Friday, March 31, 2017
Fake News Is Winning
Welcome to Can't Handle the Truth, our new Saturday column looking back at the past seven days of fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.
"The stories are fake, but the consequences are real," Scott Pelley of CBS's 60 Minutes intoned during a report on fake news that aired Sunday. The segment was a a vintage network TV investigative report with all the trappings. It was what your dad thinks of when he sees the word news. Pelly's main interview subject, and target, was a guy who's become famous selling lies and pretending they're on the level of 60 Minutes: the rabidly pro-Trump blogger and vlogger Michael Cernovich.
It did not go well—for Pelley.
The reporter listed a bunch of Cernovich's badly-sourced, misleading claims and asked him to defend this nonsense. Cernovich did the only thing you have to do to win in today's media landscape: He stuck to his guns. Cernovich called his stories "100 percent true" and insisted, "I don't say anything that I don't believe." Maybe you think Cernovich is a sleazebag, but it's doubtful that the interview did a whole lot to persuade anyone of that if they were on the fence. Afterward, Cernovich was bragging about how well he did.
It didn't help when Pelley segued into a clumsy, no-duh, exposé on fake social media followers. "Some fake news publishers use computer software called 'bots,'" he said, to audible roars of laughter from anyone under 50.
Then, on Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee held its first hearing about Russiagate—or whatever that whole mess is called—and fake news took center stage for a moment on Capitol Hill. When a former FBI agent and current foreign policy think tank researcher named Clint Watts answered a question about why Russia got so audacious with its propaganda during the 2016 election, Watts's exasperated answer explained an awful lot.
Watts brought big ideas. "We need a State Department, and a DHS website that immediately refutes when falsehoods are put out," he suggested. He also said media organizations need to slow down when publishing leaks, and consider whose agenda is being served. "What if they boycotted Wikileaks collectively?" he offered. (Given the various incentives of the media business, that particular proposal isn't like to get past the "what if" stage.)
But in the process, Watts laid out a fairly convincing case that Russian propagandists ramped up the creation of fake news because team Trump kept signal-boosting it on the campaign trail. That, he thinks, was why the propaganda worked.
"[Trump campaign head] Paul Manifort cited the fake Incirlik [Air Base] story as a terrorist attack on CNN, and he used it as a talking point," Watts said, referring to fake Russian reports of a terrorist coup attempt in Turkey. He also pointed out that time in October when Trump cited an apparent fake news story from Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik News. Watts also suggested that Trump has made life easier for Russian propagandists by repeating Russia's signature talking points about the election being rigged and by initially denying US intelligence reports about Russian interference.
If presidential candidates are willing to exploit fake news for their own ends, what chance does anyone have to discredit it—especially when a majority of Republicans trust Trump more than the media?
Overall, Watts was pretty resigned about the whole situation: "I'm going to walk out of here today. I'm going to be cyber-attacked. I'm going to be discredited by trolls," he told the very concerned-looking senators, who actually appeared to be listening intently.
Across the pond this week, the BBC rolled out an ad saying it has "always championed the truth." In the ad, BBC reporter Katty Kay walks by floating words and uses her finest newsy tone of voice to reassure the viewer that the BBC has "never taken sides in any war, revolution, or election," so it can call itself "the most trusted brand in news." When a venerable media titan like the BBC has to reassure people that it's objective, you know we've lost faith in our institutions.
And according to the BBC, we can't even trust scientific papers. The Beeb ran a pretty brutal investigative story about the world of scientific research being chock full of papers that were in some way fraudulent. Apparently there were 319 reports of misconduct between 2011 and 2016 among UK researchers. Ivan Oransky, of the science blog Retraction Watch, told the BBC that no one knows how much bad science is out there: "Universities and funding agencies and oversight bodies are not reporting even a reasonable fraction of the number of cases that they see."
BBC's report on fake science was a reminder that, as Buzfeed also pointed out this week, and VICE pointed out three years ago, it's not just Trump and Russia—the internet is filling our brains with fake stories about everything, and the real media hasn't been able to get people to realize what is and isn't true.
So remember kids: Don't believe anything you read on the internet, or anywhere! Except this.
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Jaymes Mansfield Wishes She Could've Been the Villain of 'RuPaul's Drag Race'
This post contains spoilers for the March 31 episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race.
On every competitive reality show, someone has to bear the ignominy of being the first person eliminated. On this year's season of RuPaul's Drag Race, that dubious distinction went to Jaymes Mansfield, the campy comedy queen who couldn't decide if she was a floozy or if she was snoozy or if she was a little bit of both. Instead of a mini-challenge this week, we were treated to a drive-by cameo from Lisa Kudrow for no good reason whatsoever, then it was straight to the maxi-challenge, where the two teams took each other on in a cheerleading competition.
After a rather blasé lip sync to "Love Shack" by The B-52s, we bid adieu to Jaymes, who never seemed to take his blonde bimbo screen siren schtick far enough for it to reach the cheap seats. Now she's back in Milwaukee, bringing it home for those Midwestern girls. While she would have liked to have stuck around long enough to get into a terrible conflict with another queen, Jaymes told me she isn't bitter about getting sent home.
