OK, sure—2018 is an increasingly dark place where the Leader of the Free World waggles his fists excitedly on 9/11 and invents vile conspiracy theories about the death toll in Puerto Rico. But please, remember that all hope is not lost. There are still small shreds of goodness left out there, tiny flecks of joy and kindness still buried amid the rubble of our daily lives. And this week, we were graced with a much-needed reminder of that—all thanks to Ellen Degeneres, Missy Elliott, and the karaoke queen known as Mrs. Funky White Sister.

Last month, a woman named Mary Halsey posted a video of her doing karaoke in a Rhode Island park. Normally, watching others do karaoke is a punishment appropriate only in select circles of Hell, but this time was different.

With a mic in one hand and some kind of giant horn in the other, Halsey rapped Missy Elliott's 2002 banger, "Work It"—and she absolutely slayed. The almost overwhelmingly pure and charming video immediately went viral, with even Elliott herself praising Halsey's flawless performance.

On Thursday, Halsey stopped by The Ellen Show to chat about her newfound viral fame and then, wearing the same floral shirt and again clutching her majestic shofar, she took to the Ellen stage to perform "Work It" once again. This time, though, Missy Elliott actually showed up to rap alongside her.

The audience, Ellen guest Kristen Bell, and literally everyone else watching in the world completely lost it, and Halsey and Elliott finished off the song together, arm in arm, before giving each other a giant hug. The heart struggles to process the immediate flood of emotions.

Please, just watch the whole segment above. Let the sweetness of the entire encounter warm you. Let it bathe you in a renewed sense of calm. It is a soothing balm for all that ails you.

Thank you, Ellen. Thank you, Missy Elliott. But most of all, thank you, Mary Halsey. You blew your horn and the world got better, somehow, if just for a moment.

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In 1948, the architect of the post-war American suburb, William Levitt, explained the point of the housing finance system. "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist," he said. "He has too much to do."

It’s worth reflecting on this quote on the ten-year anniversary of the financial crisis, because it speaks to how the architects of the bailouts shaped our culture. Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson, the three key men in charge, basically argue that the bailouts they executed between 2007 and 2009 were unfair, but necessary to preserve stability. It’s time to ask, though: just what stability did they preserve?

These three men paint the financial crisis largely as a technical one. But let’s not get lost in the fancy terms they use, like “normalization of credit flows," in discussing what happened and why. The excessively wonky tone is intentional—it's intended to hide the politics of what happened. So let’s look at what the bailouts actually were, in normal human language.

The official response to the financial crisis ended a 75-year-old American policy of pursuing broad homeownership as a social goal. Since at least Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American leaders had deliberately organized the financial system to put more people in their own homes. In 2011, the Obama administration changed this policy, pushing renting over owning. The CEO of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, echoed this view shortly thereafter. There are many reasons for the change, and not all of them were bad. But what’s important to understand is that the financial crisis was a full-scale assault on the longstanding social contract linking Americans with the financial system through their house.

The way Geithner orchestrated this was through a two-tiered series of policy choices. During the crisis, everyone needed money from the government, but Geithner offered money to the big guy, and not the little guy. First, he found mechanisms, all of them very technical—and well-reported in Adam Tooze’s new book Crashed—to throw unlimited amounts of credit at institutions controlled by financial executives in the United States and Europe. (Eric Holder, meanwhile, also de facto granted legal amnesty to executives for possible securities fraud associated with the crisis.) Second, Geithner chose to deny money and credit to the middle class in the midst of a foreclosure crisis. The Obama administration supported this by neutering laws against illegal foreclosures.

The response to the financial crisis was about reorganizing property rights. If you were close to power, you enjoyed unlimited rights and no responsibilities, and if you were far from power, you got screwed. This shaped the world into what it is today. As Levitt pointed out, when people have no stake in the system, they get radical.

Did this prevent a full-scale collapse? Yes. Was it necessary to do it the way we did? Not at all.

Geithner, Bernanke, and Paulson like to pretend that bank bailouts are inherently unpopular—that they were wise stewards resisting toxic (populist) political headwinds. But it’s not that simple. Unfair bank bailouts are unpopular, but reasonable ones are not. For an alternative, look at how a previous generation of Democrats handled a similar, though much more serious, crisis.

In 1933, when FDR took power, global banking was essentially non-functional. Bankers had committed widespread fraud on top of a rickety and poorly structured financial system. Herbert Hoover, who organized an initial bailout by establishing what was known as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, was widely mocked for secretly sending money to Republican bankers rather than ordinary people. The new administration realized that trust in the system was essential.

One of the first things Roosevelt did, even before he took office, was to embarrass powerful financiers. He did this by encouraging the Senate Banking Committee to continue its probe, under investigator Ferdinand Pecora, of the most powerful institutions on Wall Street, which were National City (now Citibank) and JP Morgan. Pecora exposed these institutions as nests of corruption. The Senate Banking Committee made public Morgan’s "preferred list," which was the group of powerful and famous people who essentially got bribes from Morgan. It included the most important men in the country, like former Republican President Calvin Coolidge, a Supreme Court Justice, important CEOs and military leaders, and important Democrats, too.

Roosevelt also ordered his attorney general "vigorously to prosecute any violations of the law" that emerged from the investigations. New Dealers felt that "if the people become convinced that the big violators are to be punished it will be helpful in restoring confidence." The DOJ indicted National City’s Charles Mitchell for tax evasion. This was part of a series of aggressive attacks on the old order of corrupt political and economic elites. The administration pursued these cases, often losing the criminal complaints but continuing with civil charges. This bought the Democrats the trust of the public.

When Roosevelt engaged in his own broad series of bank bailouts, the people rewarded his party with overwhelming gains in the midterm elections of 1934 and a resounding re-election in 1936. Along with an assertive populist Congress, the new administration used the bailout money in the RFC to implement mass foreclosure-mitigation programs, create deposit insurance, and put millions of people to work. He sought to save not the bankers but the savings of the people themselves.

Democrats did more than save the economy—they also restructured it along democratic lines. They passed laws to break up banks, the emerging airline industry, and electric utilities. The administration engaged in an aggressive antitrust campaign against industrial monopolists. And Roosevelt restructured the Federal Reserve so that the central bank was not "independent" but set interest rates entirely subservient to the wishes of elected officials.

In 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered his view on what causes democracies to fail. "History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments," he said, "but out of weak and helpless ones." Did the bailouts of ten years ago work? It’s a good question. I don’t see a strong and vibrant democracy in America right now. Do you?

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Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is publishing a book on the history of monopoly power for Simon and Schuster. Follow him on Twitter.

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The chutzpah was almost impressive. A member of the Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma—the notorious manufacturer of Oxycontin—recently patented a new form of the anti-addiction drug buprenorphine, according to the Financial Times.

Like the apocryphal child who murdered his parents and then pleaded for sympathy because he’d become an orphan, Purdue first profitably pushed an addictive drug, and then apparently sought to make even more money by treating addictions it helped cause. The latest drama in this saga has already shown why, more than ever, America needs tighter and more strictly enforced regulation of drug-makers.

“The Sackler family is just as shameless, and only marginally less ruthless, than the drug cartels,” argued Allen Frances, MD, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University and a longtime pharma critic.

After days of being hammered in the press, Purdue executive director of communications Bob Josephson insisted in an email that the company "does not own this patent and we have no intention of profiting from it."

But Bloomberg News just reported that the patent may actually be part of a plan to try to win leniency in settlement talks related to over 1,000 lawsuits that have been filed against it, citing "four people familiar with the talks."

Meanwhile, the Financial Times also revealed that Purdue long skirted prior attempts to rein it in by secretly owning a major manufacturer of generic opioids known as Rhodes Pharma. Purdue has often minimized its responsibility for the larger crisis by pointing out that only 1.7 percent of opioid prescriptions are written for Oxycontin—even though it is clear that the rise in opioid addiction and overdose began as that product was introduced and heavily marketed. (Regarding the buprenorphine patent, James Doyle, Vice President and General Counsel of Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, said via email, "Rhodes Pharmaceuticals has a patent, but we do not have a developed or approved product, and therefore no money has been made from this technology. The invention behind the buprenorphine patent in question was developed more than a dozen years ago. If a product is developed under this patent, it will not be commercialized for profit.”)

But combined, Rhodes and Purdue actually account for 6 percent of opioid sales, making them the seventh largest seller in the US. And, in timing that now looks especially suspicious, Purdue set up Rhodes four months after pleading guilty to mis-marketing Oxycontin in 2007, a crime for which it was fined a mere $600 million. In 2010 alone, Purdue enjoyed $3.1 billion in revenue from Oxy.

The real crime here is that many of the most egregious actions of corporations like Purdue are legal—and even those that aren’t rarely get punished by more than a slap on the wrist.

With so many lawsuits now filed against opioid manufacturers and distributors by state, local, federal, tribal and private organizations, it’s still possible that this time, Big Pharma will truly be made to pay. But if the past is any guide to what’s coming, the settlements will be minuscule in light of both the harm done and the profit made—and certainly not big enough to serve as an actual deterrent of future violations, rather than an easily written-off cost of doing business.

Take the case of atypical antipsychotics, one of the many earlier and egregious examples of pharma impunity. This is a class of medications that, unlike opioids, few people would ever choose to take if they had other alternatives. The drugs, which include Risperdal, Abilify, Geodon, Zyprexa and Seroquel, can cause obesity, diabetes, and movement disorders and have been linked to a shortened lifespan.

While they can be helpful for disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar and psychotic depression, those conditions are relatively rare and so instead the drugs are widely used to control behavior in disturbed foster children, children in institutions, and elderly folks with dementia.

Just about every major manufacturer that has created and sold one of these drugs has been fined for illegally promoting “off label” use—that is, to treat conditions for which the drug is not approved. Pfizer paid out the biggest settlement: $2.3 billion, for cases related to Geodon and several other drugs. Johnson and Johnson came in second, $2.2 billion for cases involving Risperdal, Invega and one other unrelated drug. Lilly paid out $1.4 billion for mismarketing Zyprexa, while AstraZeneca and BristolMyersSquibb each paid just over half a billion for cases related to Seroquel, Abilify and one unrelated drug. That adds up to some $6 billion.

But annually, as of 2012, these drugs collectively generated roughly $15 billion in revenue.

So how do we fix a problem that clearly goes far beyond Purdue and Oxy? When calls are made for better regulation and enforcement, the first issue raised is typically banning what is known as “direct-to-consumer” advertising, which allows drug-makers to advertise to patients rather than doctors. Only the US and New Zealand allow it, and a ban seems likely to help in some cases.

But Oxycontin was never really advertised directly to patients—I guess there are some limits to the shamelessness of Purdue. The problem here is how it was sold to doctors: This involved beefing up the sales-force (frequently, pretty women like former cheerleaders are recruited by drug companies). And, according to at least one former salesperson, employees were told to target new and inexperienced doctors and look the other way at signs of “pill mills.” Purdue also reportedly gave bonuses to salespeople who could show that they expanded doctors' opioid prescribing in general—not just of Oxycontin, which makes sense in light of the revelation that they were also profiting from generics.

To me, it seems insane that any marketing of any controlled substance is permissible—and Frances agreed that such marketing should be banned outright, whether aimed at doctors or consumers. He also suggested criminal charges for executives with significant prison time and much bigger fines. “$600 million was chump change,” for Purdue, he argued.

And since we have already given corporations the status of people in America, it is much more reasonable for them to face the equivalent of a death sentence than it is for an individual human. Obviously, such a punishment shouldn't be doled out lightly. But when a company repeatedly lies, pushes drugs that are leaking widely into the illicit market, and does not seem to recognize the damage it's done—or worse—it should be seriously considered. Only breaking up the business and taking away all of the ill-gotten gains seems likely to get corporate executives' attention these days.

If we are ever going to have a better regulatory system for pharmaceuticals—including those that have non-medical uses—we need to learn to get this type of oversight right. Prohibition and the drug war have clearly been failures. But commercialization of harmful substances is only slightly better: While supply alone doesn’t cause addiction, promotion of addictive drugs can make them more harmful or switch people from less dangerous to more deadly substances. Perhaps we can dismantle Purdue, and use some of that cash—or at least some of the settlement funds—to develop regulation to prevent drug marketing from wreaking such havoc ever again.

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It slips off my tongue— dis nigga—fresh out the breath. Issa Dee from Insecure did a messy thing, and my last nerve has been plucked. Something is different here—something de-gentrified so to speak. If my mind was an unseasoned barbecue chicken, it’s now a rotisserie jerk cookout (there’s a difference). And I’m ready to do a seven-step handshake, be unbothered, and talk that good shit. This is time to code-switch.

It’s a moment I remember so well when I watch George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give, adapted by Audrey Wells from Angie Thomas’ book of the same name. In it, we’re given two Starr Carters (Amandla Stenberg). The Starr that was raised and born in a fictional and poor Garden Heights with her immediate family. And the Starr that attends the predominantly white private school, Williamson prep with her younger brother. In the latter world she’s agreeable and submissive in that non-aggressive, quiet, not-as-black sort of way. In the other, she’s louder and carries a slang that’s homegrown. Change happens while getting a ride home by a longtime friend in her former setting, a cop pulls them over and she witnesses her friend get shot for grabbing a hairbrush that was mistaken for a gun.

What follows is a #BlackLivesMatter blueprint for film, but with an interesting side-note—her white friends notice the pissy change in Starr at the mention of #AllLivesMatter among other slights. Starr is no longer the Starr-lite that would allow this. She’s been hiding a version of herself, and as a film, The Hate U Give does well in underscoring the harm that we as people of colour do to ourselves in our constant efforts to assimilate.

