Photo via Flickr user Angelia Sims

Read: How to Survive New Year's Eve Without Embarrassing Yourself

Everyone knows that people die on New Year's—which is a buzzkill, I know, but it's true. Half the fatal car crashes on New Year's Day are from drunk drivers, and there's a slight increase in homicides and suicides during the holiday. But January 1 is also the day you're most likely to die of natural causes, according to research by sociologist David Phillips.

Phillips, along with two other researchers, studied 57 million death certificates over a 25-year period. They found a sharp spike in deaths on Christmas, the day after Christmas, and New Year's Day, which has the most fatalities. It's pretty well-documented that substance abuse and accidental fatalities go up during the holidays, but their research showed a spike in natural causes of death—things like cardiac diseases and cancer—more than accidents like drunk driving.

There's no obvious explanation for the pattern. The health problems aren't weather-related, and even if they were, that wouldn't explain the distinct increase during Christmas and New Year's. It's tempting to blame the deaths on stress from visiting with family members or wrapping up end-of-year to-do lists, but the research notes a lack of evidence that "heightened psychological stresses can cause abrupt, sharp increases in mortality from a wide range of diseases and for a wide range of demographic groups." In other words, finding the coolest New Year's party might stress you out, but it's probably not going to kill you.

Stressed about where to party on New Year's Eve this year? THUMP has you covered.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Phillips chalked it up to "a mystery," but he did offer a few hypotheses: Most of the Christmas and New Years deaths happen in emergency rooms, which could suggest that people wait longer to seek medical attention during the holidays (because they want to spend time with their families) and are more likely to die by the time they reach the hospital. Alternatively, hospitals might be understaffed during the holidays, meaning you're less likely to make it if you get sent to the ER on New Year's Day.

Either way, if you start feeling weird chest pains on New Year's Day, don't blow it off as a side effect of your hangover.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Every year I share as many great short films with my audience as I can, but every year, I miss some. This is good news, in a way: There's too much bizarre, touching, and hilarious stuff out there, and not enough space to cover them. To make up, I've rounded up some great films that I didn't get around to covering in I'm Short, Not Stupid in 2015. The resulting compilation is chock full of festival winners, Oscar-nominated shorts, and viral videos, the perfect way to spend the last couple days of the holidays.

'A Reasonable Request,' by Andrew Laurich

This near-perfect short made the badass decision to premiere online before making its premiere next month at the Sundance Film Festival. It will tickle you in all the right—or wrong?—places.

'Subconscious Password,' by Chris Landreth

Writers are always told to write what they know, but when Canadian animator Chris Landreth set out to create his latest film he chose to write about what he forgets. The result was the Oscar-nominated Subconscious Password. The film takes you deep inside the mind through a warped game-show extravaganza. It utilizes a wide variety of animation styles, and the result is as vibrant and odd as the inside of a dream, but as realistic and reminiscent as everyday life. Landreth has made a number of short films, but is probably best known for his 2004 Oscar-winning Ryan.

'Yearbook,' by Bernardo Britto

If the world was coming to an end, what would you try and save? Brazilian filmmaker Bernardo Britto tries to answer that question with his five-minute animated Sundance award-winning short. He's definitely a filmmaker to watch as he returns to Sundance in 2016 with his first feature, Jacqueline (Argentine), for which he'll be ditching the sketchbook and going live-action with Wyatt Cenac, as well as premiering his latest animated short, Glove, which is described as "the true story of a glove that's been floating in space since 1968."

'Coda,' by Alan Holly

I know the world ending is a big deal, but what about your life? That's a bigger deal for many people. Coda, the SXSW award-winning animated short, beautifully captures the confusion that I assume accompanies death. Despite being drawn, the film feels devastatingly real.

'Weird Simpsons VHS' by Yoann Hervo

Everything the title implies, but more, and better.

'One-Year Lease,' by Brian Bolster

There's something thrilling about seeing how other people live, but something equally disconcerting about seeing them grow lonely. This Tribeca Film Festival winner combines both in a peculiar little slice-of-life documentary about a couple living one year in a NYC apartment slowly falling into disrepair at the hands of their overattentive landlady.

'Stop,' by Reinaldo Marcus Green

Probably one of the most important and timely shorts for America this year. Reinaldo Marcus Green's film addresses the upsetting aspects of New York City's stop-and-frisk policies with sensitivity and insight.

'Grandpa and Me and a Helicopter to Heaven,' by Johan Palmgren and Åsa Blanck

A touching film for everyone out there with grandpas (which is everyone). This short perfectly encapsulates why family is so important and always interesting.

'Funnel,' by Andre Hyland

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.

As I've previously mentioned, I've accidentally reduced my alcohol consumption to a point you might refer to as "moderation." I do, however, like to get kinda shitfaced on New Year's Eve, which is, generally, the wildest night of my year.

And not to sound like the last 30 seconds of one of those safety videos they show before prom, but I won't be driving any cars while drunk. For added safety, I'll be careful around the roads in general, because cars sometimes eat drunk pedestrians. But any night spent binging on alcohol comes with a risk factor that no brilliant transportation plan can circumvent—the alcohol.

"On New Year's it's probably a time when everybody feels like they can let go a little bit," Dr. George F. Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse (NIAA) and Alcoholism told me. But while that sounds like it's not a big deal, he pointed out that people like me, a 31-year-old who is still planning to get wasted, are part of a trend toward greater overall national drunkenness. "There's an increase in intensity of drinking, particularly in young people, but also extending into middle age," Koob said.

On college campuses, the stated intention of "drinking to blackout," is a relatively new phenomenon, but the NIAA has taken notice. "What we pick up in some of the surveys is people are doing more binge drinking of the extreme kind—I would call it 'extreme binge drinking'—where you're doing 10 to 15 drinks in an evening."

That amount of booze over a long evening would send most people past "shitfaced" and into "unconscious." If, on the other hand, you put away all 15 of those drinks over the course of two hours or less, it could kill you.

But does New Year's put me at risk for that kind of frat house-level drinking?

Let's say like many sophisticated, career-minded adults, I began my night with a little Dom Pérignon (more likely it'll be André, but hey, they're both booze). Champagne has a much higher alcohol percentage than most beer, and carbonated drinks get you drunk faster than flat ones. "The bubbles interact with the lining of your stomach and intestine, and help facilitate some of the absorption," Koob told me, adding, "Someone who comes in and drinks three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach to load up is probably already asking for trouble."

In other words the champagne you drink early in the evening might set you on the path toward sloshed, without you fully realizing it.

The idea with alcohol is that it's a drug that makes stuff more fun. "When you do so much of a drug, like alcohol, that releases all of those good things, they also trigger your stress axis," Koob told me in an interview for a different article last year. When you start to feel shitty—typically when your blood alcohol percentage gets past .08, you might unwisely try to medicate that feeling of shittiness with more alcohol. That's the cycle that can potentially result in unexpectedly intense drinking.

These kinds of nights have become more common recently, according to the NIH's data-gathering efforts. Koob quoted to me from some in-house statistics he had at hand. "Alcohol poisoning deaths in general increased sevenfold from 1999 to 2013," he said. The rate increased from "337 in 1999 to 2,303 in 2013. A big increase in the last 15 years."

Check out our documentary about the animator behind Star Wars and 'Jurassic Park'

According to the aptly-named Bob Brewer, MD, who leads the Alcohol Program at the Centers for Disease Control, that upward trend exists both on and off of college campuses. "Binge drinking is a major public health problem across the lifespan," he told me in an email interview. "There were an average of 2,200 alcohol poisoning deaths —or about six deaths per day—in the US from 2010 to 2012," he pointed out. And far from being related to the rise of butt chugging as a hazing method, he told me that "about three in four of these deaths involved adults aged 35-64."

Right when I was feeling glad I was younger than the group he quoted, he horrified me with another statistic: "1 in 10 total deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64 years are due to excessive alcohol consumption, including deaths due to alcohol poisoning," he told me, adding that "about 70 percent of the approximately 1.5 billion self-reported binge drinking episodes among adults aged 18 and older in the US are reported by adults aged 26 or older."

As for the NIH's number of deaths from binge drinking, Koob had more bad news: "We think they're probably an underestimation because alcohol is often overlooked as a cause of death." Alcohol, he explained, doesn't necessarily get blamed when someone dies by mixing it with other drugs like opiates and benzodiazepines. Since alcohol poisoning deaths typically take the form of respiratory arrest—the same thing as prescription opiates. "About 15 percent of prescription opioid deaths also involve alcohol," he said.

"I hate to be a real downer," Koob said before transitioning to another terrifying topic: liver damage. Young people in the UK are coming down with cirrhosis in record numbers recently, and given our increased drinking, Koob suspects the US might not be far behind. But can one New Year's Eve binge do irreversible damage to your liver? Maybe, he told me.

A major binge could conceivably wreak permanent havoc on your liver, "if an individual already has a compromised liver, or they have some other disease that can compromise their liver like hepatitis C, or even HIV, or they were just born that way," according to Koob.

Still, Koob knows damn well I'm going to be drinking on New Year's Eve, and he didn't try to talk me out of it. "Having three to four drinks on New Year's Eve is not a big deal if you pace it and have some food, and drink a good bit of water in between. You can enjoy it, and have a good time." He even went as far as to concede that "you're not gonna fry your brain with one binge of five drinks."

I didn't tell him this, but I might have six drinks on New Year's. In all honesty though, that's probably when I'll call it a night.

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of Drinking Myself to Death on New Year's Eve?