VICE: How are you feeling today, after your elimination?
Jaymes Mansfield: It feels like the curtains are drawn, the mirrors are covered, I'm going into a withdrawal. No, I'm totally kidding. I'm fine! It [was filmed] a year ago. It's so spooky watching it back, it's like watching a horror movie.
What did it feel like watching yourself on the show?
Watching myself is mortifying. There's other girls that are so self-confident, and so into themselves, they're like, "I look really great." And I'm like, "Oh. I look like Leatherface."
We saw in the challenge that some of the queens were very difficult on you when you were trying to learn how to be a cheerleader. How did you feel when that was happening?
I was like, it's a competition. Most of us were just going crazy just from being there. It's like a bunch of hens cooped up in a hen house so of course we were pecking at each other. And I was the most prettiest and most talented, so I guess I was the easiest target.
Have you ever done cheerleading before?
No, the most physical I have ever been was that I took a yoga class. I was not mechanically inclined for that challenge, let's put that out there. But that didn't stop me from trying! I put my body on the line.
The judges were saying that they didn't feel like you were taking it far enough, you weren't being crazy enough, how do you feel about their criticism?
When I was up there on the judging day, I was like any performer when you hear criticism, you don't agree with it. In your mind you're like, "Well, they're all wrong. I was brilliant. I was marvelous, I don't know what they were thinking." I went into that challenge knowing I was going to be critiqued on something I don't do. So, if you don't do it well, you can't take it too personally. It's not like getting rejected for your act that you do every time you're on the stage.
Did you take those criticisms into account as you've been refining your drag over the past year?
No! The thing is that you're taking criticism from one person who is a drag queen, and the rest of them are distinguished guests. And the one who's actually a drag queen doesn't critique you anyway. So you take it for what it's worth, and either you accept it and you like it or you don't.
So there were a couple of weird things I noticed in this episode. One is that they showed a shot of this super creepy life-size RuPaul sex doll in the workshop. Did you see that?
It's a wax figure! Not a sex doll, gosh VICE. Head in the gutter!
Is it as crazy in real life as it is on TV?
I wanted to touch it and I couldn't. I really wanted to go poke it in the mouth. That's just the weird Midwesterner in me, I wanted to steal it's wig.
So they literally told you that you can't touch the doll?
Well it was on loan from Madame Tussauds. It's fragile.
The other thing I noticed was that it was really weird when Lisa Kudrow came in, said hi, and then left.
Yeah, I loved that. It was kind of like being at the petting zoo, where you're allowed a certain distance from the gate.
Did we miss anything? Did they let you say hi to her afterwards?
My biggest regret. I guess she was on a busy schedule because they shuffled her out of the room and I didn't get to shout out, "Thank you for inventing Post-its!"
Which of the queens do you think has a good chance of taking it all the way?
I thought I did, but apparently that wasn't the case. As far as other girls that are still there, I'd say look out for Peppermint because I know her history and I was a huge fan of her before I got on. You'll be surprised at what she can pull out.
So you said you thought you could take it all the way. What do you think you were missing? What is it about yourself that you didn't portray on the show?
I'd say I didn't rise to the occasion of being a good cheerleader. Which is fine, because it's never something I aspire to do anyway. As far as the whole show in general though, I feel like I gave a lot of myself and I got to present the best of what I brought. Or at least I got to present a good chunk of what I brought. I can't be too bitter about it. And, I got to be on the show, which is already winning in itself.
Were any of the girls really mean to you?
I don't feel dissed. I feel like I had a brilliant and beautiful connection with all of the girls when I first met them. I wasn't there long enough to grow to hate anyone, that's my big regret. I wish I was there long enough to hate people sooner. I wish I could have been the villain.
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How a Gay Pro Wrestler Became Mexico's 'Liberace of Lucha Libre'
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Dylann Roof Has Given Up
After receiving the death penalty in federal court back in January, Dylann Roof—the self-identified white supremacist behind the Charleston church massacre—will plead guilty to state murder charges, the Washington Post reports.
Roof's decision to plead guilty means the state's case won't go to court, sparing survivors of the attack and victims' family members from having to provide a second round of grueling, emotional testimony. In exchange for the plea, state prosecutors handed Roof a life sentence instead of the death penalty, a move prosecutor Scarlett A. Wilson described as "an insurance policy to the federal conviction and sentence."
"A guilty plea in state court means that if something very, very, very unlikely were to happen at the federal level, the state sentence would take effect and he would serve life in prison," Wilson wrote in a letter to victims' families.
Roof, now 22 years old, was convicted of all 33 charges brought against him in his federal trial—including 12 hate crimes—but it's unclear whether or not the federal government will actually end up executing him. Federal executions are rare, due in part to the relatively few number of federal death penalty cases that have been tried compared to those at the state level. Since the national death penalty was reinstated in 1988, there have only been three federal executions over the course of nearly 30 years.
