocktail, maybe a martini, something like that." It just so happens that vodka is also my poison of choice. Perhaps I'll join him for one in the offseason.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

These cropped photos are a sample of the images compiled by Jon Hendren. They're a bit like jazz—if you have to ask why I like 'These 32 Naked Dads Setting Up Christmas Trees Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity...And More,' you'll never know.

Every Christmas, my parents and I watch Trading Places, the movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd where the comedic climax (spoiler!) is a bad guy getting raped by a gorilla on an Amtrak. And every December, I also revisit Eyes Wide Shut, where the dramatic climax involves secret society's orgy. These take place at Christmas, so they are Christmas movies, just like Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and those three films are preferable to the schmaltz-covered corn of It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Just because the holiday is based on the birth of Baby Jesus doesn't mean all your traditions have to point to Him.

Which brings me to newest "alt" holiday tradition: Looking at a blog post that is a list of naked Christmas dads. To be fair, I've only been able to do this the past two years because "These 32 Naked Dads Setting Up Christmas Trees Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity...And More" has only existed on Something Awful since December 2013. But I plan on making rereading it a longstanding tradition, and you should too. Like many things that warm our hearts on the holidays, it's difficult to explain, so you should just go to that link, read it, then come back here.

(Note: It's impossible to know whether the "dads" are actually fathers. But they looklike dads, y'know?)

In honor of the season, I caught up with its author, Jon Hendren (who you may remember from the Edward Snowden/Scissorhands video), to get the how/why. He assured me that my Christmastime preoccupations with both a Kidman/Cruise erotic thriller and set of terrifying naked dads were normal, because Christmas was "one of the sexier holidays."

VICE: First off, where did these photos come from?
Jon Hendren: Where did I get the naked old men? It's a labor of love. I sort of scraped Tumblr sites that are devoted to nude old men. Usually shirtless, usually kind of fat. I have a flash drive that's heavily, heavily encrypted but it contains about nine gigabytes of photos of just older men in various states of undress. Not performing any sex acts, mind you. But they wanted to record what was going on. It's a hobby?

How long did it take to find 32 of them?
Oh, I have way more than 32. That's just how many I felt were necessary. They just kind of accumulated. They're not categorized when I find them, usually. The Tumblrs are in different languages and I'm too lazy to translate, so I just scroll through and find the ones that are good. But out of the 9,000 or so, there's probably 200 or 300 that are Christmas- or holiday-themed. There's one guy that had painted his penis to look like a dreidel. I didn't include that one because it would have been too hard to explain why there was a dreidel in my Christmas-themed article, but that one's one of my favorites. I'm saving it for a rainy day.

How did you cull them down to 32, then? What makes a good naked Christmas dad?
They have to be enjoying themselves first of all. It has to be a picture they took because they were feeling erotic at the time. They have to have a certain look on their face—usually pride, but also a certain kind of confusion is good. I just generally look for guys who look happy in that particular moment.

Since you found the photos off of Tumblr, do you have any indication of what they were originally intended for?
I don't know, because the people who post them are obviously not the old men in question. They collect these things, just like I do, although their motivations are obviously different. I don't find it sexually appealing at all—I'm in it for the artistic value, the statement being made, if you will. I think a lot of these guys took these pictures to send to a loved one and to potential sex partners over the internet, or maybe dating sites. Every one has a story behind it, right? I would say that they're really, really happy with the state of their genitals and they wanted to show somebody.

Any opinion on whether posting the naked dads counts as revenge porn?
I don't think so. I very much doubt it. It's not mean-spirited on anybody's part. Nobody's getting revenge on anybody. It's just: "Check out this picture of a great big fat guy, and he's naked. His dick is out and it's resting on the table." It's more just a marvel. You know Guinness World Records? They make a spectacle out of kind of ridiculous things, like a guy who can drink a gallon of milk the fastest in the world. Well, I think that being 65 years old and 400 pounds and you get your genitals out and manage to take a picture with your foot, that's pretty good. I think that's just as valid as a Guinness World Record.

OK, so say I want to start my own holiday collection and make this a tradition. What are the key words I should be using to suss them out?
Step one is to open your browser to google.com and then just type in "old fat guy small penis tumblr," and you'll find several called things like "Chubby 4 Me" and "Very Ordinary Person." They're collections of regular guys and older guys that are fairly heavyset, and usually no commentary. Just picture after picture after picture. It's great. It's something to do when you're lying in bed at night and you can't sleep, but you don't wanna start a new TV show because that's gonna take all your attention. You just wanna look at something for maybe eight minutes, nine minutes. I think naked old guys are a good way to do that?

Thanks, Jon. Merry Christmas and thanks for the two years of joy.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Real-life Santa Claus is a real-life monk. Photo courtesy of Santa Claus.

Santa Claus's Facebook page is filled with inspirational posters and memes. Tons of them, all meditations on a similar theme: love, compassion, peace, frugality, empathy.

One of them shows an adult reaching out to a child below to help it up. "Don't be impressed by money, followers, degrees, or titles" it reads. "Be impressed by humility, integrity, generosity and kindness." Another features a photo of Mark Twain and a quote attributed to him: "Kindness is a language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see."

"Want to keep Christ in Christmas?" another reads, its text pasted over a barn and a sky full of stars. "Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the stranger and the unwanted child, care for the sick, love your enemies."

This isn't the Santa Claus of Coke advertisements or children's books, this is the real Santa Claus of the real North Pole, Alaska. He's a 68-year-old Christian monk and cancer patient who uses medical marijuana and is a tireless child advocate. He has just under 300,000 Facebook fans, and his movement is growing. In October he was elected to the City Council in North Pole, where he'd previously served as President of the Chamber of Commerce.

