Lightning, and some fashionable things (images courtesy of Louis Vuitton)

Well, someone had to. For years now I've been wondering when some clever soul or other would uncover the connection between Japanese role-playing video games and fashionable French handbags and accessories. And, finally, Louis Vuitton has done just that.

One of the faces of its "Series 4" advertising campaign is an entirely fictional woman who'll mean nothing to 99 percent of the world's population, an almighty body of human beings that has precisely zero idea what a Final Fantasy is, let alone the events of the 13th installment in Square (Enix)'s long-running game series.

And yet, here we are: Lightning, the dour heroine of 2009's Final Fantasy XIII (pretty good), mostly absent supporting character of that game's 2011 sequel (not entirely bad), and sole protagonist of 2013's XIII trilogy-concluding Lightning Returns (yeah, a bit of a damp squib), is about to be plastered across magazines and dance her way through promotional videos in support of the new range.

While in the West, Lightning's reception amongst the FF community has always been rather cooler than not, in Japan she's an icon in her field. In 2013, gamers in Final Fantasy's home country voted her the best female character of any to have featured in the series. So if Louis Vuitton is looking to shift its goods on the streets of Osaka and Tokyo, their recruitment of Lightning, alongside campaign co-stars Jaden (son of Will) Smith and Korean actress Doona Bae, makes perfect sense.

New, on Broadly: Inside Brazil's Biggest Prison Beauty Pageant

What doesn't is this baffling statement from Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuttion's Artistic Director of Women's Collections, which is included in Square Enix's press release on the campaign. If you can untangle what he's trying to say below, please, let us know.

"It's clear that the virtual aesthetic of video games is predominant in this collection. If we push the reflection about heroines, or what might constitute the nature of a woman whose actions can be so courageous that she becomes superior and iconic, it becomes obvious that a virtual entity integrates with the founding principles of the Maison. Lightning is the perfect avatar for a global, heroic woman and for a world where social networks and communications are now seamlessly woven into our life. She is also the symbol of new pictorial processes. How can you create an image that goes beyond the classic principles of photography and design? Lightning heralds a new era of expression."

A new era of expression? For Louis Vuitton, maybe, but less so for Final Fantasy, with the next numbered game proper (XV) starring the equally grumpy Noctis Lucius Caelum as its central playable character. A man who, presumably, we can expect to see walking down a virtual catwalk for Chanel sometime in the next five years.

Follow Mike and VICE Gaming on Twitter.

Screenshot via Making a Murderer

If there are any conclusions from Making a Murderer, Netflix's ten-part docu-series released last month, it's that lawyers can make or break a trial. Few characters exemplify this more than Len Kachinsky, the public defender assigned to represent 16-year-old Brendan Dassey, a kid with an IQ below 70 and seemingly no understanding of the repercussions for confessing to murder.

As a quick refresher: Immediately after he was hired—before he'd even met Dassey—Kachinsky told the press his client was "morally and legally responsible" for his alleged crimes. Then he hired an investigator to pressure Dassey to sign a confession and draw lurid pictures of crimes he said he didn't commit. And finally, he sent the kid to be interrogated by the police, alone. At best, the series makes him appear incompetent; at worst, conspiratorial.

In an interview on TMZ Live today, where he was confronted about Dassey's trial, Kachinsky admitted that, yeah, he probably should've done a few things differently.

Harvey Levin, the host of TMZ Live, first asked Kachinsky if he believed Dassey was guilty, since he took "aggressive steps" to convince Dassey to confess. Kachinsky didn't weigh in on the matter of guilt, but said the signed confession obtained by the investigator was for "internal use" only. (He doesn't explain what that "internal use" was.)

Then Levin asked Kachinsky why he sent his client to talk to the police without counsel, and "let them grill him like a cheeseburger." At first, Kachinsky said he couldn't be there because he had army reserve duty.

"Why not delay the interview?" Levin asked.

"In 20/20 hindsight," Kachinsky said, "I would've."

Still, Kachinsky denies that he may have screwed up the kid's case. "Frankly, I'm not responsible for Dassey going to prison," he told The Wrap in an interview today. "You can say I made a mistake, that I should've or I should have rescheduled the interview—that's valid criticism."

Kachinsky also said he hasn't seen Making a Murderer yet, which must make his sudden rise to internet infamy very confusing.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Since 1997, the Webby Awards have been committed to the noble task of digging up the gems of the internet and showering these things in accolades and awards that look like silver springs.

VICE has been lucky enough to win a few of these Webby Awards over the years for our editorial and documentaries, so in honor of the Webby Awards celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, we've decided to put together playlists of some documentaries that got Webby love in the past.

On Tuesday, we released a playlist collecting all the docs that we've received awards for in the past. It was a pretty massive list—humble bragging aside—so for those of you who prefer our news coverage, above is a playlist of strictly Webby-winning pieces from VICE News.

Give them a watch, learn about Ebola and the gun markets of Pakistan, and be sure to keep an eye out for The Internet Cannot Be Stopped—the Webby Awards' massive project featuring collaborations with VICE, Pitchfork, Google, and other Webby winners.

If you're wondering what the best way to spend New Year's Eve in Nashville, Tennessee was, look no further than the above poster. Deja Vu, one of Nashville's many prestigious stripping establishments, set out to distinguish itself over the New Year's weekend by enlisting both Sassee Cassee, the self-proclaimed "World's smallest stripper," and Mama June Shannon, who you might know better as the mother of the child beauty queen/reality star Honey Boo Boo. Judging from the poster alone, the event promised a dessert buffet of trashiness. I am relieved to say that it did not disappoint.

June Shannon, whom the Deja Vu DJ odiously referred to as "Honey Boo Boo's Mom" for the duration of the evening, is not exactly refined entertainment. "Mama June," as she is also known, began her unlikely rise to the reality television equivalent of stardom by managing to be even more off-putting than her fellow outlandish pageant moms on TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras, an exploitative cringefest best known for its pernicious attitude toward prepubescent sexuality and normalizing the ingestion of energy drinks by children.

That grotesque display begat a solo vehicle for the family, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which largely exchanged the then six year-old, eponymous Alana's pageant preparations for a crash course on her mother's grammatical cock-ups and couponing.

Boo Boo captured America's attention, if not its heart, for four brief seasons before being snuffed out amidst tragic rumors that Mama June had renewed her relationship with the man—Mark McDaniel—convicted of molesting her eldest daughter in 2004. The family denied that McDaniel was back in the picture, but it was too late to save the show or the family. The victim, Anna Shannon Cardwell, remains estranged from her mother, even as erstwhile paterfamilias Mike "Sugar Bear" Thompson has returned to co-star with June in the beyond-contrived Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars. In many ways, the journey for this family has been sadder than it has been strange. It arguably peaked at a strip club on New Year's.

It's a well-established fact that Honey Boo Boo's Mama June marches to the beat of her own drum. When her absurdly folksy reality show was at its peak, TMZ reported that the five-figure per episode salary the family earned went directly into accounts designated for June's children, while she and her partner Mike "Sugar Bear" Thompson lived off his income as a contractor. Just three years later, after two revelations that she was involved with convicted child abusers temporarily obliterated her marketability and forced TLC to cancel the show, she's spent the year being trotted out as a strip club side show. Shannon is represented by a management company who lists among its clients Scott Disick, 2 Chainz, and several Real Housewives of various municipalities.

At around midnight, I could barely hear what the dancer literally and figuratively in rotation at our table, was trying to say over the oppressive din of Lil Jon and what sounded like every single one of the Eastside Boyz. Strip clubs are not known for their conversational atmosphere for a variety of reasons, and Deja Vu was no different. The combination of the thick granite tabletop, her even thicker high heels, and the condition of the worn, sagging leather seat cradling my ass meant that her mouth must've been a good seven feet from my ears. It was more than enough distance to turn her stoic declaration that "Nobody is here to see Mama June" into an unintelligible warble. Looking around, I wasn't so sure.

Strip clubs are filled to the ceiling with the word "no." No, I would not like a lap dance right now. No, your free cover coupon won't work tonight, you can pay at the desk. No, please don't take away the case of Keystone I lugged here because Tennessee law won't let you see nipples and buy booze in the same place. And so on. But by the look of the floor, very few people had said "no" to an invitation to the club that night. The place was standing-room only, and desperate-to-sit patrons (such as myself) were quickly being ushered off the reserved couches near the stage.

"What kind of crowd are we trying to attract here," a stripper asked no one in particular. She didn't stop dancing, but I could finally make out what she was saying once she squatted on the table like a much sexier Buster Posey. Though, yes, the place was packed to the gills with onlookers, the VIP rooms were curiously empty.

"It's so busy," a flustered and irritated dancer said to another employee as I looked on, sixer of beer in hand. "And I've only had one dance all night!"

When the time came for the meet and greet with Mama June, patrons jammed themselves in line like they thought June could be whisked away at any moment to catch a limousine and a private jet. I jumped at the opportunity to get myself out of the corner that had until now been the domain of a trash can, an ATM, and a dopey, bearded writer (me). I eased into the back of the line as the DJ played Eminem's "W.T.P.," which, given that the song's full title is "White Trash Party," felt a bit on the nose. Nobody seemed to notice.

Luckily, there was plenty of time for both meeting and greeting, first with June's bodyguard, and then with the big Mama herself. There were pictures and hugs and a lot of yelling, owing mostly to alcohol, noise, and the patent absurdity of the evening. The group of women in front of me were totally starstruck, speaking with June for longer than I talk with most of my closest friends.

Mama June's bodyguard took the pictures. "That's fuckin' bright!" June said of my phone's flash.

The author and Mama June. Photo by Mama June's bodyguard

Whatever disdain the dancers had for "Honey Boo Boo's Mom" and the crowd she attracted has disappeared around one in the morning, when Mama June's WTF Weekend co-headliner Little Sassee Cassee took the stage. According to her official website, Cassee stands at just 2'10"—the height of your average toddler—and having seen her in person, even that figure might be generous. But the crowd went wild for her. Dollar bills peppered the stage as she cartwheeled around, and the men who'd seemed glued to their seats all evening were on their feet and tipping, spurred on either by Cassee's show, the DJ's insistence that the crowd's inaction "made for the other team," or both.

If you're now contemplating the ins and outs of the show "The World's Smallest Stripper" puts on, allow me to describe it, but please note that words may fail to encapsulate some of the finer points of the performance. I encourage you to seek Cassee out for yourself; you really do have to be there to appreciate it. It goes without saying that in the next paragraph, there are spoilers aplenty.

As you might expect, Sassee Cassee's repertoire of stripper tricks is somewhat limited when compared to what a dancer of average height can accomplish. It's a bit slower and, yes, the view from your seat isn't great. It does take Cassee a bit longer to maneuver around the stage, but she breaks out a hell of a handstand push-up between moves. There isn't a tremendous amount of pole work overall, but she did climb the thing damn near to the top, at one point disappearing altogether behind the drop ceiling. She calls her technique for scaling a pole "the koala," and it's easy to see why. Much of the choreography seemed more impressive than erotic, which was more than alright in my book. Cassee might have been nontraditional, but she was nothing if not a crowd-pleaser.

Some drugs. Photo by David Hudson

For over a century, world leaders have been deliberating over what exactly they should do about drugs. Unfortunately, all that deliberation hasn't got them too far in terms of actually keeping people or the planet very safe. The widespread collateral damage of the illegal drug trade—the exploitation, environmental damage, criminalization, corruption, murderous gang feuds, addiction, and needless overdoses—are all evidence that the way it's currently being handled does not appear to work.

The only alternative, it seems, is for governments to seize the reins of the drug trade, by controlling how drugs are cultivated, manufactured, marketed, distributed, and sold; in other words, legalization.

In 2016, cracks are already visible in the prohibition paradigm. Four US states have legalized recreational marijuana, 23 of them have legalized medical marijuana, and the general trend worldwide is for governments, especially those in Latin America and Europe, to start edging away from a hardline, punitive stance towards policies based around ethical cultivation, harm reduction, and decriminalization.

Alternative ways of tackling the world drug problem—desperately sought by countries at the bloody epicenter of the drug war, such as Mexico—will be discussed at a special UN general assembly session in New York in April. The meeting comes in the wake of a leaked document last October written by a senior UN figure that advocated the decriminalization of all drugs. The UN, under pressure from one member country, rumored to be America, frantically downplayed the significance of its own expert's briefing document. Nonetheless, the drug reform genie is out of the bottle.

Despite the wishful thinking of a quasi-religious collection of fervent "anti-drug" campaigners, whatever form drugs may take in our digitized future, they are clearly here to stay. Humans are hard-wired to get high—it's natural. In his 1989 book Intoxication, the American pharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel concluded that after the basic human desires of hunger, thirst, and sex comes a "fourth drive," an instinctive urge to change our ordinary state of awareness.

However, the world is some time off binning the international drug treaties it has been busy enacting for over 100 years. Few politicians or political parties with any power are willing to take on the high-risk strategy of "going soft" on drugs. They face the very real prospect of being pilloried by conservative, old-school media clans that are obliged to fear-monger on drugs in order to appeal to their increasingly aging readerships.

The end of prohibition in most countries, apart from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, will most likely come in 10 to 20 years time, at a tipping point when a new generation will ensure the media and politicians jump to a different, more progressive beat on how society deals with the drug issue. A sway in public opinion, where drug morality will be more about helping people than stigmatizing them, will finally enable governments to embrace the financial benefits of a sanctioned psychoactive drug industry.

In the meantime, as we wait for global drug policy to turn around at oil tanker speed, there are ways—working within the current system of prohibition—to make drugs better in 2016. I'll focus principally on the UK throughout this article, as that's where I live, but the points I'll make ring true around the world.

Read: Inside the Secret World of a British Undercover Drugs Cop

The first priority when it comes to drugs is to make them less likely to kill people. As we now know, this is not achieved by simply telling them drugs are bad and trying to arrest drug dealers, because it's not drug dealers killing people. On the contrary: The first rule of selling drugs after "make a profit" is "don't kill off your customers." What is killing people is isolation, both from the kind of services that can help them stay alive and from basic life-saving information.