In 2015, Roof entered the Emanuel AME church in Charleston and opened fire on a bible study group, killing nine black parishioners. He confessed to the attack, and refused council in his federal trial to prevent lawyers from claiming he was mentally unstable. He's repeatedly insisted he feels no remorse for what he did, writing in his jailhouse journal that he has "not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed."
"Sometimes sitting in my cell," Roof wrote in jail, "I think about how nice it would be to watch a movie or eat some good food or drive my car somewhere, but then I remember how I felt when I did these things, and how I knew I had to do something. And then I realize it was worth it."
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Sean Spicer Is Spreading Nonsense Conspiracy Theories
Depending on where you get your news, the name "Evelyn Farkas" might hold particular meaning for you. The former Obama administration official has found herself at the center of a new conservative conspiracy theory circulating around the internet—one that White House press secretary and walking bummer Sean Spicer helped propagate Friday at the daily press briefing.
Here's the deal with Farkas: She severed as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia and Ukraine from 2012 until October 2015. Fast-forward to March of this year, when the New York Times published an article about how Obama staffers had spread information about Russian interference in the 2016 election around the government—though they didn't leak anything—in order to make it easier to investigate. The day after the article dropped, Farkas went on MSNBC to discuss it. Here's some of what Farkas told to host Mika Brzezinski:
I was urging my former colleagues, and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill — it was more, actually, aimed at telling the Hill people: Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people that left.
She wasn't one of the officials discussed in the Times piece—she couldn't have been, since she wasn't part of the White House. She was just saying she encouraged her old buddies to keep that information about Russian hacking intact.
Two days after that interview Trump claimed on Twitter that Obama had wiretapped him. Why does that matter? Well, after conservative media spread Farkas's comments in late March, outlets like Fox News began reporting on the weeks-old interview as proof that the Obama administration had been spying on Trump's campaign and transition team. Which brings us to Friday's press briefing, where Spicer regurgitated the Farkas narrative. He told reporters:
The substance—the unmasking and leaks—is what we should all be concerned about. It affects all Americans, our liberties, our freedom, our civil liberties. Let's talk about some of the substance. On March 2, the day before the president's tweet, comments from a senior administration official foreign policy expert Dr. Evelyn Farkas, together with previous reports that have been out, raised serious concerns on whether or not there's been an organized and widespread effort by the Obama administration to use and leak highly sensitive information for political purposes. She admitted this on television by saying, "I was urging my former colleagues, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, I was telling people on the Hill, 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can.' I had a fear that they were essentially watching the Trump staff and he was worried about the Trump administration." That's what's out there, and I know NBC News has just reported something very similar… Dr. Farkas's admission alone is devastating.
This is a rather disingenuous reading of Farkas's statement. It implies that Farkas was encouraging people to leak, rather than just preserve information, and ignores that Farkas stopped working for the administration in 2015. As she emphasized in an interview with the conservative Daily Caller on Thursday, "I had no intelligence whatsoever, I wasn't in government anymore and didn't have access to any."
Spicer isn't the only Trump administration official to mention Farkas. On Thursday, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Farkas's statement was "incredible," saying if "that has anything to do with the issues in regard to surveillance of Trump transition team members is something that we need to figure out this morning and throughout the day."
It seems pretty figured out.
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Fighting a Refreshingly Honest Evil in ‘Baldur’s Gate’
Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.
The opening thirty minutes of Baldur's Gate are some of the strangest in the history of role-playing games. You don't begin as a dirt farmer or a chosen one (although we do get there). Instead, it all starts in Candlekeep, a giant library that contains thousands of volumes of arcane knowledge, pulled from every corner of the Forgotten Realms. Whether the character you have just created is a level 1 paladin, sorcerer, or a thief, it becomes apparent immediately that you have grown up surrounded by the biggest nerds in this entire branch of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. You've lived in this monastery-slash-megalibrary for your entire life. You were raised by a man named Gorion. The game really starts when you're forced to flee this place in the middle of the night.
It is during this midnight journey that you first encounter Sarevok. He's a horrifying figure in spiked armor, and he stops both the player and their adoptive father in their tracks with his small band of adventurers who are dead-set on making the player, well, dead. An epic fight ensues, or at least an epic fight in terms of what the Infinity Engine could do in 1998, and the adoptive father lies dead on the ground. Sarevok has slewn him—although you don't quite know who Sarevok is yet—and the player is left to wander around this weird world.
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Jared Kushner Won't Fix the Government
President Donald Trump spent the bulk of this week doing what he does best: slashing his way through a slew of Obama-era rules and actions, especially the ones intended to protect the environment. But on Monday, he took a pause to actually create something new: the White House Office of American Innovation (OAI). Run by Trump's senior aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose chief qualification seems to be running the real estate company built by his father and grandfather, the OAI will work with "thought leaders" (so far this seems to mean a ton of tech CEOs) to troubleshoot chronic governmental efficiencies. The idea is basically that the private-sector expertise of people like Kushner could make the government run better; some have speculated that this is part of the Trump team's attempted "deconstruction of the administrative state."
