Álvaro Enrique's Sudden Death won a major literary award in Spain a few years ago and has now been translated by Natasha Wimmer, translator of the masterpiece-turned-five-hour-play 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. With these respected ambassadors at its side, Sudden Death, Enrique's first novel accessible to American monolinguists marks the arrival of a major player on the capital-L courts of literature.

You don't want to say too much about this book (from which VICE published an excerpt last week), both to avoid spoilers and because it's a beast to describe. It's a book built on—and filled with—books. It's a collage of excavations from the archives that seem unrelated at first but unite along the linear progression of a game of tennis that's also a duel between the painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo. It also involves Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs, a tennis ball made from the hair of a decapitated queen, the Virgin Mary depicted in iridescent feathers, psychedelic mushrooms, amorous activities not often discussed at the end of the 16th century, and a direct address to the reader about what all this might (or might not) mean, as the narrator himself admits:

Whatever it's about, a reader requires an active, associate intelligence to return Enrigue's intriguing serve. Our back-and-forth via email appears below.

VICE: Where did this novel come from? What was the seed for it?
Álvaro Enrigue: Where novels come from is a mystery to me. There are projects I cook for years and years—reading and making notes, but mainly just thinking about it while biking or showering—and then the moment seems to be ripe, maybe only because I don't have another fat project in the near future. There was a clear point in my life when I began to think about this book: I was in Berlin, at the Gemäldegalerie, and discovered that the toenails of Caravaggio's Amor Victorious were filled with dirt. That dirtiness was so obscene in the apparent general innocence of the painting, that I felt in my gut that they deserved a novel.

Did the ideal unwritten novel you had in your head approach the one you ultimately wrote?
Not even close. An unwritten novel is like Borges's map of the Empire: so large and precise it matches the size of the Empire. You work around it the best you can.

Did the structure occur naturally or did you have to impose order on what you wrote?
I spend as much time writing the novels as remixing them. Meaning is not in what you say but in how you organize it. The good stuff of a book is in its blind spots: what the reader has to add.

"The Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata said that a piece of land belongs to those who work it—same thing with books."

This is a novel in part about translation—at one point, the narrator says if you're reading that you're reading a translation. Was this line added for the English version?
That line and a lot more: The English version has more chapters than the original one. Half of my life happens in English, so, even when I write fiction only in Spanish, the temptation of adding a few things was too much.

I'm sure all fans of 2666 in English would agree that you couldn't have hoped for a better English language ambassador. Did you have much contact with Natasha Wimmer?
I'm a fortunate man: I got the best possible translator to English, but I can tell you that the real privilege is not that one, but to see her work through a book. She is a slow-motion spectacle. She did a first draft we went through word by word. Then she did a second one, and the same thing. That's when she really began to work, sculpting sentence by sentence again and again and again until it got my respiration, my sense of humor, all the registers of my way of writing. It's almost scary. Then I saw her following every step of the editing process obsessively, changing words and reorganizing sentences and moving commas until the last second before print.

Have you read the English version?
There is this crazy final document, with all the notes of the American editor, the British editor, their respective copy editors, Natasha's, and my own. Then there are the answers, the corrections, the discussions, the fights. A nerd's epic. I think we all read it ten times. It's not that we're all obsessive compulsives—the novel depends on very delicate mechanisms.

The original Spanish title (Muerte súbita) seems to include a little lift in it thanks to what seems like a pun—the past participle of the verb "subir" (subido) . For all the horizontal back-and-forth of Rome and Mexico, sex and sport, conquistador and conquered, past and present, text and translation, straight and queer, and light and dark, part of this novel's project also seems vertical, up and down. I feel this is in part to make those elevated by history more "elemental" and lift those characters (like prostitutes transformed by paint into Virgin Marys) otherwise forgotten, losers in the game of history won by "the bad guys." Is this over-interpretation? Or is it in the neighborhood of your intention?
I never thought about that connotation, that raising that you see in the word "súbita," but all readings are fair. And yes, it works in a binary structure: one character against the other, then one culture against the other, two religions, two empires, two continents, etc. The tennis match is just the spine of the book. It's reduced to its minimal expression—there is a chapter in which it is represented only by the score—but the novel tries to reproduce the violence and speed of the game. That's why it moves so fast.

Tennis is improvisation between two players within a definite structure, which could be extended to reader and writer. If, as you say toward the end, this novel is "combat," how are readers involved in the battle?
I just display a set of coordinates. Pieces of stories, shredded archives, intervened historical texts. Those are the rules of the game, but the book hopefully happens outside the book: I configure the battlefield and the reader does the fight. At the end there should be some sort of moral, of which I am only half responsible. The Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata said that a piece of land belongs to those who work it—same thing with books.

"Every great novel generates its own class and is impossible to repeat. Every great novel is the first and last of its kind."

Speaking of revolutionaries, when you wrote about Caravaggio's anti-Mannerist paintings, did you also intend for your writing to oppose conventional, mannered fiction?
I find conventional novels brutally boring. We have been in the mill of realism since the 19th century. I'm for moving on, right now.

But of course there's a long tradition of unconventional writing. What are some of the most influential titles in the revolutionary canon for you?
Since publication of the first modern novel, the novel has been a machine to challenge conventional thinking. In the second part of Don Quixote, Don Quixote reads the first part of Don Quixote—and finds it quite annoying. I'm speaking here about 1615. Swift and Sterne followed through, making the experiment more and more extreme, and from there to Sade, Kafka, Rulfo—the list could go forever. Is it the Realist mirage that pretended to be revolutionary—and failed? Why should someone write about what she or he knows? About the lame adventures of everyday life? It's exactly the other way around: A novel is a research expedition, a source of statistically indemonstrable knowledge, a quest for insolent solutions to complex problems.

"The problem is the industrial line of production of reading material, the standardization of the imaginative process."

I love thinking of a novel as "a quest for insolent solutions." But I don't really feel like Sterne, Cervantes, Calvino, Perec, Barthelme, Barth, and associates form a team against all the forces of realism. Towering literary artistry comes in the form of relatively straightforward realism, too: Tolstoy, Hamsun, Proust, Thomas Mann, Thomas Bernhard, on and on. Formally I'm rarely bored with them because their content kicks such ass. More recently, Knausgaard writes only about what he knows. Trying to get as close as he can to the core of his life, he goes as deeply as he can into the lame everyday adventures (washing dishes!) and somehow pulls it off. That's really the only rule: You can do anything as long as you pull it off. I'd say that Towering Literary Artists (realists or not) contribute to a formidable doubles team against the amalgamated forces of mediocrity and idiocy.
Mmmm. Tolstoy can man the forces of realism by himself, and you have a point there: War and Peace changed my way of reading. Proust and Knausgaard are not realists at all. They are bold imaginative researchers involved in an impossible but beautiful task: to make a mapamundi with a microscope. They could not be further away from a positivist agenda. They never pretended to preach through exemplary tales. Not only did they never believe in progress, they're both intensely decadent: apologists of melancholy. Much less Mann and Bernhard: Their roots go so deep into the Judeo-Christian tale tradition that both of them are close to Borges and Kafka. But you are right: What would we do without Stendhal? Pérez Galdós? Mon dieu: Flaubert!—the best of them all. DeLillo had some perfect realist novels that I have read more than once with immense pleasure—and lately he's developed an expanded sensitivity that I celebrate too. In recent literature written in Spanish, there is also Chirbes—an extraordinary writer who has received less attention than he deserves, as much in the United States as in Latin America.

But I disagree on one point: "Mediocrity and idiocy" aren't the real enemies—there is virtue, too, in being a mediocre idiot, as some truths can be found following that way. The opponent is a lack of imagination, the fear of failure. No matter what the myths about writing say, literature is highly socialized. A writer and a reader are never alone and between them there can be a chain of well-intentioned professionals who would rather play defense, as it's safer for all, including the writer and reader. The problem is the industrial line of production of reading material, the standardization of the imaginative process.

The word "novel" suggests that a novel should be novel, right? There's no one way to write one. And the greatest novelists exemplify this novelty, exaggerate it.
Everything fits in a novel. That's Cervantes's legacy: such an open form that every great novel generates its own class and is impossible to repeat. Every great novel is the first and last of its kind.

Lee Klein's translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador will be published by New Directions in July.

Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrique is out tomorrow, February 9, from Riverhead Books.

Watch the preview for this Friday's HBO show, "Escape to Europe and Cycle of Terror."

This Friday, February 12, HBO will air another episode from season four of VICE's Emmy-winning show. Last week, we took an in-depth look at Boko Haram, and this time around we will be following Syria's refugee crisis, as well as the global reaction to the devastating Paris terror attacks.

In the episode's first segment, "Escape to Europe," host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin follows the life-threatening Refugee Trail from the Syrian border to Europe, and meets with displaced Syrians determined to find a better life.

Then Gianna Toboni reports from France after the horrific ISIS attacks in Paris to see how the tragedy has influenced global refugee policies and changed the fight against terrorism.

Watch a trailer for Friday's episode above, and keep an eye out for the rest of season four, airing every Friday night at 11 PM, exclusively on HBO. If you're desperately in need of more VICE episodes to carry you through the week, you can rewatch our entire third season online now.

Editor's Note: Meet VICE's newest political correspondent, Bun B. You might know him as the Houston, Texas–based rapper, professor, and activist who's one half of the legendary UGK. He's reporting from the ground in New Hampshire, covering the state's presidential primary. His first dispatch is below, and check back for more in the next few days.

New Hampshire. The Granite State. Home of the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales and the nation's laxest seatbelt laws. And occasionally, Mitt Romney's family. And one of, if not the whitest place in America. It also happens to be the first place in the United States where registered voters get to select their respective party candidate in a presidential primary. The Iowa caucuses are actually where the first votes are cast and the first rumblings about who likes who begins. But that process is some whole other shit that quite honestly I couldn't explain to you if you had a gun to my head.