The more substances are banned, the more obscure and unpredictably dangerous their replacements have become. As a result, there are now more ways of getting high than ever before, making the UN's 1998 ambition of creating "a drug-free world" look positively delusional.

What's more, in response to this growing market of new drugs, ecstasy makers have ramped up purity to unprecedented levels, making it a far more dangerous drug than it has ever been. Deaths involving just about every type of drug have risen dramatically in England and Scotland over the last two years, with record numbers of people dying from heroin-related overdoses.

Michael Linnell, who has worked in the drugs sector in Manchester for 30 years and runs UK DrugWatch—a network of experts who provide credible information on dangerous drug trends—told me: "If you can get one message across to people who take drugs in 2016, to make drugs better and safer, it would be to take smaller doses. They need to remember the old drug user saying: 'You can always take more, but you can never take less.'" The second most important thing, says Linnell, is that people need to know how to deal with drug-related emergencies so they can help their friends or anyone else they see in trouble with drugs.

A wrap of MDMA. Photo by Michael Segalov

It sounds petty and morally questionable—and it is—but because drugs are illegal, the government has no duty to ensure authorities give out potentially life-saving medicines and messages on drugs. Despite its ability to bring people back from the brink of death, naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opiate overdoses, is being handed out by less than half of local authorities in England.

Erin O'Mara, the editor of the online drug users magazine Black Poppy, herself a long-term heroin user, told me she saved someone's life with naloxone last month. She has also been saved herself.

"For many heroin users, someone dying in front of you can happen a dozen times in a lifetime," she said. "It's almost always an accident, and it almost always is something that could have been avoided. Today we have the incredible chance to save thousands of lives by making sure naloxone is given to every single person who uses opiates, as well as into the hands of their loved ones and friends."

In Wales, where there is a national program of naloxone supply, heroin deaths have bucked the UK trend and fallen by 16 percent.

While the purity of MDMA pills and crystal has rocketed in the last two years, the British government does nothing besides make patronizing noises about illegal drugs being dangerous when people overdose. It is left to community interest groups such as The Loop in Manchester—which carries out forensic tests on drugs and disseminates information, such as the Crush, Dab, Wait campaign—that are actually useful to people who take drugs.

Read on Broadly: See the Biggest Weed Pipe in the World

In 2016, the UK Home Office's drug advice website Frank stands as a woeful attempt at protecting drug users. Despite its moniker, it is unable to offer frank advice because the government is petrified of being seen to encourage drug use. It can't advise people to take small doses—that's far too risqué. Tens of thousands of responses to the Global Drug Survey (GDS) show that drug users disregard the website.

"Frank is the last place drug users will go to get information," says Dr. Adam Winstock, Director of the GDS. "Frank is good if you are a worried parent or if you've not used drugs before. It's hard to give good advice if you cannot be totally honest about drug taking. You have to talk about drug-related pleasure if you are going to talk about the harms."

Dr. Winstock, who last month decried a recent attempt by the Australian government to send out a public health message on cannabis as "summing up all that's wrong with drug education in last 40 years," says drug users will not listen if they are "demonized, homogonized, and patronized."

The most valuable information about drugs is gained from those who take them. The Highway Code, a guide to safer drug use based on the experiences of 80,000 drug users who responded to the survey, is one of these sources.

But in the drug information cavity created by prohibition, the largest pool of data and real time feedback can be found within the online drug-taking community. Specialist drug websites and forums attached to dark web markets offer drug users access to pill reports, psychonautic experiences, data, discussion, feedback, and advice.

Dr. Dredge, a psychonaut, former online dealer, and experienced online buyer, says the internet is a crucial resource for drug users. "The main way of improving experiences is research. So use pillreports.com before taking ecstasy, Erowid before taking anything you've not heard of before, Bluelight or Reddit to ask about anything you're unsure of—there is plenty of advice and information out there which could save lives," he told me. "Don't buy drugs off people you don't know, use the darkweb if possible. There are reviews on product, vendor, and the prices are cheaper than the street. You also don't have the potential of getting pulled by the police as you're on your way home from picking it up."

Related: Watch our short documentary about young men addicted to synthesized cannabis

It's not perfect, but for drug users seeking knowledge, the web is now rivaling scientific research, according to drug markets expert Judith Aldridge, a senior lecturer at Manchester University.

"Making currently illegal drugs safer, more enjoyable, and more ethical is tricky, not least because prohibition itself makes drugs less safe, enjoyable, and ethical," she told me. For Aldridge, two of the more important "within-prohibition" changes that seem likely to grow in 2016 are both internet-enabled: "The sheer number of users sharing harm reduction advice, particularly dosing, on forums like Bluelight.org has made crowd-sourced knowledge a rival to scientifically-generated understanding, particularly in connection to the emergence of new substances and to the many psychedelic compounds already in existence."

Aldridge says dark net drug markets are able to reduce harm not just for users, but within the marketplaces themselves. "These marketplaces have conflict reduction features such as escrow, customer feedback, and marketplace adjudication that may make the conflict that arises in offline markets, often connected to the widespread use of credit, less likely," she told me. "Because people buying drugs can shop and compare vendors located in countries across the globe, online drug sellers are more accountable than their offline counterparts, and operate in a more competitive environment. In theory, this should reduce price and increase quality, and early evidence suggests this may be happening."

But Aldridge says there are limitations: dark net drug dealers can only supply the drugs they can access, and the maintenance of prohibition will ensure that drug quality can never be properly guaranteed.

As we step into 2016, there appears to be no way back from a world of increasingly nasty drugs which, despite the packaging and whacky names, are actually colored bags of toxic dust churned out by ropey Chinese chemical factories. Meanwhile, help for drug users living on the bottom rung of society—those using a deadly mix of heroin, black market valium, synthetic weed, and alcohol—is drying up as austerity bites.

Within the system of prohibition, we can't rely on statutory authorities and governments to provide the help that is needed to make drug taking a safer activity. So drug users have to take care of themselves, look after their friends, and make sure they are not—as the present laws would have it—taking drugs blind.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.

Screenshot from "Massenhafte sexuelle Übergriffe an Silvester in Köln" by YouTube user N24

On New Year's Eve, while most people were busy drinking the night away, a number of men sexually assaulted and robbed multiple women on the square in front of the central train station in Cologne, Germany. As of Tuesday, the police had produced a list of 90 charges, including one for rape. "We have no suspects at this time," Cologne's Chief of Police, Wolfgang Albers, said at a press conference yesterday afternoon. Officials must now go through the extensive video material that has been handed over to them since the incidents.

According to police reports, the situation around the central station on New Year's Eve was totally chaotic. Around four or five hundred people were already gathered at 9 PM on the cathedral steps; allegedly all young men, between 18 and 35 years old, and apparently of North African descent. The police noticed the group because they seemed heavily intoxicated and began lighting fireworks among the crowd. Two hours later, the number of people on the square grew to 1000. The mood turned, becoming more and more aggressive. The police marshal on duty, Michael Temme, described the inebriated men as "totally uninhibited." As a result, the police cleared the steps and the square, yet the crowd regrouped around 12:45 AM.

That night both local and federal police received a number of initial complaints of sexual harassment and theft. The police subsequently focused their forces around the train station, purposefully approaching women and accompanying them through the crowd to the train station entrance, according to officer Temme. By that time, groups of two to 20 men had allegedly begun to form within the large crowd, circling women and in some cases touching them inappropriately and robbing them. "We're familiar with thefts in which women are touched inappropriately on purpose to be distracted," a spokesperson for the Cologne Police Department told VICE. "But being surrounded by groups of men in the process—that is a totally new phenomenon."

That kind of ploy is meant to protect the perpetrators, as German Police Union chairman, Rainer Wendt, explained to radio station NDR Info: "It is a collusion among the perpetrators that uses the crowd of people, darkness, and the surprise effect to get away with a crime without being recognized."

Some pickpockets, who also harassed women in the process, were arrested at the same train station on January 3. However, whether these men were involved in what happened on New Year's Eve is still unclear.

Cologne's mayor, Henriette Reker, suggests that women keep men at an arm's length and avoid walking with strangers. The hashtag #eineArmlänge (an arm's length) was trending yesterday on German-speaking Twitter, with numerous users calling this statement a misapplication of victim/perpetrator roles.

What's clear is that witnesses are having a hard time recognizing perpetrators. "Imagine you're surrounded by men, they're all trying to grope you and you're just trying to protect your body. You'd hardly be able to say more about their faces than that they looked young and of North African descent," a spokeswoman for the Cologne Police Department explained to VICE.

Tuesday's press conference in Cologne.Photo by the author

Mayor Reker also noted yesterday that many of the women didn't immediately place distress calls because they were afraid their phones would be snatched from their hands.

Meanwhile, the Federal Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, promised that the case would be examined carefully. He said that the ministry is working intensely to identify the perpetrators. He also spoke of those witnesses who chose to idly stand around while the attacks took place: "Anybody who prevented women from being able to escape are moving within the scope of complicity."

"We reckon that further charges will be made over the next few days," said Police Chief Albers at a press conference on Tuesday. "Around two thirds of the complaints were made by people who don't live in Cologne. It will take some time for them to report to us."

The author's apartment. All photos courtesy the author

My husband and I began using Airbnb in March of 2015. Our first guest was an older man from Halifax, who was in town visiting his dying friend. He shared our passion for cinema, and he would visit us two more times over the next year. During one of those trips, his friend had since died, we attended some screenings at the Montreal World Film Festival together—he and his friend had been attending the festival since the late 70s and this would be the first time he went alone. I was happy to be able to share that with him, and I look forward to his next visit. While not all our guests became as close to us, it was exciting meeting new people—surprisingly we rarely had bad experiences. What we got were incredible stories, from people sneaking away from a wedding to fuck their hot cousin to a Montrealer renting a room because he had a fight with his girlfriend. We even got gifts, like one guy offered us a sheet of LSD.

Honestly, the worst of it all had been that we're still finding white Husky fur all over our furniture, nearly six months after the guest and their giant pup left—a pretty small price to pay for meeting so many great people from all over the world.

So it was more than a little surprising to inadvertently play Airbnb host to a cocaine-fuelled orgy—while we were still in our Montreal apartment. On our wedding night.

The note left by the author's guests

It was six days ago: December 31, 2015. My now-husband and I decided to get married on New Year's Eve because it was easy to remember and it was a holiday we both generally hated—might as well make the best of it. The night before the wedding, however, we received a booking on Airbnb for our wedding night. We couldn't cancel it automatically and got on the phone immediately with our prospective guest to explain why we couldn't have them stay on this particular night. They seemed desperate, it was NYE, after all: they said everything else was booked and were not sure Airbnb would issue the refund on time. Since we had a few hours to spare between our wedding brunch and reception, we agreed.

I'm an introvert by nature, but after meeting my now-husband through online dating, his extroverted nature and positive attitude have been infectious. His embrace of the sharing economy was something I extended further into my own life and began using different sharing apps to meet new people, eat and get around. I loved meeting new people now, I could be quiet as long as I was listening. The awkwardness faded away. Giving people the benefit of the doubt and facing awkward situations with positivity quickly became a default. So, it really didn't seem like that big of a deal to us to be sharing our place with strangers on what would be our wedding night.

The morning of our wedding was wrought with stress. We had another Airbnb guest staying in our second spare room, and that morning he spent over an hour in the shower. We were 15 minutes late to our own wedding at noon, but were so excited that all the anxiety faded by the time we sat down for a wedding brunch. Before the reception, my father and my new husband stopped off at our apartment to drop off the keys with our two guests: it was a couple, a young man and his girlfriend, around twenty and they looked like they'd fit in on High School Musical. My husband was excited when he got home: "they seem really cool, they're the first people to come in and see the guitar and start playing," he said. My dad, a stoic, and quiet man, similarly got "good vibes" from the pair.

We have a fantastic and intimate wedding party with good food and great music. It was around 2:30 AM when we got back home, and quickly began to realize we were not the only ones who had an exceptionally good time that New Year's Eve.

The kitchen and the living room was overflowing with garbage and half the food in our kitchen was eaten. The guests were not there—presumably gone to a club or partying at someone else's house. It was by far the biggest mess (maybe the only one) we've ever had in our apartment, but it was our wedding night and stressing about it too much didn't seem worthwhile. We would deal with it in the morning.

Shortly thereafter, my husband and I were in our bedroom talking and joking about the night when they returned. Clearly a little drunk, we heard them trying to be quiet—someone bangs into something and is shushed. In the center of our living room is a short glass table and like nearly everything in our apartment, it was bought and left by one of our former roommates. Our ex-roomie would periodically enjoy a cocaine-fuelled weekend with some of his high school friends. He bought the table specifically for these events—it's a thick and low glass table, ideal for cutting and snorting cocaine. I'm not sure if it was a mitigating factor in our Airbnb guest's decision to rent our apartment on New Year's Eve (it's clearly visible in our photos), but it quickly became the centerpiece of the next chapter of the night. We started to hear the familiar sounds of cutting and snorting (and we would later find tell-tale baggies too).

As the familiar noises subsided, the energy rose a bit before the guests left again. It wasn't long before they came back, started talking a little and then seemed to settle in bed. Around 5 AM, my husband woke me up: "Someone is having sex in the living room, listen." The sounds were unmistakable. We thought it was weird they were having sex in our living room when they had a room of their own, but again, it wasn't worth worrying about. Still, we struggled to fall asleep. My husband was a little concerned that since our guests clearly lacked boundaries, they might try to steal something. In a daze of exhaustion, I mentally made the connection to the possibility of being brutally killed and started ranting my theories about Steven Avery and Netflix's Making a Murderer. We both eventually fell asleep sometime around the time the sun started to rise.