Now on one hand, code-switching is one of the more interesting parts of existing as a person of colour—that carefully curated behavior and pressure to be multilingual. Ebonics, King’s English, slang, Gucci Mane—we’re well-versed in all dialects and messages of white-on-black camo. But this naturally makes us attuned to the languages of racism and race as well—a gift of translation we keep pocketed for pleasant relations’ sake. Yes, we instantly know what “Make America Great Again” is meant to convey. Yes, we know what an #AllLivesMatter name-drop truly means. And yes, we understand the deep-seated origins of a “harmless” race joke. Our verbal sensitivity—performed and taught by us, is a matured and fine-tuned tool, but when overused, it can imply white as the only thing deserving of being right. That presents a problem.

As Starr cycles through her divided teen experience, from attending block parties, to playing on the private school basketball team, we spot these subtle moments of a mind at work. One student passes her in the hallway with some black-ish vernacular, “those kicks are lit!” to which she smiles before her straightened face. In another, she’s in a locker room with her white girlfriends clearly attempting some bootleg version ebonics. She steadily force-laughs her way to a sly eye-roll. The series of moments in this white space are all shot with an intentionally dull colour palette, as if to imply that she lost a part of herself in her refusal to disrupt that whole single-toned world of hers. Unlike so many inclusions of black folks in white spaces, The Hate U Give makes it impossible not to notice this performance.

When Starr first witnesses injustice directly tied to her skin colour, it rocks her world from a balanced axis. The realities of her race become hard to adjust to without offsetting the world she hid it from. She can no longer collaborate with the “colourblind” bullshit. And in one moment, best friend Hailey yells at Starr during basketball practice for running too slow, “just pretend the ball is some fried chicken,” she jokes, putting Starr in the position of being ready to snatch a blonde tail in ways she never thought to do. It’s a balance that I’ve been guilty of attempting to hold myself.

Most of us understand those moments of letting someone flaunt caucastic ignorance in our presence. Like the guy in my case that would always give me awkward daps, spring ebonics in my direction and crown me as one of the cool niggas because I let him brandish the “nigga” without the sharp “-er”. My mission was to avoid conflict and run from the image I was perceived to be a part of. I wanted him to feel a comfort as I sacrificed my own—never truly considering that I was his only black association. The receipts already state that most white Americans don’t have a close black friend. And like Starr and her whole double agent approach, I was the black model for this one guy—the one he could touch and hear within an eye/ear shot. I was more than some likeness from a distance, I was a physical presence that sanctioned all his bullshit.

The talking point that The Hate U Give paints so well is in the way that we inadvertently tell those without our experiences and concerns that white experiences and concerns take precedent. It’s witnessed through the attitudes of Starr and her friends before and after her ownership of self. They don’t recognize the same Starr that unintentionally invested stocks in their “white privilege” by allowing them to feel content. By minimizing her own identity, colour and inner protest, she had few rights to act surprised when the white dude with the one black girlfriend made the claim of being “colourblind,” like in the case of Starr’s husband.

I mean I get it, like Starr, this is a culturally specific world that we have to live in. Sometimes we have to subtract and adapt to survive. But there should be a limit. I want to live in a world where I didn’t have to minimize who I was just so I could empower the same bullshit that forces so many of us come head first with cultural roadblocks (too black, not white enough). It’s why a movie like The Hate U Give is so damn necessary, and it’s why I approach these topics unapologetically and sometimes walk with a strut. I’m black, it’s who I am, and no one should feel comfortable enough to forget that.

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Earlier this month, 68-year-old Nancy Crampton Brophy, an Oregon novelist who wrote a book about a woman who “spent every day of her marriage fantasizing about killing [her husband]," was arrested for, well, allegedly murdering her husband. In 2015, the gritty romance writer self-published a book called The Wrong Husband about a woman who tries to escape her abusive husband by faking her own death. And in 2011, she penned an essay titled “How to Murder Your Husband” for a blog called See Jane Publish.

"As a romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and, consequently, about police procedure," she opined. "After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail."

Though Crampton Brophy's alleged murder is a particularly absurd case of life imitating art, it's not a totally uncommon occurrence. Here, we've collected the most gruesome and terrifying examples of what happens when crime writers turn their fiction into reality, sometimes echoing the content of their work:

Liu Yongbiao

Liu Yongbiao via Zhejiang Province Public Sercuit

In August 2017, Chinese writer Liu Yongbiao was working on a book when he was arrested for four cold case murders that happened more than two decades earlier. The book, called The Beautiful Writer Who Killed, was reportedly about a "female writer who has killed many people, yet the cases remain unsolved." From VICE:

According to Chinese website Sixth Tone, Liu was arrested at his home on Friday under suspicion that he and an accomplice were involved in a gruesome botched robbery back in 1995. Police believe that the two suspects—Liu, 53, and a man named Wang, 65—initially went to a hostel in the city of Huzhou to rob its guests but ended up beating a man to death in the process, the Guardian reports. They then allegedly killed the owners and their 13-year-old grandson to cover it up.

Since then, the case has gone cold—until new DNA evidence led police to Liu's door. When the officers apprehended him on Friday, he reportedly told them, "I've been waiting for you here all this time."

Liu's second to last novel was titled The Guilty Secret. In a letter Liu reportedly wrote to his wife, where he confessed to his crimes, he said, "I lived in fear for 20 years. I knew the day would come. I can finally be free from the mental torment I've endured for so long."

According to the Daily Mail, Liu was sentenced to death in July 2018.

Blake Leibel

Photo of Blake Leibel by Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In June of this year, writer Blake Leibel was sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of his girlfriend Iana Kasian "whose body was drained of all of her blood in a crime that a prosecutor said mirrored the script of a graphic novel he co-wrote," per CBS Los Angeles.

Beth Silverman, the prosecuting attorney, called Leibel's brutal torture and murder of Kasian in 2016 “a case of life imitating art,” noting that his 2015 graphic novel Syndrome had depictions of bloodletting. The cover of the book also depicts an image of a baby doll being scalped, which resembled body parts found at the crime scene.

Richard Klinkhamer

Richard Klinkhamer via Wikimedia Commons

In 1992, a year after the wife of Dutch crime writer Richard Klinkhamer disappeared, the author gave his publisher a manuscript of a novel that, according to the Guardian, "was a grisly, detailed exploration of seven ways in which Klinkhamer could conceivably have killed his wife, Hannelore. In one of the scenarios set out in the book, he disposes of her body by pushing her flesh through a mincer and feeding it to the pigeons."

Although Klinkhamer was an immediate suspect in the police inquiry into his wife's disappearance, they couldn't proceed with their investigation because they didn't have a body. After the Dutch crime writer's grisly and seemingly autobiographical manuscript was rejected by his publisher for being too gruesome, excerpts began popping up in the Dutch underground press. He then became a sort of literary celebrity, appearing as a guest on various TV shows.

After he moved to Amsterdam, a family moved into the house Klinkhamer formerly shared with his wife. While making home renovations, they hired a digger who found a skull burried beneath the concrete floor of a backyard shed, which belonged to Klinkhamer's wife, Hannelore. In 2000, police finally arrested Klinkhamer for the murder, and he confessed.

Krystian Bala

Novelist Krystian Bala might have gotten away with murdering a Polish businessman in 2000, but three years later he published Amok, which told the story of a Polish intellectual named Chris (the English version of Krystian) who "murders a female lover for no reason...and conceals the act so well that he is never caught."

In Amok, the description of the woman's murder—bound with her hands behind her back with a cord that's also looped into a noose around her neck—was eerily similar to a murder case that left investigators stumped a few years earlier. In 2000, cops found the body of Dariusz Janiszewski in a river after having been starved and tortured. He was also tied up.

"Part of the rope, which appeared to have been cut with a knife, had once connected his hands to his neck, binding the man in a backward cradle, an excruciating position—the slightest wiggle would have caused the noose to tighten further," David Gann wrote in the New Yorker.

When Detective Jacek Wroblewski took over the case in 2003, he traced a suspicious call made to the victim's office right before the murder to a cell phone purchased by Krystian Bala, which the author later sold on eBay. Wroblewski began researching Bala, and read Amok. Per the New Yorker, "[He] was struck, in particular, by the killer’s method: 'I tightened the noose around her neck.'" The book couldn't be used as evidence, but it led Wroblewski to other clues, and eventually Bala was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the murder. During his hearing, the judge noted, "There are certain shared characteristics between the book's narrator and the author."

Anne Perry

Anne Perry in 2012 via Wikimedia Commons

Before Anne Perry became a best-selling crime novelist, she spent five years in prison for the murder of her best friend's mom. Born Juliet Hulme, the 15-year-old was found guilty of bludgeoning Honora Parker to death, along with the woman's 16-year-old daughter, Pauline Parker.

The bloody crime occurred in 1954 after Hulme's parents told her they were getting a divorce and shipping her off to South Africa to live with an aunt. Having developed a close bond with Parker, Hulme thought they could leave New Zealand together, but Parker's mother Honora refused.

"Her refusal triggered Parker's murderous rage and Hulme believed she owed it to her friend to help lure Mrs. Parker to a Christchurch park and cosh her with a brick in a stocking," the Guardian reports.

After her release, Hulme moved to Scotland and reinvented herself as a crime novelist, changing her name to Anne Perry and going on to publish roughly 40 books. Her true identity was only outed in 1994 after Peter Jackson made Heavenly Creatures, a film based on the real-life events.

According to a 60 Minutes interview from 2012, Perry believes she paid her debt to society, saying, “One needs to pay, when you know you’re in the wrong. Then you can leave it behind you. It’s not a terrible thing, it’s a good thing, it’s a healing thing, to pay, and then leave it behind you."

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Randy S. is quite the character. The 34-year-old inherited a sizable amount of money from his dear Mam-Mam, and then purchased, in his native state of Maryland, "a brand-new, $950,000 six-bedroom town home" that overlooks his dead mother's former farm. He bribes his neighbors to do what he wants. He owns a 2013 Hummer and got vanity plates that read "RNDY82." He's written approximately 200 songs. He built a panic room in his house, where he does his "best sex watching," and has shot a porn parody, Horndog Day, in the back of a Baskin-Robbins. He drinks at chain restaurants. He still goes to spring break. He loves the writing of Dean Koontz, and only the writing of Dean Koontz. His favorite artwork is a framed Redskins jersey. He hates "guy librarians," "homeless people with attitude," and "movies that end with a twist."

His life's so amazing he commissioned an aspiring writer named Noah B. to author a memoir for him—Randy! The Full and Complete Unedited Biography of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S!—and published it himself. Luckily for us, the book has been unearthed, discovered by comedian and writer Mike Sacks at a suburban Maryland garage sale. Sacks is now releasing it to the public via his book imprint, Sunshine Beam Publishing—which, he explains, he created primarily to publish stuff no one else would publish. Sounds great, right? It is.

Only Sacks made the whole thing up.

If you know what Sacks is about, this is less weird than it might appear. A well-known comedy writer, his work has appeared in the pages of Vanity Fair, and in books like Randy!, he ups the absurdity, which can sometimes go beyond the page. And it's not his first time around this block. His inaugural project on Sunshine Beam was the equally satirical Stinker Lets Loose!, another high-concept premise that saw Sacks releasing an out-of-print novelization of a 1970s action film that heavily involved tractor trailers (think Smokey and the Bandit), also named Stinker Lets Loose! (The audio version of the fake book based on the fake movie features the voices of Jon Hamm, Paul F. Tompkins, and Andy Daly.)

Randy! is Sacks's second out of his imprint. It's also something of a performance art project: Sacks runs Randy S.'s Twitter feed—and, in part of a loose marketing strategy, has been getting in disputes with his own. All of which begs the question: What in the world would drive a guy to write a book he's pretended to have discovered about a writer who's penning a memoir about a suburban bachelor outside of DC?

Below, VICE talks about just that, as well as the state of satire, the comedy industry, the freedom of self-publishing, tricking people, and why everybody should be allowed to create.

VICE: It’s easy to see this not as a sequel, but as a continuation, I suppose, of Stinker Lets Loose!, which operated with a similar—though, in many ways, wildly different—premise. Both Stinker and Randy! were published under your own imprint. Did you found that imprint in order to publish books like this, because there's nowhere else they can be published?
Mike Sacks: No one was interested in Stinker at all. My agent didn't get it. Publishers didn't get it. So I just said, "Fuck it," and I'll put it out myself. And we're living in a time now—if you can write it, edit it, and design it—you can put it out, and it'll be as good, or better, than through publishers, assuming you could even get it published to begin with. Another advantage is when it comes out. You can write it, and put it out whenever you want. You don't have to wait two, three years, like you would with Random House or whatever.

It's basically, like, every fucking book I write. With comedy, with humor in particular, our sensibilities don't match those of agents or editors or publishers. So oftentimes younger editors will like what you've done, but then it goes up the ladder, and the older ones don't necessarily get it. Fine, a lot of people don't get it. But to rely on them to get it is something I want to avoid.

Do you have any plans to tour the book, or do a live rendition or show of sorts? I know you did something for Stinker after it was published, but the concept was certainly different.
Stinker was different, yeah, because it was supposedly this found novelization based on a fictional movie. A lot of people actually thought, including my dad, that Stinker was real—that I was basing it on a real movie, which is, I guess, a good thing. But with Randy!, it's even more removed, because I'm Randy. You know, I play Randy on Twitter—like Randy will get in a fight with me. Last night, Justine Bateman got involved. She suggested doing it: Randy getting in a fight with her, too.

I hope this all isn't too confusing. I wrote it, but I am pretending that I found this as a self-published book in Maryland, where I'm from. You know, I just love self-published books.

Who exactly is Randy S.? Where have we seen a person like him before?
So I grew up in Maryland, as I said, and I worked retail from about 15 to 25 in a record store, and I knew people like him. I was very good friends with them. I played softball with them. I went drinking with them. It's a very specific type—maybe not only to Maryland—but Randy is a very specific type of person. I grew up with them. Like, if they had some money, it was spent on framed Redskins jerseys. They went to Ocean City, and got drunk at Club Secrets. I just thought, really, that it be funny to write about this world, because it's obviously not something John Updike is doing.