The primaries, on the other hand, are good old fashioned American voting. Step in the booth, close the curtain, and make your choice. And New Hampshire residents (New Hampshirians?) take it super fucking seriously. So the candidates in turn take New Hampshire super fucking seriously. And the media goes wherever the candidates go, so they too get amped the fuck up about it. And I'm here to cover the whole fucking circus.

Granted, I don't come from the world of journalism, but I am a writer and a lot of the issues I address in my songs are in line with the issues we expect the future commander in chief to care about. Now that doesn't make me a journalist or anything like that. I understand and respect journalism, and those reporters who are devoted to their job. So I'm not here to belittle them or their profession by any means. I'm just here to observe it all, the good and the bad of everything. The speeches. The handshakes. The kissing of babies. The kissing of asses.

Our first stop Sunday is Cactus Jack's Grill & Watering Hole, in Manchester, which doesn't know whether or not it wants to be a Mexican restaurant or not. Three flags fly overhead. One of them is the Texas state flag, which makes no sense to me at all since I've never seen a cactus in Texas in my life. I'm not saying there aren't some near Waco, or near the border, but a cactus isn't distinctly Texan. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will stop by at some point and speak before the Super Bowl.

All photos by Jessica Lehrman

It's pretty packed inside, and I can't tell if the people are here for Christie or to watch the game. The Christie team is easy to spot, though, sticking out like sore thumbs in chinos and North Face jackets among the working-class New England people in their random sports gear. The scattered reporters and their impeccable, camera-ready hair are even easier to spot. Their glistening veneers light up the room better than the neon sign on the wall of a cactus wearing a 10-gallon hat. Again, I don't get the reference, but we are about as far from Texas in the continental United States as one can get, so I understand that their view of the rest of America might be slightly skewed. As the governor's state police protection rounds the bar for the 15th time and cameramen set up their tripods while their producers look for the best angles, I take a sip of my watermelon cilantro margarita and wait for the Big Man.

I talk to some of the staff working the bar, and most of them don't seem to care much about the circus that's been going on around them for the last few months. They're in the service industry, so their main concern is that it brings in business. One waitress told me it doesn't affect her one way or the other if a candidate comes in to the bar. As she said, she's just trying to pay her mortgage. But I wonder if she knows Christie's platform. I wonder if she agrees with his views. Hell, I wonder if she cares about politics at all. I also wonder if she did have concerns, would she be allowed to voice them? Or could she lose her job? If she expresses her political affiliation, will it cost her tips? These are the things I ponder while watching Seal sing in the Super Bowl pre-game show, and commentators wax poetic about Peyton Manning's swan song above a logo for Turkish Airlines and against a backdrop of the Golden Gate bridge on the TVs above the bar.

It's at this moment that Christie walks into Cactus Jack's, accompanied by Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland. For all the blustering that I've seen on TV, Christie is a much calmer and more subdued individual in person. He introduces himself as Chris to everyone inside, including me. None of the overbearing posturing he displays on camera is evident this afternoon. He's in retail politician mode, and he wears it well.

That's in sharp contrast to the next thing I see. An older white man walks in. He has a long grey beard. He is soft-spoken, but confident. And he has a boot on his head. You read right: A boot. He calls himself Vermin Supreme, which is the best non-Wu-Tang simulator name ever created. He's apparently a regular on the New Hampshire political scene. He runs on a campaign of universal dental care and riding free ponies powered by zombies into the future. Interesting as fuck for sure. Meanwhile, a small circle of people makes its way around the bar with Christie at the center, while the media forms a larger circle around them. He then makes the rounds again, stopping at every table and group twice. Reporters follow behind and interviews everyone he touches, asking how he smelled, how soft or hard his hands were, if they'll be posting their pictures with Christie on Facebook or Instagram, etc. Nothing about the issues. Nothing about their concerns. Interesting.

Our next stop is shorter. It's sold as Marco Rubio's Super Bowl watch party but it's far from it. For starters, there's only one fucking TV to be found in the whole building, which makes it hard for a room full of 300 people to watch a televised sporting event. It's basically Rubio on stage in what appears to be a gymnastics center or karate dojo, surrounded by press and supporters. Since his third place finish in Iowa, Rubio's momentum and coverage has increased substantially, and that's pretty clear here in New Hampshire. The venue is larger than Christie's, as is the crowd of supporters and press. Dozens of shutterbugs surround the stage fighting for pics of Rubio.

Rubio's handlers are also more intense. One guy dressed in black and smelling like authority is regulating the stage area in a hardbody style of doormanship I haven't seen since Suge Knight showed up at the Source Awards in NYC. They want no videographers on stage, only still photos. He tries to shut me down, but my VICE press pass stops him in his tracks like a smile from Medusa. I meet Jim, originally from Chicago. He's been in New Hampshire for 25-plus years and collects signatures of presidential candidates on two-dollar bills. I ask if he does this for all the candidates and he replies that he only gets signatures from the ones he likes. He takes his signed Rubio bill and adds it to a collection that includes former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

Rubio signs every poster and poses for every picture in typical political fashion. But he is slightly more approachable in person than I thought he would be. He engages with people. He maintains eye contact through every interaction and stays longer than his people would like. I know most of this is part of the show, but I still get the feeling that if he wasn't a politician on the opposite side of everything I stand for we'd make great drinking buddies.

Since there's only one TV and no liquor, we wrap up with Rubio and head back to our hotel to watch the big game. At check-in, we noticed Jeb Bush sitting in an SUV outside, so we knew we were in the right place. Upon returning to the hotel, we found ourselves invited to a Super Bowl viewing party hosted by the 2016 New Hampshire Presidential Primary Party, which is dedicated to making sure that the state continues to get the first presidential primary on the Republican side.

It is without question the quietest room I've ever been in where there was a sporting event playing on the TV and an open bar. Hell, scratch the TV part. Who's quiet at a party with an open bar? Republican delegates that's who. We are with the upper crust of the GOP, so the spread is A-1. I meet our host, Republican National Committee member Steve Duprey, a guy with a million dollar smile and I assume the bank account to match. His warm and welcoming demeanor seems very genuine. As he leaves to entertain his guests, I scan the conference room and realize it's filled with some of the most powerful people in the Republican Party. How I got in here is anybody's guess, but I'm in this bitch so fuck it, let's mingle.

Most of the reporters here are still reeling from Iowa. A good meal, a stiff drink, and a football game is the perfect way to wind down. I watch Queen Bey rock the halftime show, while older white women quietly observe 20-plus black women shaking their asses in synchronicity. Meanwhile, Steve, the self-appointed "Secretary of Fun," continues to make us all feel at home.

As I make my way upstairs with a belly full of short rib and jasmine rice, I reminisce about my first day in New Hampshire. I'm enjoying the process and my access, but today was just the pre-game. Shit is about to get real. So let me smoke one and get some rest, because on Monday, we start early and end late.

Check out Peter Bagge's website, Twitter, and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly.

Mike Martin, on the beach in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Photo by Meredith Hoffman

A joint between his lips, toes in the sand, Mike Martin looked like just another dude chilling on the beach in Puerto Rico. But as the 47-year-old Rastafarian blew smoke in my direction, he outlined his vision of justice: legal weed in the US territory.

"Legalization is coming," Martin told me. "The last several days have made that clear."

Martin, who sits on the board of Puerto Rico's preeminent pro-marijuana non-profit Foundation Free Juana, was referring to the government's recent moves toward decreasing its draconian weed penalties. Two weeks ago, the governor pardoned Jeremy Ruiz Tomassini, a 24-year-old man sentenced to four years in prison after cops caught him smoking near a school. The pardon, granted January 25, came 13 months after Free Juana delivered a petition to Governor Alejandro Padilla that the punishment, issued in 2014, was unreasonably harsh.

"We made an official petition and held a 'free Jeremy' vigil at the governor's mansion and my band played there," said Martin. "Then this January the governor came to Vieques for Three Kings Day to pass gifts to children in the park, and I went to talk with him. I introduced myself and said I play with Free Juana. He took me aside and asked me, 'How much time has Jeremy been inside?' He was worried about it."

Within days, Padilla released Ruiz Tomassini from prison, claiming he was not an enforcement priority.

Ruiz Tomassini's pardon was just one indicator that Puerto Rico is edging away from its notoriously harsh marijuana laws. Current legislation allows judges to sentence people up to five years for nominal possession, and up to ten years for possession near a recreational area (public use spaces like parks and schools). But recently politicians have begun changing their approaches towards the drug and activists like Martin see it as an opportunity to pave the way toward legalization.

Mike Martin sporting the Free Juana logo. Photo by Meredith Hoffman

There are already signs of progress: Governor Padilla signed an executive order last summer to legalize weed for medicinal purposes, and just last month the government unveiled its set of rules to regulate the cultivation, distribution, and use of the substance. Growers, who can be based in Puerto Rico or abroad, will apply for permission from the government; patients will receive medical marijuana ID cards, after receiving a doctor's approval that they have one of several "debilitating conditions." If all goes according to plan, medical marijuana is expected to be available in Puerto Rico by the end of the year.

Padilla also loosened Puerto Rico's penalties for small amounts of recreational possession, when he signed an executive order in September advising judges not to imprison people caught with fewer than six grams of weed.

Mike Martin poses with Governor Padilla in Vieques. Photo courtesy of Mike Martin

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico's pro-marijuana movement has taken off in the past few years. Both Free Juana and another organization, Decriminalization, have become influential on the island. Both have amplified their reach, garnering more media attention and support from the public, while US states with legalized weed have also helped pave the way, emboldening Puerto Rican politicians like Padilla to support marijuana activists.