I woke up having to pee, almost completely forgetting the events of the night before. But, stepping out of my room I was faced with two naked strangers sleeping on my couch and our glass table pushed against the wall. I quickly went pee and returned to my room, the anger starting to settle in. My first reaction was to tweet about the incident, and I got a quick response from Airbnb asking for our number. Trying to let my rage subside, it was 40 minutes before I shook my husband awake to tell him what was going on.

Together we got out of bed. By now there was only a girl dressed on the couch texting. Sleepily she wished us a happy new year and asked, "Who are you?" We ignored her as we beelined to the end of the apartment and the rented room. Knocking on the door to their room, they open it up and there are more people in the bed. We talk to the kid who rented the room in the first place, explaining how it's "not cool" to wake up to strangers in our house. Horrified and apologetic, the guy won't stop apologizing and agrees they crossed a line. There were five people in their party, three more than we knew about it. My husband, as if to punctuate his moral high-ground, ended the discussion by saying "Dude, it was my wedding night and someone in the apartment had a lot of sex and it wasn't me!" At that point, the kid is promising to clean up and get out.We went back to bed as they fixed their mess, and eventually settled into a day of relaxation. Airbnb got us on the phone and and offered to help us out, being far nicer than I ever imagined considering some of the horror stories I'd read online.

By the time our other Airbnb guest got home that night at 9 PM, we had nearly forgotten he was even still renting the room. My husband swept into the living room to apologize for the events from the night before. The guest, who was very shy and likely using Airbnb as his own way of opening himself to the world, was understandably upset. He thought the other guests were our friends, and he was sure they were "doing drugs." My husband explained the situation, and tried to turn it into a bonding situation, saying "they were doing drugs! And having sex!" To which the guy answered, "Yes I know. I had to go to the bathroom last night, and I opened up the room and there were five people having sex on your carpet. I closed the door and held it in for the rest of the night".

Telling people this story, I find many of them are horrified—how could you let this happen? How did you not murder them? What about the police? Honestly, I think I'm lucky to have such a great story to tell about my wedding. My only regret is my soiled rug, which, thankfully, Airbnb is offering to replace. (Though I did ask my dad how to clean orgy out of my rug. His answer: use the stuff that you use to clean car carpets.)

Our only disappointment being that they didn't even extend us an invitation, it was our wedding night after all.

Laurie Anderson. Photos by Jackson Krule

Would you like to go to a free concert in Times Square? Put on by the avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson? Who is playing music for dogs? In the freezing cold? Apparently, some people answer those questions with a resounding yes, and apparently I'm one of those people, because on Monday night I found myself in a cab heading into Manhattan with my dog, Kerouac, a 12-year-old chow mix. The cab's dashboard said it was 18 degrees outside, and with 17 MPH winds it felt much, much colder than that.

When I arrived, I found a couple hundred people who had made the same choices I had, all bundled in their heaviest clothing on the red bleachers of Duffy Square. There were also about 75 dogs, who had not chosen to be there because dogs cannot make decisions about where to be, but they seemed happy enough because dogs usually seem happy enough. It seemed like the sort of event that should have been in Brooklyn, and probably indoors, but here we were.

A tent had been set up at the base of the bleachers offering headphones with which we humans could listen to the concert in exchange for our IDs. Headphones on, I sought out a spot on the bleachers, where many people were already seated on blankets with their dogs.

Jenny Coffey and Beauregard

Jenny Coffey, a resident of the Lower East Side, had brought along her nine-year-old dog, Beauregard. I asked if she received the free dog treats that crew members had been handing out to attendees prior to the show.

"Yes," replied Coffey, "but it's not his brand." Coffey and her husband were both major Anderson fans, "and I hope he is, too," she said, gesturing to Beauregard.

"Is he inclined toward experimental music?" I asked.

"You know what he's..." Coffey replied, gesturing with her hands as she searched for the right words. "He is to the left. He just goes his own way."

As ambient music played over my headphones, I spoke to Steve Cho and Karmen Wu and their six-year-old American Eskimo Dog Schubert—"like the composer." The two amateur musicians had never heard of Anderson's work before, but they had read about the performance in the New York Times.

When asked whether they thought Schubert might like it, Wu replied that they didn't know.

"We just know he hates piano," she explained. "He likes cello. Maybe he'll like the lower-pitch stuff."

I took a moment to see how Kerouac was enjoying the concert, hoping he might react to the specifically dog-friendly music in some interesting way, but he seemed unaffected, content to just stand there in between strangers, who would occasionally reach down and pet him.

"I just want to put my hands in this," I overheard one passerby saying to him, presumably about his thick fur.

The author and Kerouac

Just before midnight, about half of the gigantic TV screens surrounding Duffy Square switched over from their regularly scheduled ads to a three-minute segment from Anderson's Academy Award-shortlisted documentary, Heart of a Dog, a collection of intimate stories about love, memory, death, and dogs. The other half of the screens continued playing ads.

After the screening finished and the screens returned to their ads, the crowd made their way down the bleachers.

One dogless woman who had pink-dyed hair noticed my dog and another dog circling one another. "It's never too cold for butt-sniffing," she remarked.

It was the kind of cold night when you find yourself saying things like that, things that don't quite make sense. When we were all huddling in line to return their headphones, one young woman said, "If we all scrunch together," then stopped, as if she wasn't sure if she had spoken out loud, or lacked the sufficient energy or body heat to continue speaking.

Jonathan Nosan and Clover

As I was leaving, I asked Jonathan Nosan, a contortionist, whether his nine-year-old beagle Clover enjoyed the performance.

"Her head perked," he said. "Her head cocked."

Nosan said he enjoyed the event. "It had that moment of, New York isn't so bad," he said. "Times Square doesn't totally suck.

"In , it's easy to get super jaded," Nosan continued. "And then something beautifully artistic and supportive and immersive happens like this. I was very happy about that."

Follow James on Twitter and Jackson on Instagram. Scroll down for more photos.

Yoshinori Ono, plus small Brazilian friend. Photo courtesy of Capcom

I'm at San Francisco's Moscone West complex, an hour away from witnessing the start of 2015's Capcom Cup, the grand finale of the year-long Capcom Pro Tour circuit. Thirty-two of the best Street Fighter IV players from across the world have gathered to compete for a share of a $250,000 prize pool—the winner will walk away with close to half that amount, a very useful $120,000. Honestly, if you'd told me back when I was a kid, sat on my pal's floor playing endless matches of SNES Street Fighter II, that one day this game would be played with such high stakes, and to such amazing levels of skill, I'd have laughed at you. But here we are, eight years since the release of the series-revitalizing Street Fighter IV, with the Ryu-and-company brawler once again the bona-fide king of the fighters.

But the most important Street Fighting man in San Fran right now arguably isn't a pro-player at all. His name is Yoshinori Ono, an employee of Capcom since the 1990s with credits on Dino Crisis 2, Shadow of Rome, and Dead Rising. He was sound management director on 1999's Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, but his love for the franchise went further than many who worked on III's various spin-offs and revisions. It's Ono we have to thank for Street Fighter IV ever seeing the light of day. It was his initially resisted pitch to (then) Capcom R&D head Keiji Inafune that started the development process within the famous Osaka-headquartered studio. In the same way you can't think of Mario without thinking of Shigeru Miyamoto, Ono is now Mr. Street Fighter.

"I've been with Capcom for over 20 years now, and I've actually been involved with the Street Fighter brand my entire career," Ono tells me ahead of the Capcom Cup's first bout. "At the time we started talking about SFIV and what we wanted to do with it, what was hard was that I wanted to bring the analogue experience of playing head-to-head at the arcades into the online sphere. Obviously that was something very different for the old-school Street Fighter players.

"In the 80s and 90s, everyone was playing with each other and having this face to face time with each other, so maybe some of those players felt somewhat betrayed that we took it online. But at the end of the day we really felt that was the right way to go. If you look what is actually happening with the online community, with Twitch and the streamers out there, they're constantly putting Street Fighter stuff out. And if you look at the tournament scene, there's a tournament every week, 52 weeks out of the year, being streamed on Twitch. So people can enjoy Street Fighter whether they're playing it at home, in person, or even just watching it being played. It's a completely different experience.

"But what has been interesting with SFIV is that this aspect of it, the tournament scene, has grown substantially. At the same time, the online component of the game also grew incredibly. It's a really rare occurrence, and something that makes SFIV incredibly special. And from my perspective, it was like raising a child, and watching them go out into the world and now grow up."

A screenshot from 2016's 'Street Fighter V'

Ono might have had nothing to do with the creation of the famous fists-and-fireballs series, but his campaign to get IV made at a time when beat 'em ups were at an all-time low, in terms of both sales and quality, showed an unmatched enthusiasm for all things Street Fighter. Now, mere weeks before the release of Street Fighter V, it is clear that this personal passion has translated into a framework for what he and Capcom are looking to achieve with their next numbered game.

"So, we have this Capcom Cup, and the community has grown incredibly but, ten years ago, when we discussed making SFIV, it wasn't part of the vision. It just kind of happened. Now, with Street Fighter V, it is part of the concept as to what we want to do with the new game. We're really working hard to broaden and widen the overall community, whether you're a player or someone who just watches the streams online. We want it to be more fun for both! So, not to talk negatively about SFIV, but we didn't see growth with that game like we've seen with say, Nintendo's amiibo figures, where it is just widening out at an incredible rate. We did see growth, but within the same communities as before, amongst the same core group of players coming to the tournaments.

"Now, as SFIV has grown and it's matured, that core group of people is maybe about 1,000 people who can compete at a really high level. That's where SFV comes in. We've made plans to try to grow the community at an exponential rate. We're doing that by resetting the game and evening the playing field, so that it's approachable whether you're new or old to the series. We're not trying to be adversarial to those who've been playing Street Fighter games for a long time, but we want to make sure that new people can come in and enjoy it, even if they just want to watch. They'll still have fun and get involved with the Street Fighter brand."

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Ono emphasizes two key points during our conversation. Firstly, that this is effectively a "reset" of the Street Fighter games, and secondly that Capcom is making a serious push toward courting the lucrative eSports market, set to hit revenues of over $450 million come 2017. But such intent naturally carries risk, most pertinently the concern that the series' existing fanbase—one that Capcom's spent most of IV's run growing—could be alienated by too many changes to how their favorite fighters perform.

"Something that I was very apprehensive about is that people in the games industry expect the next numbered game in a series to simply add a little to the core ideas of what came before. But Street Fighter is a special brand, because it doesn't necessarily do that— Street Fighter was one game by itself, and Street Fighter II was an entirely different game. Street Fighter III, same thing. One team working on one unique game, each time. And by the time Street Fighter IV came around, that was another reset—the first time we'd returned to a true Street Fighter game after many years.

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"We're resetting once again with V, but we're staying true to the series' roots by doing something totally different. Maybe half of the people I've spoken to about the game have been very vocally apprehensive about us doing this; but in the year since announcement, after talking with the media and pro players, people are starting to get it. People are starting to remember that Street Fighter isn't a series where every new game just rides the coattails of the previous entry. Part of the fun is going back to zero and everyone growing from the same point. Now, we seem to have everyone moving in that direction; now, we have to work towards release to make sure everyone understands this.

"We've mentioned the keyword 'reset' quite a lot, and you might think about a PC where you reboot the whole thing. We're not looking at it in that sense! We do want existing SFIV players to come back, so we're not going to wipe the slate completely clean. But we really want to bring new players in to experience Street Fighter for the first time. With SFIV, the rulebook for that game has gotten pretty big, so we're going to have to toss it out the window in order to attract these new players."

A screenshot from 'Street Fighter V'

There have been a few significant bumps in the road since Street Fighter V was announced at 2014's PlayStation Experience. The first beta test for pre-order customers was a high-profile non-starter, with most players stuck staring at a log-in screen for the entire period. Then, we have the leaks. Capcom has struggled to keep several of Street Fighter V's character announcements under wraps until Ono has had the chance to take to a stage somewhere in the world and actually confirm them.

"The very day before PSX in 2014, someone in Capcom Japan accidentally pushed a button on YouTube, and the announcement trailer was leaked online, and it kind of set the tone for the rest of the year and the promotion of SFV," Ono recalls. "I kind of feel that leaks are just part of Street Fighter V at this point!

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"The beta tests we have been running have been very challenging. We're going to be aggressively testing the game between now and its launch, as online play is such an important aspect of SFV. As for characters, we're still working on the details of each individual character but, yeah, it's absolutely possible that even experienced players will see some surprises, like Vega going from a charge to a command character. Like, for Alex, you might find that he plays completely different, or we might do something really crazy and shave his head. (Laughs) Just wait until the information about these characters leaks in the near future."

While we're talking characters, I ask about putting Abel in Street Fighter V, but Ono just laughs. Look, you can't say I didn't try. After Street Fighter IV was released and the fighting game community (FGC) began a period of growth, every other fighting game developer had to ensure that their game was reaching the highest possible standards. The audience would no longer take some sloppy, unbalanced beat 'em up that traded on nostalgia or a particular license. In recent years we've seen top-tier Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat games that actually improve on a few of Street Fighter IV's weaker aspects, such as its somewhat clunky online play and community features. And Ono himself, once we've got around a translation issue of the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats," is fairly modest about the impact SFIV had on the FGC.

A screenshot from 'Street Fighter V'

"We don't feel that we've raised the bar! We laid the groundwork with Street Fighter IV. Now, we're looking at everyone and thinking, 'Wow, they've all stepped their game up!' So, we have to pay a bit of attention to what other people are doing right now. We're looking at what some of the other fighting games are currently doing well and taking those aspects into consideration. However, Street Fighter has been around for almost 30 years now, and in this time it has developed its own identity that the other games in its genre just don't have. We might look down a few side streets, but the road that Street Fighter is on is the road everyone follows."

Street Fighter V launches in February, making 2015's Capcom Cup probably the last that SFIV will be played at. It's going to be an interesting year ahead, to say the least—exciting, sure, but I'm certain that many a Street Fighter fan is slightly nervous about the new beginning SFV is going to represent. I wonder where Ono thinks the game will be another 12 months from now.