3/5: Sweating it

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics on her website and Twitter.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

It's weird to think that everyone is fucking. Like, sometimes a sexual experience feels so profound and unique that it's sad to think a ton of other people are doing the exact same thing. What's also weird is that sometimes sex can feel like love, even when it isn't. In my continuing quest to decipher the interplay between sex and love, I've been speaking with a number of porn performers to get their takes.

Recently I spoke with on- and off-screen couple Joanna Angel and Small Hands. Joanna Angel is, of course, a notorious director, porn star, and owner of burningangel.com. Small Hands entered the porn industry as a performer much later, when Joanna lost a bunch of footage and needed to use his penis to solve the problem. After the launch of his first video on BurningAngel.com, he began getting requested all the time.

The pair invited me into their San Fernando Valley home (we all hung on their bed!) (but we didn't have sex) and shared their perspectives on emotional attachment, monogamy, fantasy vs. reality, and, of course, anal.

So Sad Today: What do you think is the difference, if there is one, between sex and love?
Small Hands: I think the two can exist separately. And they can also overlap depending on the context of the situation. I don't think there's one way that it always is. You can have sex with someone and really love them and feel those feelings, or you can just fuck someone and they're both cool, and they both have their value. They're two things that sometimes are the same thing, but aren't always the same thing.

Joanna Angel: Yeah, I have sex with a bunch of people in life. But you're the only person I love , and the feeling we have is not a feeling I have with anyone else.

Have you ever caught feels for someone while you were filming?
SH:"Caught feels"? Is that what the kids are calling it?

JA: No, I think that's how I've been able to last in this industry for a really long time. I've had a lot of fun filming with people. Like great sexual experiences, lots of orgasms, and, you know, a lot of fun and a certain intensity. But never did I think, I'm in love with this person.

Are you able to just shut it off?
Yeah, I turn it on and then I shut it off. That's just what I do.

That's cool that you have that switch. Some of us don't have that switch, which sucks.
You don't get it overnight.

So do you have to grow the switch?
I don't know. I've been very motivated in this industry. I've always had certain goals. I've also been in this industry a long time. I've always had my own company, you know? My goal has always been, "I wanna move this company forward." So every scene I do, I take very seriously. Even when I was single I would look at the scenes a different way and be like, "Oh yes! I haven't gotten laid in a while! Today I'm definitely getting laid." And that was cool, but I still didn't take it out of the box. If I was falling in love with everyone I did a scene with, and I wanted to hang out with them and date them afterward...

SH: You'd be a very busy girl.

JA: Yeah. You know, I really was that girl before porn. A lot of times I'd have sex with someone and go, "So what's going on now?"

Like, "Where's the text? Where's the phone call? Where is this going?"
Yeah. I had a very hard time separating... I wasn't very good at sleeping with people and not talking to them again. I did it, but it wasn't natural to me the way it was natural to a lot of my friends. With porn there's something about the environment where I could be a slut. There was something about the environment that was comfortable to me.

For me, even if I go in with the intention of just being casual, if the sex is good, it's like I make some kind of spiritual connection and then am unable to detach.
You have to understand that a lot of what you have in porn, you don't have in real life. You have this controlled environment. You know where the beginning and the end is. When you have a one-night stand with someone, or you meet someone online or something, or meet someone at a bar or whatever, you still don't know where a lot of the feelings come from or what's going to happen. I mean there are a million reasons why two people end up having sex. But in porn, the reason why two people are having sex is because... you take away all the outside things that are around sex and you just have the sex.

SH: Also, the two people who show up on a porn set and have sex with each other don't choose. Like, if I go out to do a scene, half the time I don't even know who the girl is, or what her name is, until I get there. Maybe the night before... it's like you're just there to do the job, and it's a cool job and obviously at times a lot of fun, especially if you see the person you're with and it's like "All right she's hot this will be cool!"

If I got to request who I was shooting a porn with it would be Xander Corvus. My favorite is this one scene where he fucks his former babysitter, played by Melanie Rios. I love the consummation of years of longing on his character's part. Like, I love it when the dude looks like he is going to die if he doesn't eat her pussy. That to me is the ultimate hot.
JA: If they put a fantasy in your head...

SH: It was a success.

I also like twinks. Twinks are totally my milieu. There's this guy Tayte Hanson. He works with Cockyboys. He's gay though, so he would have no interest in me.
Is that hot to you? The fact that he doesn't have any interest? The unattainable...

Probably. The fact that I'm already rejected in advance is some of the allure.
You're very hard on yourself. What's the deal with that?

I think it's a coping skill. Like, if you're hard on yourself it gives you some sort of false purpose in life.
Because you have something to prove constantly?

Because you have something to achieve. Like, I can ignore the fact that I'm going to die at some point if I'm obsessing about bullshit like my pube style. It builds a false sense of the world as contained. My obsessions are, like, my pube style, eye-gazing, and mouth kissing in porn—like I write little narratives where the characters are in love with each other.
That's so funny. I mean, we talk to a million people about porn and I've never heard anyone have that, like the greatest love... I get when people like romantic or passionate scenes, but I've never heard anyone say they're putting together this epic love story while they're getting off. That's pretty cool.

Sometimes life feels sad when I watch a lot of porn and reality doesn't live up to it.
I mean, life isn't an album by The Weeknd.

I wish it was, though.
But that's the whole bit. Reality versus any sexuality, you want to live in those moments because they're so fucking cool. But you have to balance out real life, and it works across the board for porn.

But it's painful to let go of those moments. Sometimes it feels like sex and love—a deep sexual experience or a profound love fantasy—is a drug. Like, I've experienced withdrawal after a really beautiful...
JA: You know—and I know this from myself—relationships can drive people more crazy than drugs. I've seen it happen with me, or with friends. Like, when you want something from someone and you just can't get it. Or when two people aren't on the same page, you know, that makes people go crazy. That has nothing to do with porn.

Part of my interest in talking about this stuff, why I'm doing this interview, is to try to make sense of my own history of romantic obsession. For me, and probably with a lot of people, sex is about the fantasy component. And so I guess I'm still trying to parse what is fantasy and what is reality. Like, I'll watch a porn, and then I'm like, well why doesn't this IRL person have a giant cock? Would you ever date someone who had a small cock?
JA: No.

You just couldn't?
SH: On our first date she had to inspect me.

JA: I wasn't like that before porn. In fact I remember before porn, when I would have sex with a guy with a really big penis it like, scared me. You know? I just got accustomed to a certain thing. And you know, it made being single hard, because you can really get along with someone...

But you don't get along with their dick.
Yeah! You're like...fuck! If they have a small dick, all these other things are gonna go out the window, and I know that's horrible, and it doesn't mean that people with small penises are bad people. There are so many good people out there for guys with smaller penises—it's just not going to be me.

That's a shame.
I actually remember on our first date , we went out, and we were talking for hours and hours and hours and I was just falling for him, like, so hard. Like, this guy is so perfect... he probably has a small dick. Something has to be wrong! He must have a small dick. There's just no way he could possibly match everything I've ever been looking for in a human ever!

SH: And I'm like, "I hope my dick's big enough!"

Awwww! That's so cute.
JA: And we're talking and talking and he doesn't even realize I'm having, like, a mental breakdown. In my brain I'm just half listening to everything he's saying and half like, "I wish it was appropriate for me to just be like, 'How big is your dick?!'" You know?! And we met through friends, and I remember asking them...

You wanted to do a dick background check.
I remember asking them "Did you ever see his dick?" and they were like, "Why would I have seen his dick?" And I was like, "I don't know, maybe you were peeing in the same bathroom together, or something." But I figured it out pretty quickly.

And you were like "thank god!"
SH: Well I obviously knew what she did for work. In my mind I'm like, OK I can't be a douchebag. I'm not gonna try to have sex with her. Especially after we hung out all day and this girl is incredible. I really like her, so I was being overly gentlemanly. But then she like, inspected me, and I got a blowjob, which was sweet.

That's awesome!
At the time I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know about all this shit she was thinking so I was just like Cool, she likes me so much I got a blowjob. That's sweet! Then months later she was like, "Dude, I just needed to see how big your dick was."

Do you guys have relationship rules?
JA: I wouldn't like to call them rules, but there are...

Boundaries?
Yes, boundaries. I don't like to call them rules because rules mean that you want to break them, and you have to use all your restraint, you know? We have fun in a controlled environment, with other people on camera. We invite other females into our lives sometimes. On occasion I play with other girls. I like it when he's involved. He actually told me several months ago that he would think it was hot if I did something with a girl when he wasn't around and I did, and it actually took a lot for me. I'm kind of a really monogamous person, which is strange, because I don't consider anything on camera like... It's a controlled environment, and I'm not uncomfortable with anything that goes on on camera, and I have fun with that, but I would not be OK with him having any kind of sexual...

SH: We're not swingers.

So, it's just on cam?
It's like she said. If it's a night, and there's a female over here...

JA: We do it together, but not on his own.

SH: I have no desire to. My dick gets used enough already.

Your dick is in, like, triage.
JA: Yeah, we don't have full time sex slaves living in our house. We don't have girlfriends. We fuck girls together sometimes. I think it's very fun, and it's very cool. We really are on the same page, and I haven't been that way with anyone I've ever dated before. The guy I was dating before him was mostly like, "Well, you're doing porn so I should be able to fuck whoever I want, whenever I want, cause that's just fair." And I was like, "Well, I guess that makes sense." And it just started happening, and it stung, you know?