"I never 'aspired' to become Santa," Santa told me via email. "I grew out my beard 11 years ago, and it was naturally white and soft. Friends suggested I appear as a volunteer Santa locally, which I did."

Santa, then going by his birth-name Thomas O'Connor and living in Nevada, was well received as the jolly giver of gifts, and so started appearing as him at charity events and for nonprofits. In February of 2005 he walked to his local post office in Lake Tahoe when a car passed him. A voice shouted "I LOVE YOU, SANTA," from the open car window. Moments before the drive-by shouting, he'd asked for a sign from God about a direction for his advocacy. "I prayed about how I should best use my new appearance for a greater number of children," says Santa. "I took it as an immediate answer to my prayer."

Santa Claus was born in Washington, DC, and grew up on the East Side of Manhattan. For years he served as a law enforcement administrator and consultant to a variety of public safety agencies and as an educator and emergency response chaplain. After finding I'd once worked at the Village Voice, he told me, "The Village Voice was about 15 or 16 when I was Special Assistant to the Deputy Police Commissioner of New York City, during the Lindsay administration—decades before my Santa years."

That job, as well as one as head of security for the Port Authority, exposed Santa to, as the Washington Post put it in their story about him, "the plethora of ills that plague America's youth—abuse, neglect, homelessness, institutionalization."

So he chose activism and moved West.

Inspirational posters from Santa Claus's Facebook.

"I completed the legal process to change my name in 2005," Santa told me. "I began concentrating on child advocacy and noticed that legislators' staffs engaged me when I mentioned my name was Santa Claus; and, I garnered a fair amount of success advocating for child health, safety, and welfare. It helped that I had a ton of Facebook followers."

In 2013, after a quixotic run for president in 2012, Santa decided to move to North Pole, Alaska, in order to muster the maximum impact with his advocacy. "From then on, I discovered that when I, as Santa Claus from North Pole, Alaska, call a legislator, I'm able to convince them that it is not only in children's best interest that they respond favorably, but it is in their best interest as well. No legislator wants a broadcaster or publisher to characterize them as refusing a request from Santa to help vulnerable children in dire straits. My approach seems a bit unusual, but it has served me, and children, well.

"I believe the greatest gift one can give is love, not necessarily presents," added Santa. "I detest the fact that, in many places, Christmas has become a crass, commercial, secular spectacle."

That belief, "the greatest gift one can give is love," comes up a lot when corresponding with Santa. It's on his Facebook page, too. And Santa, who joined the Celtic Anglican order Anam Cara in the early 2000s, is prone to drop quotes from Mother Teresa on you that revolve around the same theme.

So rest assured, children of the world, Santa Claus is alive and just as kind-hearted as you'd expect—only don't send him any letters. He won't answer them; it says so right on his website.

"There are plenty of 'Santas' and companies who already ," Santa said. "My advocacy is geared toward helping the greatest number of children—more than 2 million children in the US annually are abused, neglected, exploited, abandoned, homeless, and institutionalized."

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Look at Ines Estrada's work on her Instagram, Twitter, website, and online store.

Image via Flickr user Stefan

Slade is standing in front of his locker, mixing bowl in hand, whipping up a batch of his famous brownies. It's a regular domestic prison scene: Most of us white guys in E Block are planning on getting together on Christmas Eve this week to eat some snacks, and he's trying out a new recipe.

"I think it needs a couple of more Reese's Cups, and maybe four or five oatmeal pies," he says to me. "But I still haven't figured out what else I'm gonna do to them. I was thinking about crushing up some M&M's to make red-and-green toppings, or maybe I'll just make one big snowman brownie. I want to do something to make it feel like Christmas around here."

The truth is, this week at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana, it doesn't feel like the holiday season, and during the three years that I have been locked up in here, it never has.

In this prison, neither staff nor inmates decorate anything. There are no pictures of Santa, no trees with lights, no decorations hanging in the units, not a nativity scene in sight. The Christmas meal—which is part of a national menu and is served in every federal institution—has always been very rushed, with unpleasant staff members pacing back and forth in front of the tables barking orders, demanding that we hurry up, eat, and leave. In all of the other prisons that I have been in—six federal penitentiaries over 18 years—the big meal has always reminded me I'm still a human who can enjoy a holiday, even if I can't enjoy it with the rest of society. Not so in Terre Haute.

But what makes Christmas special in here isn't the lack of decorations or the tense dining environment. Everything for us centers around the "Christmas bags," which are full of ordinary junk food that people on the outside commonly purchase at convenience stores, but are rather exclusive in prison. Not only are these bags the only gifts that we are permitted to receive at Terre Haute, but also the items inside are usually name-brand and can be easily sold, traded, gambled off, or otherwise bartered with. This year they gave out the Christmas bags early—maybe the best thing to happen at the penitentiary this holiday season.

"If you want your shit, then get your fucking asses in your fucking cells so we can pass this shit out!" Those were the words of our unit officer on Wednesday, December 16, shortly before the staff here at FCI Terre Haute began passing out the goods.

My cellmate and I were two of the last people in our unit to receive our bags, and we were astonished, to be honest. They were big this year, and there was some good stuff in them. We opened the bags and counted 27 items in each, all name-brand items you'd never find in jail, as well as some goodies that many of us haven't seen in years.