As we've somewhat covered, the conceit of Randy! is that you discovered his memoir, written by an otherwise young, failed writer, Noah B., at a garage sale and decided to publish it without making any changes. Yard sales are obviously places where people are trying to get rid of stuff without exactly throwing it out: "Another person's trash is another person's treasure." How were you playing off this idea, if you were at all? Why a garage sale?
I like found items. I like shit. I like garbage. I'm more interested in something you can't find in Barnes & Noble, something off the radar. That interests me, more often than not, than supposedly good writing, like a New Yorker short story. I'm just fascinated by it—and I wanted to launch this book from the reality of it already existing in the world. I thought it would be funnier if people just believed this was real—where this could have been something I discovered buried beneath magazines at a Maryland garage sale.

There's something funny about somebody a hundred years from now actually stumbling onto this book at a garage sale and assuming it's real.
[Laughs] Maybe not even a hundred years.

Does that worry you? People actually taking it to be real? It might be easy to, initially.
No. I don't give a shit. Someone asked me recently why I was doing this, and why I wanted to confuse people. I really don't know. I just like it. If it's Andy Kaufman–esque, I always loved that. If someone stumbles on this at a used book store in Ocean City or whatever, and think it's real, I'd be the happiest guy in the world.

With comedy, if it's real, if it's authentic, if the person is not aware of themselves being funny, it becomes funnier. As soon as someone's up on the stage prancing about and trying to be funny, to me it becomes pathetic. So Randy, the character, isn't trying to be funny. He's living his life. And, for this fake memoir, it's a combination of Noah's purple prose applied to a really mediocre person.

Was Noah as the narrator—having it even one more step removed—always the plan, too?
I always wanted to write a Medici-type book. You know, the Medicis in the 15th-century Italy would hire these people to paint them and write about them—the diction was all flowery—and I wanted to do that in the current age and apply it to suburbia and total mediocrity. Randy comes across new money, because his Mam-Mam sold the family farm, and then he moves into a town home on the top of the hill, as if it's a mansion in 15th-century Italy or something. He sort of rules the roost.

But Randy himself, the character, that aspect came later. I had a friend who was a DJ on WSMU in New York, and she had her own show, Why Oh Why, and it was geared toward relationships, and I asked her one day if I could play the world's worst bachelor. So, through improv, Randy was born—he had moved up to New York from Maryland to write ad copy for Quiznos. His tagline, which he kept saying over and over again—he was very proud—was, "Quiz-no. Quiz-yes!" I decided, pretty much then, I had to do some kind of book on this guy. Just the ego on him, man. He's delusional.

Did you intend for Noah to have self-awareness?
Absolutely. A friend of mine, Nathan Rabin, wrote a review of the book, and he questioned whether or not Noah was aware of it. For me, though, it was obvious. Noah was out of work—he didn't want to work retail—and he's being put up for a year and being paid to write about this guy. He obviously knows Randy is an asshole, and he doesn't think anyone's going to read this book. But little does he know that I'm going to discover it and put it out even more widely.

Was Noah modeled off anyone?
Yeah. He's modeled off me. I was living in Maryland and trying to get a job as a writer for many years. And I couldn't do it. In the Maryland area, especially—it's a little different now—but it's a political town, finance-driven. You had to do jobs you didn't want to do. The creativity and comedy didn't really exist, so you had to make do by writing whatever. So I feel for Noah—he's making a living writing something that he has no desire to write. At the same time, he has it pretty easy—except for having to deal with Randy every day.

You had always wanted to be a comedy writer? Not be on radio, or TV?
It was always writing for the printed page for me, because that was all I knew. I didn't know how to be on the radio or TV or any of that. I didn't know any writers, and I didn't know anyone who knew any writers. I was totally sort of free-floating. So the only thing I could do was write for the page, because I had control of that. I eventually wanted to get into TV writing, but this is my main love. At least, at the end of the day, you have a tangible product that I can put on the shelf. It isn't a podcast. It isn't ephemeral, and it won't disappear. If you want to be a writer, I think you want to be making something that can be physically found.

My huge influence growing up was Ian McKaye of Dischord Records, of Fugzai and Minor Threat, who was a local Maryland guy. He didn't know anyone in entertainment. His father worked as a religious reporter for the Washington Post. He lived in a section of DC, which I later lived in, called Glover Park—so completely removed from creativity and the music world, but he created this business aspect, and this creative aspect, of punk that changed music. He put it out his way. He controlled the rights. He put out albums for $5, which I could afford as a kid. You could go see him in concert for $5, all-age shows, and no alcohol. And he's still doing all that, to this day.

I still don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm way off the beaten track. It confuses everyone. It confuses my family and friends. I just have to do this stuff the way I want to do it. This is all just a way to take my mind off anxiety and depression. If I don't have something to work on writing-wise, I am a bubbling mess. I'm a disaster.

There's a lot discussion today—at least on the internet, where these discussions seem to happen—about comedy’s evolution. This is a broader question, not necessarily related to Randy!, but what do you think is the role of comedy in the present day? What do you think, rather, it should be doing?
I think things change only because people are told things change. And if enough reporters write that things have changed, then they change. But all this talk about it being not comedy any longer, and going up there and being woke, and telling the crowd about your story, that's fine, obviously. It just doesn't necessarily appeal to me from a comedic standpoint.

What I like are Key and Peele. Danny McBride. Ricky Gervais. People who write characters who talk about society, in a way that will last. Like it reminds me of when I was growing up, I never really enjoyed mainstream radio, but I would have to go elsewhere—to alternative record stores, or alternative radio stations. And I kind of think the same thing now, as in mainstream comedy doesn't really interest me. Like Get Out was astonishing—satirical, scary, in tune with the times. It was brilliant, and it'll last.

I was curious, too, on your thoughts about satire today, in this political climate, in the United States and beyond. I'm in not at all a proponent against it—that our reality is too absurd to incorporate satire seems lazy, and a bit of cliché—but do you think it's harder to do so?
Maybe politically, but I'm not a political writer. I'm not into political humor at all. I admire people who can go into work every day and write a Trump joke. But I think the satire of going after the ignorant American is easier than ever. If you're doing character-based comedy, you have more to work with now, sadly, than you ever have. There are endless things you can make fun of. It bothers me, of course, what's happening out there politically, but I think it can attacked from a different angle, instead of just telling a Trump joke.

Is Randy a Trump voter, then?
I think he's more libertarian. I don't think he thinks it matters. I think, even, that he thinks he would do a better job. He's certainly an example of someone out there who's not watching PBS or listening to NPR, or really has a grasp on what the world is going for. And I know a lot of people like that—a lot of people in my family are like that, quite frankly.

There was a specific manager I worked with at the record store in suburban Maryland, who was kind of the model for Randy. It was behind a housing project, in this place called Aspen Hill, just west of DC. This guy—I became very good friends with him—had his viewpoints and way of life. He owned every Aerosmith CD. His book collection was only Dean Koontz or Stephen King. Very mainstream.

Is Randy sad, or just totally blind to himself?
I do think he's sad. It's probably something, though, like 80 percent delusion, and 20 percent sadness. I wish I had that confidence—to call up a crush he had in junior high school and just go visit. But I do think, even through his deluded worldview, that he knows he's not achieving what maybe he should be achieving, or could have been achieving.

The most human aspect of Randy, to me, is the fact that just wants to be remembered, however ridiculously. Would you say that's true?
Yeah. He's no different, really, than a kid scrawling his name in wet cement. I think there's just a human need—a desire—to be remembered. He has no real idea how to do it, though. So he's doing stuff like writing 200 songs, or a screenplay about Dennis Rodman visiting South Korea—not North Korea. He thinks it's South Korea. At least he's trying to create something. At least he's not going up at night and only watching reruns of Two and a Half Men. He's making stuff no one wants, and maybe deep down, he knows no one wants it. I feel for him.

Have you seen Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman?

I have.
That movie bothers me. I find it very mean-spirited. I think Guest has contempt for these small-town people, and these small-town creative dreams. I think he's going after the wrong people. There's nothing wrong with someone living in a small town and wanting to be a part of something creative. If you don't come from New York, if you don't come from LA, those worlds, they seem very faraway. Let people get joy out of creating. Not everyone needs to be a professional, high-end writer or actors in Hollywood. And honestly there are plenty of shit professional actors and writers in Hollywood. So I truly hope it does not come across, in any way, that I'm mocking Randy. I hope he comes off as likable, in an authentic way. Because there are plenty of likable people out there who you might not want to hang out with, but wouldn't mind reading about for an hour.

I'd hang out with Randy. Why not?
You'll go out and get a beer with him, yeah—I would, too. As long as I can go back to my own world after I'm done.

And then you have a story too.
Exactly. At least the guy is fucking interesting. There are so many boring people out there. To me, any sort of individuality, any sort of urge to be different, I think is obviously a good thing. What the fuck's wrong with that? Especially if you're a writer. Hang out with people like that.

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If you were hoping the US border was going to chill out with its handcuffed interrogations and lifetime bans over Canadians’ weed habits once it’s legal here, we’ve got some bad news for you.

A United States official overseeing the Canada-US border has confirmed that any Canadian visitor who admits they’ve smoked weed before will still be banned for life, even after legalization.

Todd Owen, executive assistant commissioner of field operations for the US Customs and Border Protection Agency, told Politico Thursday that cannabis workers and cannabis investors can also expect a lifetime ban.

“If you work for the industry, that is grounds for inadmissibility,” Owen said in a statement. Though many states have voted to legalize cannabis over the last decade, it’s still an illegal drug under US federal law.

Immigration lawyers are already preparing for a “tidal wave” of Canadians being banned from the US after cannabis officially becomes legal on October 17. Last year the parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of public safety urged Canadians to “be honest and tell the truth.”

But telling the truth has had brutal consequences for many Canadians, including BC music writer Alan Ranta, who told VICE he was handcuffed and interrogated about his cannabis history at the US border in July 2016.

“We were trying to go to Washington [State], where pot is legal,” Ranta told VICE. “It didn’t seem like that big of a deal.”

In a statement, Owen said that US border guards will ask Canadian travellers about their history with cannabis if they see a good reason to suspect past drug use. In Ranta’s case, a guard noted their camper van was headed for a music festival, and spotted a small change purse with the words “weed money” on it.

“Our officers are not going to be asking everyone whether they have used marijuana, but if other questions lead there—or if there is a smell coming from the car, they might ask,” reads Owen’s statement.

Border guards have the authority to search vehicles and electronic devices for evidence of past drug use. “If you lie about it, that’s fraud and misrepresentation, which carries a lifetime ban,” Owen said.

Canadians like Ranta who are banned from ever entering the US have the option of paying $585 for a waiver. The exception takes months to process and is granted at the discretion of border agents.

In Ranta’s case, the waiver cost wasn’t worth returning to the US. Come October 17, it’s safe to say he won’t be alone.

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After eight months of meticulous pruning, tending to his soil, and fiddling with his vines, winemaker David Dunkenberger woke up Tuesday morning ready to finally start harvesting his vineyard. But when he walked out onto his three-and-a-half acre field in rural Virginia, almost his entire crop—roughly $50,000 worth of grapes—had been stolen.

According to the Roanoke Times, nearly two-and-a-half tons of grapes had been cut straight from the vine at Firefly Hill Vineyards in the dead of night, pilfered by a crack team of highly-skilled wine thieves, Dunkenberger suspects. Seeing as the grapes weren't covered by insurance, it's a pretty severe loss. But the dollar amount doesn't really seem to be the thing that's sent the winemaker into a boundless, Biblical-level fury.

"Yes the financial loss hurts... What hurts the most is what they stole from my spirit and heart," Dunkenberger wrote, unleashing his wrath upon his Facebook friends. "Cherished memories spoiled by a bunch of low life, no soul, heartless excuses for human beings... Please know a slow and lingering death will never be long enough for you and no amount of pain you could endure will [be] great enough."

Things somehow only escalated from there, when Dunkenberger doubled down on that whole wishing-a-painful-death-upon-thine-enemies thing, ramping up his vaguely Olde English, Chaucerian tirade against the nameless thieves:

All this from a guy whose Facebook profile picture is an innocent snapshot of his two young, smiling daughters standing before a lush green field. A man who's reportedly spent years tirelessly working to harvest his crops alongside his friends and family. A winemaker who now has less than 200 pounds of grapes left to his name.

The cops are investigating who could've possibly had the know-how to snip all those grapes off the vine in a single night—a job that could have taken days—but so far, they don't have any leads. Meanwhile, Firefly Hill has been forced to shut down due to the loss, while the winemaking family continues its "grieving process."

Here's to hoping Dunkenberger, the Liam Neeson of wine, catches the thieves, but manages to restrain himself from ripping them apart limb by limb.

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Before I exited the courtroom, Judge James told me that, despite my felony convictions, he felt I would best serve my community from outside a prison cell. After so many chances already, I was given one more, and yes, I felt very lucky. Nearly 14 years later, luck is no longer the first word that comes to mind, however. When I consider how I avoided nine years in prison—instead getting three years in probation—the word I think of now is privilege.

As a young, educated white girl, I confused everyone I encountered in law enforcement. After one particular arrest, I made conversation with the two officers as they drove me down to the precinct station. Unprompted, one of them mused about what a nice girl like me was doing in the back of a police car. From the time of my first arrest at age 14, I would go on to hear many variations of this pained sentiment.

“...But, you’re so smart.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

And, my favorite.

“What a waste.”

At the time, such statements were a strange source of pride. They thought I was special, even if I didn’t.

But if I was a unique case, surely destined for something better than a life of thieving and drug abuse, what did that mean for everyone else getting arrested for the same things I was?

Eight years after my final court date, I wrote a letter to Judge James in an effort to express my gratitude for the chance he took on me, and insist I hadn’t let him down. His response was touching, but also highlighted my relatively easy ride.

“My decision to ‘take a chance on you,’ even though it went against the guidelines (of the pre-sentencing report) and conventional wisdom, was based on your exceptional adjustment to probation, your seven months of being clean and sober, the letter from your probation officer attesting to your positive adjustment to probation, and the impressive body of work you presented to the court.”