SH: I mean, every relationship is different. I think the only right way to do something is to have the two people communicate their needs, maybe what they're not comfortable with and as long as you both want to please the other person, then it's a mutual, beneficial thing.

Can I ask you about anal?
JA: You can ask me about anything!

So, when I watch porn, the characters are always having spontaneous anal. And their assess are perfectly clean at any given moment. But I feel like, with anal, when considering anal, I always have shit in my ass. Like, there's never not shit in my ass.
You should probably change your diet.

Really? What do you suggest? Is there an anal diet?
Every girl I know has their own thing that works for them, but if I'm gonna have anal sex, I don't eat anything spicy, don't really eat any dairy. It actually is kind of complicated because I do try to keep a low carb diet all the time but when I do anal it's good to have fiber.

Keep the passageways clear.
I have to say the most complicated part about being a porn star is figuring out how to have anal sex on camera and be all good.

SH: It's an art form. It's like a delicate ballet of diet and timing and everything.

Do you ever use an enema?
JA: I do, just with water. But that's a balance too because if you do it too soon before then you could just have water coming out of your butt, and during the scene you'll think it's not water, so you'll start clenching up. You know what I mean?

So when someone is having an orgasm, or a faux orgasm, on screen, what they're really thinking about is: Is there shit leaking out of my ass right now?
Well, what goes through our heads during the scene doesn't matter; it's whatever you think is going on in our heads that really matters.

Sometimes when I'm having sex I think about the ice cream in the other room...
I'm thinking about food a lot.

You're definitely thinking about the fantasies of a sandwich.
I think about food MOST of the time, and then there are little breaks in it where I'm thinking about sex. And then sometimes at the same time.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released next March from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

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Mike al-Mufreh in front of his restaurant, Ikermawi, in Jerusalem. All photos by the author

Since 1952, a small hummus restaurant called Ikermawihas stood in the most contested area of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving the same delicately flavored garbanzo bean spread through multiple wars, intifadas, and decades of sporadic violence. The restaurant sits directly adjacent to Damascus Gate, the entrance to the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City—a bottleneck for both Muslims and Jews seeking to access the city's holy sites that has historically been a center for bloodshed between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

In recent months, the area has once again become a flashpoint for violence, amid growing tensions over the important religious site known to Jews as the Temple Mount, and to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. Palestinians contend that the Israeli government is attempting to change the "status quo," which presently prevents Jews from praying on the site. The Israeli government has repeatedly denied such claims, but there is a growing right-wing movement that seeks to assert the rights of Jews to worship at the site.

At the center of it all—geographically speaking, at least—is Ikermawi. "You learn to never make any sudden movements," Mike al-Mufreh, the restaurant's chef and manager, told me. I asked him how many Palestinians have died near Ikermawi in the recent conflict and he struggles to count. "Seven, I think?"

In fact, there have been nine stabbing attacks within a few of minutes of the hummus joint, four of them within a couple hundred feet, resulting in ten deaths—eight Palestinians, two Jewish Israelis. The restaurant is inevitably intertwined with the ongoing conflict. One of al-Mufreh's coworkers is the cousin of Muhammad Nimr, a 37-year-old Palestinian who died last month after being shot by Israeli guards near Ikermawi. Al-Mufreh and his coworker claim that Nimr was drunk and attempted to scare the Israeli security officers as they walked by him, but that he had no knife. Israeli police reports, however, state that Nimrran at the officers wielding a knife, and video footage from security cameras shows Nimr appearing to run at two Israelis with a knife in hand.

Mike al-Mufreh in Ikermawi

Besides the horror of the violence, al-Mufreh said that the recent conflict has taken a toll on business. "Every time something happens we have to close immediately," he explained. Riots have taken place right outside the restaurant, and al-Mufreh said he's had to shelter the wounded, usually those hit with rubber bullets.

On a Friday afternoon this month, business was slow atIkermawi. Most customers took their hummus to-go while a few stayed and ate. Israeli police stood across the street, watching over the area. Al-Mufreh served dishes of hummus methodically, seeming to tune out the tensions around him: a scoop of hummus, a scoop of garbanzo beans, a glob of olive oil on top. Repeat.

On MUNCHIES: Hummus Is a Metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian Tensions

The secret to good hummus, according to al-Mufreh, is using exceptionally good garbanzo beans. "There shouldn't be any blemishes on them, they must be healthy" he told me, while picking up a bean and holding it up to the light for examination. The process of making hummus is not easy: Al-Mufreh's recipe takes a total of three days. First he soaks the beans for an entire day; then he slowly cooks them; on the third day, he blends the garbanzo beans with high-quality tahina (sesame paste), lemon juice, parsley, and water.

The result is an intensely delicious combination of flavorful garbanzo beans, creamy tahina, counterbalanced with the acidity and lightness of the lemon and parsley. Al-Mufreh says his customers keep coming back because of his hummus's special, robust flavor.

Mike al-Mufreh prepares a batch of hummus

Prior to the flare up, Ikermawi had a substantial Jewish Israeli customer base. "On Saturdays the place would be filled with Israelis," said al-Mufreh. "You couldn't even walk through the restaurant." Many secular Israelis used to cross into Palestinian areas on Saturdays to eat and shop, as Jewish-owned stores typically close for the Sabbath.

A Hebrew newspaper clipping still hangs in Ikermawi's window, praising the food. The article calls back to another time when Israelis ventured into Palestinian areas of Jerusalem more frequently for food and pleasure, when people simply came for the hummus.

Empty tables outside Ikermawi

Secular Jews have left the area gradually over the past decade, leaving mostly ultra-orthodox Haredim, who keep a strict kosher diet and do not eat at non-kosher restaurants like Ikermawi. Dressed in all black with long beards, the Haredim hurriedly walked by the restaurant on their way to prayer, constantly glancing over their shoulder.

Two young Palestinian construction workers sitting outside the restaurant said that Ikermawi is "one of best." We spoke as they hunched over their bowls, shoveling hummus into their mouths, and while they seemed more intent on eating than talking to me, they were quick to state that they would not allow the Israeli government to "take the Haram al Sharif from Muslims."

As for al-Mufreh, he's never considered moving until recently. He hopes that tensions will ease, business will return, and life will reach a relative calm but he is not optimistic. "I don't think things are going to get better," he told me. "There's just a bad feeling."

Follow Eliyahu Kamisher on Twitter.

Bill Cosby arriving at court in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Bill Cosby was formally charged on Wednesday for a decade-old sexual assault case in Pennsylvania that started the controversy consuming his career. The alleged victim is a former Temple University employee named Andrea Constand, who has long claimed that the world-famous comedian molested her in 2004 after handing her some blue pills and instructing her to take them with wine.

This past July, a long deposition from Constand's civil suit against Cosby was unsealed, and in it, he admitted to using Quaaludes to get women to become more amenable to his sexual advances. Dozens of women have come forward to say they had similar experiences, and Constand's outstanding accusation—the first officially levied against Cosby—became a hot-button political issue in suburban Philadelphia, and across the country. The charges were finally filed just days before the statute of limitations was set to expire in the Constand case. (Many of the other allegations against Cosby concern incidents where the statue of limitations have run out.)

That such a high-profile alleged serial rapist is finally facing criminal charges seems like a positive development. But does Cosby looking at the possibility of jail time mean anything for the 50-plus other women who have accused him of assault? And what are the chances he actually winds up behind bars? We spoke to Stuart Slotnick, a New York defense attorney, about what might happen next in the Cosby saga, and how his criminal case is likely to play out in court.

VICE: So what do these charges in Pennsylvania mean for the dozens of other women who have made similar accusations against Bill Cosby? Will there be more criminal charges forthcoming, and will this force other prosecutors to reexamine old cases?
Stuart Slotnick: I don't think that these charges have anything to do with what could happen with other cases where the plaintiffs made allegations against Bill Cosby. The reason is because in many of the cases, the statute of limitations has run out. That means the prosecutor cannot bring a case even if they want to bring a case. This particular case was looked at about ten years ago and the prosecutor could affect sentencing. If he's convicted of this case, then the prosecution will argue that it's not an one-off incident, and he's a sexual predator, and you should consider this while sentencing him.

Bill Cosby should be concerned, because the prosecution might try to bring in other complainants. And even though he's not charged with sexually assaulting the other complainants, there is a body of law that allows prosecutors to bring in uncharged alleged crimes to show that it's a common scheme or plan—or a modus operandi, an MO. So I can guarantee they will try to bring in other people to testify and say, "He called me up under the guise of an audition, he gave me alcohol and pills, my vision went blurry, and the next thing I knew I was naked and it was hours later."

If they can get that evidence in, it's very damning.

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Lemmy Kilmister, Bea Dunmore, and friends. Photo from the collection of Keli Raven, Bea Dunmore's brother

"Hey, let's go hang out with Lemmy!"

"Lemmy?" I said. " The Lemmy?"

It was 1990 or '91. I was on one of my semi-regular visits to Hollywood from my home in New York City, and for six years now, ever since the drunken summer night we'd first met at the Sunset Strip's notorious Rainbow Bar and Grill, my friend Bea Dunmore had been exhorting me in her glorious, throaty voice to join her in "hanging out" with various louche locals. Among them were karate black-belted rock stars, wizened nightclub owners, "hair-metal" drummers, 70s-era record producers, Jewish drug dealers with bona fide pharmacy degrees, bachelor-party strippers, music-video vixens—"That's my ass you see in the close-ups in Billy Idol's 'Eyes Without a Face,'" a saucy brunette told me—and bikini-clad mud wrestlers.