"Real Kellogg Fruit Loops and Apple Jacks—are you kidding me?" my celly said. "I haven't seen these since the 90s. This is awesome."

Outside of our cell, we heard all of the usual commotion that goes along with the handing out of the Christmas bags:

"I got two honey buns for them Nestle Crunch bars."

"Who wants to put your bag up on a game of chess?"

"I got $20 for a whole bag!" offered a convict named Tank. An inmate everybody called Skittles seemed like he was on a mission to buy every Jolly Rancher in the joint. Others offered drugs for treats. Next door, my neighbor Dixon yelled out that he wanted to trade his hot peanuts for some barbeque peanuts, while his celly wanted to trade his cream cookies for some Oreos. The entire scene reminded me of the floor at the New York Stock Exchange.

Up on the second tier, a guy named Lee who lived in the far back cell said that he wanted to trade two Chick-O-Sticks for one box of Lemonheads, an offer that caught the attention of many.

"Right here, homie," a guy called Block said. "Lemme get that."

"Hell nah," said another inmate named Red as he took off running toward the stairs. "That shit's mine."

Realizing that the stairs were too far away, Block knew that the only way to beat Red was to climb, which is exactly what he did. He leapt up and grabbed the rail of the second tier, pulling himself up to beat his competition to the Christmas Bag bartering table.

Image via Flickr user Rennett Stowe

Unlike many people in prison, I grew up in a relatively stable, traditional Italian-Catholic home. I have three siblings, 14 aunts and uncles, and 27 first cousins on my mom's side alone. Every Christmas Eve, all of my relatives gather for a traditional Italian feast, where food like octopus, shrimp, linguini, and so much more is sprawled out across several tables. And of course, at the stroke of midnight, the Italian sausage that had been cooked on a barbecue is served. I'll never forget that annual tradition because it meant that soon after it my parents, three sisters, grandparents, and I would return back to our house and open presents.

In prison, though, my memories of Christmases vary from the druggie years at USP Leavenworth to the drunk years at USP Lewisburg to the sober years at FCI Butner and now the ones forming here at Terre Haute. I reflect the most fondly on Butner, a prison that goes all out for the holiday season. Besides hanging decorations in the library, the gym, the infirmary, and the chow hall, a handful of inmates from each unit would volunteer their time to decorate their own housing units, a project that entailed setting up commercial decorations like fake Christmas trees, lights, wreaths, and ornaments. If you have trouble fathoming how people make hooch in jail, you'd be amazed at the decorations inmates can make with some standard arts and crafts supplies.

But even in a nicer prison like Butner, there are reminders everywhere that Christmas in jail is about as real a holiday as the needles on our fake pine trees. I'll never forget the year we had a "town hall meeting" where the Associate Warden wished us a merry Christmas then announced that the winner of a cell-decorating contest was tied between Georgia Tech (my unit) and Clemson unit. The winner would get extra goodie bags. The solution to determine the winner?

"Sing to me," the associate warden said.

All the prisoners kind of just stood there, not really knowing what to do. She replied to the silence with, "Come on guys, where's your Christmas spirit? Sing me a song and you'll all get a free bag of goodies."

Many wanted an extra Christmas bag, but no one did anything.

"I said sing to me!" the associate warden yelled. "Sing to me now!"

She pointed to a Hispanic inmate who could barely speak English. "Start singing! Come on, I said start singing now. Come on, I'll do it with you... Jingle Bells... Jingle Bells... Jingle all the—"

Reluctantly, the guy started singing and others eventually chimed in.

I felt like I was a part of some surreal human rights violation, but at the same time it was so funny I had to hide my face so she wouldn't see me laugh. To top it off, she stood in the middle of the cell unit and started shedding tears, as if getting us to sing made her feel like she had personally rehabilitated us.

Later that day in Butner, we ate a spread that including Cornish hen, mashed potatoes, gravy, greens, rolls, and mixed vegetables. The food service department at this federal prison went beyond the national menu, giving us two kinds of pie and access to an all-you-can-eat vegetable bar that was filled with fresh lettuce, olives, onions, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, raw carrots, vinegar and oil dressing, ranch dressing, and croutons. And as we excited the chow hall, there were inmates and staff members handing us a box of holiday cookies and a bottle of eggnog.

Walking back to our unit on that cool, crisp winter day some odd years ago felt as close to Christmas as it ever will on the inside. I can't expect the same feast at the pen I currently live in, but I got my hands on a couple bags of Famous Amos cookies after the goodie bag trade. Those will pair nicely with Slade's famous brownies.

The following is an excerpt from The Reactive, Masande Ntshanga's debut novel forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in May/June 2016. The story takes place in Cape Town, South Africa, during a time when anti-retroviral medications were not widely available. Ntshanga is the winner of a PEN International New Voices Award and a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing. With The Reactive, he has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts.

The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie's fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city, and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it's only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.

We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we're sitting on the right side of the light.

Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, cov­ered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we've chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver's wind-screen.

I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have or­ders for Ronny, Lenard, and Leonardo. I've got one for Mil­licent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven't come to meetings for a year.

In Blouberg, we stalk into an internet café, this gamer-pow­ered cavern complete with a coffee plunger and blue carpet tiles. The computers are sectioned into black cubicles with little hooks that hold up oversized headphones.

It's one of those LAN-gamer killing pens, I say to Cissie. The first-person-shooter covens that seem to grow in popularity each year.

Cissie nods, somewhat slackened by the place's distractions. I fax my attendance slip to Sis' Thobeka at the front counter. There's a sign here that says they sell R29 airtime vouchers.