"When Free Juana had its first 4/20 rally there were just 20 or 30 people who were brave enough to march towards the capital. We thought we could be arrested," Martin recalled of the protest in 2013. Now, multiple bands play each year, two senators sponsor the rallies, and Free Juana has grown from a group of local activists into an official foundation.

Watch Kings of Cannabis, our documentary about weed kingpin Arjan Roskam and his quest for the rarest strains.

"In the past two years, there has been an opening," said Rafael Torruellla, director of Decriminalization and of the drug education and research organization Intercambios Puerto Rico. "There's a marijuana movement here in Puerto Rico that only now is gaining more steam."

One reason is the economy, according to Torruella, a social psychologist with a PhD from City University of New York. Puerto Rico is currently $70 billion in debt, and a regulated drug market in Puerto Rico would ease the island's economic crisis.

"This difficult economic time is when we should start looking at what is failing," Torruella told me. "We're trying to move drug policy from the law and order side to where it should belong, which is in the public health side."

Torruella said the governor's executive orders are "very significant" but the job is hardly finished. Puerto Rico's Congress needs to act to ensure the orders become law.

"Medical marijuana is an executive order, not a law, which is important because the next governor can dismantle the whole system," Torruella warned.

Related: The Texas Republican Grandma Who Wants to Legalize Weed

Already, Padilla's opponents are trying to block the order in court. Members of the political party Partido Nuevo Progresista have requested a judge issue an injunction preventing medical marijuana distribution. The judge has not yet released a decision.

The current medical marijuana standards could also be better, Torruella said: There should be provisions for patients to cultivate their own crops, for the market to favor local growers, doctors, and cooperative farms.

"There are some foreign pharmacies that are establishing themselves to sell. There has been a big controversy on how business will be done. The seems already to be favoring big pharmaceutical companies," Torruella said. "There are many questions that remain about how this system is going to work."

There have been other attempts to pass marijuana legislation: Senator Miguel Pereira proposed a bill to decriminalize possessing small amounts marijuana, but it has been stalled in the House of Representatives since 2013. Opponents of the law were so irate they demanded Pereira's resignation.

As conservative Puerto Rican politicians demonize the drug and the island takes baby steps towards legalization, Martin stays patient, aided by his herbs on the seashore.

"It doesn't matter how long it takes for legalization. It's going to happen," Martin told me, taking a seat in a lawn chair beside the water. "We're not in a hurry. We just want to bring consciousness and decriminalize and medicalize it, and eventually it will be legal."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

A guy who spends his time pissing people off online sits down in our chair to confess while wearing a creepy mask.

Photo via Wikimedia

Workplace surveillance used to be an amateur business. Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates personally memorized his employees' license plates so he could keep track of who was arriving late or leaving early. A bit creepy, perhaps, but endearingly old school—the sort of pathetic scheme a crafty loafer like George Costanza would get around by leaving a car parked permanently at work so everyone would think he's still at his desk.

Skiving isn't so easy these days. A coldly efficient kind of cyber monitoring is entering the office that can ensure every keyboard stroke is accounted for, your computer can be randomly screen-grabbed, and even your sleep can be monitored to make sure you're achieving optimal performance.

Journalists at the Daily Telegraph recently arrived at work to find OccupEyemotion sensors attached to their desks. Staff were informed that the boxes were there to help the company identify "times of low usage" to save on energy bills. The journalists kicked up a fuss, believing this move was actually more about picking which staff members would be laid off as the company downsized, and the sensors were removed. BuzzFeed revealed the sense of paranoia the episode has created: "Never before has taking a shit on company time felt so rebellious," one reporter told them.

Workers' rebellions remain few and far between, however, while cyber surveillance of our desks is becoming increasingly common. Relentless monitoring of performance is no longer the preserve of call centers. It's now moved into the wider working world.

"There really isn't much privacy left in the workplace," says Lewis Maltby, director of the US National Workrights Institute. "You're often being monitored, whether you know it or not. Employers don't always tell you what they're doing."

Europeans might assume their privacy is better protected than Americans. But last month a chilling decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) established a precedent for employers to sift through your private messages if they suspect you're slacking.

The case revolved around a Romanian engineer who was fired after his company discovered he was using Yahoo Messenger to chat with his fiancée on a work computer. ECHR judges decided that it was not unreasonable for an employer "to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours."

Even if you like your boss, you shouldn't assume your company trusts you or respects your privacy. Software like Worksnaps allows employers to take regular screenshots of online activities, count the number of keystrokes made, and even capture webcam images. Worksnaps' testimonials reveal managers' enthusiasm for "keeping track of time" and making sure "nobody is allowed to be dead weight." One US business owner reveals how the software helped her "weed out those who were chatting on Facebook and playing games."

Others are experimenting with microphones and analytic tools to monitor face-to-face interactions between employees. Amazon has an internal online tool where workers are encouraged to comment on each other's achievements and slip-ups. Employees call each other "Amabots" as a compliment. "The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff," said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer for Amazon.

Being out on the road offers no escape. A former sales executive in California currently has a lawsuit pending against her former employer, claiming she was fired because she disabled a GPS app on the company iPhone that tracked her whereabouts 24 hours a day.

So where is all this leading? If businesses are increasingly obsessed with productivity data, is goofing off a dying art? And at what point in the working day are we entitled to assume our actions are no longer being logged, aggregated, and analyzed?

"It concerns me that people who work from home—people who are logged onto a company system on a personal computer—are becoming subject to monitoring and data analysis just as if were at work," says Lewis Maltby. "It makes the separation between work and personal communication more difficult."

The boundary between professional and private is now so blurred, it's difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. "As far as work-life balance goes, that's a thing of the past," says Jacob Morgan, author of The Future of Work. "We're moving towards work-life integration, where you bring your work home with you and your personal life with you to work."

So don't be surprised if your employer starts inquiring about your physical fitness, or, creepier still, becomes interested in how well you're sleeping.

Read on Motherboard: The People Who Are Terrified of Going to Work

Big companies like BP America have already given employees Fitbits to try to reduce healthcare costs. Dr. Chris Brauer, director of innovations at Goldsmiths, University of London, believes there is more scope for wearables in the workplace, both to monitor well-being and "develop rich behavioral and lifestyle profiles."

"It's about using data points that weren't previously visible," he says. "If you're a hedge fund, you want people who are going to perform well under high stress. So are you just going to do traditional things like psychometric testing? Or are you better off letting an analyst look at the data of how they're actually performing? You can work out if someone is biometrically aligned to a particular role."

Still, there may well be a place for emotional interaction among human workbots. Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer for Microsoft, predicts holograms and other visuals will give us the chance to offer "empathy presence" if we can't be at a meeting in person.

If you don't like the idea of being reduced to a series of data points, you're not the only one. "I think it's silly, because ultimately we're not machines," says Lewis Maltby. "Employers are so in love with trying to measure things. But some things—the things that really matter about how good a person is at their job—can't always be measured."

"The invasive systems companies have put in place go beyond common sense," he adds. "Autonomy about how to do your job is disappearing, just as privacy has disappeared. Assume you're monitored. Because you probably are."

Follow Adam on Twitter.

Eerily similar to the contents of half your Facebook feed. Photo via Flickr user Pixel Drip

Relationships enlarge our hearts while totally screwing up our ability to be cynical statisticians. Falling in love is a feeling of reckless creation. You feel like you might start putting Gatorade on your wheat Chex. With every queasily sweet text message exchange, you feel as if you've discovered another province of a new world. The new sex you have is a little different from the old sex: life's incandescence is restored.

But from the outside view—from the cynical statistician view—your relationship is utterly unoriginal. The particulars are particular, but the varieties of peculiarity are as old as dirt. Latin love poetry sounds like a more belaboured version of every teenage Tumblr.

SwanLuv is a Seattle startup based on this very principle—on the fact that love is radiant but mundane. Its business plan is difficult to explain. It's a marriage planning charity, but it's also a divorce speculation market. Here's how it works: couples planning marriages but lacking money for a wedding apply to SwanLuv for funding. Chosen couples receive free money (up to $10,000) with one significant string attached: the money is only free if the couple never gets divorced. Upon divorce, the money retroactively becomes a business loan—the couple pays it back with interest. This is tempting, especially for a millennial freelance writer like me, who could maybe afford a tray of hot dogs and a clown/priest in the way of wedding ceremonies. If I ever do get married, I want all the old-fashioned (read: unaffordable/unnecessary) shit, which I definitely can't buy now. Getting that money myself almost seems harder than keeping a marriage together.

The SwanLuv people have carefully insisted that SwanLuv won't make money off divorces directly. This is, as far as I can tell, half-true in a sneaky way. They won't pocket the funds—the interest they accrue from divorces is returned to the pool of money from which the marriage funds are drawn. Where they make real money is affiliate deals—when they give you money, they recommend, for example, a catering company, which pays them for the referral.

However, keeping that cycle going requires disproportionately funding nascent breakups. They depend on the predictability of your love's viability. SwanLuv only makes money by being smarter than newlyweds about predicting whether getting married is a good idea.

I contacted Scott Avy, the main dude of SwanLuv, hoping to ask him about my suspicions. He told me he didn't have time for my questions. I suspect that this was kind of a low-key fuck you, which I don't blame him for, because my questions were pretty annoying.