Bea—or "Little Black Bea," as she more than once referred to herself—was quite persuasive with her suggestions. A talented actress, she'd worked at certain times as a video vixen, a stripper, and a mud wrestler herself, and she was a true queen of the Hollywood scene. Outrageous yet accessible; my own age yet way more worldly; petite yet buxom; whip-smart yet insouciant; African-American yet totally accepted in the white world of heavy metal, Bea was quite simply one of the most unabashedly alive people I'd ever met.

What we most shared, I think, was an unfettered love of rock 'n' roll; she loved the music as much as any musician did. And whenever Bea urged me to join her in "hanging out" with someone, I found it hard to refuse.

"Lemmy?" I said. " The Lemmy? Lemmy Kilmister, from Motörhead?"

"Sure," said Bea. We were sitting in her crash pad, contemplating how to spend the day. "He's one of my best friends. Fantastic guy—I love him. You will, too. The king of the headbangers! Plus, you can discuss history with Lemmy, he's a history buff. A scholar. He's always reading history books. In fact, he's got a new song he played me called '1916.' It's about World War One or something."

"Doesn't he live in, like, England? London?"

Bea shook her wild-haired (or wildly hair-sprayed) head. "Nope, he just moved here. He lives a few blocks down the hill from the Rainbow. That's his favorite place in town. He said we can come and visit!"

"Hang out with Lemmy?" I muttered. Finally, the invitation sank in, and I sat bolt upright on Bea's sofa. "Fuck yes!"

Not only did Lemmy's badass mustache, black gunslinger attire, rolled-up shirtsleeves, and—most importantly—prodigious facial warts mark him as the most essential rock 'n' roller in the inhabited Milky Way, he by all accounts walked his talk 24/7. "The Keith Richards's Keith Richards," you might call him. Just the way the Lemmster sang onstage—with the microphone not level with his face but pointed down at him, as if he were howling at the moon, or at the gods, in a fierce lightning-storm—told you all you needed to know.

Then there was Lemmy's music, which was its own thing of wonder. Aside from Led Zeppelin, whose deep cuts, especially on Physical Graffiti and Presence, constituted their own glorious genre, an exotically seasoned and crunchy loud funk, I couldn't stand metal—Sabbath, Slayer, Priest, Metallica—it was too much redundant thudding and too many teenage boy concerns. But I always had time for Motörhead. Their sound was irresistible—a mercilessly headlong rush that sounded like the MC5 on speed (and the 5 already sounded as though they were on speed, so this was an overdose of speed). With that rush, you could never forget Lemmy's close association with the best of the British punks.

As for Lemmy's lyrics, they were as great or greater than the music. Like the man's interviews in rock magazines, where the worldview he expressed was half 60s hedonism, half no-nonsense street-wisdom, and 100-percent hilarious, the Motörhead lyrics were sui generis—"beyond category," as Duke Ellington would say. Somehow they managed to mock the typical metal subjects even while serving them up with all the élan, and then some. Think of the song "Killed by Death"—those three simple words render completely foolish the blacker side of metal's Reaper fetishizing. How fun to sing that chorus loud, though! Or listen (again, loudly) to "Eat the Rich," in which the class struggle suggested by the title gets subsumed by blowjob innuendoes—or does it? Just how should one begin to unpack a couplet like, "Sitting here in my hired tuxedo, / You want to see my bacon torpedo"?

I couldn't listen to a lot of Motörhead, since it all began to sound alike after half-a-dozen songs. Nevertheless, as Bea readily agreed with me, nothing could knock you down the way those half-a-dozen songs did. The only music that comes close in this effect is Ween's perfect Motörhead parody, "It's Gonna Be a Long Night."

Off to Lemmy's house we went. I don't remember, 25 years later, precisely how we got there. I probably drove us—but I didn't always have a rental car in LA, so we might have taken a cab or taken a bus or hitchhiked or even walked (all of which we did together when I was visiting). I also don't remember much of what we spoke about with Lemmy once we found him by the pool at his modest apartment complex, though I did ask him about the book he'd been reading, a paperback biography of Hitler. Not at all "scholarly" though certainly historical, the book looked as if it had been purchased via an ad in the back of, say, Soldier of Fortune magazine.

I do remember a few things from that afternoon: how surprised I was by what Lemmy was wearing (a Speedo or some similarly small-sized bathing suit); how slightly disappointed by my presence he seemed at first (perhaps when Bea told him she was bringing "a friend," he assumed it was a lady friend); and how polite and quietly amiable he was once he'd warmed up with me conversationally. Hardly the raging rock beast of reputation, he was a perfect English gent.

I also remember that Bea kept peppering Lemmy with questions about his latest music. She likewise kept wanting to dance. (As I've said, her love for rock 'n' roll was deep, wide, and nonstop.) Eventually the three of us walked to the Rainbow together, where the staff gladly greeted Lemmy and Bea, valued customers, and me, their "guess-he-can't-be-too-bad" companion. By then, of course, Lemmy had ditched his bathing suit and put on his proper rocker uniform, and we left him at the bar when he got started on his second glass of Jack Daniels.

Lemmy in 2009. Portrait by Chris Shonting for VICE

Since that afternoon, I've "dined out" with fellow Motörhead fans on the story of my hang with Lemmy. Unfortunately, I couldn't share the fond memory for very long with Bea, because we fell out of touch. This was mostly accidental: In those pre-cellphone, pre-internet days, it wasn't so easy to keep up with someone when they kept changing their address and therefore their phone number. But I've always felt particularly responsible for losing contact with Bea, because the last time I saw her (about a year after I met Lemmy), she got in a strange mood with me when I stopped by to see her, and this annoyed me, and I decided not to see her again during that LA visit.

Back in New York a few months later, however, I started to miss Bea and tried to call her, but her number had been disconnected. She'd often mentioned her mother and brother to me, but I had no way of reaching them either. And whenever I returned to Hollywood, I made a point of visiting the Rainbow and asking the bouncers there if they'd encountered Bea.

"Not in a long time," they always said.

Meanwhile, my enjoyment of Lemmy's music continued. I went to Lemmy's 50th birthday concert at the Whiskey on the Strip, and laughed along with everyone else at the opening act, Metallica, who all dressed up like Lemmy and played Motörhead songs.

While waiting to get into the venue that night, I felt sorry for a drugged-out patron who'd been kicked out of the place. Because he was too drugged out to notice that some prankster had set his pant leg on fire with a lighter, I started stamping on his leg to put the fire out, and not understanding why I was doing this, he turned all his fury on me, thereby proving true the adage, "No good deed goes unpunished."

In the late 90s, I began dating a lovely Norwegian woman in Paris. We didn't stay a couple, but we had a child together, becoming dear friends as well as co-parents in the process. Ingunn too was a Motörhead fan, and her brother Ols was an even greater Motörhead-head. Whenever I found an article about Lemmy in a magazine, I clipped it and sent it to him. Then, as soon as my son with Ingunn was old enough, we started playing Motörhead music for him, and Gabriel came to dig Lemmy as much as we did. At nine or ten I brought Gabriel to one of his first rock concerts, Motörhead at the Zenith in Paris, and one of my sweetest memories of my son's childhood is our dancing like lunatics together to "The Ace of Spades."

From time to time while in LA, I ran into Lemmy again at the Rainbow—he was usually alone, usually at the video-poker game—and I would remind him of how we'd met. I figured he might know where Bea was, but he didn't. Or maybe he did know but said he didn't in order to protect her privacy from a New York guy he only dimly remembered meeting, if he remembered me at all. From time to time, too, I would look up Bea's name on the internet, but never found out where she was living, much less any way to contact her.

Her trail was cold—until two years ago.

Two years ago, checking her name online for the first time in many moons, I saw that a party had just been held in her honor at, where else, the Rainbow. Except the party wasn't in "her honor," exactly—it was in her memory. She'd passed away a few days before, at age 50.

Despite our not having spoken in 20 years, the news of Bea's young death shook me up terribly. To lose a friend who's your own age reminds you that you're mortal; to lose a friend you'd tried and failed to reunite with teaches you something different: how cruel fate can be. If only I'd tried harder to reconnect with her , I kept telling myself. And now, two years after Bea, Lemmy has left the Hollywood scene, too, dying of cancer just following his 70th birthday.

I can't say how close Lemmy and Bea remained with each other as friends, or how close they ever were. But I think of Bea now as a sort of yin to Lemmy's yang—the true fan who complements the artist by a boundless love of the art. What Lemmy heard in early rock 'n' roll, Bea heard in Motörhead and the other headbanger music she loved, and in her own fashion, Bea was every bit as colorful, as electrifying, and as archetypal a rock 'n' roll figure as Lemmy was. It took each of them, rocker and rock fan, to make the music pulsate to the nth degree. The two of them, their two kinds, were both needed to complete the aesthetic circuit. So I'll be missing them separately, the Bea I once knew well and the Lemmy I hardly knew at all—but I'll also be missing them as a unit, missing them together.

Gary Lippman is a journalist, author, and visual artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, VICE, Open City, Sex and Design, and Fodors Travel Guides.

The Trans-Siberian Railway. Photo via Flickr user Andrew and Annemarie

My last New Year's was a unique trip. I had recently graduated from a Canadian university, where I'd been doing research on contemporary Russian politics. After spending the past years exploring Russia theoretically, I had decided to use my newly found free time to travel from Russia's far eastern outpost of Vladivostok, across seven time zones, to Moscow. It was exciting to finally get to experience the full length of world's largest and weirdest country by train. Third class, Soviet-style.