I catch Ruan looking around with this grim, beaten-up ex­pression on his face.

He approaches the counter. I was such a frightened little shit when I was in high school, he says, shaking his head.

The voice he uses doesn't sound like him. It sounds as if it's only meant for his ears, not all six of ours, and when he's done, he looks up at us with a wan smile. Ruan doesn't like the year we've stepped into, and behind him Cissie takes note of this and raises her eyebrows. Not every story begs to be told, she seems to say.

I get the airtime and we walk out.

This is beach weather, almost, Cissie says, when we step out­side. She stretches her arms out in front of her to feel the rays for evidence, but the solar system contradicts her. She drops her arms back down.

Well, half of almost, she says, correcting herself.

Ruan and I nod. It's a fitting description. Cissie has a way of sounding concise in the face of disapproval, and as if to defy the weather's indifference to her will, the three of us trudge into the Milky Lane up the road, next to the Total garage that ends the strip. We buy a vanilla milkshake and a pair of peanut-butter waffles and cross the road to Blouberg beach, stepping over the wooden railing and walking down a short pier to a grassy knot on the sand, not far from the polluted dunes. A large crane ship slowly drifts past the vista of Table Mountain, while above us, the sky clears up in a rounded blue column, spilling down enough light to make the ocean water blinding.

Ruan opens up our boxed packages. He uses a plastic knife to cut up the waffles while Cissie rolls a joint from the section Ar­nold sold us. She licks it from the tip to the gerrick and lights it with a copper Zippo from her shirt pocket. She holds in a drag, sipping the air in tiny increments, and then passes the joint on to me as she exhales.

Taking it from her, I lean back. The air feels cool but pleasant on my skin, and when I look out at the water, it seems to ripple in slow undulations, each one extending to the farthest reaches of the world.

I close my eyes and take a drag.

I try to savor the smoke's effect on my nervous system.

You know, Ruan says, his voice reaching me from behind my closed eyelids, Napoleon sent some of his troops to fight against a British fleet here. It happened in the 19th cen­tury, I think. More than 500 people died.

I open my eyes. Ruan sits facing out to sea. He scratches his neck, takes a bite from his waffle, and leans back on his elbows. I pass him the joint.

Imagine, he says.

Imagine what?

Like, where we're sitting now could be the exact place some British or French assholes drove bayonets into each other. Isn't that weird?

I guess. That's probably this entire country, I say.

No, really, he says. Imagine. One guy could be standing with his boot on another's face, just over here, pushing the barrel of his musket down his throat, and shouting, hey! We found the natives first! Then the other would be over there, going, non! Niquer ta mère!

Ruan does the accent well and Cissie and I laugh.

Hey, she says. I didn't know about that Blouberg and Napoleon thing. Do you think I could talk about it with the kids?

Sure, Ruan says. Make it a musket adventure.

He peels off a slice from the waffle and bites into it, sloppily. Then he grunts at us through the batter like a Disney pirate.

Cissie laughs.

Wait, she says. I didn't tell you guys about what happened to me last week, did I? Well, I made my kids draw me a picture of the Earth. Or I asked them to, anyway. Can you believe it? None of them knows what their planet looks like.

This isn't new. Cissie likes to think everyone has an opinion on outer space.

It doesn't take her long before she starts telling us about Cape Canaveral again.

If you know anything at all about Cecelia, then you'll know this isn't her first time on the subject. The three of us stretch out on the polluted sand, our fingers digging shallow troughs in Blouberg's white, heated dunes, and Cissie tells us about the headland on the Space Coast, the Cape in Florida, where the United States launches more than half of its space missions into orbit. Then she moves on to the Kennedy Space Center and tells us about the collective unconscious, the embedded memory all of us humans share with our planet. She tells us how she feels like she's been there at some point in her life, crossing an empty parking lot in Jetty Park, or lying under a clear sky and drinking a molten smoothie, or kicking around a bottle cap, or standing within touching distance of the station and staring out at the launch sites. The details don't matter, she says. The way Cissie thinks about her kinship with the headland, she tells us, isn't because she visited a family friend on the Florida coast when she was 12, it's because everyone on our planet has a story to share about space. It's the only thing she's certain of, she says. That everyone has an idea about what the sky turns into at night.

Listening to her, I feel as I always do: uncertain. I have a feel­ing it might be true, but Ruan, on the other hand, is adamant he doesn't have a story about space.

I watch him pull on what's left of the roach and bury the ember in the sand. Cissie tears off a corner from a waffle and pushes it into her mouth, chewing on it for a long time before sucking the syrup off her fingers. We don't eat the banana slices. I watch them pile up in the red boxes for later.

I roll another joint. When I look up to lick it, a container ship makes its way into our view from the horizon. Then Cissie asks me to tell her a space story.

I don't have one, I say.

Unfazed, she leans over and hands me her lighter. Then she draws back and says, of course you do. Everyone does.

I look ahead. I can feel my elbows digging holes in the sand. I flip the copper lid of the lighter and torch the joint at its pointed end. It burns slowly and I take a long drag before I let the smoke out through my nostrils in thick white plumes.

I'll work on it, I say.

Then the three of us go quiet for a while.

The sand under my feet feels packed. Closer now, the con­tainer ship sounds its horn, its bilge cleaving the water like a scalpel through skin. I watch as a handful of ships melt into the horizon, each one swaying before tipping over the edge of the world.

It's better outside those killing pens, Ruan says after a while, and I remember how his face looked inside the internet café.

Cissie and I don't answer him.