Experts on the left and right say the OAI is—outwardly at least—less about deconstruction, more about the uncontroversial goal of good governance, albeit pursued in an ideologically tinged manner. Kushner's initial goals for the office—improving veterans' services, developing new tools to fight the US opioid epidemic, upgrading federal tech, training, and logistics—are laudable. The catch is that this type of initiative is hardly innovative, and so far we have yet to see the OAI take any of the steps experts tell me will be vital for it to get anything done.
"There are a lot of open variables right now as to whether this will in fact be a productive exercise," said Max Stier, founder and president of the Partnership for Public Services, a nonprofit organization focusing on efficient public sector management.
Most administrations for over a century have tried to improve governmental efficiency, and every president since Ronald Reagan has prioritized working with private sector expertise. Bill Clinton launched a notable initiative that made a number of reforms; Barack Obama, who prioritized governmental efficiency bids in major speeches, made it a point to focus on the kind of Silicon Valley-style innovation that seems to get Kushner excited. (Critics claim Obama never took business leaders' advice.) As Mordecai Lee, a historian of governmental reorganization and efficiency efforts, pointed out to me, Congress has embedded internal performance analyses, critiques, and improvement functions into most federal agencies, while management overhaul is baked into the mission of the Office of Management and Budget. So Trump's executive order is nothing new.
Arguably the only real novelties the OAI offers are how quickly it was created, its placement within the White House, and the fact that it's run by a key member of Trump's inner circle. "This is one area where you can applaud the Trump team for getting started early," said Stier, "and for the fact that it has championship from the very top."
But Stier and others I spoke to agree that head start won't matter if the initiative isn't properly staffed. The thing about government is that it's not a business, no matter how often people insist it should be run like one. The public sector is beholden to vast arrays of interests and constrained by inviolable rules, which can be utterly alien to businessmen used to more total control. Experts agree the OAI won't succeed unless it's helped by people from within agencies targeted for reforms who know what's worked and failed before. That kind of buy-in is especially important because, as the Harvard governmental innovation expert John Donahue told me, "Career civil servants tend to view the inevitable new-administration efficiency crusades as the 'flavor of the month,' which they'll basically wait out."
Or as Chris McKenna, an expert on transferring management models at the University of Oxford, put it: "You could import Goldman Sachs bankers into the [Catholic] Church as much as you want. But I don't think that's really going to improve it" on its own.
Stier cautioned that the OAI can't be efficient unless it is explicit about what it wants to accomplish, draws from the work of previous administrations, and gets financial backing for its plans in annual budgets. "This is a long road," he added. "It's not one of those things where you sign an executive order and wash your hands of it. It's something that requires a deep commitment over time where you constantly pay attention to it, or it doesn't make much of a difference."
Kushner might have a problem with the "paying attention to it" part. Beyond the OAI, he's tasked with managing Middle Eastern peace talks and general foreign policy in that region, as well as Canada, China, and Mexico.
"Each one of those is a gargantuan job in and of itself," said Elaine Kamarck, who created and managed the massive Clinton-era National Performance Review, a rough parallel to the OAI. "You don't give more than one of those jobs to one person and expect anything to happen—it's just not realistic."
"Going around and insulting bureaucrats and making war with everybody in government is not exactly a great way to start."
So far, the OAI reportedly meets twice a week in Kushner's office. Kushner is apparently proud that none of the core team members have political experience. The way he talks about citizens as customers and government as a business suggest he may believe his private-sector knowledge is all he needs. (His tenure as a real estate mogul and newspaper owner was a bit spotty, reportedly.)
McKenna believes language describing the OAI as a "SWAT team" suggests it will stay a small unit as well, capable of making proclamations about tone and general ideas at best, but lacking the staff to dive long or deep into any issue or agency. "And frankly, going around and insulting bureaucrats and making war with everybody in government is not exactly a great way to start," added Kamarck.
Even if the OAI is, by design or by ineptitude, just an optics-boosting playpen for Kushner and business leaders and rail against federal inefficiency, there's no real harm in that. It'll just be another case of Trump not actually getting anything done.
Stier cautions that there's not a lot to go on from the OAI so far. Kushner could surprise everyone by bringing in long-term dedicated lieutenants adept at navigating the tricky maze of bureaucracy and special interests that has to be negotiated during any substantive reform effort. But Donahue's impression is much more grim: "I suspect it's not a fundamentally serious enterprise."
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Mike Will Made It Might Be Our Generation's Best Collaborator
When we meet Mike Williams on a chilly Monday afternoon in East Williamsburg, the sky is the same shade as his cream-colored Metallica hoodie. The Atlanta producer, better known by his beatmaking moniker, Mike WiLL Made-It, arrives calm and collected. I ask if this laid-back demeanor means he's recuperating from a blow-out weekend. On Friday, Will released his newest record, Ransom 2, and celebrated his 28th birthday. But no. "I just tried to take it easy and have a good day," he confesses. "I've had a lot of work going on, so it was nice to slow down a little."