"In terms of the future, and what we want to see, we want to see the Pro Tour grow and have a bigger Capcom Cup," he says. "Hopefully, we'll have thousands of people at all the physical events; but perhaps they're going to become a more digital experience? Perhaps people will enjoy watching matches in their living rooms just as much as they will in a huge arena full of spectators. All of this will come with the bigger audience, though, which is the most important part. I would like to hear people saying, 'The first Street Fighter game I played was Street Fighter V'. Then I can sit back on my sofa and be like, 'I did it.'"

Follow Andi on Twitter.

Street Fighter V is released for PlayStation 4 and PC on February 16. Find more information at the game's official website.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When I was 13, I got really into hair products: Wella Shock Waves Gel, Wet Look VO5, Fudge Styling Wax, L'Oreal Extra Strength, Aussie Mousse, basically anything the promised to texture, control, or volumize my greasy crown. At one point I was applying several of these gloopy potions daily, ruffing my follicles into a crispy, lacquered mess. Beneath the fiberglass meringue that was my barnet you would usually find a combination of Paul Smith aftershave, Nivea moisturizer, Levi's engineered jeans (straight from Cromwell's Madhouse), and reproduction 70s football training tops with "BRA" on one side and "ZIL" on the other.

It would have been a ridiculous look for anyone, but especially for a 13-year-old. My pustular skin didn't need to be made any more moist and I didn't even own a razor, let alone need expensive aftershave. But it wasn't a look I was forced into by my peers, who were still turning up in full Man United outfits and using roll-on Lynx, it was one I was coerced into by a group of older men: the metrosexuals.

Writer Mark Simpson first coined the term "metrosexual" in 1994, but it's his 2002 summation of the tribe that explains it the best: "The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis—because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms, and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference." In essence, they were the men of their time: hopelessly stylish, haplessly selfish, helplessly lost.

By today's standards of gender fluidity and body modification, it doesn't seem like much of a revolution. But the metrosexuals were the post-9/11, pre-credit crunch dandies: They shagged around but cared about their skin, watched football but cared about their hair, drank lager but cared about their teeth. They drove BMW Z3s and vintage Vespas, they had canvas prints of Bobby Moore and Michael Caine on the walls of their Islington bachelor pads. They drank fruity beer, wooed PR girls, and knew that wiping, rather than washing, your porcini helped retain the flavor. This was masculinity, Carluccio's style.

There were a litany of examples: David Beckham's Police campaigns, the work of Gordon Ramsey before he became a crumbling lunatic puking out undercooked clam chowder in mid-American diners, José Mourinho before he became the ultimate dad-on-the-sofa, the entire oeuvre of Tom Ford, Hugh Grant's character in About a Boy, the video for "Gotta Get Thru This" by Daniel Bedingfield, in all its millennial glory.

The conduct, philosophy, and aesthetic of the metrosexual man were enshrined in the 2004 remake of Alfie, where Jude Law skips around Manhattan on a scooter, breaking hearts and moisturizing daily. Much in the same way that Taxi Driver spoke to a generation of young men suffering from disillusionment in the post-Vietnam era, Alfie spoke to a post-millennial man who was really worried that that his T-zone was looking a bit oily.

This became the standard of masculinity for some time: Rugby players started getting back, sack, and crack waxes; prime ministers appeared on the cover of GQ; nobody wore a tie for almost a decade. This was the first time in history in which, feasibly, you could have your head kicked in by somebody who used toner.

But then something happened among the high-earning metropolitan elite: that idea of ultra-smooth sexuality, skinny ties, scooters, and chillout compilations suddenly became old hat. A new kind of man was on the horizon: the Old Street farm-hand, the heavily-considered, heavily follicled throwback who likes his pork pulled, his jeans salvaged, his beard oiled, and his beer brewed in a barrel.

Photo by Javier Cabral

The staples changed. Zero 7 became Caribou, Carluccio's became Meat Mission and Jude Law became Bon Iver. First they decommissioned Concorde, then came this. It was as if the future we had been promised had been snatched from us, and we'd been plunged into a cultural darkness where the overlords ran coffee shops with swear words in their name. The original metrosexuals, meanwhile, slunk off towards fatherhood, bankruptcy, and chronic cocaine addictions.

Of course, both these ideals are just as ludicrous and fake as each other, but the differences between them tell us a lot about what's happened to society in the last few years. For all their capitalist swagger, the metrosexuals were believers in industry, in mass production, in brands: Nivea, BMW, HMV, and Absolut Vodka. Whereas the Old Street farmhands are essentially luddites, suspicious of anything that comes from anywhere further than the next town over, brewing their own booze, and selling to their own people like some weird southern death cult.

The metrosexuals, for all their sins, saw themselves as men of the world, even if only because they had a La Dolce Vita poster in their kitchens and they were on first name terms with the Italian geezer at the Deli. The Old Street farmhands see themselves as very much local, essentially carrying out some eccentric nu-tribalism, competing with people from other villages about who's got the best pale ales and chili slaw.

Although neither would want to hear it, both are very much the result of the politics of their time. The metrosexuals were the spawn of Tony Blair, international playboys who nailed major arms deals in Paul Smith suits and committed atrocities whilst listening to "A Rush of Blood to the Head" off their first-era iPod docks. Whereas the pork'n'beard brigade are the bastard children of the Big Society, little Englanders in heritage workwear, desperately trying to recreate the set of To Kill a Mockingbird in inner-city London, refusing to let a little thing like the working class get in the way.

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It's pointless to say if either tribe is better or worse, both have their sins. But while it's hard to imagine any legacy the Old Street farm hands will leave, aside from transforming great swathes of Britain's industrial brownfields into unaffordable cafe spaces, metrosexuals have had a lasting, tangible impact on British culture.

You can see the metrosexual legacy in the buffed, pampered, increasingly feminized men of Britain. In the guyliner and the creatine and the spray tans of the protein shake guzzling gym-obsessed sad young douchebags. Granted, it's in a much more lurid, sexualized form than Jude Law on a Vespa or Jamie Oliver tearing (not cutting) some parsley, but it's also inherently more charming than buying a property on Brick Lane, serving expensive coffee, and telling anyone who complains to fuck off. It's something that's traveled a lot more, had a lot more impact, and maybe, for all it's inherent silliness, changed the way we perceive masculinity. Whereas the Old Street farmhands only serve to challenge notions of the future, endlessly trying to "reclaim," rather than "reimagine."

It's easy to write off the metrosexuals, but perhaps they were some misguided vanguards of the future, forgotten dreamers, with a legacy far beyond the world they lived in. Moisturized, texturized, maximized dreamers on Vespas, riding toward a freedom that we may have only just found.

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Ammon Bundy. Photo via Gage Skidmore

As you may have heard, earlier this week an armed militia group occupied a building on a federal wildlife preserve near Burns, Oregon. They were initially there in support of a local rancher and his son who ran afoul of the government after setting fire to roughly 140 acres of federal land, and now face some tough prison sentences. Included in the militia are relatives of another federal-government-hating rancher named Cliven Bundy.

By Tuesday night, the Oath Keepers, a militia group not linked to the occupation, were warning anyone with children to stay away from the wildlife reserve. The occupiers, meanwhile, were alternately announcing to the press that they'd leave when there was a plan in place to hand the federally owned land, known as the Malheur Wildlife Reserve, over to the local community, and boasting that there were federal warrants out for their arrests—and that they'd be waiting, armed, when federal agents arrived.

So what the hell is going on?

In the days leading up to the standoff, it appeared that the plan might have been to keep the federal government from hauling the local ranchers, Dwight and Steve Hammond, off to prison. The Hammonds were caught in a judicial clusterfuck involving minimum sentencing and the War on Terror, and the Bundys weren't happy to hear that they'd be doing five years of hard time for lighting fires on federal land in 2001 and 2006, in what the government claims was arson.

In November, the Bundys wrote on their family blog that "the incarceration of the Hammond family will spawn serious civil unrest." The militiamen's occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which appears to include at least three of Cliven's sons, is apparently the family's way of making good on that threat. Theoccupation echoes the standoff at theBundys' own ranch in April of 2014, when armed militias faced off against agents with the Bureau of Land Management, the culmination of two-decade legal spat over Cliven's unpaid grazing fees.

Unlike Bundy, the Hammonds are now in prison. To the dismay of militia groups like the Oath Keepers, the father and son turned down the generous offer to have armed insurgents protect them from the government's attempts to drag them to jail, and showed up Monday at a federal penitentiary in Southern California. Although they apparently were in contact with the Bundys before this week's events, the Hammonds have now made it clear they're not interested in the occupation of any wildlife refuge. So this isn't really about the Bundys keeping their kindred scofflaws out of the pen.

As in the Bundy Ranch standoff, the militiamen's main issue, at least nominally, seems to be land ownership, and specifically, the fact that the federal government owns the majority of the land in eleven western states, which is, to be fair, a shit ton of land. This fact is particularly irksome to ranchers like the Hammonds and the Bundys, who need lots of open space to graze livestock, and tend to take issue with the federal government using the land for things like, say, wildlife protection.

While lots of people in the West take issue with the feds controlling local natural resources, the Bundys and their allies take this view much further. Basically, Cliven—and presumably the Bundy sons that are now freezing their asses off in Oregon—think the federal government unlawfully seized the land from the state, and thatArticle 1, Section 8, Clause 17 of the US Constitution says the feds can't legally own all those huge tracts of land anyway.

This, of course, is why Bundy lets his cows graze on federal land that is technically reserved for a species of tortoise, while also refusing to pay the $1.2 million in grazing fees he owes the government because he doesn't believe the fees are valid. The 2014 standoff was sparked when BLM agents started seizing Bundy's cattle, but when the family and their militiamen advanced on the federal agents with firearms, the cattle were promptly surrendered. No blood was shed, and the Bundys can make a credible case that they won.

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That victory no doubt bolstered the Bundys' feeling of moral certainty about their particularly screwy interpretation of the Constitution. Now with the Oregon occupation, his sons are apparently taking a victory lap.

The occupiers, who call themselves theCitizens for Constitutional Freedom, include other militia members who are not members of the Bundy family. But at this point, wedon't know very much about the non-Bundy members in its ranks, or even how many of them there actually are. According to Ammon Bundy's own headcount, there are about 150 people in the wildlife refuge, although more reliable estimates say it's more like 15 to 25.

Known sovereign state groups like the III Percenters, the Oath Keepers—who participated in the Bundy Ranch standoff—and the assorted West Coast militias operating under the aegis of the "Pacific Patriot Network" are beginning to distance themselves from the Malheur antics. One III Percentertold Reuters that Ammon Bundy "believes he's on a mission from God," and that to the Bundys, "what the Hammonds want and what the community wants is immaterial."

In addition to Ammon Bundy, the de facto leader, another high-ranking occupier is Ammon's brother Ryan. An Army veteran named Ryan Payne is another apparent ringleader of the group, and told The New York Times that he will occupy the refuge "for as long as it takes." An occupier named John Ritzheimer has participated in anti-Muslim rallies, according to the Los Angeles Times, and tried to recruit people to Oregon in a YouTube video, saying ,"We need real men here." Then there's the mysterious figure known only as "Captain Moroni"—a reference to the Book of Mormon—who says he's "willing to die here." A rancher from Arizona with the outrageous name of LaVoy Finicum says there are tons of occupiers, but they were hiding when reporters looked around.

Another occupier named Michael Stettler told The Washington Post that the group was mostly couch potatoes fielding phone calls from the media and watching Fox News, and that if push came to shove, "most of them couldn't even run a mile."

From time to time, people do show up and join the occupation, but firsthand accounts say their arrivals are disorganized and awkward.

Ammon Bundy tried to win over the community of Burns, at a news conference on Sunday."This refuge here is rightfully owned by the people and we intend to use it," he said. He went on to say that he wanted the newly liberated land to be "a unified body of people that understand the principles of the Constitution."

Despite the tantalizing promise of countless acres of federal land, the people of Burns, Oregon, population 3,000,hardly seem thrilled about the occupation. And the militiamen haven't been great at outreach so far. In one baffling incident, they showed up at a yard sale and got into a shouting match with the elderly mother of the local sheriff, and then later marched into the sheriff's office to tattle on her for threatening them.

Even the members of the community sympathetic to the militia's opposition to federal land ownership seem to doubt Ammon Bundy's competence, and the wisdom of seizing a federal building. Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward has asked them to go home and be with their families, which must have stung, because county sheriffs are some of the only authority figures the Bundys respect.

But while their tactics might be questionable, and their approach disorganized, their basic argument against federal land management speaks to a broader movement that has been gaining steam in the West in recent years. The Bundys have attended rowdy anti-BLM events, and they haven't all been spontaneous, grassroots rallies. At least one was organized by Phil Lyman, a Utah county commissioner known for his anti-BLM activities.

Lyman is not the only member of a government agency who would like to see federal land handed over to the states. In Utah, for instance, state legislators are fighting hard to seize land back from the feds. Legislators in Idaho and Nevada have made similar attempts. These efforts have been criticized by environmentalists as land grabs, but to date, none of these state pols has gone all Dog Day Afternoon on a wildlife preserve.

Publications like InfoWars and Zero Hedge—the ones often lumped into the "conspiracy" category—are, of course, watching the events in Oregon closely, and as outlets that reliably post material critical of federal land rights, exploring their take on events can be illuminating. A blog post by Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden called the Oregon Occupation "a terrible plan that we might be stuck with," and games out what might happen if the feds try to take out the occupiers. The answer, it seems, is that it would be inauspicious start to a nonetheless necessary revolution.

"If the Feds use brutality to handle the Oregon conflict, it will indeed 'kick-off.' There wont be any way to stop it," Durden writes. "Just don't get too excited, folks. This is no Lexington or Concord. I really don't know what to call it." writes Durden.

For their part, the BLM—or any other federal agency for that matter—probably doesn't want a shootout with the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. The government's botched handling of past sieges, like Ruby Ridge or the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, have been disastrous, leaving behind unnecessary body counts and deep, meaningful scars in the cultural imagination.