I lie back and watch my blood turn orange behind my eyelids. The grass spikes me between my ears and my neck, and the heave of the ocean, when it reaches us, sounds like the breath­ing of an asthmatic animal. We remain quiet a while longer, and I suppose it's now, with the column of blue finally closing up above us, and the water losing its shimmer and ability to gouge, that my eyelids turn from orange to red and then to black again, and Bhut' Vuyo, my uncle from Du Noon, sends me another text message, and this time around, he tells me in clear terms to come home to them.

Watch a Web-Exclusive Clip from Our Doc 'Countdown to Zero' About HIV Treatment in South Africa:

Cissie finds half a pack of Tramadol on her top shelf. She's kept it in an old Horlicks tin above the kitchen counter, saving it for a day like today. We split the pills over her glass coffee table. Then, while passing around a glass of water, Cissie gets a text message from Julian. It's about a Protest Party at his flat off Long Street. We take what's left of the pills.

Outside, the sky's grown dark again, thick and almost leaden in texture. To the north, columns of rain emerge from the hills that once came together, more than a million years ago, to create the crest and saddle of Devil's Peak. We smoke another cigarette with the painkillers. Then we wait for a taxi out on the main road. I get the feeling, as we do, that the sky could drop down on us at any moment.

Thankfully, the trip doesn't take long. The sky shows no inter­est in us, and we arrive at Julian's an hour later. Standing across the road from his place, I realize that my hours have become something foreign to me, that they've taken on a pattern I can no longer predict.

Looking out over the cobblestones on Greenmarket Square—each orb cut from a slab of industrial granite, connecting the cafés on the right with the Methodist Mission on Longmarket, where hawkers and traders from different sectors of the conti­nent erect stalls and barter their impressions of Africa—I feel my thoughts branch out and scatter, grow as uncountable as the cobblestones beneath us, as if each thought were tied to every molecule that comprises me, each atom as it moves along its random course.

Ruan waves to the security guard. I ring Julian's intercom and we get buzzed to the 11th floor. On our way up, we stand apart, the mirrors in the lift reflecting the fluorescent lights. We remain quiet, facing ourselves as our bodies get hauled through thick layers of concrete. I lean against the lift wall and think of Greenmarket Square again, and how, not too far from here, and less than 200 years ago, beneath the wide shadow of the muted Groote Kerk, slaves were bought and sold on what became a wide slab of asphalt, a strip divided by red-brick is­lands and flanked by parking bays where drivers are charged by the hour; behind them, yesteryear's slave cells, which are now Art Deco hotels and fast-food outlets. I think of how, despite all this, on an architect's blueprints, the three of us would ap­pear only as tiny icons inside the square of the lift shaft, each suspended in an expanse of concrete.

Then the lift doors slide open.

Cissie walks out of the lift and Ruan and I follow a step be­hind, trailing her down a long open walkway.

Julian's door has a silver number: an 1100 with two missing zeroes. In the corridor, voices mill together in a growing murmur over the music, while shadows dance behind the dim­pled window. Outside, a couple sits on the fire escape behind us, a few steps below the landing, holding bottles of Heineken and sharing a cigarette. Cissie and Ruan face straight ahead, focused on getting themselves inside the party. The music seems to get louder, too, and the weather grows colder, but that doesn't seem to bother us.

Loud footsteps approach on the other side of the door, and before long we hear someone struggling with the lock.

Looking back down, I notice that the couple, both in black winter jackets and thick woolen beanies, have a large cardboard cut-out leaning over the steel steps behind them. The placard bears a detailed illustration of the female anatomy.

Eventually, Julian manages to get his door open. He greets us from the threshold, his face painted bright silver. He's both tall and peppy tonight, so tall, in fact, that we have to look up to see his face. Smiling, he uses his long arms to wave us in.

Please, guys, he says, come inside.

Ruan, Cissie, and I file into the hallway and then into the kitchen. It's a small space, with brandy boxes lying flattened across the tiles. The three of us try to walk around them as Ju­lian follows behind.

We went to a farm earlier, he says, waving his hand across the kitchen counter. From one end to the other, the surface is packed with raw vegetables. Liquor bottles emerge intermittent­ly from the grove.

Help yourselves, Julian says, and we do.

Cissie takes our quarts from me. We bought them with a bot­tle of wine at the Tops near Gardens. I keep the Merlot and rinse out three coffee mugs in the sink. The brown water inside the basin looks a day old, so I yank the plug-chain. Then I stand there for a moment, watching as the fluid swirls out.

I'm not surprised to find the drain half-clogged. I've been in and out of places like Julian's for most of my adult life. One year, Cissie brought a colleague over and we played Truth or Dare at West Ridge. On a Truth, I'd tried but failed to piece together how many times I'd woken up shoeless on someone's lidless toilet. Nicole, the colleague, had meant the question in good humor, but even as we all laughed, I remembered how most times, my eyes would be half-focused, the door swaying as my pants rode off my ankles.

Well, do you like it?

Julian breaks out in a laugh behind me. He points a finger at his chin and wipes a thumb across his forehead. The contrast between his face and his mascara makes his eyes appear pressed out, or even feral. Each orb bulges out in shock, as if from pro­ptosis, a sign of an overactive thyroid, and a sometime symptom of the virus I have inside me. Standing in place, and swaying on his feet, Julian achieves an eerie trembling, as if he were a sup­porting character excerpted from a malfunctioning video game, now stranded in a different reality, awaiting instruction in our less tractable environment.

I don't know, Cissie says. She leans back against the counter.