The week before releasing Ransom 2 in its entirety, Will had been dropping its tracks one after another. First came "Gucci on My," an infectiously simple trap ode to the Italian house, featuring 21 Savage, Migos, and YG. It was followed by the Lil Yachty-assisted "Hasselhoff," "Come Down" — with one of Rae Sremmurd's three appearances — and Future's high energy guest spot, "Razzle Dazzle." Will saved some of Ransom 2's best tunes for the final countdown. "Aries (YuGo)" saw an unexpected turn from Pharrell, while "Perfect Pint" united Gucci Mane and Kendrick Lamar over an evocative Rae Sremmurd hook. Both of these bangers arrived in the 48 hours before the full release. You can understand why he wanted a chill weekend.
It's astrologically fitting that Ransom 2 dropped on Will's birthday. Susan Miller recently described March-born Aries as "always full of ideas, always thinking of new ventures to start, and always so enthusiastic about what you are doing." An even more cosmic excerpt from the birthday month reads: "One of your most engaging talents is your ability to build the ultimate dream team that gets results." When Will rolled out the rest of Ransom 2's 17 tracks on Friday, his fans found Young Thug, Rihanna, Big Sean, Ear Drummers signee Andrea, and 2 Chainz also in the mix.
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We Asked Doctors About Patients' Dumbest Health Beliefs
Even reasonably well informed patients walk into doctor's offices every day with assumptions that are 100 percent false. We asked three health care providers on the front lines to share the most common misconceptions that drive them nuts—and to shed light on the truth.
Green mucus means you need antibiotics. From amoxicillin to Z-packs, antibiotics rank as one of medicine's greatest discoveries—but as the name implies, they only work against illnesses caused by bacteria. Meanwhile, viruses deserve the credit for colds, flu, and most sinus infections, says Myers R. Hurt III, a family doctor at Diamond Physicians in Frisco, Texas.
Contrary to the belief of many patients and even some doctors, Hurt says, the color of the stuff oozing from your nostrils and clogging up your coughs has more to do with where you are in the course of your illness than what's causing it.
Continue reading on Tonic.
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How Black Female MCs Changed the Conversation Through Hip-Hop
Seated at a coffee table in an unidentifiable diner, revolutionary singer Nina Simone once told her interviewer that "an artist's duty [was] to reflect the times."
And she was right.
So far, there hasn't been a time where feminism, hip-hop, and the black women in it weren't desperately needed.
Unsurprisingly, black female MCs aren't widely acknowledged for their contributions to feminism throughout the ages. And it's even more unsurprising that the sexism and misogyny black female MCs faced (and still do) are generally less talked about. We're quick to minimize black female hardships in hip-hop largely because we've never had to put a microscope on what it's like to be a black female MC in a male-dominated industry.
That's why the voices of stars like Nicki Minaj ring so loudly when they make bold statements like "you need no man on this planet at all, period" in their interviews.
Minaj cuts through the noise because she's been the biggest voice in female MCing (despite contestation) for quite some time now. And her Marie-Claire interview certainly wasn't the first time that the ten-time Grammy nominee had expressed the double standards she's faced so far.
As a hip-hop fan and black female feminist, her position in the rap world is of particular interest to me because of her control (or lack thereof) in the game. She's in a position where she's had to be everything to be everyone, simply because, for a long time, there were no others.
And though some might find it difficult to consider her feminism groundbreaking, her very presence alone poses a particularly interesting question: What does it take to be a black female feminist in the game?
Before we can really look at Minaj's contributions, we must first take into account the magnitude of the female MCs who have come before her. We must examine the hardcore hood feminists who were at the forefront of intersectional feminism when it came to race, gender, social class, and even sexuality before hip-hop took the world by storm.
The year 1979 saw the rise of Harlem's Sylvia Robinson ("Rapper's Delight"), Philadelphia's Lady B ("To the Beat Y'all"), and the Sequence ("Funk You Up") as some of hip-hop's first female MCs.
During this time, feminism was in its second wave and began resisting conventional notions of beauty and femininity in lieu of social equality (e.g. The 1969 "bra burning" protests against the Miss America Beauty Pageant in Atlantic City.) At this time in New York, crime rates were soaring in the South Bronx as crack cocaine started rolling in. There was a major blackout, and a lot of community housing was literally on fire. The late 70s also saw the rise and fall of the disco era, with local clubs packed to the sounds of Donna Summer and Soul Train. For black people, it was also an interesting time of revolution with social justice movements like the Black Panther Party. But hip-hop would still prevail despite its rough infant stages and, in a way, ended up reflecting the disco sounds; it was music you could move to.
The 80s saw the rise of Salt-N-Pepa, both of whom were quintessential masters of ceremonies. Moving the crowd with their high energy and flow, their presence on the mic was larger than themselves. Often described as the "first Lladies of hip-hop," these women overcame being subjected to "misogyny, adversity, economic hardship, incarceration, sexual abuse/objectification, [and] violence" in the industry, according to Source. The self-described feminists pushed the envelope of what rap could mean for women at a time when there just weren't that many female MCs. In 1995, the duo won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, making them the first female rap group to ever win that award.
During this time in the late 80s, feminism was starting to center on sexual liberation and control of the female body. With fights for reproductive rights, abortion reform, and birth control, feminism was starting to critique women's roles both in and out of the home and differentiate between sex and gender.