I had exhibited the strength and determination necessary to pull myself together, but only because I was given the opportunity to do so.

The judge would never have seen those improvements were it not for my mother’s money, which paid for the multiple bails that freed me from awaiting my court dates in jail. This also meant I could go to my hearings in my own clothes, instead of an orange jumpsuit.

Money paid for the lawyer who was able to stall sentencing for felony charges I pleaded guilty to in Norfolk, Virginia, while negotiating a plea deal for another set of charges in a neighboring city. The time he bought gave me a chance to get a job, find a place to live, and prove that I could stay (mostly) clean.

Once I moved out of state, I was required to pay $30 on each of my monthly visits to the probation office. When I was short on the money needed, my mother gave it to me with no expectation of repayment.

While on probation, I drank heavily, smoked pot, and didn’t go to the Narcotics Anonymous meetings I was supposed to. Thankfully, my probation officer seemed satisfied that I maintained employment and showed up on time at his office every month—and never gave me a drug test.

Shedding my old ways was a process that took time, and I possessed a level of invisibility that gave me the space to change. I also met plenty of people who have not enjoyed that same privilege.

As I slowly got back on my feet, my mother provided more support in numerous ways. She gave me her old car, which made it easier to find employment. Without that car, the 30-minute drive to visit my probation officer would have required 2.5 hours of travel time.

My mother also financed my return to college and paid my medical bills when I was sick. I have never dealt with the painstaking process a convicted felon goes through when trying to apply for an apartment because I’ve never had to. My mother ultimately put a down payment on a house for me.

I say these things not to minimize my own experience. The indignities I have suffered throughout my years in the criminal justice system have been countless.

There was, for example, the sheriff’s deputy who processed my intake after a particular arrest. While inventorying my belongings, he discovered a cap of heroin that even I had forgotten was in my bag.

As I lay dope sick in a holding cell, the deputy—delighted in his discovery—dangled the heroin before me and said, “I bet you wish you had this right now.” I was then taken back to the police station and booked on another charge.

A few months later, while out on bail, I was hit by a car while crossing a street. Though pretty banged up, I was uninsured and declined medical attention. The officers told me to wait while they finished their incident report.

Within moments, they returned and, apologetically, placed me under arrest. As I would soon find out, additional charges had been filed against me in a neighboring county. The warrants were served to an address I no longer resided at, so I was completely unaware of their existence.

With bruises and road rash covering my body, I was taken to jail and placed directly into general population without so much as an Advil. When they took my clothes away and gave me an orange jumpsuit, I was informed that someone would need to bring me white undergarments. In the meantime, I would need to do without.

Unfortunately, I had just started my period.

There were also instances where the color of my skin and manner of speaking were disadvantages. Spending time in jails and juvenile facilities mostly populated by people of color, I was treated as an oddity at best, or picked on and bullied at worst.

I have lost job opportunities because of my criminal record, and I will always have to prove myself in ways others won’t.

I write this because I know how hard it was for me. At times, it felt impossible that life could ever be better, particularly given the limited resources available for those with severe drug addictions. I, also, never made it into a rehab facility. It was always jail, jail, and more jail.

And yet there are those who must beat the odds with even fewer resources. Internal fortitude is necessary of course, but societal support is vital—and for too many, what’s available is deeply inadequate.

If I am lucky, it’s because I won the family lottery when my drug-addicted birth mother personally selected the parents I have today. They tried to give me the very best life possible, and never gave up on me even when I was doing everything I could to destroy it.

Jennifer Jordan, 36, served time in various juvenile facilities and jails between the ages of 14 and 21. She is currently applying to graduate school while working as a video editor and tending to her bees in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A representative of the Norfolk, Virginia, sheriff’s office confirmed the author's arrest and subsequent booking, but found no records of complaints or internal investigations related to her incarceration.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about living through the Donald Trump presidency is that against all odds, the man has retained his ability to shock. Last month, he was complaining about how badly his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was being treated in court (Manafort has since been convicted on eight counts of fraud). A week ago, he was openly calling for the Justice Department to slow-walk corruption investigations into Republican congressmen to help his party hold onto power in the midterms. And just when you thought all that might represent a nadir in terms of ugly and depraved presidential rhetoric, on Thursday Trump said the Puerto Rican hurricane death toll was a Democratic plot, or something:

As usual, ascribing precise meaning onto Trump's tweets is like trying to climb a greased-up pole. But it has been widely assumed the president was accusing a report from George Washington University—commissioned by the Puerto Rican government—of being politically biased. This followed his calling the federal response to Hurricane Maria "an incredible unsung success" even though that report estimated thousands of Americans died because they lacked access to healthcare, clean water, or electricity. The ridiculous and almost nonsensical charge demonstrates more clearly than ever that Trump cares more about his own image than the lives of his citizens.

It's no longer really a matter of debate that Hurricane Maria was handled extremely poorly. The federal Government Accountability Office released a report this month finding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was understaffed and unprepared for the disaster. Stories about inadequate distribution of food and water on the island have circulated for months; days before Trump's pissy complaints about the death toll, photos of thousands of bottles of water lying unused on a Puerto Rican runway spread on social media, fomenting fresh rage.

Previously, Trump blamed Puerto Rico's poor infrastructure for these problems, but his tweets on Thursday went further than that. As usually happens when the president says something really stupid, his fellow Republicans quickly moved to not exactly condemn him, but make it clear they didn't agree. Still, House Speaker Paul Ryan's response made it clear that even if the Republican line is more refined than Trump's bombast, it's still essentially an attempt to dodge responsibility:

For a comparison, it's helpful to look back at the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, which included a report from a Republican-dominated Congress that was extremely critical of the George W. Bush administration. This time around, however, Republicans have largely succeeded in blocking Democratic efforts to start such an investigation of the Maria response, and Congress has ignored calls to provide the type of assistance Puerto Rico advocates say the island needs.

Trump is the only one saying the government did a "fantastic job" here. But the Republican Party as a whole appears remarkably uninterested in how the government could have done a better job, or how it might improve its emergency response in the future. This is hardly an academic question with Hurricane Florence currently bearing down on the Southeast coast, and more major storms on the horizon thanks at least in part to climate change.

Hopefully, no one is still under the illusion that Trump will moderate his rhetoric—he's an angry, paranoid old man stuck in a job he's unprepared for and has little interest in. But seriously examining what could have been done better during a crisis should be a routine action for any large organization, public or private. Even if the response to Maria had been adequate, a competent federal government would be working on ways to make that response even better and to save more lives next time a disaster strikes a vulnerable community.

Such thinking, of course, would require an executive willing to admit mistakes and learn from them. Instead, America has a president who sticks his fingers in his ears at every piece of bad news, denounces his supposed enemies when reality isn't to his liking, and avoids responsibility at every turn. Trump's tweets on Maria are lies, but that much shouldn't surprise anyone. They're also as pure an example of cowardice as you're likely to see.

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Until recently, Michael Kupperman was known for crafting the funniest comics in the graphic storytelling game. He’s done a lot of hilarious stuff for the New Yorker, VICE, McSweeney’s, Adult Swim, Comedy Central, and everyone else. His last book was the fictional Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910 - 2010, which he promoted by doing readings in a Mark Twain costume. But with his new book, All the Answers, Kupperman’s buckled down and knocked off all the yukking around.

Cells from All the Answers

All the Answers tells the life story of Michael’s father, Joel Kupperman, who became a national phenomenon at a young age from his weekly appearances on the trivia radio show Quiz Kids. Joel Kupperman was pushed into the spotlight by his mother, a typical stage mom and then propelled farther into fame when he was used as pro-semitic propaganda during WWII. He became a full on national sensation, starring in a bad movie where he played himself and being forced to go to parties so his mom could rub elbows with celebrities. Being in the public eye severely taxed Joel Kupperman’s mental health and caused him to completely withdraw from the world around him. With All the Answers, Michael Kupperman is attempting to understand who his father is/was and how not to repeat the mistakes of his father and his father’s parents. He discusses important topics such as fame, America, family, mental health, prejudice, all the big stuff.

I decided to interview him about All the Answers after he started subtweeting about what a piece of shit I was for not interviewing him about All the Answers.

The author, Michael Kupperman, on the left; a poem about his Michael's dad, Joel, on the right.

VICE: What led you to become a cartoonist?
Michael Kupperman: I didn’t even consider it until I was an adult and had already been to art school (for a different type of art). I was living in Williamsburg and friends were putting together a xeroxed comic zine called Hodags and Hodaddies. I did a few pages and started to feel like this was an art form that would be rewarding for me, that I could do something new with it. A piece of paper and a pen could be the gateway to a new kind of narrative. Still not sure if this was a good decision.

Do you hope to follow All the Answers with more serious graphic novels? Are you trying to get out of the comedy ghetto?
I want to explore more serious subject matters now. I realized a little while ago that if I could communicate humor to like-minded people, then I could communicate more universal emotions to larger groups of people. The experiences I’ve had in my life have caused me to form ideas about human behavior, and I’ve gotten to the stage where I want to express them, and continue to grow as an artist.

Joel Kupperman with Bob Hope

What was it like making All the Answers?
It was an intensely painful experience, and the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I set out to make this book in 2012, around the same time that my father started to show signs of dementia. I knew I didn’t have much longer to get anything from him, but I also really believed that maybe I could halt his decline if I brought out lost memories. I was of course wrong. There was a lot of research, but then it became obvious to me that I had to be part of this book, and that my pain, my real sadness, would have to be in it for the book to work. I wrote it over and over, and then I had to draw it. Completing it seemed impossible. I had to practically hypnotize myself to do it all. I hand-lettered every piece of the book except the bar code, because it is magic. It’s not just a book but a spell to adjust the balance of the universe and heal my family. It was so intense that part of me is still stuck in the process, like I’m going to wake up and still be working on it.

You decided to draw yourself with eyes that are little dots inside a circle with black shapes that shift between being the shadow of your brow and your eyebrows.
I believe it makes the book more universal to have a simpler lead character that the reader can project themselves onto. I did try a version with a more realistic version of myself, but it was too jarring, and I couldn’t face drawing myself over and over.

I wasn’t aware of who your dad was and I got pretty confused during the scene where he’s watching Abbott & Costello and mentions that they gave him a dog.
That was the desired effect. I wanted the reader to not be sure what’s going on at first—Is this a delusion or something real? I think it helps pull the reader into the mystery of what is true. Is one person’s experience the reality of a situation? Is it the agreed-upon experience of the majority? Everything my father felt and took away from Quiz Kids was very different from how most other people saw the reality he was living. To them, it looked like a fabulous dream. He was famous, he was meeting lots of celebrities, and doing glamorous things. He was on radio and then TV every week.

How many of the other Quiz Kids are still around?
There are a few around. A couple have contacted me. Richard Williams, the other surviving member of the star Quiz Kids who toured during the war, has written to me and said he hadn’t realized how hurt my dad had been by the whole experience. He came on the show when he was older and it just didn’t have the same effect on him.

There’s a scene in your comic where you show your father being attacked by students while he’s attending college. You mention in the book that you based this scene on an account you’d read online by one of his attackers. Was the tone of this story remorseful?
No, quite the opposite. The roommate who boasted of attacking him, and also complained about my father screaming in his sleep, was a white supremacist. In his writings, he uses my father, a Jew, as an example of a degenerate race. He was quite proud of his own behavior. Actually, he was an early example of a type that’s prevalent today, the proud internet Nazi. He was posting these stories in the early days of the net. I didn’t want to credit him by name, but I had to use what he had said, because I believe it’s true. My father didn’t remember it at all, but that’s because of how he’d erased every unpleasant experience he’d had from his own mind.

Still from Quiz Kids. Joel is in the upper right corner

What were some of the things you wished you could have included in the book, but had to cut?
There are endless details and side stories. Other Quiz Kids included James Watson and the artist Rini Templeton. My father and Have Bennett were ball boys in an all-star baseball game coached by Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Bob Hope used my father as a punchline constantly through the 1940s. Eleanor Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover asked questions on the show in 1945. Certain women columnists mused about what kind of boyfriend my seven-year-old father would be... It would have been a very different book. There were also themes that didn’t make the cut, such as the idea that before the war was the age of the individual, and after the war what mattered was the committee and the machine.

Has your mother read All the Answers?
She has. Much to my relief, she liked it and was not upset. I was very worried. I think due to my investigation and conclusions, she actually sees my father a little differently than she did before. Now, she’s more aware of how traumatized he actually was.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

When Alia Youssef was in Grade 10, for one of her first real art projects, she depicted a Muslim woman looking at herself in the mirror happily and another image showing a black and white image showing a silent Muslim woman with paint over her mouth. The first was titled The way I see me, the other titled The way you see me.

“Even when I was in my young teens, I felt like some sort of need to use my art to share a different reality,” she told VICE.

It wasn’t until years later that the Canadian portrait photographer would start The Sisters Project: her way of trying to change the way Muslim women are viewed.

Youssef traveled to 12 cities across the country and photographed 85 Muslim women to see them in their communities, their homes, or at their jobs, with the intention of showing the world how they see themselves.

We caught up with Youssef during her first exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre for The Sisters Project and to talk about her experience of immersing herself in the community.

VICE: How was the opening on Wednesday?
Alia Youssef: It was pretty good! We saw 400 people come through. I had a lot of positive responses from people I didn’t know who somehow found out about the project. I felt very supported and a lot of love.

When did you first start to think about the idea for this project?
It started a year and a half ago in the fourth year of my undergrad, I was taking a class called women in Islam. Being a Muslim woman, surrounded by a lot of Muslim women we were talking a lot about present day representation. One day one of the women said ‘I’m so tired of being painted with the same brush stroke, as every other Muslim woman’ and I think it was something that I’d been thinking about as well. Also, since I’m a portrait photographer I think it just kind of set a light bulb off.