On her right, Ruan pulls out a carrot and inspects it. He breaks off the stem and starts chewing. I open the bottle of wine and pour us each a coffee mug of Merlot. Then Julian starts laughing again. I look up and find him still swaying.

Think about this, he says. Under the kitchen light, his teeth shimmer like dentures. He waves his hands and tells us to listen.

We prepare to. I hand Ruan and Cissie their mugs and, taking a sip from my own, lean back and wait for him to start.

I'm doing something bigger than all my previous marches, Julian says.

I nod, sipping the Merlot. Ruan pulls out another carrot from the grove.

Cissie and I watch him as he yawns into his sleeve.

I suppose none of this is new to us. Julian hosts a party like this every second month now. He ends each of them the same way, too, by locking everyone inside his flat before morning. The reason he calls them protests is because the following day, he organizes his guests, a half-stoned mass, into a march outside the parliament gates. There, Julian takes pictures of them, which he then sells at a gallery in Woodstock.

Cissie used to be classmates with him. They attended the University of Cape Town together, both receiving MFAs from Michaelis, before Cissie became a teacher. I once read an in­terview Julian had given to the arts section of a local weekly. Towards the end, when the interviewer had asked him if his marches were protests in earnest or just performance art, he'd chosen to skip the question. Later, when I googled him, I found a one-minute clip of Julian playing a prank on his agent: He ar­rived at his exhibition disguised as one of the parking attendants working on Sir Lowry Road, in a green luminous vest and a cap slung low over his forehead. The gallery walls held large framed photographs of his marches, and the video ended with Julian wearing a wine-stained paper cup on his head.

I'll tell you all about it later, he says. You'll be around, right?

We might be, Cissie says.

Sure, he tells her. We'll talk then.

I pour out more wine for us, and find a shelf for our beer inside the fridge. Holding our coffee mugs, the three of us walk out into the living room.

In the lounge, Ruan, Cissie, and I join an audience for Julian's latest performance. Everyone else draws closer to watch, and Julian presents himself as our party host, kneeling down in front of us. Smiling from the head of the coffee table, his metal face gleams while a string of sweat drips down the bridge of his nose. He removes a button pin from his blazer and turns it over to take out the 15 tabs of LSD he's concealed in the back. Then he returns his hands to his pockets and tells everyone they should know what to do by now.

They nod.

Ruan, Cissie, and I keep still. We watch as Julian's followers gather around the coffee table, each of them with their head bowed. In order, they raise their left hands and Julian nods as he passes them the acid.

Cissie pulls on my sleeve. Let's go, she says.

I nod.

Ruan pulls on the sliding door at the end of the living room. Then the three of us walk out onto the balcony.

I have very little regard for Nietzsche's detractors.

This comes from a guy sitting on the floor. He has his legs spread out in a narrow V over Julian's tiles. He introduces him­self as an ecology student. He's wearing a fitted leather jacket under a black balaclava that covers his face, and he's speaking to a girl leaning against the balcony wall. The girl laughs at his quip. I'm doing my third year in linguistics, she says.

We share a marijuana cigarette with them. Then it's followed by a leaking pipe we take a pass on. On the balcony, the breeze feels tactile around our fingertips. We take hits from the weed and sip on our wine. From where we're standing, our view of Cape Town is a maze of brick walls; a checkerboard of aban­doned office lights. Exhaust fumes waft up from the streets below, mixing with the smell of rubber baked during the day, a combination that reminds me of Ruan's summation of our planet's atmosphere: that the ozone layer is Earth's giant garbage lid.

Julian looks like a deep-water mutant, Ruan says.

Cissie and I laugh. I inhale and blow out smoke.

To defend herself against the cold, Cissie's wearing a green hoodie. The strings on the sides are pulled and knotted under her chin. She leans out over the balcony.

You know, Julian asked about my documentary, she says.

Cissie has an audio documentary she edits for two hours each month. The subject is a 28-year-old from Langa called Thobile. Last year, Thobile quit his job to live on eight rand a day. It was in solidarity with his community, he said, and in the clips Cissie played back for us at West Ridge, we could hear the difference in his tone at the beginning of the experiment, and then a month later. Cissie, who planned to paint a portrait of him—using only her memory and her recording as a guide—said he lost eight kilograms in three weeks.

Leaning on the railing, I turn to face her. How's it going? I say.

Cissie shrugs. I don't know. They all started getting sick.

I remember listening to Thobile in the clips Cissie played for us. He described how he hadn't robbed anyone, yet.

He has this little brother, you know. In June, Vuyisa contracted bronchitis. That's why Thobile had to go back to work.

I nod.

Cissie digs in her pocket and retrieves a soft pack of filters. The two of us watch as a car speeds down the narrow lane be­low. Its headlights illuminate a piece of graffiti on the opposite wall: PLEASE DON'T FEED THE ANIMALS.

VICE Meets Norwegian Literary Sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Sometime during the night, I think of my late brother. There were summers I'd take Luthando down the block in my old neighborhood, eMthatha, to a big white stippled house at the corner of Orchid and Aloe Streets, where an Afrikaans family from Bloemfontein had moved in. Their son, Werner, who was older than us by a few years, had taken control of his family's pool house; a flat at least twice the size of my room. Werner liked to make us watch him while he squeezed a tube of Dirkie condensed milk down his throat; and sometimes he'd com­mand my brother and I to laugh with open mouths through his fart jokes, after which he'd collapse into a castle made from his bright plush toys. We always met Werner at the window of his room. He was an only child and coddled by both of his parents. Since moving into the neighborhood, his parents had banned him from leaving his yard; and LT and I had to jump their fence to register his presence. I suppose he was spoilt, in retrospect, almost to the point of seeming soft in the head. As a teen, his teeth had started to decay, turning brown in the center of his lower jaw, but he was also big-boned and well-stocked, and would often bribe us over to his home with ice lollies and video games. I had my own video games by then, but not as many as Werner. My mother was still new at her government job and I couldn't show off in the way I wanted to about living in town. Lately, Luthando had started thinking he was better off than me. My brother had grown a patch of pubic hair the previous summer, and I wanted to remind him that he still ate sandwiches with pig fat at his house, and that one evening in Ngangelizwe, his mother had served us cups of samp water for supper.