It might not come to that. Ammon Bundy has already said he's willing leave if the locals tell him "directly," to do so. Details such as which residents would have to say this, and what qualifies as "directly" have not yet been provided.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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

For Echosight. Life After Michael Brown and Freddie Gray: a photographic collaboration between Ferguson-based photographer Michael Thomas and Baltimore-based photographer Glenford Nunez to commemorate the anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, edited by Daniella.

You know the vulnerability of being in front of the camera—how hard it is to act "naturally" when someone is taking your photo, how you inevitably worry that an "honest" (read: unflattering) photo of you will exist, be tagged on Facebook, become the next meme. You know that vulnerability, but you might not have considered the vulnerability of the photographer behind the lens. As the newest members of Toronto's Boreal Collective, New Orleans-based photographer/filmmaker Annie Flanagan and UK-based photojournalist Daniella Zalcman work on the principle that photography is more powerful when it inverts traditional roles and contexts: that the photographer can be vulnerable to their subject, that artists are stronger working together than alone, that asking questions and pushing boundaries is art as much as activism. Founded in 2010, the Boreal Collective's photographers have a reputation for tackling pressing cultural and social issues across the globe; their belief in expanding "creative and social consciousness" means diversifying a traditionally white, straight, masculine profession—and their newest additions bear witness to that philosophy.

I wanted to speak with Flanagan and Zalcman about their individual practice and collaborative support, a balance that is frequently complicated for photojournalists, who often work alone. For Zalcman, the "joy and strength of a collective is that it creates something of a group conscience access to a small panel of people who understand your job, your work, and your priorities." Flanagan adds that joining Boreal is "a commitment not only to my own work, but also to the work of the other collective members and to the art of photography." In an industry driven to continuously redefine itself, Flanagan and Zalcman paused to talk with me about the language, audience, and framing of photography in new contexts.

Bradley Cooper reenacts as part of the Essex Second Battalion at the Damyns Hall Aerodrome in 2013 (from Sunday Soldiers). Daniella Zalcman

VICE: I first heard that both of you had joined Boreal Collective in a Time Lightbox piece that declared the "comeback" of the photo collective. Why do you think collectives died out, and why are they being revived? Why now?

Annie Flanagan: Perhaps because there are not many options for staff positions as a photographer, so we have to seek support networks that are outside certain publications? That was never what I wanted—a staff position—and collectives of all kinds have been a presence in my life for a while now. So, a photography collective has always seemed like an ideal situation.

Daniella Zalcman: I don't know that I agreed with that piece, actually. I think, as with every other journalistic institution, they've had to reevaluate and restructure in a lot of ways to keep up with technology and the new/different ways that we interact with media. But newspapers, magazines, wire services, galleries, museums, and publishers have had to do that, too. I don't really feel like the notion of a group of photographers joining together to strengthen each other's visions and brands was ever likely to die out.

I'm always frustrated with industry alarmists. If you listen to the doomsayers, there's no work, no money, no audience and we're all screwed, but the truth is we're consuming more media, more photography, than we ever have before in human history. We just have to figure out different ways to monetize and innovate. We can do that. And it's easier together.

Nekqua dance with her twin sibling, Shy. "We have a bond like no other, he is my everything." / Syracuse, NY 2012 (from Hey, Best Friend!). Annie Flanagan

Many of your projects focus on marginalized and oppressed communities. You are each part of one—maybe even some—of these communities. Can you talk a bit about marginalization in the subjects you photograph and in your own subject positions (female, queer, however you identify)?

DZ: For me, one of journalism's best and most noble applications is its ability to elevate oppressed voices. And here is where I start to sound more like an activist than maybe is fashionable, but there are stories where clinical objectivity is absurd. I can pretend all I want that I am approaching stories on the ongoing oppression of sexual minorities from a neutral perspective, but we all know that's bullshit. I do not support anti-homosexuality legislation. I do not support homophobia. I believe that there is a right side of history here, and maybe my work can underscore that too many people, governments, and leaders are on the other side. I think that it is also my job to listen to those voices and do everything I can to represent them honestly and fairly. After three years of documenting Uganda's beleaguered LGBTI community, I realized I'd never made an effort to interact with the 96 percent of the population that supports anti-homosexuality laws; so I reached out to dozens of religious leaders in Kampala to discuss sexual identity, homophobia, and religion with them. While a lot of the conversations were fairly predictable, I was surprised by the number of moderate voices that are often ignored or underrepresented because they don't make for spicy quotes.

I don't know that my own background has all that much to do with it. I identify strongly as a woman of color (I'm half Vietnamese and Jewish), but I had a privileged childhood and, to most people, I look white. I am heterosexual and cisgender. All things considered, I have an incredibly easy life. But of course, I've experienced small doses of racism and huge doses of sexism (any woman who says otherwise is, with all due respect, completely blind).

AF: Yes, it is important to focus also on the oppressor; in many cases, violence and oppression are the result of an individual's experience with violence and oppression in their own life. I find viewing those that commit violent acts as "monsters" really quite harmful: we need to listen to their stories so that we can better heal. It is a cycle and the whole cycle needs to be investigated.

I guess my experiences greatly impact what I choose to focus on. Most of the work I make stems from my own experiences and experiences of those closest to me, and then I want to see how they exist in different circumstances and on a larger scale.

"You know what's nice?" Charlotte asked, "Being able to get in the car and go to the store...without asking." / Williston, ND 2013 (From Sweet Crude). Annie Flanagan

What is the relationship between photography and vulnerability, as you see it? This might mean the vulnerability of your subjects and/or your own vulnerability "behind" the camera.

AF: We ask a lot of those we photograph and a large part of that is that they be vulnerable. As I began to focus my work on gendered violence and trauma, I found it vital to understand what it was like to document and share my own trauma. And understanding what that vulnerability is like, what it feels like to document and share your own trauma, has made me a more compassionate artist

I was given a lot of conflicting advice about putting working out there. This might impact your job. Editors might have concerns about your PTSD or how your trauma can impact the way you do your job. You might be an insurance risk. I listened and did not share the work and it pissed me off, because that is exactly what we ask of people when we ask them to be open and honest about their experiences. And I thought it was bullshit to sit behind a camera and ask of people what I was too threatened to do myself. Now I just put it all out there and understand that being vulnerable does not make you weak.

It is important that I never forget that with a camera comes power. I must be aware of how that power is used, how to navigate that power, how making work has consequences; I must be accountable to those consequences. I prioritize talking to the people I photograph about how they feel about it. What is being photographed like for you? What are your concerns? Hesitations? Specifically, in working with groups of people that have a history of being misrepresented or exploited through the media, our presence can be triggering or harmful.

DZ: Almost all of the subjects of my recent projects are deeply vulnerable in some way. I've had people disclose sexual and physical abuse to me for the first time; I've photographed individuals whose identities needed to be completely obscured or they could risk being arrested, beaten, or killed. The vulnerability of those I am privileged to document is always at the forefront of my consciousness. Their lives and their personal, physical, and psychological security matters so much more to me than my work.

As Annie says, we ask so much of the people we photograph, and there has to be something repaid in the transaction that justifies their trust in us. And it's so easy to damage that relationship. Maybe the worst moment of my life was the time a young gay man from Kampala called me on Skype in a panic to say that his parents had seen a photo I ran of him on CNN and he'd been kicked out of his house. I'd photographed him with his partner a few weeks prior, and had shown him the image and explained to him how and where it would run. He agreed, knowing that their families wouldn't have access to the broadcast, but a neighbor saw the photograph and, because of me, he was homeless. I walked around for the rest of the day suppressing the urge to vomit, feeling completely powerless.

Lisa practices a hula hoop routine in Runnymede Eco Village, an intentional community that existed in a woodland just outside of London for three years before they were evicted earlier this year (from To Make the Wasteland Grow). Daniella Zalcman

So many past and present photography collectives are predominantly ol' white—boys' clubs. Until you two joined Boreal, for example, it was comprised of nine male, one female, all straight-identified, as far as I know, and almost exclusively white members. In my experience, people don't want to talk about this lack of diversity. There is a kind of deafening silence when questions shift from aesthetics and contexts to questions of representation and equity. Why is it so terribly uncomfortable to discuss?

AF: Diversity, and lack thereof, is so important to discuss and we need to fight for the space to discuss and dismantle. It is hard and uncomfortable because it requires that people investigate their own privileges, admit them, and work to dismantle them. It is not a priority for a lot of people. I also think it's hard to discuss because people feel threatened: if you are used to being granted everything based on something that you are born into, if it gets taken away, you tend to do everything to keep it intact. It is going to take a lot of work for both sides—for the oppressed and the oppressors. Coming forward about shit experiences is not easy and can have consequences. Personally, I have had successful dude photographers say shitty things to me because I assume they felt threatened or felt that was their right or did not even understand how misogynistic their speech was. And I hate misogyny.

DZ: Annie nailed it. I think that it is deeply important that we continue to talk about diversity and the lack thereof in the photography community, but I'm also so goddamn sick of the conversation. I don't think it's fair to pin the lack of women, people of color, and queer-identifying individuals on collectives specifically—it's the whole industry. What were the numbers from that World Press Photo survey? That 80 percent of the photographers surveyed were male? I know the pool wasn't an ideal cross section, blah blah blah, but that's just so gross. I forget, sometimes, since I am surrounded by so many strong, talented, amazing female photojournalists, that it's so skewed.

AF: I think it's so vital that we work to support and encourage different perspectives. If you don't see people you can identify with, it can make you not only doubt your own ability, but also the worth of your perspective. We all have a lot to unlearn—as humans, as photographers, as an industry. We need to actively work to support and elevate a diversity of perspectives, to make sure that there is no homogeneous perspective in media coverage, photography, filmmaking (and beyond). Which takes concentrated efforts—like including females and queer people and people of color in your collective.

DZ: And it's an impossibly fine line between wanting to be outspoken, and an advocate for equality, and wanting not to be labeled the crazy feminist harpy on her soapbox (everyone already thinks I'm a crazy feminist harpy anyway, so that ship has sailed for me). I was speaking to a male editor recently (someone I have known for a long time, whose opinions and moral compass I trust completely) and mentioned in passing that maybe half of the male photo editors I've worked with have acted in an obviously inappropriate, gendered way in a professional setting. He was actually speechless. It was simultaneously heartwarming to see him so completely shocked, and also depressing to realize that he was totally unaware of these pathetically common occurrences. It's uncomfortable to discuss because we all have stories. That's okay, I like making people uncomfortable.

KM: As a way to conclude, I wonder if you might each engage with one image from the other's oeuvre.

My First Black Eye / Washington, DC 2006 (From We Grew Up With Gum in Our Hair). Annie Flanagan

DZ to AF: I saw the self-portrait of your first black eye a few weeks ago, and it has been ingrained in my memory since. I'm curious about what you think are the strengths and challenges of documenting yourself in such a vulnerable and personal way, and how you think it affects your presentation of a story (and your audience's reaction to that work). I struggle a lot with this in a very different way; I am almost always a complete outsider in my projects, and that's something I'm very self-conscious of and think about constantly. I wonder if the inverse is just as stressful?

AF: I am terrified about putting images of my personal life out into the open. Every time I share an image and I am open and honest about my personal life, I do it in complete fear and lack any confidence. We need to understand what we ask of those we photograph—to be vulnerable, to share trauma and other intimacies, to share the healing process. I cannot ask other people to do these things if I am not comfortable doing them myself. If fears of judgement, of safety, were stopping me from being honest, how could I expect others to be honest? This particularly relates to documenting my own trauma and anxiety, but also to sharing images of my friends and relationships. I made a promise to myself that I would not let fear stop me from moving forward or making work or taking risks, so even though I now share work about my life, I do it in fear. I just refuse to let that fear stop me.

Gary Edwards, 2015 (from Signs of Your Identity). Daniella Zalcman

AF to DZ: My question is about "Signs of Your Identity," because I am interested in people's perceptions of photographing past traumas and the healing process. I would love to hear your perspective on this project in relationship to one's ability to heal or the collective healing process. Before you began making images, what were people's reactions to the proposed project? Once the images were made, what was this person's reaction to the work? Do you believe photography can heal, or help to heal?

DZ: I didn't share all that much about how I was going to use the portraits. I mentioned they'd be double exposures, and that faces could be somewhat obscured for anyone who felt more comfortable not being identifiable. But once the images were made and initially shared, the response was the most powerful and positive reaction I've ever gotten to my work; many of my subjects told me they were proud to be part of the project, that they were glad they'd shared their stories, and an overwhelming number of other survivors came forward to tell me about their experiences over e-mail as well.

I spent so much time during this project thinking about healing: how we heal, and how others can facilitate healing. I photographed and interviewed 45 Indian Residential School survivors on my last trip in August, and there was a huge range in the conversations I had with them, from hours of emotional, uninterrupted testimony about their time in those schools, to one man who told me that he'd never told anyone what had happened to him and he never would. I wanted everyone to disclose in their own way, however they felt comfortable. For some people that took hours, for some, less than a minute. I felt that there was a concrete relationship between the openness with which survivors discussed their pasts and where they were in the healing process. I saw so many people who clearly were determined to keep their pain and trauma balled up inside, and it was heartbreaking, and clearly a huge psychological weight. But for every survivor who chose to share his or her story, often in tears, almost all of them remarked after the fact that each time they shared their histories, they felt a little lighter, a little happier, and a little more able to forgive. So, I don't know if photography itself can heal, but maybe the process of storytelling can.

See more of Annie Flanagan's work on their website, and Daniella Zalcman here.

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Over the last few years, people with mental health problems have, to some extent, become better at talking about them than ever before. Yet mental health services have splintered in such a way that, even if someone feels more comfortable reaching out and asking for help, it may be more difficult for them to get what they need. It's a bind that is both ironic and frightening.

In 2015, Britain's mental health crisis grew increasingly dismal. The Conservative government isn't just failing to tackle it—as a result of its systematic dismantling of the national health system, it is directly influencing it.