That I was going to be spending New Year's on the train, somewhere between Lake Baikal and the Urals, just seemed like an odd bonus. There is something appealing about being in a non-place at the right time. What I didn't imagine was that I'd be celebrating the proverbial ball drop with fanatical activists who would make the political condition I'd written my thesis on come to life in all its amazing absurdity.

By New Year's Eve, I'd been on the train for almost a week, and smelled accordingly. Unsurprisingly, there are no showers in third class, and not much privacy either. Rather than having discrete compartments, each car is divided into a dozen or so open segments. During the afternoon the train had nearly emptied, and I was starting to worry I'd end up with no-one to clink glasses with.

I started the night by pre-partying in the restaurant-car, which was also deserted, save for the staff. In proper Russian fashion, the attendants asked me to join them for traditional appetizers and vodka shots. Thus began a Groundhog Day–style approach to the celebration, fuelled of course by copious amounts of booze.

The thing about New Year's on the Trans-Siberian is that time is ambiguous. While all Russian trains run on Moscow time, the passing villages will be on theirs. Meanwhile, passengers and staff will generally go by their home time zones for the magic hour. So by the time I returned to my car, after one round of drinks and the first of many rounds of the ubiquitous New Year countdown with the restaurant staff (Pacific Time), my night had only just begun.

A Facebook post listing "ugliest girls" at a high school is basically the digital equivalent of the Burn Book. Still via 'Mean Girls'

It's really no surprise that teenagers are ridiculously awful to each other. It could have something to do with raging hormones and the animosity stoked by being stuck living with your parents in a bleak small town, but nevertheless, cyberbullying has been around since bored teens got their hands on DSL-connected desktops in the early 2000s. In the latest case of potential cyberbullying at a Newfoundland junior high, cops are investigating claims that a list of "ugliest girls" in Grade 9 at the school, St. James Regional High, was posted on social media.

"We're still trying to determine who posted it on Facebook," RCMP Sergeant Terry Alexander told The Canadian Press. "We have no idea." Police have been conducting interviews to try to find out the original poster of the list, which contained about a half dozen names of girls from the school in Port aux Basques, a port town of just over 4,000 people. The list was put up on Facebook on December 17 and reported to police the following day.

The list is the second case of cyberbullying harassment investigation in Newfoundland in the last month. In the previous case, a similar poll was posted on ask.fm about Grade 12 girls from Holy Trinity High in Torbay, a town with a population of just over 7,000.

Lynelle Cantwell, one of the girls listed on the Holy Trinity High poll earlier this month, made her own post on social media in response: "I'm sorry that your life is so miserable that you have to try to bring others down... To the 12 people that voted for me to bring me to 4th place, I'm sorry for you too. I'm sorry that you don't get to know me as a person."

Even though police are investigating the case, and cops could potentially charge for criminal harassment, that's usually reserved for threats of bodily harm or livelihood. In Canada, unless cyberbullying contains revenge porn, criminal conviction is improbable.

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Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo by Jeff Cottenden/Courtesy of Knopf

The first big literary dust-up of 2015 occurred when Kazuo Ishiguro expressed worry that some of his fans would be put off by his new novel: "Will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?" This seeming slight against genre fiction by an acclaimed literary author was taken as another campaign in the decades-long genre wars. Partisans on both sides took up arms in interviews and essays, with no less than Ursula K. Le Guin arguing the book was clearly fantasy and that Ishiguro's snobbery had made it a failure: "It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, 'Are they going say I'm a tight-rope walker?'"

But what soon became apparent is that the debate was less a grand debate about genre and literary fiction than a small debate over semantics. Was The Buried Giant in the same genre as 20th-century fantasy classics like Lord of the Rings, or was it better categorized as a modern take on medieval Romances and Arthurian legends? And does it even matter? Pretty soon Ishiguro, whose previous book was a sci-fi novel about clones and considers Westerns and samurai films to be major influences, clarified that he was "on the side of the pixies and the dragons."

The whole thing was quickly forgotten, as well it should have been because it's time for us to declare an end to the genre wars. We are in an age when superhero and Harry Potter films dominate audiences and highbrow magazines cover Game of Thrones and Sherlock while literary writers employ zombies and apocalypses in their novels. The artificial boundaries between literary fiction and genre fiction have never been thinner. Last year many of the most acclaimed and bestselling books where from so-called genre authors publishing on literary presses, such as Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy on FSG, and so-called literary authors publishing genre-infused books, such as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. This peace is seen not only in sales, but in the increasing way books contend for both genre and literary awards. Station Eleven was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke award. David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks was long-listed for the Man Booker, and won the 2015 World Fantasy Award. At last year's National Book Awards, the lifetime achievement was given to Ursula K. Le Guin with an introduction from Neil Gaiman.

So let's say goodbye to the genre wars with a look at 11 great books from 2015 that showed how much those walls have collapsed.

'The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy,' edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill

The Best American Short Stories anthology has been running for 100 years, and in the last century the Best American series has expanded to Essays, Comics, Travel Writing, and more. But 2015 was the first time the series has been expanded to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Sure, one could argue that if the genre walls were completely finished, there would be no need for a separate anthology. Still, a look at the table of contents shows a mix of genre and literary stalwarts, from Neil Gaiman and Jo Walton to Karen Russell and T. C. Boyle. The stories are also drawn from publications in both worlds, with stories first appearing in the New Yorker and McSweeney's alongside those from Tor.com and Asimov's Science Fiction.

'The Buried Giant,' by Kazuo Ishiguro

Controversy aside, Ishiguro's novel was an impressive melding of fantasy and philosophy, weaving an Arthurian quest with deep musings on memory, loss, and war. The New York Times called The Buried Giant "the weirdest, riskiest and most ambitious thing he's published in his celebrated 33-year career." Luckily for readers, he pulled it off.

'Get in Trouble,' by Kelly Link

Link has been smashing down genre walls for decades with her brilliant story collections that mix fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and YA with beautiful sentences and unforgettable characters. Get in Trouble, her fourth collection, was published in hardcover this year and quickly became one of the most talked about collections in both the genre and literary worlds.

'A Planet for Rent,' by Yoss

This hilarious and imaginative novel by Cuba's premiere science-fiction writer gets my vote for most overlooked novel of the year. Yoss's book imagines a world where Earth is run as a tourist destination by capitalist aliens who have little regard for the planet or its inhabitants. A Planet for Rent is a perfect SF satire for our era of massive inequality and seemingly unchecked environmental destruction.

'The Fifth Season,' by N. K. Jemisin

Jemisin's works have long been acclaimed in the SF/F communities, and it's high time she broke out with literary audiences. The Fifth Season, the first book of her new series about oppressed sorcerers that is partly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, might just do that. It received great reviews in literary outlets and has been deservedly making many year-end lists, including the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2015 . Jemisin was also hired this year to write Otherworldly, the new science fiction and fantasy column in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

'Haints Stay,' by Colin Winnette

In my review of Winnette's surreal Western I wrote, "Great genre fiction takes its tropes and twists them into new shapes. In that way, Haints Stay recalls another novel of murdering brothers: Patrick deWitt's fantastic 2011 novel The Sisters Brothers . But where deWitt's novel puts an existential spin on the Western, Winnette's ventures into myth and unreality. This is a land where you must bury the teeth of your enemies or be haunted by their ghosts. If you aren't careful, you may wake to find a cannibal eating your limb."

'Undermajordomo Minor,' by Patrick deWitt

Speaking of deWitt, his latest hilariously inventive novel is another spin on a classic genre. But instead of Westerns as in his last novel, The Sisters Brothers, he takes on fables and fairy tales. Lucien (A.K.A. Lucy) Minor leaves his small village for a life of (mis)adventure as the assistant to the Majordomo at the dark Castle Von Aux. Fans of fairy tales and black comedy should be sure to put Undermajordomo Minor on their list.

'You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,' by Alexandra Kleeman

One of the most highly praised debuts this year, Kleeman's novel is a hilarious yet philosophical satire on our weird obsessions about food and bodies. It exists alongside the works of George Saunders in that nebulous overlap zone of satire, near-future SF, and postmodernism. No matter what label you put on it, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was one of 2015's great reads.

'The Heart Goes Last,' by Margaret Atwood

Atwood has been doing the literary/genre crossover thing since long before it was cool. Her works of speculative fiction—the label she prefers—are frequently piercing satires of our society through the lens of near-future or alternative realities. Her latest, The Heart Goes Last, is yet another entry, crafting a dystopia of economic collapse and control that is too close to present realities for comfort.

'Aurora,' by Kim Stanley Robinson

Several of the books on this list offer grim dystopian visions of our present and future, but Kim Stanley Robinson's latest epic, Aurora, is a nice antidote to the pessimism. Called "a rousing tribute to the human spirit" by the San Francisco Chronicle, Aurora envisions humanity's first trip to another solar system.

'Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe,' by Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti has long been a cult horror writer with a small but dedicated following. However, his nihilistic cosmic horror (think Lovecraft with less adventure and monsters and more existential dread) broke into the public consciousness when the first season of True Detective used his writings as the basis for much of Rust Cohle's dialogue. This year, Ligotti became one of only a handful of living authors to have a Penguin Classics edition of his work when they reprinted his first two books as a single volume.

Lincoln Michel is the co-editor of Gigantic and the online editor of Electric Literature. His debut collection Upright Beasts was published this October by Coffee House Press. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and on Twitter.

Screenshot via 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee'

Read: Listen to Marc Maron Interview President Obama on His 'WTF' Podcast

The seventh season of Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee kicked off Wednesday night by ditching its comedy-centric format in favor of an interview with President Barack Obama.