At the same time, MC Lyte was boldly making a name for herself in Brooklyn, stepping onto the scene at just 16 years old. Unlike other female MCs, like Roxanne Shante, who'd been introduced to the rap game as the "first ladies" of mostly male rap groups (she later went solo), MC Lyte made her emergence into the hip-hop scene alone and remained that way. She wasn't afraid to take on topics of sexuality, consent or talk about just how great she is.
But it wasn't until the third wave of feminism during the mid 90s that we really saw a reformation of sexuality in hip-hop. At that point, the feminist movement had de-mystified and un-tabooed notions of women's sexuality within the academic sphere. Now, with the help of female music artists, women's sexual liberation was becoming more than just a literal conversation at the table.
It was ranking high on Billboard charts, selling out in record stores, and playing at local clubs. Female MCs were using hip-hop as a medium and their music as a platform to send strong messages about femininity, sexuality, gender representation, and self-worth louder and clearer than a lot of activist monikers could.
The 90s were peak times for female MCs in hip-hop with artists like Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, Lauryn Hill, Queen Latifah, and Missy Elliott, to name a few.
Unlike the MCs before them, Kim, Foxy, Hill, Latifah, and Missy all held their own on what it meant to be an individual artist. There was less of an emphasis on who the best lyricist was or who had a better flow, with record labels honing in on appearance, individuality, and sex appeal.
Kim and Foxy were two of the first high-profile female rappers to take sexual representation of the black female body to a new level. Kim not only owned her sexuality through raw, aggressive, lyrical stories, suggestive poses, and bold hairstyles; she also gave black women the permission to do so (though some would argue that this still "fell in line" with the black male fantasy and gaze.)
Nevertheless, Lil' Kim would go on to make the top of the Billboard charts with her debut album, Hard Core.
Where Kim catered to the "sex sells" model, rival Foxy Brown was "no nonsense and fearless" according to former VIBE editor-in-chief Smokey D. Fontaine in a documentary interview. The self-professed "dark-skinned Christian Dior poster girl" was also highly successful, selling more than 109, 000 copies of her debut album, Ill Na Na, in just one week.
And who could forget the pioneering anomaly that is Lauryn Hill? Critics still wax poetic about The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as being one of the greatest albums of all time.
Her music had a spirituality that was matchless, timeless, and impossible to recreate. She was unapologetically herself in an era when female rappers were being marketed as sex symbols and didn't think twice about conformance.
Hill reinvented what the female MC could look like. Her thunderous flow, soul-hitting lyrics and vocal tone and ability were not only unmatchable—they had also never been done before. She was the first MC to gain recognition for bridging the gap between womanhood and spirituality and contextualizing the struggles female MCs faced in the game.
In documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women in Hip Hop, Fontaine goes on to note that "hip-hop is based on the truth… [But] when it comes to a woman's story, being who they are more often than not is going to have tales about how a man has done them wrong. Ultimately, [fans] don't want to hear that."
But when it came from Hill? Yes, you did.
She wasn't afraid to call out inconsistencies in our culture and hypocrisy in the industry.
Queen Latifah ("Who you callin' a bitch?"), 'Da Brat, Left Eye, and Missy Elliott were also artists who ignored the idea of appearing sexy or hard, and were all MCs who diversified and revitalized black women through creative videos, hood aesthetics, and innovative sounds.
Both hip-hop and feminism didn't care about how black women were represented until we claimed an identity for ourselves. Lil' Kim and Foxy were among the first to embark on their journey to reclamation by intentionally identifying as "bitch" in their music.
The Hampton Institute, an online grassroots think tank, likens the now more popular term "bad bitch" in the rap world as both "a woman who de-emasculates her man by running the household and being financially independent, or as a woman who simply does not know her place."
It's less likely that Kim and Foxy would align themselves with the latter.
However, mainstream feminism was still largely dominated by heterosexual, middle-class, Western white women who didn't create open, inclusive spaces for women of color, lower-class women, queer women, sex workers, or domestic workers. Feminism was still high off of the effects of earlier waves that fought for equal women's rights, such as the right to vote (which, again, did not include poor women of color) and was only now warming up to the idea of multidimensional feminism (or, as author and poet Alice Walker coined in the late 1960s, "womanism.") Activists and feminist writers like Bell Hooks took matters into their own hands with essays on everything from the racialization of black women within feminist spheres, to the dissonance among the issues, to the lack of unity between race and social class, to the radicalization of black self-love both in and out of our communities.
The very presence of female MCs meant acknowledging them not only as equals in the rap game but as black female rappers in the rap game and as black women in general. It meant humanizing a demographic that had long been dehumanized since slavery. And it also meant identifying the obvious misogyny in hip-hop, a still highly patriarchal arena that had desensitized, normalized, and even commercialized the use of the words "hoe" and "bitch" in relation to black female bodies. Regardless, music by female MCs posed a threat to the very pillars of patriarchy in hip-hop, all the while trying to figure itself out. A black female in a male-dominated space became political, whether she meant it or not.