How did it all lead to this?
So I did it as a thesis project for school and then while I was still in school it got popular. Somehow the parliament of Canada found out. So when I graduated I had already established that people were passionate about the project and I continued working on it. I realized I was showing a lot of women from Vancouver and Toronto, but my statement said that it was a project about Canadian muslim women, so I felt like it was time to get some other perspectives, other experiences from muslim women that weren't just in some of the “biggest cities” in Canada.

What is the false stereotype you’re hoping to addresses?
I feel like growing up mostly post 9/11, there were two images of how Muslim women specifically were depicted in the media. The first one was, well really is an invisibility of Muslim women. There weren’t ever really stories of how successful or exciting—really any positive stories coming out about Muslim women. So that left the only other depiction that you really ever saw, which was ones of trauma, ones of grief, from those from abroad, depicting war affected areas or were talking about clothing, the only real stories you see about muslim women are where she's’ the victim, she’s silent, she’s not in control, or we’re talking about her clothes. Not in Teen Vogue, not in television, not in movies. I think all of that really played a part in how I felt about myself growing up, how I felt about being Muslim myself because it definitely affected me in a bad way because I thought people would only assume the negative stereotypes on me.

How did you find the women in every city you went to?
That’s a great question. Facebook mostly. I used social media to help me find these women. Canada’s quite small in the way that people are connected. And then of course when I got to the cities themselves people would be like, ‘oh you’re for sure photographing this person, right?’ and then I’d be like… ‘no?’ and they’d say, ‘let me connect you!’ So once I actually got to the city a lot of people would advocate for people I didn’t know about in their community. I was really overwhelmed by the kindness. Even though it was really daunting to do this by myself, I really found my subjects were my biggest supporters and helped in whatever way they could.

You have this really unique perspective now that you’ve met these women across the country. Is there anything that you’ve learned from Canada’s muslim women community as a whole?
I’ve learnt so many things that I’m still processing. But speaking to the similarities between all of them, I think all of them are really on the same page as me. I guess the people who joined the project are believers in the message of the project, meaning that they all feel the weight of the stereotype in their own cities one way or another. I really felt like a lot of people, despite where they were in Canada, or how big or small the city was, there’s a lot of advocates for the muslim community and I think muslim women in general are super involved—it really feels like everyone is volunteering or working with some organization to try to better their own community or try to better muslim women’s experiences in Canada, so that was something that really struck me.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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BoJack is back on his bullshit on Friday, and you know what that means:

Netflix's Bojack Horseman is simultaneously the funniest and most emotionally-draining animated series on the market. A spoonful of absurdist world-building helps the deeply troubling story of middle-aged former sitcom star (and literal humanoid horse) BoJack Horseman go down. In the satirical alternate reality of Hollywoo, anthropomorphic animal versions of celebrities coexist with fully human ones. That's the stage for some of television's most diverse and nuanced portrayals of shitty human behavior, despite many of the characters being cats and dogs and turtles and, well, horses. BoJack's thing is making viewers empathize with an objectively awful man-horse , and he’s back on it harder than ever in the latest soul-crushing arc from creators Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Lisa Hanawalt.

When we first met him in 2014, BoJack had wealth and ghostly fame as the former star of the Full House-like sitcom Horsin' Around. His charmed life was meaningless, he didn't have any real friends, he was an out-of-control alcoholic, and he was suffering from severe depression. By the beginning of the new season, he's starred in a popular biopic about his hero, the racehorse Secretariat, and is helming a gritty, True Detective-esque prestige series called Philbert. His career is finally being revitalized, but his problems are mostly the same: loneliness, self-sabotage, addiction, bad communication, and worse judgment.

He's an idiot savant at finding the worst possible outcome in good situations. Season four extensively explained the environment that impacted his bad behavior through the heartbreaking story of his mother, Beatrice Horseman. There's no doubt that BoJack is one link in a chain of abuse that stretches back generations. But season five makes it clear that those factors don't excuse the abuse he passes on to others. It's Will Arnet's finest and most complicated portrayal of the anti-hero yet. (One particular funeral scene is blisteringly raw. If you see a casket, make sure you have a box of tissues nearby. )

The writers also continue to heap modest professional success and crippling unhappiness onto the actor's menagerie of self-involved, selfish, and self-sabotaging—yet mostly lovable—cohorts. Last season set up Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter's divorce, Todd's struggle to find normalcy in his asexuality, and Princess Carolyn's drive to become a mother. They all try to muddle their way through romantic isolation, divorce, death, drugs, forgiveness, and betrayal, and the process is messy and imperfect. This show has made a habit of avoiding easy morals and lessons, and it doesn't start in season five.

Yet there is plenty of joy and laughter to be had in between the ugly crying. While it's BoJack Horseman's darkest season, it's also the most hilariously meta. Philbert's self-proclaimed auteur creator Flip McVicker, broodingly deadpanned by Rami Malek, practically looks at the proverbial camera in the first episode as he delivers the line, “This is going to be a sensational season of television.” The whole show-within-a-show takes place on a set that’s identical to BoJack's house. A later episode is framed as a lesbian couple telling each other intertwined stories about the main characters with their names changed to protect their identities, to hysterical effect.

Even meta-er is this season's approach to feminist discourse. A string of devastating one-liners from Diane offer biting commentary on institutional misogyny. But the moment you laugh, she points out the dark subtext of the joke. “This isn’t fun for me! Being a woman is not a hobby or a pet interest of mine," she tells BoJack after he begins to dabble in performative wokeness. "You get to drop in and play Joss Whedon and everybody cheers. But when you move on to your next thing, I’m still here." Scenes like this would be funny if they weren't so damn real—or maybe vice-versa?

Of course, it wouldn't be BoJack without an incredible roster of celebrity guest stars. In addition to Malek, there's Whoopi Goldberg, Issa Rae, Laura Linney, John Leguizamo, Eva Longoria, David Sedaris, Wanda Sykes, Stephanie Beatriz, Brian Tyree Henry, Hong Chau, Randall Park, Daveed Diggs—suffice to say, there's a ton, and Bob-Waksberg knows how to use them.

BoJack Horseman is a whole show made of those multicolored emotional mixtures visualized in Inside Out. Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt’s molotov cocktail of numbingly depraved personalities and fiery meta humor consumes the audience with nervous joy, sad anger, reluctant disgust, and ambivalent empathy.

Both the new episodes and the tears begin streaming on September 14.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

One of the most common strategies used in the vitriolic toolbox of transphobic rhetoric is the assertion that trans women are “biologically male”, thus pose a risk to “real biological women” in women-only spaces. This argument is used on both sides of the political spectrum, from conservative columnists to trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) activists. Trans women are constantly met with attacks on our basic existence and sense of human dignity.

Though trans folks have been recently afforded basic human rights in federal and provincial law, we are still at the mercy of an overwhelmingly cisgender population who carry deep-seated beliefs that cisgender folks, those whose gender align with what they were assigned at birth, are inherently superior to transgender folks. This perception of superiority is at the very foundation of our cissexist society, which is largely built to accommodate exclusively cisgender people. As a result of this perception of cis supremacy, we are often characterized as strange, sick, perverted, dangerous, and pathetic.

The most recent use of this rhetoric was in a toxic hot mess of an op-ed written by Barbara Kay in the National Post. Kay conjures up a series of stereotypes and discriminatory myths to represent trans women as hysterical radical activists and dangerous sexual predators. She underscores her assertions with a liberal use of Orwellian language to make exaggerated comparisons between trans public figures and violent and oppressive totalitarian nation-states. (It’s also worth noting the story’s original headline was: ‘Transwomen deserve respect, but they aren’t women’ —which has since been changed to “Diluting the meaning of 'woman,' to appease transgender activists, is misogyny.’)

Trans women, Kay argues, are not women because of biology. She draws on the “biology is fact” argument which reduces human beings to our invisible chromosomes. Fun fact though, we most certainly are women and biological research is much more complicated than transphobes are willing to admit.

Moving beyond the basic dichotomy of sexed chromosomes found in high school textbooks, Julia Serano, writer and biologist, illustrates the “multifaceted, variable, and somewhat malleable” characteristics of human biology. Across the spectrum of male, female, and intersex sex bodies, there is a diverse and sometimes surprising variety of chromosomal combinations and sex characteristics. And because of the wonders of modern medicine, through procedures like gender confirmation surgery and hormone replacement therapy, we are able to alter our sex characteristics to better align with our gender identity, which complicates deterministic arguments of biological sex.

Science is a moving target, especially in relation to something as complicated and varied as human biology. Research is suggesting that the brain composition of trans folks are much more similar to their actual gender, not the one they were assigned at birth.

As reported by Claire Ainsworth in Nature, “Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up”. Though science is expanding expert knowledge around biological sex, trans people are still pummeled with arguments that reduce our very personhood to the shape of our genitals.

The “biology is fact” argument is often paired with the discriminatory prediction that allowing trans women in women’s spaces, such as a restroom, will lead to a spike in sexual assaults.

Transphobes deal in moral panic, and they create elaborate mythologies to stoke fear among the cisgender population by inventing the “man in a dress” boogieman.

Despite these myths, a recent study from a research think tank based in the UCLA School of Law, suggests that there is no correlation between allowing transgender folks to use their appropriate washroom and spikes in violent crime. Though this study will likely be ignored by anti-trans bigots, it does help confirm to the cisgender population-at-large that we’re no different from anyone else using the washroom.

In fact, an earlier study published in 2013 from the same think tank, researchers confirmed that trans folks actually face increased discrimination and harassment in the restroom.

This is so real for trans women. Myself and just about every other trans person I know have at some point been afraid to use the public restroom. For many of us, a trip to the restroom is a panic-stricken rush in and out of the stall because you never know when you’re going to run into a Barbara Kay doppelganger ready to jump down your throat.

All this grief just to take a piss.

When anti-trans bigots try to spin a tall tale of the violent trans woman, they often cherry pick extreme cases in order to put forward gross exaggerations of violent crime. However, it doesn’t take an expert to realize that there are violent people in every societal category. You can’t tell me that because you can identify a story about one violent trans woman, all trans women should be considered a threat to public safety.

And honestly, I believe that most people are intelligent enough to recognize the smoke and mirrors at play in anti-trans rhetorical strategies.

Kay writes, “Radical transactivists, with the complicity of progressives earnestly attempting to support what they perceive as a vulnerable victim group, are guilty of the worst form of misogyny in their ruthless campaign to erase from our thoughts the human female body as a unique life form.”

But the reality is that trans women aren’t erasing cis women, we’re being erased as women. No trans person is publishing hot takes trying to undermine the basic human rights of cis women. All we’re doing is trying to navigate our everyday lives within a public that can be incredibly hostile to our very existence.

Trans women belong in women’s spaces like any other woman. And if you got a problem with that you can bring it up with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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So let’s just cut right to the chase: Drake is reportedly dating a teenager.

The 31-year-old rapper, who has often been linked to more age appropriate women, including Jennifer Lopez, was recently seen dining with 18-year-old model Bella Harris in Washington, DC, according to Page Six. A photo on Harris’ Instagram feed shows the pair embracing somewhat awkwardly (Drake is giving off a handsy uncle vibe), with the caption “no place I’d rather be 💙.”

Drake and Bella Harris. Photo via Instagram

It appears that the pair initially met when she attended Drake and Future’s Summer Sixteen Tour in 2016, which is oddly poetic because she would’ve been 16 at that time (if we’re doing the math right). Six-fucking-teen. Harris also posted an Instagram photo from the American Music Awards later that year congratulating Drake.

Harris, daughter of legendary music producer Jimmy Jam, is a model who recently graduated from high school.

She has appeared in campaigns for a host of brands including Forever 21, Guess, and Fenty. Penny for Rihanna’s thoughts?

The trend of older male celebrities dating very young women is a tale as old as time—Jerry Seinfeld dated a 17-year-old when he was in his late 30s, and Leo DiCaprio seems to have a pretty rigid “models around-20” rule. Heck, even Scott Disick, 35, is currently dating 20-year-old Sofia Richie. But just because it’s common, doesn’t mean it isn’t gross.

It’s hard to say whether this is an anomaly or if Drake is entering his creepy old man phase about 10 years too early. I mean, he did recently admit to hiding his child from the world.

Maybe he just got tired of being rejected by women who can legally drink.

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Life has seemingly been hard for disgraced former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi since he was publicly accused of abusing 24 women and was subsequently fired from his job.

The former Q host was acquitted of four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcome resistance by choking in the spring of 2016. But there were many allegations—ranging from violent sexual assault to workplace bullying—for which Ghomeshi never stood trial nor commented on publicly. Though you wouldn’t necessarily know that from reading Ghomeshi’s 3,400-word cover (read: sob) story for the New York Review of Books.

The piece, published Friday, part of an issue called The Fall of Men, hits readers over the head with how much Ghomeshi has struggled since his fall from grace.

Here are some things we are supposed to feel sad about:

1. Ghomeshi no longer has a platform to speak to hundreds of thousands of listeners on a daily basis
2. His infamy makes it harder for him to pick up women and make friends
3. Money and “influence” made it easier for Ghomeshi to be a dick, blame them
4. His crisis management team gave him bad advice
5. Reporters are mean
6. Lawyers are expensive
7. No one liked his dumb YouTube project

Astoundingly, Ghomeshi even tried to take credit for #MeToo, writing, “One of my female friends quips that I should get some kind of public recognition as a #MeToo pioneer. There are lots of guys more hated than me now. But I was the guy everyone hated first.”

That sounds dangerously close to a humble brag.

Only in the vaguest of terms i.e. “I began to use my liberal gender studies education as a cover for my own behavior” did he acknowledge how poorly he treated women.

This was published in an American outlet, for audiences who aren’t likely as familiar with the Ghomeshi saga, and there’s not so much as an editor’s note explaining everything he’s accused of doing.

Ghomeshi also used his father’s death, and racist attacks he faced after the accusations surfaced, to attempt to make readers feel bad for him.