Under every policy that fails to deliver and every stretched system, lives don't just suffer—they are lost. Although no mental health issue can be attributed to a single cause—problems like anxiety and depression are multi-causal, with a confluence of factors at play—there were clear findings in 2015 that proved government policies in the UK are directly impacting vulnerable people and making things worse.

The United States, too, has a mental health system that is pretty fucked: despite the mental healthcare parity mandates that were implemented under Obamacare in January 2014, reports this year have shown that the system remains broken. In an encouraging sign, however, yesterday Obama pledged an additional $500 million in additional spending on mental health care.

The human ramifications of the mental healthcare failings of 2015 make for upsetting reading. In September, a landmark ruling in the UK directly linked the suicide of Michael O'Sullivan—a man with severe depression who was found "fit to work" by outsourced assessors despite notes from his GP about the cyclical nature of his illness—to having his benefits removed. The Work Programme is David Cameron's flagship scheme for welfare reform, but in December the charity Mind found that fewer than one in ten people (16,090 of 168,730 people) with mental health problems have been helped into sustained employment. Tom Pollard, Mind's Policy and Campaigns Manager, said: "After almost five years it is clear that it has been a failure."

We've been reminded constantly of how reluctant those in power are to zoom in on where things are going wrong at the ground level. In November, the DWP refused to examine the effect of its benefit sanctions system on the mental health of people who are affected by it. In December, all parties debated the issue of mental health—how the number of children with mental health issues who have gone to A&E has doubled; that one person in prison takes their life every four days; that the number of people of people detained under the Mental Health Act has risen by 10 percent in the last year—in Parliament, but the government voted against opposition calls for things like asking ministers to restore transparency of mental health funding and where it goes, to address the fundamental inequalities in access to services, and to work on a plan to help prevent mental health problems from occurring in the first place.

As Luciana Berger, Shadow Minister for Mental Health, said: "Nowhere is the gap between political rhetoric and reality more evident than here." The outcome was exasperating, but there is some reassurance in the fact that it happened at all. In 2016, we can be cautiously optimistic that Berger is there, trying to make changes, in a role that is the first of its kind in British politics.

In Britain, austerity has, to some extent, stirred public spirit. The broad range of people who went to this year's many anti-austerity protests—those directly affected, of course, but also those who want to help fight for them—speaks of a greater compassion for and awareness of mental health because it's at the root of everything. That people have become so active around such issues should mean that conversations about mental health will be more frequent in 2016, better informed, and more encouraging of empathy, because this is what helps break down social stigma.

In 2016, mental illness and stigma are still a double helix that needs dismantling. The media must change its behavior. Headlines are not just headlines; language is how we form perceptions. And if that language is discriminatory, the trickle-down effect is seismic.

When Andreas Lubitz, co-pilot of the Germanwings plane that he crashed into the Alps in March, killing 150 people, was found to have a history of recurrent depression, some outlets went into overdrive. CNN's homepage splashed an image of Lubitz beneath the headline "UNFIT TO WORK." "Killer Pilot Suffered From Depression," shouted the Mirror. "Madman in Cockpit" was the Sun's headline. "Why on earth was he allowed to fly?" asked the Mail. Inside, Piers Morgan argued that no one taking antidepressants should be allowed to fly a plane. "Frankly, I don't care if he was mad, bad, or sad," he said, never shy of using a tragedy to push his brand. That mental health charities had to remind the public how very few depressed people become murderers was very sad indeed.

The current system of press regulation in the UK is a sham. Jo Brand, a former mental health nurse, told the Guardian that press watchdog Ipso ("a toytown regulator") has so far achieved "square root of sweet FA" in tackling negative reporting. She's right. In 2016, the media can and should do far better. The worst thing a media outlet can do is feed the public misinformation about how one thing can cause mental illness or, worse, drive someone to suicide (see the Express's headline about a man "driven to suicide after battle with traveller site on his doorstep"). As Brand says, "It's not one thing that batters you and makes you kill yourself. It's a very subtle mix of events... Trying to make it look like it's one thing is a terrible thing to do... For all those people who do suffer, it's a punch in the stomach to their dignity."

What we say among friends on the sofas in our homes is very different to what can be said in a public space. But what we say on our sofas is important, too. We can do better, in 2016, than not challenging ourselves when we find the vulnerabilities of others weird or annoying. We can do better than using words like "mad," "mental," and "crazy" when talking about people we know with a mental health problem, because it is just one part of who they are. And, if we don't understand that part, we should be educating ourselves rather than sitting in a bubble of ignorance and assumption. We should be reading things and asking what we can do to help, not feeling burdened by someone's limitations. Human brains have infinite capacity for change and no one's mental state is fixed—how many of us really know that?

Being more conscious of the language we use around mental health is something every single person can do and it does make a difference. It's not a huge affront on our free speech—it's simple humanity. This year, it's something we can all try.

Follow Eleanor on Twitter.

For criminal justice activists, 2015 was an exhausting year. After high-profile police brutality incidents captured the public imagination at the tail-end of 2014, America had a new national conversation about racism to contend with. Protesters took to the streets across the country, chanting "Hands up, don't shoot!" and "I can't breathe!"; fresh instances of death and pain inflicted by police officers on (mostly) black civilians spread across social media every week; newspapers compiled databases of the number of people killed by cops; presidential candidates were asked to distinguish between "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter" on nationally-televised debates.

One of the responses to these protests from the law-and-order crowd was to ask if all this campaigning against police brutality was contributing to an increase in crime. This is the so-called "Ferguson Effect," a theory suggesting that anti-cop rhetoric was creating a climate in which police could no longer effectively do their jobs. It remains a theory—the statistical evidence supporting a rise in crime rates is thin; last month, the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and law institute affiliated with New York University, published a report finding crime was roughly the same last year as it had been in 2014 in America's largest cities.

That report, however, was scant comfort to Baltimore, a city where mistrust between the cops and the people they serve may have created some serious challenges. Charm City saw a per-capita record of 344 homicides in 2015, the highest total since 1993, when the city had 100,000 more people living in it, as the Baltimore Sun reported this month. In April, 25-year-old Freddie Gray died while in police custody, sparking weeks of Baltimore protests and unrest. In five of the eight months following Gray's death, homicides surpassed 30 or 40 a month. Before the unrest, according to the paper, Baltimore had not witnessed 30 or more homicides in one month since June 2007.

All told, there were some 900 shootings in Baltimore last year, up some 75 percent from 2014—a violent crime spike unparalleled among the 30 largest cities in America, according to the Brennan Center's analysis. Though Baltimore's police and political leadership insist they are determined to make last year's crime statistics an aberration, whether they're planning to do so through tougher policing in 2016 remains to be seen. And with high-stakes local elections coming up, along with a legislative season where police reform will most certainly be on the table and months of trials left for the six officers charged with the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore residents are not expecting closure to the unrest any time soon.

Read: David Simon Talks About Where Baltimore Police Went Wrong

Speaking to the Sun, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis recently said he plans to pressure the state legislature to make possession of illegal firearms a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, and for police to hunt down gun traffickers. He also said he's ramping up recruitment efforts for 200 vacancies in the police force, and trying to coax retired cops to come back to the department. Davis wants to increase street patrols, focus more on residential burglaries, and partner with other city agencies to prevent and solve crime. These priorities reflect some ugly statistics: The BPD's homicide clearance rate dropped sharply in 2015; police solved only about 30 percent of all cases, and according to the Sun, their 2015 clearance rate was less than half the 2014 national average—as well as some 15 percentage points below the BPD's own average in recent years. Experts suspect that the lack of trust between the police and the community is a major contributing factor behind the low clearance rate. (The Baltimore Police Department did not return repeated requests for comment for this story.)

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore City Police Officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, thinks that until the cops on trial for Freddie Gray's death are acquitted, the BPD is not going to be able to do its job effectively. "It isn't that these officers did something bad and got caught. It's that they did exactly what they were told to do and are being prosecuted for it," he says. "As long as cops feel like they can get criminally prosecuted for doing their job, you shouldn't expect cops to be proactively policing." He adds that winter offers a sort of natural reset button for communities, since crime tends to go down when the temperature drops. "It gives them an opportunity to feel like, OK, we're starting over," he says. "But the department is still understaffed and morale is in the tank."

Tara Huffman, director of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Programs at Baltimore's Open Society Institute (OSI), says her organization has been working closely with Commissioner Davis and Baltimore's police to help them identify and reduce discriminatory practices within their department. This would hopefully help to restore some trust between the police and Baltimore residents. OSI will also be providing seed funding for a policing pilot program this year where officers will send people who appear to be suffering from an underlying drug addiction into a community-based treatment center rather than arresting them. The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, (LEAD) was first developed in Seattle, and it helped to keep low-level offenders out of the criminal justice system while also getting them the aid they needed.

When asked whether she thinks the city has responded in a serious enough way to the unrest and its aftermath, Huffman acknowledged that there's "a lot of talking" going on, including dialogue between people who don't normally speak to each other. "There is room for progressive ideas and solutions that wouldn't have gotten the same audience eight months ago," she told me. "But we're not seeing the fruit yet. I think we still have a ways to go until we see the fruit."

The question of whether the city and state will be willing to make serious investments in poor Baltimore communities, a critical factor for reducing gun violence long-term, remains an open one. Just last month, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a federal complaint over the cancellation of a long-planned transit project in Baltimore, which would have primarily benefitted low-income blacks who lack quality transportation options. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan cancelled the project and diverted money to roads and highways elsewhere in the state. The city also massively underfunded its Operation Ceasefire program, a violence-reduction initiative that has proved successful in cities like New York. Baltimore's Operation Ceasefire director resigned last spring in protest, citing insufficient resources and support. In addition, following the Freddie Gray protests, Governor Hogan cut Baltimore City's public education funding by 3.3 percent.

Yet on Tuesday the governor traveled to West Baltimore to announce a nearly $700 million plan to tear down vacant buildings throughout the city and bring in new development over the next four years.

"I don't see us policing ourselves out of this crisis. That has never worked before," says Alex Elkins, a visiting historian at the University of Michigan who studies the police. "We need sustained engagement with hard-hit communities in order to establish a different pipeline, toward civic inclusion rather than banishment to jail and prison. To achieve that, a policy that attacks root causes is essential, ethically and strategically."

"People are generally angry about a variety of things, and we have a community that makes promises but no real substantive investments," adds Dayvon Love, co-founder of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), a grassroots organization that advocates for the interests of black people in Baltimore. "This year we're gonna see a lot more of what we saw in 2015. It won't be an anomaly. We'll continue to see a lot of the same."

City residents are not expecting an end to the unrest any time soon. The six officers on trial for Freddie Gray's death will take the stand over the next several months; the first officer's first trial, which ended in a hung jury, has already been rescheduled for June. The pretrial hearing for the second officer, Caesar R. Goodson Jr., began Wednesday. Goodson faces a number of charges, including second-degree depraved heart murder, a crime carrying a maximum 30-year sentence.

On top of the trials, 2016 is set to be an intense year for state and local politics. The state legislative session kicks off in Annapolis next week, and activist leaders will be pressuring legislators to pass police reform measures, like body cameras and changes to the Law Enforcement Bill of Rights—or a list of ways cops can evade scrutiny. On top of that, a new Baltimore mayor and City Council will be elected in November; Huffman thinks the current City Council could turn over more than 50 percent in the next cycle.

Love says he and other activists will continue to pressure leaders to invest directly in the people living in the beleaguered communities—a more effective and sustainable way, he argues, to create safe and thriving neighborhoods.

Elkins agrees. "Anything we try will be expensive—rather, anything that is worth trying ought to be expensive," he says. "The spike after Gray's death and the riots does seem anomalous at the same time that it is cause for concern. Yet we shouldn't be distracted by the dispute over the Ferguson Effect—which essentially asks, who's to blame? That's a sideshow to the real issue of economic justice. Because of the way our criminal justice system favors the rich over the poor, we should be trying to empower the poor."

OSI's Huffman adds that it remains to be seen whether the powers that be are ready to do what the city needs.

"There's definitely political will to stop the bleeding, but whether or not there's a real recognition of what the underlying problems are, I'm not sure," she says. "The city is still in transition, but we have a lot of opportunities right now to get this right."

Follow Rachel M. Cohen on Twitter

Photo via Flickr user Shaun Merritt

A Toronto dispensary is now offering its patients Rob Ford Kush, named after the city's crack-smoking former mayor.

The Canadian Compassion Dispensary, located in Kensington Market, told the Toronto Sun it's been selling the locally grown strain of indica for a few weeks at a cost of $10 a gram.

According to an online review riddled with double entendres, the "fat, stinky buds" found in Ford's weed namesake are pretty good shit.

"Although the name sounds like it won't get the job done, this is a very powerful indica dominant strain."

In a nod to Ford's not-so-subtle comments about going down on his wife, the reviewer notes "I stocked up on this, so I have more than enough to smoke at home."

Though better known for having smoked crack cocaine during his disastrous time in office, Ford has also freely admitted to being a pothead. He was also charged with possession in Florida after being pulled over and caught with a joint in his back pocket; the charge was later dropped for reasons Ford reportedly can't recall.

"I've smoked a lot of it," he told a reporter who inquired about his weed smoking habits.

However, when CityNews asked Ford on Twitter if he was aware of the bud bearing his name, he replied somewhat defensively (and irrelevantly) with this burn:

"Did you know that 'City' and 'News' are 2 separate words? or how's it feel to have 1/4 the followers of @CP24?"

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

How our writer sees himself. Still via 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

The piss-coloured and sickly saccharine sherry comes in a 750 mL clear plastic bottle (complete with a shitty black screw cap) and sells for $7.89, making it 40 percent stronger and 25 percent cheaper than a mediocre bottle of wine. In short, it's a highly repulsive and economical way to get sloshed.

I devoted most of 2014 to two things: ingesting a heinous quantity of the swill and penning newspaper articles for pay. In that fairly critical order. So while my roommates worked real jobs in construction and data entry, I drank and wrote and spent money I made from writing on drink, pretending to live out the tortured ideal pioneered by the Holy Drunken Trinity of Hemingway, Hitchens, and Hunter S.