Much like in modern-day activism, black female bodies have often been at the forefront of the battlefields raising our fists for our communities while simultaneously being ignored or forgotten about. Sparking meaningful social change in hip-hop means not being afraid to speak about sexuality and identity politics outside of an underground subculture. It also means acknowledging the double standard between Nitty Scott MC and Kendrick Lamar, who, as one of my hip-hop-head friends would say, is "able to make politically charged music and still exist on a mainstream level."
Is it fair to criticize MCs for wanting to move forward in a mainstream career riddled with sexist sentiments? Should female MCs work harder to "demand" respect in an industry that has profited off of [black] female slander? Or should female rappers come together to form a collective of sisterhood in order to tackle the issues together? And is it even up to female MCs at all?
And ultimately, can hip-hop today exist without misogyny?
The answer is not a clear one.
Being a black female MC today means an introspective look at what it truly means to be both an artist and a black woman in our current sociopolitical climate. It's getting real raw, gritty, and honest with oneself—a responsibility that our male counterparts aren't always tasked with.
Hip-hop feminism and former female MC contributions birthed unapologetic acts like JUNGLEPUSSY and Princess Nokia, both of whom make music with strong messages of female positivity, freedom of sexuality, and a celebration of the female spirit. In a talk with Galore TV, Nokia, whose Afropunk-esque roots speak for themselves, points out that "before hip-hop got [really] corporate and it had those qualms of aggressive masculinity that were almost a prerequisite to sell records, hip-hop was very female-oriented."
We're now seeing a renaissance of new, independent artists whose work dismantles the narrative that says you can't be successful as a trans rapper, queer tomboy or an Afro Latinx bruja without pandering to the male gaze.
And gone are the days when women needed to prescribe to problematic notions of female objectification and "video vixen-ism." Artists now are moving away from larger narratives like these and slowly tapping into their own personal and political truths. We're reverting back to a time when art was an exploration of who we were as individuals and less about how we could be marketed, packaged, sold, and distributed to the masses. There's now less of a need for artists to actually sign with labels in order to be successful, affording MCs the artistic freedom and ability to build their brand, identity, and overall aesthetic, organically.
In other words, the music industry is slowly morphing into what black female MCs historically have had to be: self-sufficient and grassroots.
It only makes sense that rappers like Young M.A., Quay Dash, Kari Faux, Jean Grae, and Nezi Momodu would be a significant part of this shift with sex-positive/laden messages and carefree black girl vibes.
The waves and the droughts of female MCs makes us question why, then, someone like Nicki Minaj can truly be considered monumental to feminism in hip-hop. For someone who's continuously claimed the "queen of rap" title but failed to adequately defend her position, it leads us to wonder: With such power and visibility, is Minaj really a celebration of womanhood in hip-hop through her music, message, or actions?
Even rival Remy Ma, after her second diss track, admitted that though she "[didn't regret ["shETHER"], [she was] not particularly proud of it," and believes that women "work so much better when [they] work together."
Minaj's feminism, though positive, is rooted in monopoly; feminism becomes a much less nuanced conversation when you're the only woman in the room. With power comes responsibility, and Minaj exists in a unique space where she is the only high-profile voice at a time when we need to hear more from intersectional communities and backgrounds. To consider her contributions socially significant is to discount the work that was done before her, or work that exists outside of her music and audience.
And for Canadian black female pioneers like Michie Mee and newcomers like the Sorority, it's also an uphill battle in an industry that has historically struggled to stand on its own two feet (and, despite, Drake, still struggles to stand now).
While the future of feminism and the female rapper is still a bit hazy, one thing is for certain: The tides are now changing, and it's time we all acknowledged the groundwork laid before us.
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How a Cruel Foreclosure Drove a Couple to the Brink of Death
"Franz Kafka lives… he works at Bank of America."
Judge Christopher Klein's words kick off an incredible ruling in a federal bankruptcy court in California last week, condemning Bank of America for a long nightmare of a foreclosure against a couple named Erik and Renee Sundquist. Klein ordered BofA to pay a whopping $46 million in damages, with the bulk of the money going to consumer attorney organizations and public law schools, in hopes of ensuring these abuses never happen again—or at least making them less likely.
The ruling offers numerous lessons in the aftermath of a foreclosure crisis that destroyed millions of lives. First of all, the judge specifically cited top executives as responsible, not lower-level employees. Second, the sheer size of the fine—for just one foreclosure—is a commentary on the failure of America's regulatory and law enforcement system to protect homeowners, despite the financial industry's massive legal exposure.
Here are the horrific facts of the case: the Sundquists purchased a home in Lincoln, California, in 2008, but ran into financial trouble when Erik's business faltered in the recession. Like so many others, the Sundquists were told by Bank of America's mortgage servicing unit to deliberately miss three payments to qualify for a loan modification. Despite agonizing over ruining their perfect credit, they did so.
Inspectors contracted by the bank staked out the home, banged on the doors and tailed the family in cars, terrorizing them to keep tabs on the property.
Bank of America promptly lost or deemed inadequate roughly 20 different applications for a loan modification. At the same time, BofA pursued foreclosure, a dubious practice known as "dual-tracking."