Here’s the thing: no one should feel bad for Ghomeshi. He is accused of being a serial abuser and has suffered severe social consequences because of it—but that’s pretty much the only kind of justice his alleged victims will ever experience.

Beyond a reasonable doubt is an incredibly high standard of proof and in sex assault cases, where there is often only the testimony of the complainant to rely on, it’s notoriously hard to meet that threshold. So while in criminal terms, Ghomeshi is “innocent” the reality is, there just wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. Beyond that, most of the allegations against him were never tested in court.

If the justice system worked differently, Ghomeshi may well be in jail right now. Instead he’s writing cover stories for prestigious literary magazines. Pass the Kleenex.

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Disney (and to a certain extent, Pixar) movies have been foundational in many of our lives. These films have served a multitude of purposes: lessons in morality, sparking obsessions to fuel capitalism, and of course, to show us the horrors of the world. They’re a common thread, a parallel in so many of our upbringings.

Though Disney’s movies have arguably gotten considerably less dark as time has progressed, some of us are still understandably impacted by the ones we can’t forget.

So, we ranked animated Disney and Pixar movies from least to most childhood-ruining to try to make sense of it all. The “childhood-ruining” rank takes into account a number of factors, including key scenes that stay burned into your memory, instances of death, and troublesome themes.

Before we get started, some ground-rules on our methodology. We only included feature-length Disney animated films with a theatrical release, so our deep apologies to people that enjoyed their straight-to-video work in the 90s. Additionally, we decided to add the Pixar catalogue—even though it was only purchased by Disney in 2006—since Pixar has been the go-to for children’s movies for the last 20 years. This is a totally not-scientific ranking after all.

Spoiler alerts, obviously.

67. (Tie) The Reluctant Dragon (1941), Fantasia (1940), Saludos Amigos (1942), Victory Through Air Power (1943), The Three Caballeros (1944), Make Mine Music (1946), Song of the South (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Melody Time (1948), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Very few people alive have seen these films, so they all rank here.

66. The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Back in our day, we had The Land Before Time. That movie caused many tears to flow upon the faces of doe-eyed children yet to understand the horrors of the lives they would live. (Besides, do you know the tragic story behind the voice of Ducky? Go ahead and look that up if you want to ruin your childhood even more.) Kids today apparently have wholesome, non-childhood-ruining dinosaur movies. Can’t relate.

65. Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Yeah, a big, scary monster descends on an arcade, but there’s no way that this story measures up to most of the films on this list.

64. The Sword in the Stone (1963)

A little boy named Arthur who embarks on a path to become a squire gets the unlikely opportunity to be mentored by a wizard, Merlin. Not only does he get to be trained by a cool, weird wizard, but he also ends up becoming the King of England when he does the impossible: pulls a sword out of a stone. Not childhood-ruining unless child watching it thinks that they might get a deal as sweet as this in life.

63. Ratatouille (2007)

How could a rat with dreams of becoming a gourmet chef in Paris be childhood-ruining? Remy not only defies odds, but he overcomes his family’s and society’s expectations of him by entering the culinary world. Being a rat in such a world is not without its unpleasantries, of course—like being chased around a French restaurant’s kitchen by an angry chef, trapped in a jar, and having your life threatened after making critically acclaimed soup.

62. (Tie) The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977); Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Winnie the Pooh is not childhood-ruining; it’s childhood-making. All of that said, Everyone is the embodiment of depression, which children watching Pooh films will likely not realize until later on in life. Seriously, the fan theory surrounding Christopher Robin, mental illnesses, and his animal pals is hella dark. We wouldn’t suggest looking into it unless you want to ruin such a pure part of your childhood.

61. Fantasia 2000 (2000)

Honestly doesn’t seem to be anything remotely childhood-ruining about this other than the typical Disney themes of life and death, though it is a pretty intense film with epicly amazing music.

60. Incredibles 2 (2018)

Incredibles 2 is among the best sequels ever made (right up there with The Godfather Part II and Shrek 2). The film builds on everything we loved about its predecessor, namely Jack-Jack, featuring a fight in which the baby wields his newfound superpowers to playfully fend off a raccoon in the family’s backyard. It’s positively delightful. Baby battles aside, the film also centers around a strong female protagonist and antagonist, which is a nice (important) change. It’s a movie that feels reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons of yesteryear—like Jonny Quest, but far less problematic (remember Hadji? oof).

59. Moana (2016)

An epic story of adventure, demigods, and pure feminine badass-ery. Moana pursues an ancient quest and finds herself along the way. Way cooler than going backpacking in Europe.

58. Lilo & Stitch (2002)

Stitch is super cute and weird, as long as you’re not scared of aliens nor fugitive ones. This is a super heartwarming story about a little girl teaching an alien how to care for others. This may give children some unrealistic expectations because obviously you can’t change everyone, no matter how hard you try.

57. Treasure Planet (2002)

This film really didn’t get the attention it deserved. If you don’t remember it either: It’s an epic space adventure based on the novel Treasure Island. Pirates are pretty gnarly, but it’s unlikely many people remember this film enough to be ruined by it.

56. Robin Hood (1973)

The Disney adaptation of the classic tale about an outlaw stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is likely not as vibrant in your mind as the live-action (and there’s another one coming this year, as it would happen). In the animated version, a humanoid fox fights back against the royal rule of a lion, Prince John, when he tries to implement taxes that target poor people—landing those who can’t pay in jail. There’s some action, violence, and imprisonment, but the evils of over-taxation is likely to go beyond a child’s comprehension, minimizing the childhood-ruining effects.

55. Mulan (1998)

Everything about Mulan is so satisfying. First off, she’s a badass heroine who impersonates a male soldier to save her people. She has a dragon for a sidekick, who rivals the genie in Aladdin in terms of hilarity. And the soundtrack—”Make A Man Out Of You”—need we say more? This isn’t childhood-ruining; it’s inspirational.

54. Toy Story 2 (1999)

Basically harmless compared to the third instalment in the Toy Story series. If you didn’t cry during that scene with Jessie featuring a song called “She Doesn’t Love Me,” though, you have no soul.

53. Brave (2012)

This movie is super beautiful, set in Scotland, and Merida is inspirational. Of course a curse onsets, and there’s a horrifying bear attack scene, but ultimately Brave shows how important courage is. There are some fake Scottish accents though, which is damaging.

52. Monsters, Inc. (2001)

This movie literally dismantles the classic childhood fear of the monster under the bed. Assigning human emotions and comic relief to this common terror probably does some de-traumatizing for certain kids rather than traumatizing. Finding out that children are actually toxic to monsters is just the antidote kids who are afraid of what’s under their bed need. Not childhood-ruining.

51. Monsters University (2013)

Monsters University tells the backstory of monsters Mike and Sulley’s friendship, which was not always as it was in the original film. Turns out that you have to have a university degree to be a scary monster though, and there’s even frats in monster school. Who wants to live in a world like that?

50. (Tie) Cars (2006), Cars 2 (2011), Cars 3 (2017)

Personified vehicles—even when they experience violent crashes—can’t possibly be as scary as the films featuring people and human-like animals on this list. Cars are not human nor animal enough to provoke disturbance like so many others on this list are apt to do, so we’ll leave all three of these together.

49. Home on the Range (2004)

This movie starts with an eviction notice! That is super terrifying but likely to go over most kids’ heads. However, following the notice, a few cows decide to hold a cow thief ransom. Basically, this promotes vigilantism to get what you need (money), so take that as child-ruining if you must.

48. Oliver & Company (1988)

Based on Oliver Twist, an abandoned orange kitten named Oliver joins up with criminal street dogs in New York City. Confronting the reality of homelessness—which every child must one day learn about—and the constant struggle of survival is enough to make kids come up with tons of questions for their parents when and if they realize that it’s not just animals that have to go through this.

47. Finding Dory (2016)

Good, but not as good as its predecessor, Finding Dory tugs at your heart strings with its powerful message about family and finding your way home. But you know what tugs at you more? Thinking about how humans treat fish and other sea life. Shit is seriously fucked up. There’s actually a scene in which a whale shark bumps into the wall of her enclosure and smashes her face, which is a real thing that really happens to real sharks and really kills them. You ever seen Blackfish? Fuck, my dood. Humans are garbage.

46. The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Tiana is just trying to pursue her dream of owning a restaurant when a man-turned-frog mistakenly believes she is a princess and kisses her, turning her into a frog too. Other than the time crunch of Tiana needing to figure out how to turn back both of them into humans before it’s too late (and the fact that this is based on a Brothers Grimm tale), this film ranks pretty low on the scale and has a happy ending.

45. The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

Cockiness and selfishness could get you turned into a llama. An evergreen lesson.

44. Brother Bear (2003)

If you’re like us, you probably don’t remember this one. Apparently it’s set in the north, and the following chain of events happens: A dude named Kenai has beef with bears after one kills his brother. He then kills said bear, then turns into a bear himself. Kenai’s other brother then wants to murder him while he’s in bear form, not understanding what has happened. Potential sibling-cide is scary, and the scene above is sad af.

43. Bolt (2008)

This is honestly kind of a depressing story. It’s about a TV-famous dog who goes on a quest to find his owner. He experiences delusions and thinks he has magical powers due to his time on TV and finds himself in New York City after being accidentally shipped there.

42. Frozen (2013)

Disturbing due to dead parents but also because of how the obsession children who see this film experience, leading them to demand Elsa-themed toys, birthday parties, and clothing. What kind of capitalistic mind control is this?

41. Meet the Robinsons (2007)

This is a sci-fi cartoon about time travel that starts in an orphanage. The main character, named Lewis, is a precocious child inventor. In a sad twist, though, he is working on some sort of contraption to search his memory for his birth mother who abandoned him. That’s some really depressing stuff, especially if a child watching this has one or more parents absent from their lives.

40. Zootopia (2016)

An iconic furry film. However, despite how cool it is that this movie has a variety of animals akin to Noah’s Ark, it is basically about police. The film follows the main character, a rabbit named Judy Hopps, as she becomes a cop. No further comment.

39. Tarzan (1999)

Any children’s film that features predominant colonial themes is by default damaging. But, at least we get a bit of a gender role reversal here that is atypical for Disney films of this era: a woman (Jane, who is part of a British expedition) lures Tarzan away from his life when he realizes she is human and he is too. That killer Phil Collins soundtrack still bangs.

38. Inside Out (2015)

When Bing Bong sacrifices himself into non-existence, every adult in the room will burst into tears thinking of how their childhood innocence has been lost and how disappointing they must be to their childhood selves. But that said, this movie is way worse on adults and given that it’s only three years old, it loses points because many viewers are too young to realize this movie is gonna fuck them up.

37. Chicken Little (2005)

Chicken Little has to save his town from a goddamn alien invasion, no one believes him, and he is bullied at school. There’s also a dodgeball scene—in which a gym teacher splits the class into “popular” and “unpopular” teams—that is childhood-ruining because it’s so relatable.

36. Hercules (1997)

Depending on how you look at it, having to fight a series of terrifying monsters is a low price to pay for immortality. However, being separated from your family because of a power-hungry villain is not great.

35. Tangled (2010)

The Disney version of this story is based on a classic German fairy tale, so of course it’s gonna be a little unsettling. Surely a girl should not spend much of her life imprisoned in a tower just because she has some power she never even asked for.

34. Toy Story (1995)

The emotional effects of the original really can’t be compared to the widespread ruin caused by the third in this series. Still, that kid Sid is a sociopath and tortures his toys, including a terrifying mechanical spider thing with a baby head. Hell no.

33. The Jungle Book (1967)

There is a MAN-EATING tiger in this story that wants to eat the main character! The setting of a jungle is scary even without this factor, but the presence of a song-singing, knowledgeable bear named Balloo is quite soothing. It’s kinda traumatizing that Mowgli does ultimately decide to return to human life, though.

32. The Black Cauldron (1985)

This Disney movie is known for bombing at the box office. A movie that is so often accused of being boring is unlikely to be equated with ruining a childhood, pushing this one’s rank down. It’s still pretty spooky though, especially that demon skeleton dude villain, the Horned King. He’s likely to cause nightmares. The main character, Taran, also almost dies multiple times, and his animal friends are tortured!

31. The Aristocats (1970)

Kittens are drugged and abandoned so that some dickhead can claim a dead opera singer’s fortune, which she somehow left to her cat.

30. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Mostly childhood-ruining because it made kids want to go to a place that they’ll never get to go to and may not even exist.

29. Lady and the Tramp (1955)

A cocker spaniel has a lavish life until her owners decide to have a baby. She becomes homeless, eventually eating spaghetti with a fellow stray (Tramp) in quite possibly one of the most iconic romance scenes of any animated film. HOWEVER, those Siamese cats are conniving and creepy as hell—and maybe a little bit racist. There’s also some real slut-shaming in this movie. The 50s, man.

28. Peter Pan (1953)

This one is disturbing both for making children realize that being an adult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and for normalizing a strange boy coming into your bedroom at night.

27. Aladdin (1992)

There’s so much to love about Aladdin, but good luck concentrating on any of it if you’re even remotely claustrophobic. From the Cave of Wonders melting with Aladdin inside, to Princess Jasmine being trapped in a giant hourglass filling with sand, to the genie literally living in a tiny-ass lamp, there are so many tense moments where our heroes come close to being smothered and suffocated. Having said that, as a young brown girl who was obsessed with Disney, this was the closest thing I had to representation. But I’m still holding out for a South Asian princess.

26. 101 Dalmatians (1961)

It’s impossible to scrub from your mind the evil that is dognapping villainess Cruella DeVille. What could be more terrifying to children than someone obsessed with using a nice family’s newborn puppies’ fur as fashion?

25. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

This movie is about kidnapping, a fact only slightly dulled by the fact that the characters are mice and not people. When a toymaker is abducted by a bat on his daughter’s birthday, a mouse detective comes to the rescue. A sadistic, greasy, insecure af rat criminal named Ratigan (who doesn’t like being called a rat, btw) is behind the kidnapping and is sure to scare children.