So, instead of interviewing that guy, I talked to my friend Kate, a counsellor who knows how to dance with swords, who was at the time of our interview eleven days from marriage. I wanted to see if she thinks about her future marriage statistically—whether, for example, she thinks divorce statistics matter. "Absolutely they do," she said. "I thought they were worth considering all along, and they've informed the way we've worked on problem areas of the relationship." Kate and her fiance share a high level of education, religious affiliation, and an understanding of the dark places mental illness can take you—what Kate charmingly refers to as The Pit. But, she said, she didn't select a boyfriend that way—she just happened to find somebody who's very statistically viable, as well as cute: "I could have been armed with all the theoretical knowledge in the world, could have decided to get a statistically promising partner... and if my gut had steered me otherwise, forget it. No one loves by calculation."

It's true. But do people divorce by calculation? How predictable is your relationship, exactly?

It seems like the answer is: very. Psychological models about what causes divorce have become pretty robust. Dr. John Gottman, a relationship science guy, predicts with eerie skill whether a couple's marriage is durable. He looks at couples talking to each other, then makes a forecast about whether the relationship is lasting. In one study, he was 95 percent correct. How he does that is a whole other article. But the very fact that he makes such accurate assessments means our behaviour is pretty goddamned predictable.

Then there's the fact that unless you manage your life exclusively in cash or with encryption—unless you're an especially cautious criminal, in other words—much of the data about your life is purchasable. Basically, every service you use is recording your behaviour patterns all the time. From the mass of that data, correlations emerge. Your spending habits may have already pegged you as a future divorcee. The way you trawl the profile pictures of your attractive acquaintances might make you seem desperate. As might the think-pieces you read about the predictability of divorce.

Any interested party, in other words, can get a psychological profile of you that's much more penetrating than the Myers-Briggs profiles of medieval times. Whatever type of alcohol you drink in whatever quantity you do makes you a category of person you don't know exists—a category in some credit card company's database which might indicate you shouldn't be trusted.

Just to be clear, I have no idea whether SwanLuv will do any of these specific things. But those are just a few of the tools available. If the people at SwanLuv are clever—I assume they are, based on their very slick branding—then they will surely know more about your relationship than you do.

The most annoying question I asked Avy was whether he would place a SwanLuv wager on his own marriage. Kate kindly put up with this question. "Oh, I'm gonna so WIN THAT," she said, "show me the money!"

Meanwhile, I would answer differently. I believe in numbers. I believe I'll die of heart disease, because that's the average thing to do. I believe that if SwanLuv offers me money for a marriage, that means the obviously correct intuition is that my marriage is doomed. The only smart move, as far as I'm concerned, is to assume that if SwanLuv wants to pay for your marriage, you shouldn't have one. However, this cynicism may be self-fulfilling, may in fact be why I'm not married, whereas Kate, after our interview, e-mailed me, "Also I AM GETTING MARRIED IN ELEVEN DAYS CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT???" Given her answers, I can—I would bet on Kate's marriage myself.

Though it hasn't yet launched, Avy says the demand for SwanLuv's services has been "explosive." It'll be online just in time for Valentine's Day.

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For Hollis McCollie, 26, Donald Trump is "Obama on steroids."

The day before, Hollis told me, he sold $600 worth of merchandise: hats, long-sleeved shirts, scarves, all emblazoned with the candidate's signature slogan, "Make America Great Again," with an asking price of $20 a pop. As he set up shop outside of Trump's town hall on Monday morning in Salem, New Hampshire, a day before the state's primary, the vendor was counting his money already. "If I sell just the shirts," he said, scanning his inventory, "that's $1,000 right there."

"For me, it was either I flew to Denver yesterday for the Super Bowl, to sell merch," Hollis told me. "Or come to New Hampshire for this. But football is unpredictable — Denver could've lost the Super Bowl, and I would've wasted money, and time."

"But here, it's political," he continued, "and you can't win, or lose."

All the New Hampshire regulars I've spoken with over the weekend—the voters, the veteran reporters, and the vendors themselves—told me that the campaigning in the Granite State has exploded over the last few election cycles. And if there is money to be made in politics, than this state is a gold mine.

The party machines, fueled by seemingly infinite funds, have boosted the economy in all sorts of odd ways, as the candidates, their teams, the national and international media, and assorted interested parties have brought their cash with them. Of course, local businesses do better than usual as a result, but the circus has also given rise to a cottage industry of unofficial merch pushers, booksellers, and even those looking to promote their new iPhone apps.

Especially if what they're selling ha either Donald Trump or Bernie Sander's face on it.

Keith Thomas, from Atlanta, holds up one of his shirts.

The first time Chones, another vendor I spoke with, knew he had struck Trump-ian gold with his candidacy was at the Donald's first rally, in Phoenix, Arizona. "Everyone asked us, 'Is this money going to the GOP?' We said no. They said, 'Good,' and bought everything," he told me. "That line for the event was two blocks long!"

The appetite for this gear is seemingly bottomless: Trump's colossal rallies are always attended by vendors with "Bomb the Shit Out of ISIS" buttons, "Hillary for Prison 2016" stickers, and other kitschy souvenirs to sell. Some items is handmade; others get theirs from a supplier. "Trump doesn't come after us, because he thinks it's free publicity," Chones said. "We're business people, just like him."

But Chones isn't necessarily a Trump supporter, and neither is Hollis. Nor do they hail from New Hampshire: Chones is from California; Hollis, Ohio. They just go where the money is—which is why, after Trump's town hall was underway, Chones immediately headed to a Sanders rally in nearby Manchester. Other candidates, they said, were just not as profitable.

Get it?

Outside of a Marco Rubio town hall, in Londonderry, Marty Miller, 74, had a stand with "Benghazi Matters" buttons that he assembled, alongside other vendors, in his hotel room earlier that day. On Sunday, Rubio was his guy, but the next day, it would be someone else; maybe John Kasich, or Chris Christie. None were worthy of continuous coverage.

But for Marty—a retired Republican who makes supplemental income with this business—he reserved one rule: no Bernie.

"If I'm selling something to a Democrat," he told me, "there's some nice people. But some say, 'Do you have anything for free?'"

Several vendors I spoke to repeated a stereotype that Sanders fans are cheap, that they want everything for free, or paid for—a talking point that sounds derived from the Republican criticism toward the candidate's policies. I encountered some other well-worn bits of trade gossip: Carly Fiorina is known to kick out vendors; Hillary Clinton's people "want to control her image," so nothing unofficial gets sold; Trump supporters are "entrepreneurial."

"Bernie fans get on us for being capitalists at a socialist's event," Chones said, "So we have to sell things for less." (The vendor refused to give his last name, he said, out of fear of retribution from Sanders's customers.)

But at a Sanders rally in Portsmouth, there was plenty of money changing hands. A vendor there, Keith Thomas, sold everything for the same price as the Trump gear, and fans of the insurgent Democrat lined up with their debit cards (most vendors have the Square app, and take cash or credit). Most of Keith's merch featured the famous "Feel the Bern" line, with a scribble of the candidate's scruffy hair. Other people strolled in wearing ugly Christmas sweaters, Star Wars–style T-shirts, and other knock-off brands, all with Sanders's face on them—signs of the primary economy at work.

Keith, 53, is a campaign veteran: he looks back at the '08 and '12 election with stars in his eyes. "Nothing," he told me, "was as big as Obama."

The young candidate was a savior—and, according to several vendors, active promoter—of unofficial vendors, with a campaign that made politics cool, and therefore profitable, again. T-shirts and hoodies with the HOPE insignia of Shepard Fairey fame sold like hotcakes. And Sanders's campaign, Keith said, is only now even approaching that level of merchandising.

Before New Hampshire, Keith was in Iowa. And, after Tuesday, he'll head to South Carolina, home to the next primary later this month. Keith, a self-declared Bernie supporter, said he plans on riding out the campaign as long as he can. "I don't have a job right now," he explained. "And until I find one, it's money in my pocket."

For Chones and Hollis, their business rides on Trump's momentum. Should he win in New Hampshire, it's off to the South, with more supplies for more rallies. If he fails... well, there's always the next campaign cycle.

"If this whole thing falls apart, we'll jump ship," Chones told me. "And then, we'll just come back in four years."

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Pallbearers carry the casket of Bettie Jones to an awaiting hearse during her funeral at New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church on January 6, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois.(Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

When police kill people in America, they generally don't have much to worry about. Sure, video surveillance might capture the incident, but except in the most flagrantly egregious cases, prosecutors are loathe to go after the cops who make their own jobs possible. And even when police do get criminally charged, they very rarely get convicted. Since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, though, there's at least been some anecdotal evidence that video footage can be used to make cops answer for their actions.

And then there's Chicago.

The city has been in the national spotlight over its policing practices pretty much forever, going back to the bloody Haymarket Strike in the 1880s. But between people reportedly being detained at secret black sites, an array of deeply disturbing killings, and the reparations the city is giving to black men tortured by cops, it's fair to say the Chicago Police Department is one of the more troubled in the country. In November, local prosecutors took the novel step of actually charging an officer for murder in the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, which was caught on a video that finally got released after a lengthy delay by local authorities.

Unfortunately for the family of 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, who was shot and killed while apparently suffering from a nervous breakdown on the day after Christmas, his death was not recorded on camera. And now Chicago Police Officer Robert Rialmo is actually suing LeGrier's estate for the emotional and physical trauma he says he's experienced since slaying the teen and his neighbor, 55-year-old Bettie Jones, on the day after Christmas, as the New York Times reports.

The $10 million suit filed Friday is a counter to a wrongful death claim brought by LeGrier's family against Rialmo, whose actions are still under internal police investigation. The officer's attorney claims LeGrier swung at him with a baseball bat multiple times after charging down the stairs and that the cop did what he had to to protect himself, accidentally killing Jones in the process. (LeGrier's family maintains the teenager was inside the house.)

The city, the CPD, and the local police union aren't involved in this suit, suggesting Rialmo is at it alone. His lawyer, Joel Brodsky, seems pretty confident in the righteousness of the cause, however.