The outgoing US leader has spent the last several months having on-the-record chats with everyone from Bill Simmons to Marc Maron to Marilynne Robinson, so an interview with one of the most famous stand-ups of all time isn't exactly shocking, but it's still an enjoyably low-key affair; the pair strolls the White House grounds talking about cursing, to the president's underwear drawer, power-crazed world leaders, and the perils of notoriety.

"I would love to just be taking a walk, and then I run into you, you're sitting on a bench," Obama says to Seinfeld. "Anonymity's not something you think about as being valuable."

"With all due respect," Seinfeld responds, "I remember very well not being famous. It wasn't that great."

You can watch the entire episode on the show's website and stay tuned for new episodes every Wednesday at 11:30 PM EST.

The author with his baby's squad

You gotta bring the baby around other people of its same altitude. Let the babies all squad up, that's how they trade baby info and compare baby notes and kick all of their baby activities up a notch. Babies learn quicker around other babies, they see other babies do or say this or that thing and they're like, "Oh, tight. That's what all the other babies are on, OK, lemme level up."

Teach the baby how to organize all the other babies and run up into the mall like 40 deep, grab ten tiny Polo jackets a piece and jet, sell them on the black market. Let the baby shoot dice with all the other neighborhood babies and then let the baby buy you dinner for a change.

The baby will be hella bored of its own toys but then see another baby come around who's super juiced off the toys and the first baby will be like, "Huh, maybe there's something to these things after all," and fuck with the toys some more with a renewed vigor and zest for life.

Let the baby shoot dice with all the other neighborhood babies and then let the baby buy you dinner for a change.

From what I can tell, babies all have hella advanced jokes, too. Like a baby will just raise its eyebrows at another baby and they'll both start cracking up. Babies are wavy as fuck.

Babies are down to just kind of stare at each other and not even say much. They don't feel some constant urge to fill the void of silence with small talk. The baby has no concept of what's awkward. They'll straight up just reach out and touch each other's faces like "I wonder what your nose feels like. Oh, it feels like that. Word, word."

That being said, they can be moody as fuck and burst into tears off the weirdest shit. Like one baby might insist that the other one take a sip off they lil juice bottle or whatever and then cry like a baby when the other one is like "Naw, I'm good." There's gonna be some grabbing and pushing, yelling, maybe even some mild scraps. You gotta basically be a boxing ref—separate them, move them to different corners and let them lumber back toward each other for a few more rounds. It's a learning process.

If there aren't any available babies, older kids will do fine. A baby will pick up a lot from an older kid and the older kid will usually find the baby an interesting enough novelty to pay attention to for a while. As the kids grow up, the age gap becomes less of a thing and then when they're all adults they'll be like "Oh yeah we been folks since we was babies," and that seems like a positive thing, I guess? I don't know, man. I can't believe I get paid to write a parenting column.

The babies will be running things soon enough. Already are, to be quite frank with you.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, get your baby to squad up with other babies, mane. Get their lampage levels up, baby lamping is important. Get the babies really working all the baby rooms, get them babies shmoozing early, furl me? You got to get them active, whip the babies into a little frenzy, get them hyped, get the babies to form rival dance crews and have dance battles, get 'em poppin' and lockin', my dude. Get these babies into fraternal orders with advanced step routines and complex multi-part secret handshakes. Let the babies organize, let the babies get the jump on you, put some fire under your ass, hit the ball back into your court. The babies will be running things soon enough. Already are, to be quite frank with you. We're part of a feedback loop of consciousness that's cosmic in proportion. Get these babies to march on Washington, to rock over London, to rock on Chicago, to swag on these ducks, to sit in, to drop out, and tune in to the universal consciousness, to dig love and peace, to destroy police property in protest of police brutality, to serve and protect without the copper badge, to dissolve the wills of gun manufacturers with their mere social attitudes, to universalize love as the primary motive, to move toward a collective agreement on the infinite concept of love, etc., etc. Just put all these babies in the world together with each other and see what they do.

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If American race relations in 2015 seemed like one enormous déjà vu, revisiting Margaret Walker Alexander's 1942 poem "For My People" helps drive that point home. She expansively captured the highs and lows of black society, championing the certain joys of family, church and community, pointing an accusing finger at duplicitous elements:

"For my people ... distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, false prophet and holy believer ..."

Residents of Chicago, a character in "For My People" and the city where Alexander once lived, certainly know a thing or two about facile forces of state in the person of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, currently in the hot seat for his actions—or lack thereof—after the grotesque police shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

It doesn't help that police shot and killed two more residents on Saturday after the father of one victim, 19-year-old engineering student Quintonio LeGrier, had called 9-1-1 seeking help for his distraught son, who was at home wielding a baseball bat during a mental breakdown. LeGrier's neighbor, 55-year-old Bettie Jones, perished in the pursuit, guilty only of answering the door so police could get in to minister to LeGrier's needs, according to his father.

The McDonald case and others like it have put Chicago and its mayor in the national spotlight just as the neo-civil rights movement in the guise of Black Lives Matter is leveraging pressure and awareness of police brutality in black communities. If Emanuel flew under the radar of #sayhername activists who uplifted the name of Rekia Boyd, an unarmed Chicago woman shot and killed by off-duty police officer Dante Servin, he certainly isn't now.

Protesters like those from the Black Youth Project 100, one of the leading activist groups challenging Emanuel, have been unrelenting in pressing the need for safety from police in a city where residents in poor black and brown communities need to be protected from criminals, too. The city has seen days and weeks of protests in front of posh retail establishments, City Hall, police headquarters and even the mayor's own house.

Let's not forget that Chicago was in the grip of an epidemic of youth murders before Emanuel came to office and before 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida by a wannabe cop who got off. And before another cop mistook 18-year-old Michael Brown for a monster and felt perfectly sane in saying so because he knows so many others don't regard black men has fully human anyway. Residents have sought answers to community-based gun violence since before the 2013 death of fresh-faced 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, which drew the attention of the White House where Emanuel's friends, the Obamas, live.

Believe it or not, African Americans want to call the police, too.

And yet a sense of rote operation—tone-deaf, automatic and without empathy— has been infused in the response to a judge's order to release the McDonald video and Emanuel's actions since then, such as the Wednesday announcement of new policies to change way police use excessive force.

For example, how is it that the cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Brown in Ferguson or Eric Garner in New York or Freddie Gray in Baltimore could be evaluated outside of a context that considers police culture? These tragedies have provided plenty of opportunities to address broader systemic problems such as how race and history intersect—with often-tragic results for people of color. Yet there's a resistance to rebuilding a centuries-old justice system never meant to protect protect them, regarding their spaces as places to occupy and control rather than serve. From Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow to mounds of other research, we know the problem—and the answers. The fact is Chicago police apparently showed up to the LeGrier home more ready to shoot to kill than to help.

It's notable that Emanuel, whose first run for Chicago mayor got a lift from the blessing of President Obama, benefited from a sort of shorthand for black and brown voters affected by violence. Many apparently felt no need to do due any further due diligence on a candidate with a lengthy record of championing causes antithetical to their plight, such as being anti-union.

If more Chicagoans spend as much time marching to the polls next year as they have downtown blocking retail traffic that, too, will be progress. If every 18-year-old high school senior registers to vote for everything from judges and the state's attorney to president—and actually follows through to show critical mass—people like Emanuel who keep wishing it all would go away will know better.

But then again, Alexander knew that, too:

"Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control."

Deborah Douglas is a Chicago-based journalist and adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University.

Image via the author's Instagram/Tinder

Like most of pop culture, "fuckboy" is a term largely appropriated from black culture. You can find an early version the term used on the hook of Cam'ron's "Boy Boy" ("Oh this cat over frontin'? Fuck boy, boy!") back in 2002. In 2003, Petey Pablo rapped, "I don't blame you, I blame yo mammy bitch / She shouldn't've fucked yo daddy, she should've sucked his dick / You a punk boy, a fuckboy" on "U Don't Want Dat." The implication here is that the fuckboy is a man who is weak, or lame—a worthless poser of sorts, who might not even deserve to exist. However, in the last few years, a new definition of fuckboy has emerged, thanks to the internet's habit of recontextualizing everything. Today, the fuckboy has come to mean a promiscuous man, the kind of promiscuous man who is manipulative and cocky while still being a worthless poser. He is the perfect combination of a "basic bitch" and a "slut," two insults that are rarely levied against men.

Before fuckboy assumed its current form, there wasn't really a term for this special snowflake of a man. Sure, there are words like "manwhore" and "asshole," but the latter lacks the sting of "basic bitch," and the former is still unnecessarily rooted in the idea that there's such a thing as "too much sex" for a women. Men with active sex lives tend to be congratulated more than degraded. (Although, that's not to say promiscuity is the problem. In a perfect world, we would all be able to have equally active sex lives as long as we weren't hurting anybody else in the process.) But the fuckboy is not interested in the feelings of others, and that is why he is a fuckboy.

Fuckboys are men who date to serve their egos. They are entitled, predictable, uninteresting, and hollow. They attempt to make conversations about things only they know about. They tell horrible jokes, and are offended if you don't laugh. They complain that you are clingy and say things like, "you need to chill" when you ask why they haven't texted you in five days. They are easily intimidated by women who are smarter or more successful than them. Heterosexual women needed a word like this in our lives, a word that could serve as both an insult and a warning as we try to date in the age of swiping right only to receive a deluge of unasked for dick pics (it's different if I ask for them, which I usually do). It's a sign that we are no longer willing to tolerate the bullshit. Not only do we know what you're up to, but we can finally call you out on it.