Days started at 10 AM, alcohol by noon. It wasn't until I lined up at the local liquor store behind an overtly intoxicated homeless dude and noted our shared interest in purchasing Kingsgate Reserve Canadian Apera that four equally unfortunate and related things started to sink in: a) my overwrought writing will never compare to the work of my literary heroes; b) two of those legends offed themselves while the third smoked himself to death; c) I was buying a slightly fancier Listerine; and d) the whole writer-as-alcoholic shtick is hazardously romanticized. Despite such thoughts, I still bought the bottle, drank most of it in the subsequent three hours and spent the remainder of the night playing Borderlands 2 while subsumed in a massive bean bag chair instead of doing actual work. That quickly turned into a nightly occurrence because playing first-person shooters while drunk is hilarious, but also quite the impediment to meeting deadlines. One time, I just completely forgot about an article and my editor had to hastily come up with filler to get the issue out the door.

Art and intoxicants have always had a blurry relationship, yet writers seem to posses a lock on the most extreme and irksome form of self-aggrandizement on the subject. Spend an hour in a newsroom or writing circle—or even worse, among a classroom of overly eager creative writing students—and you're bound to hear an assortment of cringey dad jokes regarding whiskey bottles hidden in desks and drinking before noon: former Slate editor Jack Shafer once mourned the loss of the Mad Men era when "alcoholics were celebrated or at least regaled in newsrooms for their heroic immoderation." Absent from such deification was the fact many such writers were misogynist assholes or faux-contrarian conservatives.

There's no denying that there's a time and place for alcohol in the journalistic process. It's much easier for me to interview rappers or CEOs after a few sips of something. But such indulgences can swiftly become a problematic habit, one that culminated in me conducting a 9 AM phone interview with a 79-year-old Catholic ecofeminist theologian while buzzed off boxed wine. (Tbh, I had a great time, even though she was a bit hard of hearing and yelled into the phone for the duration of the call.)

I exceeded Statistics Canada's seemingly conservative classification of "heavy drinking" as "five or more drinks, per occasion, at least once a month during the past year" almost every day, often before sundown. Soon after, Manitoba's liquor stores started retailing 473 mL cans of my favourite IPA for $2.50. That inevitably led to a two-month bender at roughly 250 calories per can. In other words, I was receiving half my daily caloric intake via beer. The shed in our backyard quickly filled up with empties. Luckily, the desk I worked at was in a room with laminate wood flooring, making it much easier to clean up drunken spills than, say, carpet.

Alcohol certainly allows for exceptional efficiency at writing. The first time I ever got drunk was from chugging Growers Cider while camping somewhere in British Columbia with the family, after which I meandered to the lake and cranked out a half-dozen semi-legible poems about angsty bullshit in like 15 minutes. Today, I can pen 800 words in a few hours with a couple of gins. Unfortunately, the kind of writing I care about—somewhat heady shit about politics and environmental policy integrating plenty of interviews and research—takes a fair bit of fact checking and attention to word choice. Such work, just like piecing together an academic paper, requires discipline and awareness. In my experience, alcohol isn't especially conducive to that.

Research and writings on the subject indicates the same. While intoxicants can aid the unlocking of free associating forms of creative expression (like lakeside teenage ramblings or the dude who drew self-portraits under the influence of 52 distinct drugs), it often detracts from precise thinking that relies on traits like memory and linearity. That's why debates tend to become considerably less productive after the third or fourth pint, with emotion largely trumping rationality. So, sure, I could banter with the jovial rap duo Run the Jewels at 10 AM while in that twilight zone between buzzed and drunk (courtesy of my friend's homemade everclear-based drink that she gave me specifically for the task), but translating that experience into a sensical narrative was an arduous undertaking unless I gained a degree of sobriety.

Absurdly, my infatuation with shitty sherry—and, if I was feeling fancy, a 750 mL bottle of Copper Moon malbec—was something I'd make subtle quips about in social settings, presumably hoping to rack up some of that esteemed bad boy cred I missed out on by skipping high school prom to play Star Wars video games with my friends. It probably never worked. Despite that, my go-to anecdote for nearly a full year was the tale of being unable to complete a cover feature on time because I was stuck in Indiana on a Sunday (when there's a preposterous ban on packaged liquor sales).

In my Year of Sherry, I'd talk myself out of the detrimental aspect of the practice, re-attributing that already misattributed Hemingway quote about writing drunk and editing sober. Problem is that intentional writing isn't just about word choice (which can be quickly revised) but concerns things like thematic progression; fuck up an argument in the first section and it can take hours to rectify as logical errors snowball into sentimental and incoherent bullshit. I have a frighteningly poor memory, but there's something especially disturbing about revisiting old articles – sometimes for reference and other times to shamelessly feed the ego – and not recalling when or where I was when I wrote the material. On the other hand, it's especially odd when you read your own argument and think, well, that's a good point.

To be fair, it's easier to make clever dick jokes when buzzed, but that rarely serves as the foundation for airtight arguments about the merits of a higher minimum wage or carbon pricing framework. As uber-bougie University of Toronto professor Joseph Heath put it: "There is no getting around the fact that most moderate, progressive positions are frankly difficult to explain." The presentation of radical alternatives to the bullshit society we inhabit tends to require a fair bit of imagination. But it also requires rational thought to offer up such ideas in a logically sound argument. Drinking may enable the former, but rarely the latter.

There will always be savants who defy this problem: James Joyce and William Faulkner were both mad alcoholics and technical masterminds. But most of us plebes operate on a different wavelength. It's hellishly important to accept that. And maybe get different role models;David Foster Wallace andStephen King, while wildly different authors, shared common ground in producing some of their cleverest work after sobering up (Infinite Jest and The Shining both partly served as meditations on alcoholism). Which isn't to say that I've ditched drinking as a mandatory activity for writing: I tend to oscillate between teetotalism and dipsomania every few weeks with fairly vigorous dedication to each. The problem for me is the attempted justification for drinking alone—that I can make funnier dick jokes—quickly slips into just drinking alone all the time. Which could be fine for some, but I like bourbon and ginger ale way, way too much. Throw in a season of Fargo and any semblance of productivity vanishes. The day after the double-binge, more liquor would have to be ingested to numb the hangover and be able to actually focus on work. Such habituation cost hundreds of dollars a month. In short, I was essentially losing money by writing.

The image of the drunken yet effective creative mind's indeed a prominent one. Perhaps it's time to admit that most of us who try to practice it just end up as pathetic alcoholics and mediocre writers. But talk to me next week and I'll probably be singing a different tune, likely with a bottle of something in hand.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Hollywood swoons for the male entrepren-asshole. The epic of the coarse young man chomping at the venture capital bit is our generation's bildungsroman of choice. We love our Zuckerbergs and Jobses and Musks, and our films mythologize these men into characters even more irreverent, ruthless, and cruel than their real-life counterparts.

What is it that we love about the entrepren-asshole, this paragon of egomania and excessive bro-courage? Maybe we're drawn to the idea that in order to be truly successful, we'd have to give up on kindness and put generosity on hold, shave off all our human concerns and cut out our close relationships, to focus single-mindedly on the target of wild success. Maybe we like the idea that the people who "make it" in business are the ones who tell the rest of the world to fuck right off, the masochistic 20-somethings who sleep at the office, who heartlessly swindle their best friends out of money, who—like Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs or David Fincher's Mark Zuckerberg—believe in nothing but their own status as world-changing messiahs.

We like a touch of evil to our self-proclaimed geniuses. For many of us, these stories affirm our own decisions to opt out of a competition we'd never win. And for a small number of us, the image of the entrepren-asshole provides a handy, all-encompassing justification for heartless behavior: It is easy to write off our own flaws when selfishness and callousness are portrayed as the unifying features of our era's great men. This is the special power that Hollywood frequently aligns with success: an unfounded, unshakeable belief in one's own Greatness. It's a trait that society bestows upon many men—particularly those belonging to the Zuckerberg-Musk-Jobs demographic—from early in childhood. This is a luxury most women—especially women of color and women from working-class backgrounds—are denied. Women have to find another way. In a word, women have to innovate.

Enter Joy. David O. Russell's latest film is a radical reminder that working women have long been the original "disruptors," forging their way and upending stale systems to get ahead. The most successful women in business have been, out of necessity, entrepreneurs and innovators: Ruth Handler took a gamble on her hunch that children might enjoy playing with dolls that look adult, and Barbie was born. Florence Nightingale Graham dropped out of nursing school and moved to New York, where she worked a secretarial job at a pharmaceutical company and snuck in time at their labs; her experiments turned into a skincare line, which turned into the billion-dollar beauty empire known as Elizabeth Arden. As a working single mother, Joy Mangano, Russell's inspiration, took an item as ubiquitous as the wheel and reinvented it: the Miracle Mop launched Mangano's home innovation empire, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

In the iconic working-woman film of the 80s, Working Girl, Melanie Griffith's character Tess McGill defends herself with the classic line, "You can bend the rules plenty once you get to the top, but not while you're trying to get there. And if you're someone like me, you can't get there without bending the rules." Like Griffith's Tess, Jennifer Lawrence's Joy Mangano comes from a working-class background, and is faced with the expectation that she will ultimately give up her career to care for her family. Unlike Working Girl, Joy doesn't weave a love story into its success story. Early on, a young Joy declares she has a "special power" that means she doesn't need "a prince." The prophecy holds true. Watching Joy, you begin to forget the appeal of romantic plot lines altogether.

Joy is loosely based on the story of Miracle Mop inventor and OG entrepreneur Joy Mangano, and the opening epigraph reads "inspired by the true story of daring women..."To be a woman, and to imagine greatness for yourself, is to dare. Daring men, of course, abound. The men in Joy's life—her ex-husband, her father, and the men she does business with—are big dreamers with china-fragile egos. Joy's ex Tony insists he's going to be the "next Tom Jones," a claim met with the simultaneously generous and disbelieving rise of Lawrence's eyebrows. Joy's father believes he's always on the verge of finding "The One," an earth-shattering true love. As the head of QVC and Joy's ticket to televised sales, Bradley Cooper's Neil Walker carries himself with the cockiness of his convictions, as though he's cured cancer by inventing a home-shopping television network.

Joy, on the other hand, is seen on her feet and on her knees, getting her hands dirty, chaffed, and bloody. The men in Joy's life are, ultimately, good men, but their untempered dreams and loud confidence serve to set her own ambitions and quiet assuredness in relief. In The Social Network, the only blood Mark has on his hands is that of his friends; in Steve Jobs, the most physical labor Jobs is seen putting into his product is carrying a handful of calla lilies to place onstage before a presentation. Meanwhile, Joy toils, and the camera focuses in on her hands as she carries her children, fixes her mother's plumbing, and wrings out a sopping mop, getting shards of broken glass in her palms in the process (a visual shattering of the possibility that Joy will be offered a pair of glass slippers, whether from a love interest or a venture capitalist). This painful wringing is what gives Joy the idea for her Miracle Mop: the self-wringing, lightweight mop that would make her first million.

On Broadly Meets: 'Margaret Cho on Power Bottoms and Surviving Bullshit'

Where Fincher's Zuckerberg and Jobs follow a fairly upward climb to success, Russell's Mangano falls down the ladder every time she steps up a rung. Each triumph brings an even bigger failure, and Joy is treated with a skepticism and condescension that few male entrepreneurs of her time (or ours) must confront. In one scene, a potential investor tells Joy, "Look, you were broke and bored. You had an idea. A lot of people have ideas. Go home and take care of your family." Joy refuses to back down, and continues to push for her product. Her fights take a kind of grit and tenacity that is often sugarcoated in our modern-day stories of entrepreneurial success. Where Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg "goes to California," he rents a summer house with a swimming pool in Palo Alto; when Joy "goes to California," she busts into a Central Valley manufacturing plant. Joy cannot afford to show up at her investors' offices in jeans and a hoodie; she does not find herself courted by a slew of VCs, with free-flowing cocktails and lap dances. When she is given an initial investment, she doesn't splurge on ping-pong tables and beanbag chairs for her office. Instead, she's left with no option but to match her investor with an equal investment of her own, taking out a second mortgage on her home and parting with all of her life savings. These are not risks Joy can afford to take. She takes them anyway.

Narrating Russell's film is Joy's grandmother, Mimi, who assures Joy of her destiny. Mimi tells Joy that she was born to the "successful matriarch" of the family, and the "unanxious presence in the room." Her prophecy holds true, too. Where Fincher and Boyle infuse their male protagonists with a hyper-neurotic energy, Russell's Joy approaches her negotiations—in business and in her personal life—with a studied calm. And in her fight for success, Joy does not stop caring for her young children, her bedridden mother, or her infantile father. For once, Hollywood has given us an image of success that doesn't involve destroying all of one's relationships.

Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

When I asked my friend Kelly Peeler, founder of the money-managing start-up NextGenVest, about her experience as a woman entrepreneur, she pointed me to a recent Kauffman Foundation study, "Women Entrepreneurs Are Key to Accelerating Growth." The study found that while entrepreneurship is seen as a "masculine activity," women are, overall, more nuanced risk-takers, with greater ambitions and tenacity in the face of an often uneven playing field. The study also made a few suggestions as to how we can "pave the way" for more women innovators, chief among them was the idea that we should celebrate successful women entrepreneurs. Joy is an excellent start.

The current image of entrepreneurship in America is simultaneously idealistic and ugly. At the altar of his or her potential, the entrepreneur is expected to sacrifice all: healthy relationships, sleep, solid food, general social skills. Almost always, the entrepreneur is a man—the quintessential stereotype is a white guy Stanford dropout with a distaste for authority, a passion for Ayn Rand, and a love of "disruption." Like women entrepreneurs themselves, Joy offers us an alternative to this image. Russell's film points us away from the entrepren-asshole, and towards the long history of innovative working women.

Follow Jennifer on Twitter.