"Why do we have the headline, 'Police officer sues college kid he killed last year,' instead of 'Police officer sues college dropout who tried to kill him with a baseball bat'?" Brodsky asked BuzzFeed News.

Brodsky is something of a character himself. He represented Drew Peterson, the man found guilty in 2012 of murdering his ex-wife in a high-profile trial that earned blanket cable media coverage. He's also been cited repeatedly for his conduct by judges and involved in bizarre disputes with rival attorneys over the years.

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Flea of RHCP performs at last week's Bernie Sanders fundraiser in Los Angeles. Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are probably not the first band that comes to mind when you think of political activism. Yoga-sexual lead singer Anthony Kiedis is not Bob Dylan; perpetually shirtless bassist Flea is not Killer Mike. But in at least a few ways, the Southern California radio rock stalwarts are to Popular Rock Music what Bernie Sanders is to the Political Establishment.

Fiercely independent as he may be, Sanders may very well be molding the Democratic Party in his own image. Though at first it seemed as if his campaign was aimed mostly at keepingpresumed frontrunner Hillary Clinton honest and sufficiently left-leaning during the presidential primaries, it looks increasingly like the the Vermont Senator may actually have a real shot at securing his party's nomination. And where the Red Hot Chili Peppers were once an unknowable quantity that melded funk, hip-hop, and hardcore punk with knuckle-headed aplomb, the brotastic band unwittingly predicted a sea change in mainstream rock with s1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik, managing to stay so popular for so long that they outlasted—and outlived—contemporaries like Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, and Pearl Jam, to the point that by the time George W. Bush took office they'd become America's de facto answer to U2.

The logic might seem hazy, but Sanders' campaign and RHCP have enough of an affinity with each other that on Friday, they merged like a middle-aged Voltron for a fundraiser at The Theatre, a venue at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Th crowd was more diverse, in terms of age and race, than I had expected from a Sanders event (or a RHCP concert, for that matter); a pre-show video montage of social and political leaders set to a live, ukulele rendition of "This Land Is Your Land," leaned heavily on non-white icons. This would presumably please the candidate—the knock on Sanders has long been that he polls poorly with racial minorities and with female, and that this will especially hurt him in the Southern states that hold primaries after New Hampshire;

In a taped dispatch from New Hampshire, Sanders' voice opened the night with an impassioned speech that not only railed against the "billionaire class" and the influence wielded by the one percent, but likened the grassroots opposition to billionaires to the Civil Rights movement, women's suffrage, and the fight for marriage equality. Each pause was filled by thunderous applause from the sold-out audience.

At this point, it might be worth discussing the Bernie Bro—a gangly, vaping specter that hangs over his campaign. Many observers have pointed out that a certain kind of Sanders supporter—usually affluent, almost always white, college-aged, and male—has taken his aggressive proselytizing support of Sanders past the point of persuasion and into the realm of bullying. Recently, the narrative of the "Bernie Bro" has come under scrutiny for not representing the entirety of Sanders' supports—but the Bernie Bro certainly exists, and he is certainly telling your sister that she would vote differently if only she knew what was good for her.

To wit: within 10 minutes of taking my seat Friday night (and after learning that I was a reporter), a white guy with an earring seated next to me gestured vaguely at the black security guard who was facing us. "The blacks and Latins," he told me, should realize that Sanders will be "way better for them."

But what the Bernie Bro is eternal, and cannot be pinned to Sanders alone—my clueless neighbor was roughly 45, and later told me he had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. It served as a reminder that while the Bernie Bro is absolutely a real person, he has probably existed for decades: the Ron Paul Bro, the Michael Dukakis Bro, the George McGovern Bro, the RFK Bro, and so on, back through modern elections. The Bernie Bro might have started listening to music with his first iPod touch, or he might have seen RHCP on tour after 1985's Freaky Styley.

The Sanders candidacy is not an academic one, in which policy wonks cross their arms and frown while someone more charismatic snatches up delegates. The movement is deeply populist, as evidenced by the cross-generational roars for "Otherside" or energy independence. Most people I spoke to at The Theater were as impassioned and confident in their conviction for Bernie as any Donald Trump supporter, if perhaps less vitriolic. I also spoke to many fans who despite being decked out in Sanders garb, spoke highly, or at least fairly, of Clinton—a refreshing counterpoint to the blunt, reductive, or harassing arguments that one sometimes sees online, and that Clinton's campaign aides have tried to use to characterize Sanders supporters as a whole.

After the Chili Peppers finished their hour-plus set, and the attendees people poured out into downtown LA, there was undoubtedly a kind of electricity among the crowd. Broadway and Ninth Street were dotted with the blue Bernie 2016 caps that had been placed meticulously under each chair in the audience, right on top of giant Bernie 2016 placards. But as great as the RHCP set was—the band had leaned heavily on post-2000 hits, and an endearingly messy cover of David Bowie's "Cracked Actor"—the band can't take all the credit for the mood.

From the time I walked past security at the beginning of the night until the time I returned to my car in a $20-lot eight blocks away, most person I encountered had trouble containing their excitement about Bernie Sanders. Some of these people were insufferable. Many were unfailingly gracious and nice. But everyone was one overpriced Modelo and a mention of single-payer healthcare away from jumping over the balcony and into the revolution—the smiling, disheveled, more-or-less polite revolution.

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Michael Bloomberg. Photo via Flickr userDavid Berkowitz

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Bloomberg Considers Presidential Bid
As the first primary election gets under way in New Hampshire, billionaire Michael Bloomberg has admitted he is considering an independent run for the presidency. The former New York City mayor criticized the current debate as "an outrage and an insult to the voters." —CNN

ISIS Widow Charged in US Aid Worker's Death
The widow of a former ISIS leader has been charged with conspiracy in the death of a US aid worker Kayla Mueller. Iraqi prosecutors say 25-year-old Nisreen Sayyaf, who is currently in Iraqi custody, kept Mueller captive and allowed her to be repeatedly raped. —USA Today

Last Oregon Occupiers Call FBI 'Losers'
The final four occupiers of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon have posted a series of defiant videos in which one of them calls FBI agents "losers." Posted on the "Defend Your Base" YouTube channel, one video shows an occupier taking a "joyride" in a FBI truck. —The Washington Post

Dengue Fever Outbreak on Hawaii
The Mayor of Hawaii County has declared a state of emergency after at least 250 people on the island have contracted dengue fever. Bill Kenoi said the island needs to do more to reduce mosquito populations and protect people from mosquito bites. —CBS News

International News

Nine Dead in German Train Crash
Two passenger trains have collided head-on in the state of Bavaria, with at least nine people confirmed dead. One of the trains was derailed in the crash and several carriages were overturned, with around 150 people injured. —BBC News

Hong Kong Activists Clash with Police
There were violent clashes in the Mong Kok district of Hong Kong during an attempted operation to shut down food stalls. Activists threw bricks, while police used batons, pepper spray and fired shots in the air as hygiene inspectors tried to remove street vendors. —AP

Canada to Arm Kurdish Forces
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he will pull Canadian jets from Syria and Iraq within two weeks. He also announced that his country will triple the number of special forces training Iraqi Kurdish fighters and arm Kurdish forces with light weapons. —Al Jazeera

Taiwan Developer Arrested After Quake
Prosecutors in Taiwan have arrested the developer of a building which collapsed during the recent earthquake, killing at least 39 people. The developer who built the Wei-guan Golden Dragon Building was arrested on suspicion of negligent homicide. —Reuters

A Starbucks employee with dyslexia has won a disability discrimination case against the coffee chain. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Giuliani Thinks Beyonce 'Attacked' the Cops
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said thought it was "outrageous" that Beyonce used the Super Bowl halftime show "as a platform to attack police officers." Beyonce's dancers were dressed like members of the Black Panthers. —Politico

India Blocks Facebook's Free Basics
Indian regulators have banned Facebook's attempt to offer free, basic internet access to the country's poorest people on the basis it would "discriminate" against other providers. Mark Zuckerberg said he was "disappointed." —CNN

Starbucks Employee Wins Discrimination Case
A British woman with dyslexia has won a disability discrimination case against Starbucks. A tribunal found employee Meseret Kumulchew had been given lesser duties in a London branch after difficulties with reading and telling the time. —The Guardian

Puerto Rico Relaxes Weed Penalties
Puerto Rico has made changes to sentencing policy for marijuana possession, leading campaigners to hope harsh marijuana laws are on their way out. "Legalization is coming," says Mike Martin of the Foundation Free Juana. —VICE

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'Confessions of an Internet Troll'

Photo by Harry How via Getty

When Beyoncé dropped "Formation" out of the blue on Saturday, the internet, predictably, lost its shit. This has become standard practice anytime Bey releases new work, but Saturday was different. "Formation" is a Big Deal not simply because it is a new Beyoncé song that exists, but because it is a song about Beyoncé's blackness. The track highlights her Southern roots, draws on the strength of her ancestors, and wills that empowerment on to her daughter, Blue Ivy. And it comes at a time when frustration at unfair policies and policing practices that disproportionately affect people of color has spread across the country.

Beyoncé didn't sanitize "Formation"'s Afrocentrism the next day, when she performed it in a black-and-gold leather militant costume in front of an audience of millions. Her onstage clique was made up of 30 black women, their curly afros topped with berets. Dressed in Black Panther regalia, the women's movements blended physical finesse with revolutionary symbolism, switching from hip jerks to raised fists with a synchronicity that suggests it's all from the same ancestral power. This was the peak in a show that included a thrilling trade-off with Bruno Mars. It was almost as if they didn't even invite Coldplay, technically the headlining act, to rehearsals.