Still, we hid together that day.

Like always, Werner told us his parents didn't allow Africans into their house. He called us blacks, to which we nodded, and then he threw the controllers through his burglar bars like bones on a leash. My brother and I scuttled after them on our bare and calloused feet. If Werner didn't win a game, he'd switch the console off and turn into an image of his father, barking us back onto the tar like a disgruntled meneer at the store, his face twisting as fierce as a boar's, fanning out a spray of saliva. When he did win, when Werner felt he'd won enough, he'd say his parents were due home in the next few minutes. Then he'd hoist the controllers back up and wipe them down with a wad of toilet paper. It was the same toilet paper he used to wipe semen off his plush toys, Luthando would later say to me.

He's a pig, your bhulu friend, he'd say, I've seen tissues of it all over his bedspread.

That day, Werner's parents came home early for a long week­end and he hid us behind a sparse rosebush growing against their newly built fence. The day was gray, like most of them that summer, but the bricks in the wall were still warm. My brother and I were caught not 30 seconds later. Maybe Werner want­ed us to be caught. The maid watched us with a blank mask from the kitchen sink while Werner's mother lost the blood in her face and his father, a large, balding architect with sleek black hair around a hard, shimmering pate, came after us with a roar, waving his belt over his head and shouting, Uit! Uit! Uit!

We were only 12 years old, so we ran.

Later, back home, Luthando found me in the kitchen and squeezed my nose between his thumbs from behind. We hadn't spoken since our escape from Werner's house, and I'd been making us coffee, watching as two of the neighborhood mutts mated lazily in the yard across from ours. My brother led me to a mirror and mashed my face into the cold pane. Luthando was in a rage, and he asked me if I liked looking that way—with my nose pinched—and nearly broke the glass with my forehead. I struggled and elbowed him and we both fell to the floor and fought. When he tired of pressing my face against the bathroom tile, and with my saliva pooling against my cheek on the floor, I asked him why he was hurting me, even though I knew the rea­son. Luthando said everything else about me was white, so why would I mind having a pinched nose on my face. Then he heeled my cheek again, and I thought it was to spite him that I smiled at what he'd said, but I knew even then a part of me was charmed by it. Eventually, when he got up and started to walk away, I tried to spit on his heels, and then I called him poor for the first time in our lives. This was me and my brother Luthando.

Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the 2013 PEN International New Voices Award, as well as a Finalist for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. He was born in East London in 1986. His novel, The Reactive, will be published in May/June 2016 by Two Dollar Radio.

Thumbnail courtesy of Two Dollar Radio

Photo via Flickr user Norbert Schnitzler

Although the religious meaning of Christmas was long ago neutered, replaced with the secular joys of eggnog and mall Santas, at its core December 25 is still a celebration of Jesus Christ's virgin birth. Although holy men have long regarded the virgin birth as an inexplicable miracle, others have sought scientific explanations for the story—either to prove its plausibility or debunk it as an impossibility. These seekers have come up with several intriguing, and conceivable—if improbable—scientific explanations.

Before jumping into the science, it's worth clarifying what we mean when we talk about the "virgin birth," a term that's frequently contested and often confused with the immaculate conception. Many have argued that the prophecy of Christ's birth in Isaiah 7:14 uses the Hebrew word almah, which means a young—but not necessarily virginal—woman. This, some argue, could have been mistranslated as "virgin" by hapless Greek scholars over 2,200 years ago, creating a false mythology. But even if the prophecy was mistranslated, the tales of Jesus's birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are emphatic that the savior was born of a virgin woman.

Still, it's not clear what virginity meant during the time of Jesus—just like it's not entirely clear what virginity means today. An intact hymen? No history of penetrative intercourse? A total lack of exposure to sexual stimulation? It's too easy to explain a "virgin birth" if virginity just meant an unbroken hymen, or lack of vaginal intercourse—maybe semen leaked in during dry humping; or maybe Mary was sexually active, but still had her hymen intact. So we should use the most conservative definition of virginity—total abstinence from sexual activity—to provide an airtight scientific explanation for Mary's virgin pregnancy.

With that assumption, the go-to scientific explanation for the virgin birth has long been that Mary somehow achieved human parthenogenesis, a process by which some animals reproduce without mates. In parthenogenesis, a cell within an animal splits via meiosis, halving its genetic material. Then one of these split cells, essentially an egg, fuses with another split cell nearby, fertilizing itself and—because the genetic material of cells were not split evenly or identically—creating a not-quite-clone embryo that can be carried to term.

Parthenogenesis is common in invertebrates; birds, fish, and reptiles can have virgin births as well. Until recently, scientists believed this was a rare response to captivity, environmental stresses, or mate scarcity, but over the past three years, researchers have found that parthenogenesis is also surprisingly common in healthy populations living in the wild. And while researchers are still trying to figure out what triggers parthenogenesis, the fact that it happens across so many species means it's theoretically possible that Mary could have given parthenogenetic birth to Christ.