Joy is now playing in theaters nationwide.

Air pollution in China in December, 2015. Photo via ChinaFotoPress

The environment beat was a busy one in 2015. The year started with US Senator James Inhofe tossing a snowball onto the Senate floor in a bizarre attempt to demonstrate that human-caused climate change is a hoax, and ended with 195 countries signing a landmark deal on reducing heat-trapping carbon emissions, just before a Christmas marked by springlike weather across eastern North America.

Between all that the world kept heating up. The past year is expected to top 2014 as the hottest on record. The Middle East, India, Europe, and southeast Asia sweltered under a summer heat wave that left thousands dead, while late fall brought flooding to southern India, killing hundreds more. Wildfires wracked Indonesia and the parched American West.

Meanwhile, coal and oil slumped worldwide as solar and wind power started cutting into electricity markets. The International Energy Agency says non-hydroelectric renewable energy will make up almost half of all new electric capacity built between now and 2020, and total renewables—including hydroelectric and biofuels—are expected to be about a quarter of global electric production by then. Environmentalists scored a victory when Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline that would have linked Canada's tar sands to the refineries of the US Gulf Coast, while oil companies got a win when the United States lifted a ban on exporting its own crude that dated back to the embargoes of the 1970s.

All that is to say that 2016 has some pretty big shoes to fill if it wants to be more environmentally eventful than last year. Is it up to the task? We asked some experts to fill us in on what we'll be talking about in our year-end pieces this December.

The Big Hangover

The same conditions that made 2015 all but certain to be the hottest year on record are expected to continue into 2016, raising the odds that global average temperatures could hit a third straight annual high.

"If that were to happen, it would be remarkable," Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann told VICE. "That suggests that we have entered a new realm where the climate change signal is so profound that we're literally breaking records each year." And while the Pacific warming trend known as El Nino is drawing a lot of the blame, Mann said, "The more important story is how climate change is exacerbating this El Nino to give us unprecedented weather impacts around the world."

Aside from the record-breaking temperatures, heat-trapping greenhouse gases keep building up in the atmosphere. Monthly carbon dioxide concentrations ran over 400 parts per million for most of 2015—the first time that's happened since regular records started being kept in the late 1950s, when the figure was around 315 ppm. Last year's extremes played out as a taste of what the world can expect if those levels continue to rise.

But Mann said what keeps him up at night is the possibility that scientists have underestimated the speed and extent that the climate is changing. For instance, he and others will be watching an unusual cold patch in the north Atlantic Ocean that's likely the result of fresh water running off melting Greenland glaciers. Mann said that's a possible indication that the ocean currents that bring warm water northward—and heat to western Europe—may be stalling.

"It bears a striking resemblance to the fingerprint that we predict for this slowdown," Mann said. If that continues, "We may be witnessing that particular climate phenomenon playing out in real time, way ahead of schedule. Models predict we shouldn't see this until later this century."

We'll Always Have Paris

But 2015 wasn't all doom and gloom, and a number of events last year gave us reason for hope in 2016 and beyond. Pope Francis putthe weight of the billion-member Roman Catholic Church behind efforts to rein in carbon emissions, and Obama used a trip to an Arctic conference in Alaska to highlight the problems of a warming world.

Perhaps the most significant climate change action happened in Paris, when the world's top emitters put up plans to reduce their carbon output in hopes of keeping global warming down to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times. Unfortunately, analyses by several groups say the carbon cuts promised in Paris only get us to 3 degrees C (5.4 F) at best.

"Right now, there is a disconnect between the goal of the agreement—to keep warming below 2 degrees and possibly try for 1.5 degrees—and the climate change commitments countries have put forward," Kelly Levin, senior associate for the climate program at the World Resources Institute, told VICE. "What we don't know is whether that will be aligned in the future. What we hope is the cooperation that we saw in Paris will only get stronger and stronger over time."

It's now up to the governments who signed the Paris pact to live up to their promises. The agreement calls for countries to review their progress every five years and beef up their efforts as needed.

And the changes can't come soon enough, said Rob Bailey, research director for the British think-tank Chatham House. Bailey told VICE that the gap between the Paris agreement and the emissions cuts needed to hit 2 Celsius amounts to about 16 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year by 2030.

"That's the same as the current emissions of the US and China combined," Bailey said.

"The hope is that incrementally, in 5 year cycles, that gap will be narrowed, but we're a long way behind."

China and the United States are the top two sources of greenhouse gases, according to the IEA. Together, they made up about 14 billion of the 32-plus billion tons of carbon dioxide and other compounds released worldwide in 2013, the agency estimates. Still-developing China has pledged to peak and start reducing emissions by 2030, while the United States has promised to cut emissions by up to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Oil and Coal Are the Worst

But despite its less-than-perfect ambitions, the climate pact has sent a clear signal that the world is willing to invest in a low-carbon future, Bailey said. And that's going to put added pressure on coal and oil, which hit the skids in 2015.

"I spoke to a former oil executive in December, and his words were: 'The genie is well and truly out of the bottle now,' " Bailey said. "The expectation is that even though the commitments that governments are putting forward aren't really sufficient, they actually mark the starting point of a global transition."

Saudi Arabia and the oil cartel OPEC continued their full-throttle game of chicken with their Western rivals, fueling a global glut that drove crude prices down to a fraction of their 2014 highs. After years of battling regulators and conservationists, Royal Dutch Shell returned to the seas off Alaska—only to walk away disappointed, writing off $7 billion in the process. And investors turned bearish on coal as utilities turned to cleaner-burning natural gas to run power plants and the wind and solar power started to extend into power grids.

China, which became the world's biggest coal consumer as it industrialized, is investing heavily in renewables as it tries to reduce both its carbon emissions and its horrific smog. And developing countries that are just now building an electrical grid are opting for "a more organic, decentralized model" of renewables, Bailey said.

"As other regions in the world also start to drive renewables further and further and deeper and deeper onto their grids in search of decarbonizing their power sectors and achieving their Paris commitments, this is a pattern that is going to play out globally," he said.

The Public Actually Gives a Shit About the Environment Now

One of the biggest environmental disasters of 2015 had nothing to do with oil or coal, however. Over the summer, fires set to clear land for palm oil and paper plantations in the Indonesian rain forest raged out of control, wreathing much of the country and some of its neighbors in choking haze. On some days, they spewed more carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the sky than the entire US economy.

A reported crackdown by Indonesia's government on the people and companies implicated in the blaze appears to have stalled, Rolf Skar, forest campaign director for Greenpeace USA, told VICE. But a number of consumers don't want their money going to companies that burn down rainforests in countries like Indonesia or Brazil—and they're putting pressure on companies that do by boycotting their products.

"It's trending in the right direction, and we're seeing companies be surprised by it," Skar said. "It wasn't long ago that I was hearing from large companies in the US that Americans didn't care about these issues, and now they're scrambling to catch up."

They're doing that by trying to reassure consumers that they're good corporate citizens, he said—a trend he believes is likely to continue in 2016.

"You see a shift driven by some of the main players in a sector that people don't have to vote with their dollars every time they buy a burger or a bottle of shampoo," Skar said. "It just becomes standard business practices."

Speaking of voting, the world's No. 2 source of carbon emissions, the United States, has a big election coming up. Most leaders of the party that controls both houses of Congress and is seeking to regain the presidency still insist there's no such thing as man-made climate change. That's left the rest of the world wondering whether an incoming Republican administration in Washington would junk the Paris agreement, Bailey said.

"That would be a disaster for the international process," he said. A US renunciation of its Paris pledges "would make it almost completely impossible" to reach more ambitious goals in the future, he believes.

New Year's Resolution: Pay Attention

In the end, it's largely up to us. Who we vote for, what car or soap we buy, even what we choose to eat—Bailey suggests easing up on the meat, by the way—all have impacts that ripple across the globe. The sum of our decisions today will shape the world to come.

So pay attention, because right now our behavior is making the experts we talked to kind of nervous.

"We're seeing a lot of things that appear to be happening faster than the models predicted, and that raises the distinct threat that the impacts are going to be even worse than our current best estimates," Mann said. "Those are the kind of things that keep me up at night."

Follow Matt Smith on Twitter

Police officers patrol in front of the main station of Cologne, Germany, on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz)

On Tuesday night, some 300 people gathered in front of the central train station in Cologne, Germany, to protest the mass sexual assaults and robberies carried out against women there on New Year's Eve. Along with the attacks themselves, people were apparently pissed off at what they perceived as sluggish state and media reactions to the brutality. With over 100 complaints filed as of Wednesday morning—most involving theft, roughly a quarter involving groping and sexual harassment, and one involving rape—and more victims expected to emerge soon, the incident was quickly deemed unprecedented and attracted international media attention. But the apparent coordination of the assailants and their initial evasion of detection on a busy thoroughfare has many Germany on edge.

"This is apparently an entirely new dimension of organized crime," German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said Tuesday.

Attempts to grapple with this deeply disturbing incident and reestablish a sense of security in the city have been complicated by the fact that the assailants were, according to victim and police statements, apparently of Middle Eastern or North African descent. This has sucked the event into a wider European conversation on the security risk of mass refugee immigration, adding an element of racial and social tension to an already murky case.

The attacks took place just before midnight when hundreds of young men, apparently intoxicated and between the ages of 15 and 35, swarmed the crowded square and let off firecrackers, perhaps as a distraction. They then split into groups of 20 to 30 and surrounded women—one of them a plainclothes volunteer police officer. Some men reportedly tried to shake the women's hands before going for their bags. Others proceeded to taunt and grope the women—so hard that some investigators report victims had bruised breasts and buttocks; one victim apparently had her underwear torn away from her body. Meanwhile, they or other men were stealing from their victims. At first, police reportedly could not see the attacks, but eventually, dozens of local and federal officers cleared the square, although in the dim and dense scrum they apparently failed to apprehend any suspects.

Public assaults and robberies against women are tragically common in Cologne, as elsewhere in Germany. Last year, the city's Detective Chief Superintendent Günther Korn told Spiegel TV, they had 12,000 reports of similar incidents. The Telegraph quoted a police spokesman from Hamburg on Tuesday as saying that, at least in his city, they've seen this strategy of encirclement, harassment, and robbery before. But Professor Sandra Bucerius, a University of Alberta criminal sociologist who's studied crime in Muslim immigrant communities in Germany, tells VICE that there's not much data on who uses this tactic—in an organized way or not—how often and where.

Yet the scale and execution of this assault, coupled with six criminal complaints of similar attacks against several dozen women in Hamburg and more (unquantified) attacks in Stuttgart, has some fearing a new mode of public violence might be emerging in Germany.

Still, in an email to VICE, Bucerius cautioned against calling this a novel form of organized crime—as Maas did—before investigations conclude or a clear pattern of similar incidents emerges. She thinks it's more useful to talk about the attacks as a manifestation of common but neglected assaults against women at festivals, highlighted perhaps in part thanks to the (reported) ethnicities of the victims and assailants.

"That is violence that happens during mass events with many partying and intoxicated people, especially young males... irrespective of race, ethnicity or immigrant status!" wrote Bucerius. "Violence against women... is a prevalent phenomenon in Western societies, which is often ignored. It is all the more interesting, that we now seem to have vibrant discussions... with people supposedly enraged about the events that are supposedly characteristic of 'other cultures.'"

Local outlet Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger has reported that police are investigating the possibility that a local pickpocketing gang may have carried out the attack, suggesting that they believe it was an organized, tactical hit. A dedicated task force, Operation New Year, is culling through CCTV footage and soliciting stories to track down suspects—a slow process. One officer reportedly told the local newspaper Express that they'd apprehended eight suspects, all asylum seekers, involved in area pickpocketing. So far, the police have only confirmed three suspects but have not made any arrests.

Officials have acknowledged that the assailants were likely young men of a Middle Eastern or North African background (in Cologne, one of Germany's most diverse cities, that hardly narrows things down—it could describe immigrants, German-born kids, or foreigners of diverse cultural backgrounds.) But they've (mostly) been careful to separate this detail from commentary on roughly 1 million refugees who arrived in Germany last year and who're already viewed as a security threat by many locals. (Some argue officials covered up the attack's scale, which only caught the public eye on Monday, to avoid stoking social tensions at the cost of the safety.)

Naturally, the apparent correlation between recent arrivals and the supposed emergence of a new violent trend by Arab-looking individuals is leading some to draw dangerous conclusions. Supporters of the far-right populist group Pegida are spewing invectives against refugees for the attacks. Meanwhile commentators, opposition politicians, and even members of Chancellor Angela Merkel's own party have used the attacks to bash her open-door policies, which were already under fire, and propose new restrictions on asylum-seekers.

Swen Hutter, a research fellow at the European University Institute studying far-right political groups, suspects that anti-migrant populists in Germany and beyond will use this event to promote their goals. However, he does not see it as an influential tipping point. "Rather fueling a process that has already been on the rise during the last months," he told VICE.

While refugees may have been involved in the assaults, there's no hard evidence so far—and it'd be a bit unusual if they were. The police seem to be looking for Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, and most refugees to Germany these days are Syrian. A November report by the German Federal Criminal Police Office showing that refugee crime is rising slower than their population growth rate—and therefore that they have a lower-than-average crime rate—suggests their involvement is less than probable. (European second-generation communities, on the other hand, tend to have higher than average crime rates.)

While they work the case, police have increased local security and will up the number of cops at future festivals. However, recommendations put out by the mayor's office that women stay in groups and keep an "arm's length" away from strangers in the name of safety have been greeted with general derision. Many observers worry now about whether Cologne will have resolved this crime and attendant social tension in time for the city's massive Carnival, five days of drunken street parades and parties slated for next month and fertile territory for a repeat of New Year's Eve.

Right now, Cologne is awash in anger, confusion, and assumptions. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that investigations into the incident need to be rapid and conclusive. Only once officials know more about and bring to justice the assailants behind these attacks will they be able to determine whether we're liable to more crimes like them in the months to come—and just how deeply they might resonate in the national (and European) consciousness.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.