Beyoncé isn't the first to pull off such a big, black cultural moment in the Super Bowl. Michael Jackson's 1993 performance essentially birthed the halftime extravaganza as we know it. No musician has ever been able to nail the high notes in the "Star-Spangled Banner" quite like Whitney Houston in 1991. And then there was Prince's unforgettable 2007 appearance, the clear highlight in what was a dry period for halftime shows (who was frothing at the mouth to see The Who?). But there has never been a Super Bowl performance this subversive, militant, or flagrant in its assertion of blackness. Here is Beyoncé, at the height of her superstardom—on CBS, the whitest channel in network television—flanked by a cadre of other black women dressed in all black. At one point the women arranged themselves into a giant X on the field. If the Super Bowl pays in publicity instead of US currency, Beyoncé spent all of it on a spotlight pointed directly at a centuries-old struggle.

The statement comes almost a year after Kendrick Lamar revealed the cover for To Pimp a Butterfly, featuring a family of black men and boys posing with stacks of cash in hand and standing over an incapacitated white judge. The message was clear: We're taking back what's ours. It's an important message, but the lack of women in the tableau is glaring, and not unique in the broader history of the struggle for civil rights.

The Black Panther party was made up primarily by men when it was founded in 1966, but evolved into a female majority by the early 70s, according to Stanley Nelson Jr., director of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. And yet a bepenised remembering of history has pushed the outsized role of male revolutionaries as canon. Even the movement itself relegated women to the periphery.

"A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant," former Black Panther member Elaine Brown says in her memoir, A Taste of Power. "A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race."

The Super Bowl is a holiday made for Americans to indulge in our time-honored tradition of rampant consumerism. It's a male-centric atmosphere that allows the privileged to easily discount the voices of the disenfranchised. By using only black women in her set, Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance acknowledged the tremendous contributions women have made to the civil rights movement. The symbolism behind that decision doesn't only give her voice as an activist validity, but also the voices of the sisters and mothers who came before her.

"Formation" is a throughway that runs from Angela Davis to Blue Ivy, past to future. But it's also an urgent cry that's very much of the present. The dancers held up a handwritten sign that read, "JUSTICE 4 MARIO WOODS"—a tribute to the 26-year-old man who was shot dead while surrounded by a gang of San Francisco police officers in December. Footage of this slaying, and multiple others, is available through just a click on YouTube. The breaking of a black body is readily available for viewing, but there are too few spaces that show the opposite: black culture and its resilience. Beyoncé forcefully took one last night in front about 114 million people and made the most of it.

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All this could be yours for a mere $17

Free gifts are always better appreciated by people who can already afford them: That is just the cold truth. You there, with your mug full of change, headed to the Coinstar hoping all those pennies and nickels add up to a meal: A $31,000 skin cream voucher would be wasted on you. You there, the one trying to figure out if you qualify for food stamps, and if you don't, wondering how you'll pay your electricity bill: Free Audi rentals for life are not going to help you. It makes sense that the great and the beautiful get rewarded beyond supermodels to have sex with and multimillion-dollar salaries at the Oscars this year. It makes sense and is entirely appropriate and logical that the goodie bag for every nominee in the acting and directing categories includes a ludicrous $200,000 worth of free shit.

The Oscar's press team described the contents of the goodie bag as being "once again a blend of fabulous, fun and functional items meant to thrill and pamper those who may have everything money can buy but still savor the simple joy of a gift." So let's cast aside the cynicism and sarcasm and rage at the gross, gross unfairness of it all: Incredibly wealthy people enjoy free shit too.

The bag includes bizarre cosmetic procedures (a voucher for the "Vampire Breast Lift" promises "blood-derived growth factors to revive rounder cleavage without implants") through to more predictable items, such as a the ten-day first class trip to Israel, or a $250 "arouser" sex toy for female guests. Also a $249.99 vape pen, because vaping is cool.

Unfortunately, for reasons, we weren't invited to the Oscars this year. But we wanted to get involved in the goodie bag-shaped fun anyway. So here's how we put our own together, on a slightly pared down budget of about $17.

Oscar nominees get: a ten-day first class trip to Israel ($55,000)
We got: a framed oil painting of Larry David ($6)

Why go all the way to the Holy Land? As any Curb enthusiast knows, Larry David's relationship with Israel is profound, which is why we put him in a frame instead of buying plane tickets and hotels and flights and a guide and a book called What Israel Is?. Most notably, Larry David's love for Israel (and world peace) was brought out in the Curb episode "Palestinian Chicken," where Larry attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by wooing a lady at a Palestinian-American restaurant. Needless to say, many viewers found the episode distasteful. But there's nothing distasteful about this $6 picture frame!

Oscar nominees get: Ultherapy, a laser skin-tightening procedure
We got: 50 wooden pegs ($1.50)

Yes, lasers can have a lasting tightening effect on the skin when properly shot at you by a trained professional, but they are also expensive (bad) and can possibly be retooled by a Bond villain to be some earth-destroying hyper-weapon (very bad). Instead, peg your saggy face back onto your skull with these actual pegs: hygienic, affordable, and a 50-pack should last you weeks.

Oscar nominees get: a lifetime supply of Lizora skin creams ($31,000)
We got: one pot of Hollywood Beauty Cocoa Butter ($5)

I mean depending on how often you use it, this pot could feasibly last a lifetime. It is extremely petroleum-heavy and rich. A little goes a long way. Unless you have exceptionally warm fingers, it is quite hard to get out of the pot. And, fundamentally, aren't all creams basically the same? A wholesale scam by the beauty industry to make us invest in unguents? If anything, the Hollywood Beauty Cocoa Butter (which says the word "Hollywood" multiple times on the pot, guys) is too expensive for what you get.

Female Oscar nominees will get: a $250 "arouser" offering "gentle suction and stimulation"
We got: one cucumber ($1)

Suction and stimulating are both incredibly broad services that (depending on how you slice it) a cucumber could undoubtedly provide. Also—and not sure you've noticed this, but—a cucumber is roughly similar in shape and size to a human penis. Who needs a bedazzled dildo! Not us! (Note: Do not use a cucumber or any other piece of produce as a sex toy.)

On Motherboard: Why Transhumanists Are Angry About the UK's New Drug Law

Oscar nominees get: a year's worth of unlimited Audi car rentals ($45,000)
We got: an Uber promo code (potentially free)

Anyone with half a brain and enough mobile data will know that there is only one way to ride around in a car that doesn't belong to you. So, we give you this: NZSOU, or something, a promo code for Uber which entitles you to £10 ($15) off your next ride and may or may not work.

Oscar nominees get: three private training sessions with celebrity wellness expert and star of ABC's My Diet Is Better Than Yours, Jay Cardiello ($1,400)
We got: three squishy balls, which my grandma uses to combat arthritis ($2)

If you place a squishy spherical object in your hand and hold it tightly for periods of time during the day, the short busts of exercise will combat the symptoms of arthritis in your hand. You should try shaking my grandma's hand these days. Grip like a... well. It's not strong, but it's better. She's not winning any jar-opening competitions, let's put it that way. But it's better.

Photo via Hanako Footman

Oscar nominees get: a Japanese walking tour ($45,000)
We got: a group tour around London's most Japanese venues, guided by our friend Hanako, who is half-Japanese (Price: suggested donation, a.k.a. free)

Quote from Hanako about the tour: "Starting out at the Japan Centre in Piccadilly Circus, you will explore the very best of Japan without having to spend a penny, although I do accept donations." Note the wording: donations. Legally you do not have to pay Hanako for this. Morally? Morally it's on you. But legally. Legally this tour is gratis.

Oscar nominees get: a 'Vampire Breast Lift' ($1,900)
We got: a large roll of sellotape ($1.50)

Yeah you could get all your blood taken out and pumped back into your tits OR if you just wrap enough sellotape around your chest, eventually all the blood inside of you will find its way there anyway, giving the vague appearance of a boob job and a hell of a welt when you unwrap yourself after a night out.

Oscar nominees get: a Haze Dual V3 Vaporizer ($250)
We got: a cigarette butt from the floor (Priceless)

Because smoking and vaping kills. Well, vaping doesn't kill. Unless you count your dignity. It definitely kills that.

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In January, 11,000 people attending a Donald Trump rally in Florida were treated to the musical stylings of the USA Freedom Kids—a girl group clad in red, white, and blue, dancing and lip syncing to a song proclaiming all the ways the Republican candidate would make America great again. It also included the word "Ameri-tude."

The mastermind behind the band is dad-turned-manager Jeff Popick, who created the group to spend more time with his daughter and her friends while also spreading Trump-style American pride during the 2016 election season.

VICE traveled to Fort Meyers, Florida, after that already infamous Trump performance, to talk politics and freedom with Popick and the preteen singers.

Outward on the M5 from Sydney, under the wind turbines that look like spinning Mercedes badges on enormous stems, through towns where life and death is marked by the newly painted population number on faded green signs, you will arrive at a bungalow flying a tricolor flag.

You have arrived at Atlantium, the smallest country in Australia. The only micronation on AirBnB.

"Atlantium is not a micronation," the nation's emperor, Georgivs II, corrects me as we arrive.

"It's a non-territorial global sovereign entity," he continues, offering to make tea for my girlfriend and me using the country's gas stove.

Art Deco portraits cover the walls, and a mixture of travel, science fiction, and local interest books pack the shelves. Inside, the empire's one building for guests (the emperor stays next door in a corrugated metal-sheeted shed) is not too dissimilar from any other AirBnB housing.

There are some distinct features. The heat is oppressive here in Atlantium. Walking into it is like opening an industrial oven door. The place is incredibly silent. All you can really hear is the stridulation of locusts and the warble of Atlantium's various bird species: crimson rosellas, cockatoo, and owls.