24. The Rescuers (1977)

Yet another children’s movie featuring abduction! This time, a little girl named Penny is kidnapped, and a message begging for help reaches the Rescue Aid Society, located in the basement of the United Nations and run by mice. Penny’s kidnapping has a strange and terrifying reasoning: A pawn shop owner named Madame Medusa abducted her and has forced her to go on a quest to find the world’s largest diamond in a dark, dangerous pirate cave. Additional childhood-ruining factor: the pawn shop owner’s pet alligators.

23. The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

ANOTHER child abduction. This time, the victim is a boy in Australia named Cody who was just trying to rescue a trapped giant golden eagle. Instead, he’s taken captive by a terrifying, homicidal poacher, Percival McLeach, who wants the endangered-species eagle. Once again, the mice must come to the rescue to save both Cody and the eagle from a villain that is more frightening than in the original.

22. A Bug’s Life (1998)

This children’s movie is basically about food scarcity and war. Those grasshoppers still haunt me to this day even though I really liked this movie. While we’re here, I just want to say fuck Antz, which was definitely not as good as A Bug’s Life but came out the same year. Peace.

21. Big Hero 6 (2014)

May I direct you to the scary-as-hell scene in the clip above?

20. Cinderella (1950)

No story about orphanhood, confinement, and forced servitude is allowed to get a pass for childhood-ruining. This movie totally gave stepfamilies a bad reputation and gave kids false hope that a fairy godmother and/or a man could help make their problems go away.

19. Finding Nemo (2003)

Getting lost [and kidnapped] is one of the most prolific fears children have, so this one hits home. Also childhood-ruining because it permanently makes kids think that clown fish are all called “Nemo” and that blue tangs are named “Dory.”

18. Sleeping Beauty (1959)

You can’t consent when you’re in a deep in a curse-induced sleep, FYI.

17. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

A young woman must make her way alone in the woods and is tempted with a poisonous apple and has only the company of strange, small men and animals. With the tense relationship between Snow White and her step mom, this also introduces children to the concept of toxic familial relationships and jealousy—childhood-ruining, but necessary.

16. WALL-E (2007)

The future is scary and full of garbage, and WALL-E makes sure you know this. Even though this movie is almost silent, it has the power to make grown adults cry. When WALL-E is rebooted and doesn’t remember his loved ones after risking his little robot life to save the Earth—heartbreaking.

15. Pocahontas (1995)

This has to rank pretty high on this list due to historical inaccuracies and racism. This disturbingly sets up American children to completely misunderstand the United States’ history with Indigenous people by turning what is actually a really fucked-up story of kidnapping into a romance. As if how the public education system teaches the meaning of Thanksgiving to American children could use an additional brainwashing supplement. GTFO.

14. Dinosaur (2000)

Bruh, the meteor scene! No child wants or needs to see the world being completely obliterated, even if it is to make way for mankind.

13. The Fox and the Hound (1981)

Yet another Disney flick with parental death. Other than the fox losing his mom, this story is pretty tame and includes a not-so-terrifying moral lesson: Friendships with those who are different from you can be challenging but rewarding. However, it has a pretty devastating ending—our titular characters seem to be forever separated, and the movie ends with Copper dreaming about the day he met Tod. “We’ll always be friends forever,” dream Tod says. And that kids, is how you learned what bittersweet feels like.

12. The Incredibles (2004)

The dude who wanted to equal the playing field and give everyone superpowers is the bad guy and, for his belief in equality, gets killed after he’s knocked into a goddamn jet turbine. That’s horrifying!!! We even get to see him, while getting sucked in, terrified and trying to claw his way out of certain death. Thanks to The Incredibles we kids know the (animated) eyes of a man who knew he was going to die a excruciatingly painful death. On top of that the main characters are going through a midlife crisis and their marriage is collapsing. Fun stuff!

11. Coco

This 2017 Pixar movie is known to make grown adults cry (and surely kids, too). This movie fucked me up and everyone I know who’s seen it. A boy named Miguel goes to the world of the undead during Día De Los Muertos after he misunderstands his hereditary roots. He’s pretty sure a popular musician was his grandfather, but when he gets to the afterlife, he eventually realizes he was wrong. The reality is much darker—his real grandfather wrote popular songs for which he was not credited, and he was murdered by his “friend” who stole his music.

10. Up (2009)

This film is known for making adults emotionally wrecked more than kids, so for that anomaly it deserves a mention quite high up on the scale. Is there anyone who doesn’t immediately remember that they cried while they watched this portrait of love and mortality? Witnessing an elderly man and his wife try to pursue their everlasting dream of visiting Paradise Falls only to have the wife get sick and die is unbelievably upsetting.

9. Alice in Wonderland (1951)

You might not have known it at the time, but this film was basically a challenging acid trip. Psychedelics are not for everyone, especially not little kids who are terrified by smoking caterpillars and repeated threats of decapitation. This film can either traumatize a child or confuse them enough that they’ll later read the novel trying to make sense of what they missed as a kid.

8. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

Quasimodo’s life is one of immense trauma. He was almost murdered as a baby and then lives out much of his life as an unpaid socially isolated bell ringer in a cathedral with a crazed religious dude as his boss, befriending personified gargoyles. This is plainly messed up. He then ends up meeting a Roma girl named Esmeralda in town and ends up having to defend her against the cruel man who both tried to drown him and convince him that he was a “monster” for the way he looked.

7. Toy Story 3 (2010)

There’s a scene in this Toy Story film so terrifying that it is referred to as “The Furnace.” In it, all of your favourite original characters almost die a painful, fiery death. Also, the ending is super sad and has sparked YouTube reaction videos of people crying to it, so how can it not be ranked high?

6. The Little Mermaid (1989)

An ocean-themed movie featuring mermaids and humanized sea creatures is eye candy for many feminine children, which is what makes it so messed up that this film has a lowkey troublesome theme. Are we really meant to think it’s OK that a 16-year-old girl would make a shady deal with a sea-witch to trade her talents (beautiful singing and also just talking ffs) to be with a man? Honestly any Disney film that puts marrying a man on such a pedestal deserves to be ranked as childhood-altering, but this one has to be one of the worst.

5. Beauty and the Beast (1991)

OK, this is straight up one of the best Disney movies of all time. Having said that, the beast was absolutely terrifying for the first half of the movie. That scene where he catches Belle looking at the enchanted rose and screams “GET OUT! GEEEETTTT OUUUUUTTTT!” still gives me chills, in a bad way. Also—is this technically a movie about bestiality? Or Stockholm Syndrome?

4. Dumbo (1941)

A baby elephant is separated from his mother at a circus—who is then locked up and whipped. “Dumbo” is called a fucked-up name because of how he looks and is ridiculed. Then there’s problematic alcohol use and hallucinations, not to mention racist stereotypes (including a bird character literally named Jim Crow).

3. Pinocchio (1940)

This film is just dark. Pinocchio’s entire existence is traumatic as he transforms from inanimate wooden puppet to boy trapped in puppet to circus donkey (wtf?) to puppet again, then finally to a “real boy” (whatever that is). First of all, he never asked to be made. Gepetto and that fairy are honestly selfish to want to collab on the creation of such a torrid life. This is basically a child horror movie.

2. Bambi (1942)

Surely one of the cutest Disney animated films, Bambi is full of adorable, wide-eyed and innocent woodland creatures. All is well and good as the animals frolic in meadows and munch on plants until Bambi must confront grief when a hunter named “Man” (wow, subtle) shoots and kills his mother and he is left alone wondering where the hell she went. To add insult to injury, a stag that is almost definitely Bambi’s deadbeat dad appears at the end of the film to save the day as a forest fire erupts. A violent parental loss and a theme of human’s impact on nature that will probably go over a child’s head until closer to adulthood make this almost just as bad as The Lion King.

1.The Lion King (1994)

If you grew up in the 90s, Mufasa not waking up may have been one of the first times your little child brain tried to comprehend the meaning of death. And if you’re like some of us, you watched this movie tearfully over and over trying to make sense of it all. Combined with how iconic this film is, the childhood-ruining is widespread enough to be a list topper.

Some very, very weird shit is currently going down at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, and no one, except for the FBI, has any idea why. On September 6, without warning, the feds rolled up with a horde of agents, ordering an immediate evacuation of the facility and a nearby post office. It's since set up shop, closing the facility—without any reason or explanation. Even the local sheriff, Benny House, was kept completely in the dark.

"The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on," House told the Alamogordo Daily News. "But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there was a lot of stuff going on up there... There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas, and work crews on towers, but nobody would tell us anything."

Now, more than a week later, Sunspot's solar observatory is still locked down, and we're no closer to understanding what the hell is actually going on. The best we've got for an explanation came from a very vague post on the observatory's Facebook, saying that the "Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) is addressing a security issue" at the facility and has "no further comment at this time." Weird!

Naturally, in the absence of any real information, a flood of conspiracy theories have rolled in to try to fill in the gaps. Did the observatory stumble across evidence that the sun is about to explode? Did aliens finally make contact? Who knows! Is this whole thing a very elaborate viral marketing scheme for another X-Files reboot? We can hope!

Here's a quick rundown of all the major theories surrounding the New Mexico observatory mystery. We'll leave it on you, dear readers, to separate the fact from the fiction—and then decide, yep, it's definitely aliens.

A Massive Sun Disaster Is Coming

The Evidence: This is the most discussed theory going around right now, and for good reason. It's got it all—vague facts, confusing science, and fully apocalyptic implications. To understand it, we have to look back at the Carrington Event in the mid-1800s, when a solar storm sent out something called a "coronal mass ejection" that rocked Earth and shorted out telegraph systems across the world, according to National Geographic. The date when the Carrington Event hit? Early September, 1859.

Of course, our modern world relies on a lot more technology than some weak-ass telegraph systems, so a similar event today could fuck some serious shit up. And if the government knew it was coming and couldn't stop it, would it immediately spill the beans and send the world into a panic? Probably not. Plus, according to some unsubstantiated Reddit posts going around, Sunspot isn't the only space observation that mysteriously went dark over the last couple weeks—a bunch of observatory livestreams allegedly went down "at the same time" and Spaceweather.eu is "temporarily unavailable" for some reason.

Still, though. Let's be real. First of all, there's a huge number of people, both professional and amateur, keeping tabs on the sun's patterns constantly, so someone else would have noticed a solar flare. Plus, if someone at Sunspot really did see the Big One coming last week, the super flare would've reached us by now. And since you're currently reading this a functioning computer, that seems unlikely. Sorry.

Likelihood of Truth: 1/10

There Was a UFO Crash

The Evidence: What possible reason would the FBI have for taking over the local post office building than to use it to house the charred remains of an alien life form? Well, sure, there are a ton of reasons, but come on! The observatory is in New Mexico. Know what else is in New Mexico, a mere 120 miles away from Sunspot? Roswell.

Plus, the director of Sunspot told local news station KOB that the "telescope did not see aliens," according to Gizmodo, which is exactly what someone who saw aliens but didn't want to admit it would say!

Likelihood of Truth: 5/10

There Was a Terrible Mercury Leak

The Evidence: Sunspot observatory has a liquid-mercury mirror telescope, which uses spun mercury to reflect images instead of giant lenses, like Hubble. This theory offers that somehow there was a deadly mercury leak, and everyone needed to be evacuated while the government cleaned it up.

Unfortunately, things don't exactly add up—if it really is something as seemingly mundane as a chemical leak, why all the secrecy? Why not tell the sheriff? Plus, shouldn't the Center for Disease Control be involved? On the surface, a mercury leak sounds like a plausible explanation, but it doesn't really stand up once you put it, uh, under the microscope.

Likelihood of Truth: 4/10

Chinese Spies Hacked the Observatory

The Evidence: According to valiant YouTuber JonXArmy, he has uncovered the definitive explanation for why the FBI swooped into Sunspot: China has hacked an antennae array at the observatory and was using it to spy on the nearby White Sands Missile Range.

"Supposedly, the Chinese had set up shop at this Sunspot telescope," he says in one video, "and who knows what all information they were harvesting via an antennae array."

Of course, the guy says his theory is based solely on a single Reddit post he read, but it's at least more plausible than a solar apocalypse, so let's give it to him.

Likelihood of Truth: 6/10

Some Stranger Things-Type Shit Is Happening

The Evidence: OK, there's no actual evidence that a New Mexico observatory is harboring an interdimensional portal full of hell-beasts from the Upside Down or whatever, so this one isn't all that believable. But all the pieces are there! An innocuous government facility? A potentially massive cover-up? A nosy local sheriff bent on finding the truth? A nearby town that probably has some kids in it? The only way it could scream "Stranger Things" more is if some local cats start disappearing.

Likelihood of Truth: 2/10

Likelihood That Some Struggling Screenwriter Will Read This Article and Get Inspired to Write a Derivative Sci-Fi Spec Pilot: 10/10

We Will Never Actually Find Out Anything

The Evidence: This whole mystery is very compelling right now, but give it another couple weeks. The best we can hope for is that the FBI holds some kind of bland press conference with an even blander explanation, and that'll be it. Sunspot will be forgotten, destined to live on only in that one kid's terrible TV script, and everyone will collectively move on to the next confusing mystery in a world full of confusing mysteries.

Of course, that's exactly what the government would want you to do if it actually just made contact with alien lifeforms in a remote section of New Mexico! Wake up, sheeple! Keep your real eyes realizing or whatever!

Likelihood of Truth: 9/10

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Taking nudes is difficult. You might be snuggled in bed, wearing ages 12-14 Jack Wills flannel pyjamas when the person you're seeing texts you asking for one.

Panic sets in – how does one act sexy? You must pretend your life involves something other than watching Netflix cooking programmes featuring perfumed onions and dry barbecue rubs you will never make. Your face appears pallid and purplish, like a faded bruise. You grab your only nice underwear out the washing basket; humans can't see smell. Balancing your phone tentatively on the radiator, you try to stick your arse out, but you lean out so far your belly is protruding more than your butt cheeks. The camera flash is so unflattering you are almost tempted to put an MSN-style sepia filter on it to get rid of the redness. Your genitals appear in the final picture like some sort of mini-demogorgon, tentacles and all.