But the hypothesis is still shaky, because while mammals can initiate parthenogenesis, they typically cannot give parthenogenetic birth. A mammal's eggs usually split to accommodate the DNA in sperm when they sense the swimmers getting close, then die off if fertilization fails. Trickery, or random genetic irregularities, can cause a split in the absence of sperm and even recombination with another nearby split cell—but mammals (with the exception of echidnas and platypuses) use a process called imprinting to make sure reproduction only kicks into gear with the right complementary match of active and inactive genes between sperm and eggs of the same species. So if parthenogenesis begins, it creates a haywire oddity that doesn't survive beyond a few days.

There are ways to overcome this problem. In 2004, Japanese researchers showed that they could alter imprinting genes in mouse eggs to create an artificial but fully parthenogenetic and viable baby. It's possible, if extremely unlikely, for these same genetic alterations to occur as random, natural mutations. But genetic mutations that overcome imprinting alone would have meant that Jesus only received X chromosomes, from Mary, making him a her.

In her 2012 book Like A Virgin,science writer Aarathi Prasad offers a couple workarounds. One possibility, Prasad theorizes, is that Mary could have been a genetic chimera—meaning, formed from both male and female embryos—which would have meant she had Y chromosomal material that could have been absorbed into her theoretically self-created Christ child. Alternatively, Prasad offers, Mary could have been intersex—having both female and male genetic characteristics. Specifically, she could have been born with ovotestes, a condition in which a woman gets an X chromosome from her father that contains a sprinkle of Y chromosome, leading to the development of a hybrid ovary-testes organ. If Mary only manifested her male material in her gonads and, again, had a perfect balance of masculine and feminine tissues and hormones, her ovotestes could have produced sperm and eggs simultaneously, sending them down the fallopian tubes together, and resulting in fertilization and implantation within her functional uterus.

It's tempting to write this off as functionally impossible, but there's been at least one recorded case of a girl born with a possibly suitable balance of genes and genetic expression for this self-fertilization to play out—in Mexico, circa 2000. Researchers are still waiting to see if the child would be able to produce viable sperm and eggs, and thus produce a virgin birth.

There's at least one simpler explanation for the virgin birth, although it's brutal and very messy. According to a 1988 report in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a 15-year-old girl in Lesotho who had been born without a vaginal opening (due to a condition known as Müllerian agenesis syndrome) gave birth to a healthy male child via C-section. While giving her beau a blow job, an ex had walked in on the woman, pulled a knife, and stabbed her twice in the abdomen, allowing the sperm in her empty stomach to leak through her damaged gastrointestinal tract and into her reproductive system.

Although many have been skeptical of this account, urologists believe it's possible, as sperm can survive acidic environments, travel further than we appreciate, and survive in friendly environments for days, fertilizing eggs even outside of their traditional meeting places. And while someone with Müllerian agenesis would usually have trapped menstrual blood blocking up her uterus, it wasn't an issue in a young girl like this one.

Obviously, this scenario is extremely grim, in contrast to the pure life Mary supposedly lived. But the conditions need not have been the exact same. If Mary had suffered a non-fatal abdominal wound (or even had a peculiar abscess) in the presence of semen, then there's a chance—however slight—that she could have been crudely impregnated, without any sexual act.

So a virgin birth is scientifically possible, though it's so highly improbable that most scientists don't put much stock in the idea.

"I have been asked many times," said Warren Booth, a leading expert in parthenogenesis at the University of Tulsa, "and honestly I can come up with no feasible explanation as to how a female that had abstained from intercourse could give birth to a child of either sex."

To devout Christians, of course, it doesn't really matter if the virgin birth is scientifically unlikely, because science is a discipline exploring the laws and nature created by God. "God is not a captive of the universe," said Vern Poythress of the Western Theological Seminary, an evangelical theologian whose work focuses on the divine truth and authority of the Bible.

Poythress uses his background in math and science to dissect and dispute rationalist arguments against faith. As for God's role in the virgin birth, he explained, "He's not caught in a system of impersonal law. He's the lawgiver. He's the author of both the regularities and the things that are exceptional.... He can do unusual things when it suits him."

The way Poythress and others see it, God could have created a sperm with a Y chromosome from nothingness, or from the atoms in the Virgin Mary's womb as needed, fertilizing her egg and creating a wholly human, but also wholly divine, genetic male. Of course, Poythress doesn't have proof that God went about Christ's conception that way, but that's beside the point.

"The Bible is not getting into all the technical details," he said. "God knows all the technical details. But His purpose in the Bible is not to satiate modern scientific curiosity, but to tell us what we really need to know from the standpoint of salvation, from the standpoint of our personal understanding of ourselves and our relation to God."

Unlike some Christians, who sometimes violently reject the search for scientific explanations of the virgin birth, Poythress acknowledges that it's almost impossible to distinguish between divine acts and those that extend from God's orderly laws of nature. Still, he doubts that there is a scientific explanation for the virgin birth, and rejects the idea that this disproves it in any way.

This is fair—those who criticize magic, mysticism, and even faith from a rational perspective often forget that a lack of evidence is not proof of something's falsehood. They also forget that God and his works stand outside of the realm of firm scientific inquiry or disproof.

So whether people come up with complex scientific explanations, or reject those explanations as impossible, the virgin birth of Christ will likely always remain a mystery. And in a debate wrapped up in faith, which transcends science or rationality, neither assertion really matters.

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