The bungalow overlooks the Lachlan River Valley, near Reids Flat in New South Wales. The toilet is next to the emperor's office. It's a compost type deal where, instead of flushing, you throw sawdust down the hole.

A herd of sheep graze in the shade of a nearby copse. Farther away, a mob of kangaroo holds court near a river basin. The wasps here sound like helicopters, which at least gives you prior warning of their arrival.

Other noticeable differences are the various sites and sculptures of cultural significance. The giant timber pyramid, for example—the only of its kind in Australia—or the column made up of an eagle statue sitting on top of a gold sphere.

Tea prepared, Emperor Georgivs II—or George Francis Cruickshank, as he goes by outside the nation's boundary lines—rattles the wind chimes and takes us all back to his mother's backyard in Sydney, where he and his cousins, Geoff and Claire, created Atlantium in 1981.

"We were living in the tail end of the Cold War. It was a very confrontational world, and we had this idea that maybe we should set up our own country. I wrote the constitution and we developed the postage stamps and flags and all that sort of stuff. It was largely an intellectual exercise: a black and white dotted line in the corner of my mother's backyard in suburban Sydney. I think that black and white line is still there."

Back then, Atlantium was a reflection of the young emperor's ideals. It had no territory, only values and paraphernalia. In fact, it was the paraphernalia that, in part, went some way to establishing the nation it is today. George and his cousins created and issued postage stamps, which attracted stamp enthusiasts, which attracted other micronations. Recognition grew for what was essentially a product of the imagination of a group of teenagers.

As time passed, however, and George went to university in Wagga Wagga, his cousins' interest fell away. Yet the idea of Atlantium lived on in his mind. He calls it his obsession; a thread through his entire life. Naturally, Atlantium matured as George did—or, as he puts it: "It evolved as I evolved. Atlantium was a way of expressing my broadly progressive political views in an age and at a time when progressivism was under attack from all comers."

Trouble was, it's difficult to have your progressive notions taken seriously by anyone when half your country is a bedroom. So when, by chance, a friend bought a piece of land near Reids Flat in 1999, the young emperor began to visit in the hope of terraforming the nation. By 2008, he became a co-owner and the Atlantium as we see it today was finally free to be realized.

The pyramid was constructed, the column erected. If the regality of its ceremonial sites and the emperor's own title gives the nation a sense of pompousness, George is quick to dispel it. The monarchy he's created for himself has more to do with the message than madness.

"It's based on Australian humor," he says. "If you're trying to communicate a serious message and do that with a smile on your face, you're perceived as not threatening to people in power, or to people you're communicating with more generally."

It's clearly a technique that works, allowing George his proudest moment: being asked to appear as the emperor on a national morning television show in Sydney. He took the opportunity to broach the subject of abortion and assisted suicide.

Looking around the empire, it's easy to see the irony at play, whether it's in the postcards, the pyramid guarded by the sphinx, or even the stamps, which feature a Soviet-style portrait of the emperor that wouldn't look out of place in the Gosha Rubchinskiy SS16 look-book.

Stamps also led Atlantium into its first and last conflict.

With the attention he garnered from the original Atlantium stamps, George expanded to cover other micronations. For the 15th anniversary of Hutt River Province, Australia's oldest micronation, he created commemorative postage stamps. Little did he know, this would become an act of war.

British-born Alex Brackstone came to Australia in the 1950s. He worked as a circus monkey trainer and uranium prospector before finally buying up a piece of property in southern Australia and seceding to ensure a part of the continent would remain forever British. Such was his devotion to both his homeland and his micronation, the Province of Bumbunga, he planted strawberry plants there in the shape of the British Isles. Brackstone would later become one of many to follow the issue of George's commemorative Hutt River Province stamps.

" wrote to us and basically said, 'If you do the same thing with my micronation, I'll be hauling you into court.' And so I said: 'Bugger you,'" says George. "There was a series of correspondences of increasing escalation, and we did actually declare war on the Province of Bumbunga. As a consequence, we've completely renounced the use of state force. We have no army. We have no military significance. We have a non-confrontational relationship with our neighbor Australia."

Later, as the emperor fixes himself up in a suit and a sash bearing the empire's flag, it's hard not to feel like the act is a bit labored. The costume a kind of ritual he has to enact. How do you end a 34-year private joke?

In the morning, we share another cup of tea and I manage to send a postcard to the office using the nation's official postbox.

Before we go, I ask George about the landscape that Atlantium has become a part of and how that plays into his 15-year-old vision for the world.

"I don't know whether Atlantium is tied up in some way with my desire to make a mark on the world, but I suspect it is, because that's what I was really doing when I was 15," he says. "That's really what I've been trying to do all my life with all of the things that I do. Maybe that's just a way of me raging against the infinity of knowing that my time here is finite, and that once you're gone, you're gone."

Before I went to Atlantium I had my reservations about venturing into the Australian wilderness to meet a man who'd deliberately set himself apart from the world. But that's not what Atlantium is at all. It's a man's imprint of his vision on the landscape. A teenage ambition—the kind most of us come across years later in our childhood bedrooms, sketched on the back of notepads, or scrawled across backpacks—realized in the shape of a yellow bungalow, a pyramid, and a collection of postage stamps.

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Melina Laboucan-Massimo helped build a solar installation in the heart of Alberta's tar sands. Photo via Daily VICE.

Last summer, in a remote Alberta First Nation surrounded by pipelines and increasingly plagued with oil spills and forest fires, workers wearing reflective vests attached 80 giant solar panels to 20-foot poles. Overseeing the operation and coordinating its documentation with a film crew was Greenpeace campaigner Melina Laboucan-Massimo.

"It's a big system," the 34-year-old Cree Lubicon woman told VICE from the job site in August. "It will probably be one of the biggest solar installations in northern Alberta, especially in the tar sands."

Located near Little Buffalo, 450 kilometers north of Edmonton, the Lubicon Lake Band's 20.8 kilowatt Piitapan Solar Project is the culmination of Laboucan-Massimo's masters research, which she was finishing off last December. She and her partner, David Isaac, who shares her interest in renewable energy, planned the unique and customized solar installation from start to finish, and employed three experts and at least ten people from the community—five young people and five adults—to help assemble the project.

The solar panels, which now power the community's health center, are her way of injecting a tangible solution into her community, where residents are "climate hostages," she said.

She and Isaac were able to fund the project almost entirely through $50,000 of private fundraising, including generous donations from Bullfrog Power and Laboucan-Massimo's friend Jane Fonda. She met the 77-year-old actress-turned-climate activist at a dinner hosted by Greenpeace in Vancouver. She told Fonda about the project and the actress said she was inspired and wanted to contribute. "She basically took out her checkbook and started writing a check."

There was no injection of public money due to limited grants for renewable energy projects in Alberta, although the First Nation did kick in support.

"We have such a high solar potential in Alberta," she said. "Solar is also a way for us to move forward, a way for us to stop digging down into the earth and a way for us to look up."

Though her masters in environmental studies was aimed at improving renewable infrastructure in her remote community, the project itself has an even deeper personal connection. In the early spring of 2009, as she was in the midst of her studies at York University in Toronto, she had to drop everything to move back home for a family emergency. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer after working week-on week-off as a community counsellor for a decade in Fort Chipewyan, a community where elevated levels of cancer have been recorded. Though residents speculate that the higher levels of three kinds of cancer are linked to the environmental effects of living near the Alberta oil sands, Alberta's Chief Medical Officer of Health has said there is no evidence of a link. Luckily, Laboucan-Massimo's mother survived and is currently in remission, but the experience was "a big eye opener" for the young Cree woman, who believes the oil sands do have an environmental effect on the people who live nearby.

"It made me realize I had to go home and work on full time," she said.

Laboucan-Massimo at a Toronto environment protest. Photo via Daily VICE.

Laboucan-Massimo took a compassionate leave of absence from the environmental studies program, and began campaigning full time for Greenpeace that same year because, as she put it, "I not only wanted to talk about the problems, I wanted to talk about the solutions."

As a young girl, Laboucan-Massimo would go out on the land each summer in a horse and wagon with her grandparents—traditional knowledge-keepers who only spoke Cree—across the lush and vibrant landscape of northern Alberta.

"It felt very free," she told me. "It felt like this was our territory and we were exercising our sovereignty and our right to be on the land, to live off the land."

But as she grew older, the encroachment of industry and pipeline tendrils from the oil patch became apparent. When it started about 15 years ago, the Alberta oil boom brought jobs and about $200 billion USD worth of investment, but it also wreaked environmental damage, including up to 23 times the toxic hydrocarbons in nearby lakes compared to before the oil sands mines were built. Her First Nation lived off the land, and she grew up eating moose meat, but she remembers the day her dad found tumors in a moose he killed. Similarly, her grandparents used the water from the lakes and streams to brew tea, but gradually the water became undrinkable and her community began relying on bottled water—an all too common situation in Canada.

In April 2011, she flew over her band's territory in a helicopter to witness the effects of the province's largest oil spill in 35 years. Though they were 30 kilometers away from the 4.5 million liter crude oil spill, her family felt its impacts. "They couldn't breathe, their eyes were burning," she remembered.

In recent years, forest fires have become more frequent and intense, and Laboucan-Massimo doesn't hesitate to link them to climate change.

"The thing that I think really politicized me was, in the 90s, when I started getting older, and then when I went to high school and university and coming back all the time and seeing the changes in the landscape."

"That was a really hard reality to come to terms with," she said. "It was really upsetting driving back home to visit my family, and see all the heavy industry coming into the area."

"I realized, I can't not do anything about this. I have to act."