Another problem is that there are only two angles known to women: selfie with boobs or a mirror shot of the ass. For men, there is the dick pic, which in my experience involves a pixelated close-up of an erection. Surely there are more angles? In fact, I know there are, because I’ve seen hot people on Instagram doing them. Bum splayed on a kitchen cabinet, so perky the cheeks are smiling. Women wearing gingham two pieces which somehow make them look more naked than dressed. Antoni from Queer Eye in boxers in his kitchen, abs tensed but not in that buff gym way that makes you think they might pop like bubble wrap.

So, to find out how to take a good nude, I contacted the experts, cam boys and girls who make a living from looking incredibly sexy.

HOW TO FIND A GOOD POSE

Image courtesy of Chloe Cherry.

Chloe Cherry: My favourite nude pose is full frontal, because most people fear seeing themselves that way. I like to show my natural physique exactly how I see it. Clients always say, "Put your hair in pigtails and your hands on your hips." I also love up-skirt shots. Skirts are hot because it teases people when they see a tiny slice of your booty; it will make them want to see more. A good way to make your ass look big is to sit on the edge of a counter that has a mirror and turn around and take a picture with your cheeks propped up. As you sit down, they get squished to maximum size. Another useful porn star booty trick is to pull your pants right under your butt and use them to scoop it up.

Kira Noir: I stretch every morning and every night, mostly so I can get a dramatic arch in my selfies. I would suggest not focusing on hiding things you consider flaws – instead, pick the things you love about yourself and try to accentuate them. I really like my lips and my butt, so when taking a lot of my nudes I try to put the focus on them.

Ona: I'm into extreme angles, which makes a selfie stick essential. A close-up of your butt from behind makes your waist look tiny; other times, I face backwards, looking over my left shoulder towards the camera. I also love doing open leg splits – it shows how flexible you are while also making your ass look plump. I take hundreds of nudes. Depending on what I'm going for, it can be quick or it can take hours. Whatever the pose, I always prefer natural daylight. I always use the Ludwig filter, or sometimes Juno. Photoshop is also a lifesaver.

JP and Philip: A tripod with a remote can work wonders. Also practice in the mirror. Tooch the booty, turn your waist, tense your abs and don't forget to breathe. Doing something unexpected, like a slim guy flexing or a muscled guy taking an androgynous pose, can create the most beautiful picture. Penis-wise, all cocks are different. Some curve left or right, some down or up, some are super straight. Most people try to make their dick look bigger by taking a low angle and shooting the picture upwards. But for curved ones this might not work; in that case, take a picture following the length of the curve.

WHAT TO WEAR OR NOT WEAR

Image courtesy of JP and Philip.

Chloe Cherry: I've taken a lot of nudes with a tampon string out, which is pretty distracting, so don’t do that. When you’re taking a nude, the best thing to wear is something that makes you feel confident. Accessories make nudes extra cheeky and personal. I like to wear trainers, stockings or baseball caps. Normally these items are associated with innocence, so corrupting them is sexy.

Kira Noir: Not everyone is comfortable doing a full nude with spread legs and bright light – and that’s totally fine. I often use my hair to hide my nipples. You should wear – or not wear – as much as you want. I personally love implied nudes. For one, these kinds of photos are fit, but also it's easy for close-up shots of your junk to look weird.

Ona: I'm into every variation of nude – clothed, panties coming off and fully off. Instagram forces one to be more suggestive, so people pay attention to the picture – you need to stand out. But that's super fun too. I've found, during shoots, that I'll be working hard to get something exciting with clothes on, but as soon as I’m naked, the images get more exciting and I reach maximum aesthetic perfection. But there's a difference between nudism and nudes. Nudism has nothing to do with arousal – being fully naked is actually anti-arousal – but nudes are made to sexually excite; they’re more of a tease. I like the latter, because I like sex. In my opinion, the arousing nude is under-appreciated as an art form – there are lots of non-arousing nudes in art – which is something I'm looking to change.

JP and Philip: Never wear something you are uncomfortable in. It will always show in the picture. Mixing fashion with sex confidence can make for awesome results; we love to balance the two big Fs: fashion and fetish.

WHEN TO SEND ONE

Image courtesy of Kira Noir.

Chloe Cherry: The best time to send a nude is when the person you are sending it to is at work or with friends and they aren’t thinking about sex, so when you send that nude they’re reminded. It’s exciting to crave someone you can’t have yet.

Kira Noir: Make sure the recipient wants your nudes, and you’re sure you want to send them. Never, ever send surprise nakedness. If they didn’t want it, you just end up looking like a creep. Asking, "Hey, want some nudes?" is seriously underrated, in my opinion.

Ona: Anytime.

JP and Philip: If it's welcome, there’s no bad time to send a beautiful nude. But we would suggest mornings and evenings. Most of the time we wake up horny and go to bed horny too. But a lunchtime nudie might just perk up their day.

THEIR BEST EVER NUDE

Chloe Cherry: The best nude photo I ever took was full frontal and I had a really short haircut and a cute little bush, so everything looked very symmetrical and compositionally sound. I was in a perfectly white bathroom where the light was all soft and hazy. I looked like a doll. I ended up sending it to some guys I was talking to and they were all blown away and showed it to all their friends – which I personally like.

Ona: I took a selfie in the mirror and shared it everywhere. Someone noticed my friend was in the shadows in the background; they reposted with a red circle around him. It had been seen thousands of times without anyone noticing. It was pretty funny. But my favourite was one outdoors on a trail just outside of Zion. I was standing on a rock fully naked and the wind was blowing in my hair – it was sublime.

JP and Philip: We had a shoot on a beach in Miami with a photographer who was a little lowkey. So when we dropped our pants in the water he turned completely red, but we ended up with amazing pictures. Another time, one of us took half a Kamagra for a nude shoot that was meant to be sensual rather than sexual, but we couldn't stop getting hard. Also, we had a little crush on the photographer, so that made things awkward.

@annielord8

All images courtesy of Chloe, Kira, Ona, and JP and Philip.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"They're going to steal your organs!" screams Sabina Eriksson, before running towards oncoming traffic on the M6 motorway, having already been hit head-on by a Volkswagen driving at speed. Her twin sister, Ursula, legs crushed by the lorry that has just run her over, is spitting and screaming at paramedics on the side of the road.

Ten years have passed since the world came to learn of the Eriksson Twins, the majority through footage of this bizarre roadside incident being broadcast to millions on the BBC show Traffic Cops, then the 2010 BBC documentary, Madness In The Fast Lane. They're also a popular topic in the conspiracy and mystery sections of Reddit – but a decade on, few could claim that they're any closer to understanding the chaos that occurred over two days in the West Midlands in May of 2008.

The commonly accepted timeline begins on Friday the 16th of May, when Sabina and Ursula Eriksson, two Swedish women in their late-thirties, travelled to Liverpool – by ferry, it's believed, though nobody on said ferry has ever come forward to confirm they were seen – from Sabina's home in Mallow, County Cork, Ireland. Ursula had travelled from her home in the USA to visit her twin sister. Once in Liverpool – arriving, it's believed, at 8.30AM on Saturday the 17th of May – they both went to visit St Anne Police Station, where Sabina reported concerns about the safety of her children back in Ireland. The police made contact with officers in Dublin and promised to follow the complaint up. At 11.30AM, Sabina and Ursula boarded a National Express Coach to London. Again, no other traveller has ever come forward to say they were also on that coach.

The sisters left the coach at Keele services – which isn't a scheduled rest stop – either because they were feeling unwell, as stated by the police report that would follow, or because, as the bus driver has claimed, they were acting erratically. The latter story goes that they both held onto their bags, having refused to put them in the luggage hold, and that the driver asked to search their luggage. When they refused, they were ordered off the vehicle. Once at the services, they headed to the back of the complex. The services' manager, also alarmed by their behaviour, called the police. Her concern was that the twins were carrying explosives. The police came to speak to the women. Convinced they posed no threat of harm, either to the services or themselves, the police allowed them to leave.

What happened next was extraordinary. Having seemingly left the services on foot, the two sisters were spotted on CCTV walking down the central reservation of the M6. Later, their elder brother, Björn, would claim they were fleeing from "maniacs", though nothing to confirm this has ever been released on film. They attempted to cross the road, Sabina being grazed by a red SEAT León as they tried. Highway Agency officers headed to the scene, as did the Central Motorway Police Group, with camera operatives from the Traffic Cops programme who were shadowing the unit at the time. They stopped the sisters. The situation appeared calm. The sisters stood smoking and chatting affably. Sabina was wearing a yellow visor with the ledger, "Time To Believe".

Then, as the arriving police were being briefed about the situation, Ursula suddenly ran into the road, her coat being pulled from her by a concerned officer as she attempted to free herself. She ran straight into the side of an oncoming articulated lorry. It was travelling, it's estimated, at 56mph. You can see her shoes strewn across the road in the wake of the collision. Seconds later, Sabina jumped into the road, smashing into the bonnet of a Volkswagen Polo. Ursula's legs were crushed. Sabina was unconscious for approximately 15 minutes. Somehow they both survived.

An air ambulance called, Sabina started to come round and responded by immediately clawing and spitting at the police officer attempting to help her. She screamed, "I recognise you – you're not real." She made the claim about the theft of her organs. Then, miraculously, she rose to her feet and started screaming for the help of the police, seemingly unable to establish that the police were already there. Sabina began to ask, "Why do you kill me?" Then she punched a police officer in the face and bolted into the next carriageway. With nowhere to go, she took her red coat off and squared up to the police officers surrounding her, who eventually put her into handcuffs.

Searching the debris of the incident, the police found a number of broken mobile telephones.

The sisters were taken to hospital. Ursula, her legs fractured, was admitted. Sabina, seemingly uninjured, was taken to the police station to be processed. She was much calmer by this point – but faux-frustrated that she had to take her jewellery off – a bit flirty, even. She commented to an officer, "We say in Sweden that an accident rarely comes alone. Usually at least one more follows – maybe two." The following day, Sabina was released from court. She plead guilty to the charges of punching a police officer and trespassing on the motorway, and sentenced to one day in custody. Having spent a full night in the police station, she was deemed to have served her sentence. Remarkably, there had been no full psychiatric evaluation.

Sabina was now stranded in Stoke-On-Trent, wearing Ursula's green top and carrying her possessions – including a laptop and £1,000 in cash – in a clear plastic bag, provided by police.

At around 7PM, two local men out walking a dog were stopped by Sabina. The dog belonged to Glenn Hollinshead, 54, a former RAF airman. His friend was Peter Molloy. Sabina asked if there were any B&Bs nearby. Glenn suggested they go back to his house, nearby. Sabina was nervy, but agreed. Once there, she couldn't stop peering out of the window. She offered the two men a cigarette, before snatching them out of their mouths before they could light them, claiming they might be "poisoned". Just before midnight, Peter Molloy left. Sabina stayed the night. The following day, at around 7.40PM, Glenn made some food, before heading outside to ask his neighbour, Frank Booth, if he could borrow teabags. Under a minute later, he staggered outside, bleeding, telling Frank, "She stabbed me." His last words before he died, allegedly, were, "Look after my dog for me."

Frank called 999. Sabina fled. She was spotted running by a motorist named Joshua Grattage. It was later said that she was hitting herself with a hammer at regular, if erratic, intervals. Grattage tried to restrain her and was hit by a roof tile Sabina had in her pocket. Eventually, she made it to a bridge, where she jumped 40 feet onto the A50, breaking both her ankles and fracturing her skull.

It was the last act of madness Sabina Eriksson would commit – though certainly not the end of the madness.

Sabina Eriksson's mugshot

Sabina was arrested on suspicion of murder, while convalescing at the University Hospital Of North Staffordshire, on the 9th of June. Still in a wheelchair, she was discharged on the 11th of September, charged and taken into custody the same day. Ursula was released the same month. She made it back to America, via some time spent in Sweden. Never charged with a crime herself, she is now a member of the Sacred Heart Church in Belle Vue, Washington. Sabina's trial was due to start in February of 2009, the following year, but ultimately didn't begin until the 1st of September. There were reportedly problems in obtaining Sabina's medical records from Sweden.

On the 2nd of September, Sabina plead guilty to manslaughter with diminished responsibility. There was no explanation; every question put to her to was greeted with the reply of "no comment". The video from the M6 was never shown. The prosecution and defence both claimed that Sabina was insane at the time of killing, though not at the time of the trial. The defence claimed that Sabina was a secondary sufferer of Folie à deux, French for "a madness of two", going on to claim that she had transmitted insanity from her twin Ursula. The prosecution at Nottingham Crown Court accepted this. Sabina received five years, to be served at Bronzefield Women's Prison.

Though this information is rarely included in the accepted timeline, on the 6th of December, 2012, some footage was uploaded anonymously to the internet that should significantly change the understanding of the events ten years ago. Shot at the same time as the footage that aired in both Traffic Cops and Madness In The Fast Lane, it shows two police officers, stood in the hard-shoulder of the M6 after the motorway incident, agreeing that the sisters should be given a "136" – a clause within the Mental Health Act that means the police can "hold" a person on account of their mental health, as well as having to give the detainee a mental health assessment. Neither of these things happened. It is believed that the police requested that BBC-Mentorn Productions, who shot the footage, remove the segment from the film. What this means is that Sabina should never have been released after just one day, meaning Glenn Hollinshead would never have met her, meaning Glenn Hollinshead never have been stabbed.

As to why he was stabbed, it's unlikely we'll ever know. Since her release from prison in 2011, Sabina Eriksson has disappeared, whereabouts unknown.

@jamesjammcmahon

UPDATE 14/9/18: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that Sabina Eriksson's trial was due to start in February of 1999. This has now been corrected.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.