Image via the author's Instagram

The biggest lesson this fuckboy phenomenon has taught me is that they're not going anywhere. In fact, they're increasing in numbers. Some fuckboy behavior I have encountered includes: being texted by a man who claimed to "miss me" a year after we had only been on one date, only to hang out with me one more time and then tell me he couldn't see me again because he had met someone new; a guy telling me he wanted to see me (but only in the context of me going to see his shitty band play some shitty show); a guy sending me furious text messages until four in the morning because I didn't want to have sex with him on our first date; and a guy who refused to believe that I had gotten food poisoning on a date and instead insisted that I was just drunk and didn't realize it.

This past year has not been so great for me romantically. I've attempted being in an open relationship, which failed miserably. I got back together with two different men from my past, which failed miserably. I attempted to use self-help books to find love, which (you guessed it!) also failed miserably. I've been ghosted, both in the "guy stops texting me" sense and the "guy leaves the country for good" sense. It has been exhausting to try to encounter deep, romantic love, to the point that I have often considered giving up on the whole endeavor completely.

But what am I going to do, not date at all? Sincerely sit around and wait for the right guy to come along? Fuck that. I'm too impatient and too horny to wait, and too broke to not accept free drinks.

This is where fuckboys re-enter the picture.

I shouldn't have to distance myself from casual sex, dating, and everything in-between, all because I fear it might hurt me. That's letting the fuckboys win. And when the fuckboys win, none of us win. In this new year, rather than quitting fuckboys for good, I'm going to tackle them head on.

The biggest mistake I've made with these men in the past was let their desires have priority over mine. I let them dictate to me what my feelings were, without questioning their fuckboy logic. But if this past year has taught me anything, it's that I no longer have a problem standing up for myself. It's possible, empowering even, for a woman to engage in fuckboy-esque behavior as a method of genuinely expressing what she wants. Something tells me they really won't mind my non-committal attitude, to the point that I will be able to use their fuckboydom to my advantage.

It can be fun to have a fuckboy in your life, as long as you know he's only that—a boy to fuck, and nothing more. A boy whose lectures about craft beer and half-written screenplays you can drown out with your own lectures about whatever you want. A boy whose invitations to see his bad band play at some bad bar you can wholeheartedly ignore. A boy you can force to watch reruns of Wahlburgers with you. A boy you can deal with strictly on your own terms, because he's so interchangeable there's a whole word for him.

Although maybe in 2016 we should work on calling them something else, seeing that fuckboy was never meant to be what it is now. I'm going to propose "whateverman." As in: "Why are you with that guy?"

"Whatever, man."

Follow Alison on Twitter.

There's an old joke out there about forcing politicians to wear Nascar uniforms that tell us who their corporate sponsors are. I can't seem to trace it back to its origin, but I assume it was an email forward from someone's uncle. Now, it's looking conceivable that that joke could soon be a non-humorous, actual thing, legally required in the State of California.

"I wish I could claim that this was original to me, but it's not," businessman John Cox told VICE in an interview. Cox is behind a proposed 2016 California ballot initiative pushing to make the sticker plan a reality. "Some people told me that it was either Bill Maher or Robin Williams who suggested it in a standup routine. So it's been out there as an idea, and we're adopting it."

While the idea is still nothing more than an idea, California just might be the right place to try it out. As one of the top three states in terms of number of ballot measures created to produce new laws (The other two are Colorado and Oregon), the 2016 California ballot is expected to be freakishly overstuffed this November. Steve Maviglio, a campaign strategist, told the LA Times in November of 2015 that the California ballot is going to "look like the Encyclopedia Brittanica."

A mockup of California Governor Jerry Brown

If you can get get 365,000 valid signatures your issue goes on the ballot. It's not as though getting one percent of the entire population of California to endorse your idea is easy or anything, but if you've got some money burning a hole in your pocket, and the desire to change something politically, it's doable.

Cox seems to fit the bill. He's an investment manager and a self-identified "Jack Kemp Republican." He hasn't held political office, but he was once president of the Cook County, Illinois Republican Party. "I've run for office in Illinois unsuccessfully several times," he said, before becoming disillusioned and seeking change by other means.

But precisely what is the change he has in mind?

"This initiative will require every state legislator to wear on his coat, stickers, or some kind of logo representing their top ten contributors," Cox explained. Even if not an actual sports coat, the logos must be worn on the legislator's person. "It can't be a sign that they hold up."

John Cox

Cox says he aims to do something about politics and money, even if the sticker plan fails, because he sees it as the bipartisan political issue du jour. "Trump, Sanders—everybody Identifies the problem. The issue is, what is the best solution?"

The issue of money in politics has been front-and-center during this recent presidential election. On one hand, funding—like poll numbers—gets covered horse race-style: We all know Jeb Bush is the best-funded Republican, Trump is theoretically self-funded, and Sanders and Clinton show that Democrats can have impressively-stuffed campaign coffers too. Meanwhile, even candidates other than Sanders and Trump, including Hillary Clinton have at least paid lip service to the idea of limiting campaign funds.

Cox and his "California is Not for Sale" campaign began holding press events back in November of 2015. At each event all 120 members of the California Legislature were rendered as life-size cardboard cutouts, standing around plastered with the logos of corporations, as well as interest groups and unions.

"It's funny and it's inventive, but it really is a serious proposal," Cox insisted. However, it's expressly a way to ridicule America's broken campaign finance system, and is not meant to be a quick, at-a-glance method for telling what a politician's interests are.

"I'd like to tell you that we're doing this so that people can make good judgments about is this a good guy or a bad guy?" he said, "but that's really not part of our motivation."

"To us, the whole system is the bad guy," he added.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user Savara

No matter what eat-right-and-exercise intentions you're starting this year with, chances are 2016 began the same way 2015 did: with the kind of bone-deep hangover that leaves your eyes bloodshot, your hands shaking, and your head soggy and full of fear. January 1 is always punctuated by the memories of embarrassing and offensive things you did on December 31. We can't help you change that. But we can give you something to look at while you hide out in you room, and perhaps provide some emotional respite and guidance.

Hangover Cures with Nick Liu

When you feel like an empty ball of pain, hollow and useless to the human race, you can always distract yourself from your shame spiral by thinking of all the delicious things that await you when you finally get up the energy to get an egg sandwich. Or just watch Nick Liu nurse Matty Matheson back to health through Chinese comfort food, and pray for your own benevolent food angel.

The Cute Show: Wiener Dog Races!

If you're feeling particularly endorphin-starved, there's only one solution: cute animal videos. This is literally the reason the internet was invented. Don't fight it.

Space Barbie

Speaking of the internet, there is no better time to delve into its deep and sweet trove of oddities than when you're confined to a dark room nursing a coconut water. Meet the people behind the cat videos, find your next sexual fixation, or transcend time and the cosmos with a human Barbie.

Get Fit with Sara Sampaio

You've made it this far, now it's time to get stuck into some not-fully-thought-through resolutions. In 2016 your clothes will not be covered in a perma-crust of spilled food, you won't be a hot ball of anxiety, you will establish the basic outline of a unique identity. But first you need to make the promise you've made and broken so many times, but will never stop believing in: This year you will get healthy and never drink again.

Muslim-American men pray in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan as part of a demonstration against Donald Trump in December. (Photo by Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

I first felt what it meant to be an outsider on a work trip to Israel. My headscarf marked me as a Muslim, and it was clear some Israelis assumed I was an Arab, and by their logic, unwelcome. People pointed, stared, treated me rudely. Security checks at borders were longer and more intrusive ordeals for me than for my non-Muslim colleagues, and I grew frustrated and exhausted with constantly having to provide details on my family background and nationality to prove my identity.

But I told myself this was expected, especially during these tense times, and tried not to take it personally. Does everyone tell themselves these sorts of things when they are profiled? I just wanted to finish my work and leave as soon as possible for friendlier territory—East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and finally, America, my home. Sure enough, when I got off the plane in the US, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. No one at the airport, grocery store, or mall stared or treated me differently. I was American, the same as everyone else.

However, this was all before San Bernardino, before the alleged shooters were identified as Muslim, before Donald Trump's call to ban Muslims from coming to America full stop, before the sudden spike in violence and threats against American Muslims. My Muslim friends and family worried about being harassed or attacked; some women I knew considered taking off their hijabs. It was overwhelming—Islamophobic incidents were already on the rise after the Paris attacks just a month earlier, but San Bernardino and its aftermath hit much closer to home.

What was perhaps most frightening of all was the sense that that the need to prove myself had followed me from Israel to America. I had not changed, but all of a sudden my religion made me a target of suspicion. This is not my imagination, and the phenomenon is not limited to a few loud far-right voices. While he was careful to make the distinction between ISIS and Islam in a recent speech, even President Barack Obama stated that it was the "responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization."

Watch a recap of our coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement:

Imagine if Obama had replaced "Muslims around the world" with "white Americans" or "Christians" in reference to white supremacists like Dylan Roof, who killed nine people in a Charleston church this summer, or Robert Lewis Dear, a self-identifying Christian who killed three at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs just a few days before the San Bernardino tragedy. This would no doubt be met with widespread outrage. In fact, if you ask white Americans whether they should be held responsible for Dear's actions, they emphatically disagree. They feel no need to root out white supremacist or radical Christian propaganda, and insist, correctly, that they're separate from such extremists. So why isn't the same courtesy extended to Muslims? Why is this associated blame so commonplace?