Read on VICE News: This Aboriginal Community Is Launching a Solar Project in the Heart of Canada's Oil Sands

Her activism has taken her from the frontlines of the oil sands to protests and other projects around the world. She was on staff with the Indigenous-run Redwire newsletter, which distributed news to friendship centers and prisons. She has also produced short documentaries, including one about the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation's fight against oil sands expansion. She has testified before US Congress on the impact of the oil sands in her community and how Keystone XL pipeline would affect them, and spoken at big oil AGMs.

As a parallel action to the divestment movement, which aims to convince shareholders to give up their investments in big oil, she infiltrated the shareholder meetings of companies including BP and Shell between 2008 and 2011 to force environment into the conversation.

Shareholders in these companies who worried about the effects of oil extraction on the environment gave her proxy shares so she could attend the annual company meetings to push the company's operations in a socially responsible direction. "It was like ally work in certain ways," she said, though she was met with "somewhat of an antagonistic room" when she eventually attended the shareholder meetings and asked questions about the oil sands.

Along with the divestment movement, other major activism efforts she's been involved with have seen some measure of success.

Back in July, Laboucan-Massimo marched front and center at the Jobs, Justice, Climate march as it wound through the streets of downtown Toronto. Organized by Naomi Klein alongside famous environmentalists including David Suzuki, the march aimed to show the false choice between the environment and the economy in the then-impending Canadian election.

Now that Canada has a new prime minister, Laboucan-Massimo is cautiously optimistic that the climate conversation can move forward. "Probably more on the cautious side," she adds.

"Trudeau's going to have some hard decisions to make, and one of them is, you can't be a supporter of three major tar sands pipelines and actually have concrete and effective action on climate."

Trudeau hasn't said no to Energy East. He has supported Keystone XL, though when US President Barack Obama killed the project, Trudeau said in a statement, "We are disappointed by the decision but respect the right of the United States to make the decision." He has said he would ban tanker traffic off the coast of BC, which would effectively kill Northern Gateway. And as for the controversial Trans Mountain expansion, in January the National Energy Board process to consider the pipeline marched ahead in Burnaby, BC, despite local opposition. The government has said Energy East and Trans Mountain will face a GHG emissions test, and the government will consult with directly-affected First Nations on the projects before they can go ahead.

Trudeau has also promised to reform the National Energy Board (NEB), a promise the government took a first step toward when it announced the new pipeline hurdles in January, and has also promised torestart the nation-to-nation consultations with First Nations.

"He might be able to overhaul the process, potentially for the NEB, he might say that there's consultation that will happen, but at the end of the day the majority of Canadians and especially First Nations along those corridor routes are in opposition," Laboucan-Massimo said.

"We don't want to see him, just like Harper, be out of step with First Nations and Canadians when they've made their voice loud and clear."

On November 8, months after completing the solar project in the Lubicon Cree First Nation, she attended the "climate welcome" outside Prime Minister Trudeau's residence to present the new Canadian prime minister with solar panels wrapped in red ribbon for future installation at 24 Sussex. The stunt, which was part of over four days of creative action by climate protesters, was designed to remind Trudeau about his climate promises.

"We thought that, having just put up , it would be fitting to have someone from Alberta to deliver solar panels to the new prime minister to say that this is the direction that we would like to see our country as young people," she explained in an interview with VICE in early November. "It's really going to affect the rest of our lives."

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The first episode of Project Heat opens with an argument between a couple in an apartment in the Pink Houses, a public housing project in East New York, Brooklyn. The woman complains that they never do anything, so her boyfriend says they'll head to a Nets game—his friend has tickets. They get dressed up, head out into the hallway, and briefly wait for the elevator before deciding to take the stairs.

When they step into the stairwell, the boyfriend turns to look upwards, and is quickly shot from the landing above by a New York City police officer.

Then the action rewinds, and this time we see it from the NYPD perspective. Outside in the stairwell, a rookie police officer explains to his partner why he keeps his gun out while they patrol the projects. "You know why I have my weapon drawn. I want to be ready at all times. You know the shit that happens in these places," the officer explains. They continue their patrol. They turn a corner, and the rookie shoots the boyfriend from moments earlier. The theme music plays.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it should. In 2014, an NYPD officer shot and killed 28-year-old Akai Gurley in the stairwell of the Pink Houses while on a vertical patrol. The officer, Peter Liang, a rookie, had only patrolled the Pink Houses once before the night he killed Gurley in the darkened stairwell.

"I don't know how, but we're not dead. And we're trying to channel it into something positive." —Tiffon "Pop" Dunn

Project Heat is a web series that takes its cues from the headlines, with East New York, one of New York's toughest neighborhoods, serving as backdrop and muse. Like most web series on YouTube, the production can be a bit shaky sometimes. The actors are recruited by the creators from among the people they grew up with in the Pink Houses, and the series is shot in the hallways, lobbies, and public spaces of a housing project deemed one of New York City's "most dangerous" by at least some members of the NYPD.

"We wanted to start the show off with the Gurley shooting because we wanted to let the community know we were feeling for them," says Tiffon "Pop" Dunn, creator and star of Project Heat. "That we were all dealing with what happened to that kid."

Tiffon "Pop" Dunn. All photos by Jonah Bliss

Dunn moved to the Pink Houses when he was a teenager in 1988. So it only makes sense that Project Heat follows a family as they move from suburban Queens to the Pink Houses and get tied up in the rivalry between gangs from two sides of the development. "When I moved from Queens to the Pink Houses, the first time I moved to Pink Houses, the very first day, I saw someone get murdered," Dunn tells VICE.

In Project Heat, a family watches a man get killed over debts as they move a couch into their apartment.

But even Dunn admits that was from a different time period. "Right now, Pink Houses slowed down a lot," he says. When we talk, he's celebrating the release of the first episode of the show's second season at a Red Lobster in Gateway Center, a massive retail complex that exemplifies the changes in East New York, a neighborhood once seemingly forgotten by the NYC political establishment.

"We used to just take our bikes and ride all over the vacant lots that were here. Just go crazy back in the day," offers Dionico "Dee" Chambers, the co-star of Project Heat and a lifelong friend to Dunn.

Over the past decade, multiple official efforts have been made to help the low-income neighborhood on the edge of Brooklyn. Retail complexes like Gateway Center have popped up alongside sweeping new affordable housing developments. Some of the projects have proved controversial. A rezoning proposal by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio aims to have developers build a new mix of affordable and market rate housing, just as East New York finds itself on the new front lines of gentrification.

"It's way more expensive out here than it used to be, and we know they're coming for us," Chambers explains.

In one of the subplots of the show, a developer targets the Pink Houses for replacement with luxury housing, dispatching a henchman to turn the gangs on each other until the houses are too violent for the city to handle. Project Heat spends most of its time on that kind of violence—a source of criticism that was levied against the show after a cast member got shot during a party this summer. The next episode of Project Heat opened with an actual news report about the shooting, with the two actors who portray the leaders of the rival gangs explaining that they're not celebrating violence on the show, but giving it an outlet. "Cause at the end, when the lights and cameras go off everyone lives!" a title card reads before the episode begins.

"Listen, we're not saying it's not rough out here. Other people will test you, the police will harass you with no hesitation," argues Dunn. "But we went through that all. I don't know how, but we're not dead. And we're trying to channel it into something positive."

While the YouTube views might not be massive, Dunn and Chambers have received a level of fame within their community, with people stopping both of them on the street and asking for parts in the show. As we walk around the Pink Houses a few hours after the new season premiered, the two friends soak up congratulations, with someone yelling "Project Heat!" as they pass.

Dionico "Dee" Chambers

"Even the cops like the show," Chambers insists. "They're asking if we can give them walk-on roles, stuff like that."

While the rest of the city is focused on the criminal trial of Peter Liang—the officer who shot Akai Gurley—which could conclude as soon as Tuesday, some residents of the Pink Houses don't seem to be following it too closely. For Dunn and Chambers, they're more focused on offering their own narrative of what's going on in the projects, taking current events and wrapping them into a larger arc of life in the Pink Houses and New York.

As Dunn puts it, "This season, we're taking it to other parts of the city, and then next season, worldwide."

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If a pandemic hits Canada's borders, are we prepared?

Is Canada ready to handle the sort of super virus that has many scientists worried? In the final part of INFECTED, VICE visits The Ottawa Hospital's "Ebola Room" and speaks with Dr. Virginia Roth about what protocols are in place to handle deadly infectious diseases. We also speak with German physicist Dirk Brockmann, who studies human mobility patterns to find out how infectious diseases spread in our globalized world.

This video has been made possible by Ubisoft and Tom Clancy's The Division.

That's an alligator at a Wendy's. Screenshot via WPTV

A Florida man (the start of every fun sentence) was arrested this week for tossing a goddamn gator through a Wendy's drive-thru window last October, in what his mother says was just a "stupid prank."

According to local Florida station WPTV, the original gator throw happened after the accused—23-year-old Joshua James—placed an order at a Wendy's near the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, just east of Loxahatchee.

After taking his drink, James reached into the back of his vehicle, grabbed the three-and-a-half-foot gator, and tossed it through the drive-thru window before jetting off.

His mother, Linda James, called her son's stunt "stupid."

"He's a prankster," she told WPTV. "He does stuff like this because he thinks it's funny."

While no employees were hurt in the incident, one of the workers managed to capture a shot of the gator chilling on the kitchen floor following the toss. The reptile was later released back into the wild. James is now charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession and transportation of an alligator.

A judge has ordered James to stay out of all Wendy's restaurants, barred him from possessing any weapons, and required that he get a mental health evaluation. He's also not allowed to be in contact with any animals except his mother's dog.

Gator guy is not alone in his cold-blooded stupidity—in December 2014, a Canadian man tossed a snake over a Tim Hortons in Saskatoon before running off. Christopher Cook, the man eventually arrested in the case, was easily identifiable due to a recording of the incident that was posted online.

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