I entered the counterterrorism field because I felt a civic obligation as an American, not a religious one as a Muslim. And as someone who has written extensively about my experience as a Muslim American, the double standards are frustrating and, frankly, exhausting. It seems that nothing we say or do is enough, and the countless condemnations of terrorism by Muslims fall on deaf ears. Islamophobic rhetoric and attacks continue without consequence. It is now common for teachers to ask Muslim children (or those that "appear" Muslim) if they have bombs in their backpacks and for police to arrest and incarcerate them for days because a classmate joked about them having one. We are effectively being treated as outsiders in our own country.

Some Muslims have taken to social media to counter that sentiment through blogs, crowdsourced fundraisers, videos, and hashtag campaigns like #MuslimApartment and #MuslimAmericanFaces. More power to those that have the energy and enthusiasm for this work, but how long will this be necessary? As Muslim Americans, we don't have an obligation to prove, explain, or apologize for anything. Just as we accept that the overwhelming majority of Christians in this country are not all inclined to bomb abortion clinics in the name of Christianity, so should we assume the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists hell-bent on killing non-Muslims.

I for one am done trying to convince people that I'm American and on their side. What could I possibly do or say that hasn't already been done or said? It is time for the double standards, vitriolic rhetoric, and hate crimes against Muslims to end. Let us move forward as Americans and fight intolerance, discrimination and injustice together. Let us live.

Wardah Khalid is a writer, speaker, and analyst on Middle East policy and Islam in America. She is the author of the "Young American Muslim" blog for the Houston Chronicle, was previously Middle East policy analyst at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and also worked as a countering violent extremism consultant. Follow her on Twitter.

Follow Leslie on Instagram, Tumblr, and buy her books from Fantagraphics.

All images courtesy of Ioan Grillo and Bloomsbury Press

There's a 23-year-old kid in a prison in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico who goes by the nickname Montana. In his cell, he has a poster of the Al Pacino movie gangster he's named after. But Montana isn't your average Scarface wannabe. According to journalist Ioan Grillo, he committed his first murder at age 13 and has supposedly killed another 30-plus people in the following decade he spent working for the Mara Salvatrucha gang before being locked up. And Montana isn't an isolated example of a present-day criminal mimicking and even one-upping the lives of infamous real-life and fictitious gangsters.

In his new book Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and The New Politics of Latin America, Grillo makes it clear that gang members like Montana, cartel leaders, sicarios, and powerful members of crime organizations exist all over Latin America and the Caribbean—not just Mexico. From the Shower Posse gang in Jamaica and the Comando Vermelho syndicate in Brazil, to the gangs running rampant throughout Central America, there is ample evidence that giant crime networks are thriving all around the world today. And these cartels and gangs are run by a modern type of criminal Grillo describes as "part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star"—violent Pablo Escobar-types who make pop culture villains look soft.

To write the book, Grillo embedded himself in the front lines of cities where gangs, cartels, and police are facing off and killing one another (as well as civilians) by the thousands. The British reporter interviewed former sicarios in Mexican prisons, rode shotgun with police through Venezuelan slums, and investigated crime lords in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and shantytowns of Kingston. In his research, Grillo realized a new breed of criminal kingpin was becoming the norm right in front of his eyes: One with deep pockets, a heavily armed militia at his back, and a cocky swagger that often results in impulsive power flexing whenever the mood strikes. To these gangster warlords, life has become a video game or gangster movie where every pop culture cliche has come to pass.

Grillo previously penned El Narco, which profiled how Mexican cartels rose to power in the mid-aughts. Gangster Warlords is a step-up for the writer, documenting a very grim reality that's unfolding in real time. VICE spoke to Grillo via Skype from his base in Mexico City to talk about his new book and gain insight about what's going on in the narco arenas down south.

For more on crime, watch our doc 'How Pablo Escobar's Legacy of Violence Drives Today's Cartel Wars':

VICE: You have reported extensively from Mexico on that country's drug cartels and violence, but when did you start researching what's going on in other nearby countries?
Ioan Grillo: I've found from the 15 years I've been in Mexico reporting on cartel violence that you get connections to other places. When you realize that there are similar and even worse situations in many places around Latin America and the Caribbean, you can follow the trail of dominos between the Mexican cartels to Honduran gangsters to Colombian gangsters. You can follow guns that travel from the United States and Mexico all the way to the Caribbean. You have these physical connections that you find, but also you see the similarities of the situations. It's not a coincidence that suddenly you have cartel-related violence in Mexico killing 17,000 people a year, and organized crime violence is killing tens of thousands in Brazil and Honduras, too.

That really led me to look at the bigger picture. I'd already been down in the slums of Colombia and very quickly came to an understanding that the cartel is the authority there, the shadow power in these ghettos. The same thing is happening in Mexico. But then you start seeing other parallels, like in Jamaica where the areas between different ghettos have been cleared out. If you go to Honduras, you'll see the same thing has happened, where the gangs are forcing people out of areas to create buffer zones between their territories. You find these similarities and you start to see a clearer picture of what these gangster warlords are like and what they have become .

Do you think a lot of these crime groups and gangster warlords are influenced by or are part of the legacy of Pablo Escobar and what he did in Colombia in the 1980s?
Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel built a model. He was a man ahead of his time in that sense. He tapped into the cocaine dollars and made more money than you or I could possibly imagine. Pablo dominated the cocaine market, but now it's spread right across the continent and is growing. Brazil is the number two market in the world for consumption of cocaine after the United States. Right now they are number one for consuming crack cocaine. In Brazil, you go to these favelas and they have a table and they sit there selling drugs. When you have these poor countries with young men that have very little job opportunities living in these slums and the cartels offer them drugs, money, women—all of these things—these very quickly recruit their own private armies.

Watch our doc on Matthew Heineman, the filmmaker behind 'Cartel Land':

Who are some of the more notorious gangster warlords you cover in the book?
Dudus Coke, aka the President, a Jamaican drug trafficker who is now incarcerated, is one. Bunny Wailer, the big reggae artist, had a song called "Don't Touch the President" about him. Coke was a rock star, CEO-type who did a lot of charity work that he took to incredible levels. In the song, Bunny Wailer sings, "Sometimes out of evil, come the poor good/Can't you see the progress in the neighborhood." It's like he's saying from the evil of drug money comes good. At the same time, he was also moving a lot of cocaine to the UK and United States. He had women moving the cocaine in condoms in their vaginas. There would be like 30 of them on a plane. The might bust one or two, but there would still be 28 or 29 who got through.

Another figure that I look at is Nazario "El Mas Loco" Moreno, who led both La Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar cartel in Mexico. He wrote his own religious text called Pensamientos, meaning "My Thoughts," and he became venerated as a saint—even beyond rock star status. When people misguidedly thought he'd been killed, they actually prayed to the guy. How can people be praying to a man who is trafficking crystal meth? I went to the area where he's from. He believed that people who drank Coca Cola were rich because he grew up poor and drank water from the river, but this guy took over his entire area.

Did you notice pop culture's influence on any of these criminals and crime figures?
I went into a prison in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico where a gang leader had a pool table in his cell and a disco sound system for parties. On his wall he had a life size poster of Al Pacino as Scarface. I interviewed this young Mara Salvatrucha gang member and his nickname was Montana. This is a guy, 23 years old, who's killed 30 people and started killing when he was 13. He described to me all of his murders and all the craziness behind his incredibly violent life.

In Jamaica, the criminals and kingpins are called Dons. I was interviewing this older guy from the Shower Posse gang in hopes of finding out why. He told me that they started calling themselves Don's after Don Corleone when The Godfather came out.

In Honduras, I asked when these guys got so violent and someone told me it was after they saw the movie Blood In, Blood Out dubbed into Spanish. The young gangsters all know that movie by heart.

Image via Ioan Grillo

How do we stop all the gang and cartel violence? Did you come to any solutions through your research?
We can't prohibit singers from talking about drug traffickers or Hollywood from making movies. Watching movies or listening to records isn't the problem. Law enforcement is part of the problem. The police and the soldiers are part of that violence. I don't want to blame everything on them, but they are clearly part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In America, it's a big deal right now about police officers killing African Americans, but right across Latin America and the Caribbean police officers are killing at a level way, way higher than the United States.

What do you mean?
I just came back from Venezuela and you should see the police there. Some estimate that the police killed over 1,000 people in 2014 . That's in a country with 30 million. In the United States, that would be like killing over 10,000 people. In Jamaica, the police are very aggressive and heavily armed—they come into the ghettoes real gung ho. The police commit one in every four murders there. In Mexico, we have seen extraordinary things like the police working with the cartels, kidnapping, killing students, murdering innocents. The police are part of the problem. Often they are corrupt and make money off the criminals, and can get away with murder. But on the other side, the police are also facing extraordinarily violent and heavily armed criminals and gangs.

So the fight between the two is super complex.
It's a mess on both sides. These criminal kingpins have this crazy role in society where they head these big business empires and organizations. They're attacking policemen, throwing grenades at people in squares, all these crazy violent acts. But they are also a part of popular culture. We have soap operas and songs being made about them. We are looking at who these figures are, what do they mean to society, how do they challenge the government? It's weird how this relates to and plays out in popular culture, especially right now with all these TV series like Narcos. We are reliving Pablo Escobar while this stuff is still happening out in the world.

'Gangster Warlords' is out January 19 on Bloomsbury Press. Pre-order it here and visit Grillo's website for more on his work.

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