The Sundquists eventually filed bankruptcy in June 2010, triggering an automatic stay, whereby Bank of America couldn't foreclose until after the case concluded. But BofA sold the house anyway at a trustee sale and ordered eviction. Inspectors contracted by the bank staked out the home, banged on the doors and tailed the family in cars, terrorizing them to keep tabs on the property.
The bank didn't correct the violation for six months, by which time the Sundquists, spooked by the constant surveillance and belief they would be evicted, moved into a rental property. Bank of America finally rescinded the sale, but that put the Sundquists back on the house's title, which is to say on the hook for mortgage payments and maintenance fees.
By the time the Sundquists got the keys back to the home in April 2011, they found all furnishings and appliances removed and the trees dead. The homeowner's association charged them $20,000 for the substandard landscaping. Bank of America refused to take responsibility for the damages; in fact, they were still threatening to foreclose. Interest on the loan accrued at $35,000 a year this whole time, increasing the amount due.
The couple, both world-class athletes (Renee was an Olympic–level ice skater in Italy, Erik an NCAA champion soccer player) were physically and emotionally broken by the ordeal, what Judge Klein termed "a state of battle-fatigued demoralization." Erik attempted suicide with pills. Renee suffered a stress-related heart attack and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She routinely cut herself with razors as an outlet for her pain. In a journal documenting six years of this nightmare, Renee Sundquist described constant stress. "All I do is cry," she wrote.
The Sundquists won a case in state court against Bank of America in September 2013, but the violation of the stay, the heart of the wrongful foreclosure claim, had to be decided in federal bankruptcy court. There, the Sundquists found a judge who empathized with the abuse layered upon them.
In a 107-page opinion, Judge Klein found that BofA definitively violated the automatic stay and wrongfully foreclosed on the homeowners. "Throughout, the conduct of Bank of America has been intentional," Judge Klein wrote.
By law, judges can impose actual and punitive damages in this type of case. Judge Klein ordered $1.074 million to the Sundquists in actual damages, for housing expenses, attorney fees, lost income, damaged property, medical bills, and emotional distress.
For punitive damages, Judge Klein stressed that the award had to be "sufficient to have a deterrent effect on Bank of America," especially because of the role of top management and corporate culture in the case. The judge cited communications from the office of Bank of America's CEO, both to the Sundquists and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency currently under attack by the Trump administration. After the Sundquists petitioned CFPB about the case, Judge Klein wrote that BofA lied to the agency by denying that they ever foreclosed.
"The oppression of the Sundquists cannot be chalked off to rogue employees betraying an upstanding employer," Judge Klein wrote. "This indicates that the engine is driven by direction from senior management." He even added that the misconduct of the CEO's office "strayed across the civil-criminal frontier."
This unusual candor hints at executive culpability for foreclosure fraud. "The judge signaled something very important here, which every regulator knows," said Eric Mains, a former FDIC official who left the agency to fight his own foreclosure case. "This kind of corrupt culture can only be maintained with knowing approval from the top executives."
After a long discussion of how to best punish BofA, Judge Klein decided to award $45 million in punitive damages, but to give them to entities that fight financial abuse, including the National Consumer Law Center, the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, and five public law schools in the University of California system (UC-Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Hastings Law School). Klein added that the Sundquists would be protected from having to pay their mortgage until BofA pays up the $46 million.
"Certainly this opinion is a shot across the bow for the bank mortgage servicing operations," said Alan White, a law professor at City University of New York.
Check out Motherboard's documentary about the strange, troubled fate of the smart gun in America.
In a statement, Bank of America stressed that the Sundquist loan dated back to 2010: "The processes in place at the time were subsequently modified; regrettably our performance in this particular case was unsatisfactory." The statement from BofA added, "We believe some of the court's rulings are unprecedented and unsupported, and we plan to appeal."
But if one bank is ordered to pay $46 million for just one foreclosure, it begs the question of whether the federal government settled on the cheap in its more systemic investigations of America's largest financial companies after the 2008 crash. "The governmental regulatory system has failed to protect the Sundquists," Judge Klein wrote, and that goes double for the millions of homeowners who suffered similar fates, yet didn't contest their cases or find a judge willing to act on their behalf.
The Obama administration responded to the foreclosure crisis by effectively letting banks off the hook with a series of settlements. Government officials have repeatedly touted these actions, even as subsequent scrutiny revealed the headline numbers to be grossly inflated or at least misleading. But if the going rate for mega-bank legal exposure is $46 million per egregious foreclosure, it's safe to say the feds dropped the ball in a big way. And the judge's hints of criminal culpability for top executives, not low-level paper-pushers, clarifies the enduring shame of law enforcement for failing to indict a single major executive for financial crisis-related crimes.
"This is not just an indictment of one big bank, but all of them that continue with this kind of illegal conduct with impunity and no measurable governmental oversight to stop them," Mains said.
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We Talked to Jason Segel About the Afterlife
Jason Segel made his name working in comedy—nine seasons on How I Met Your Mother, numerous big-screen collaborations with Judd Apatow's camp, rebooting the Muppets for a new generation of kids—but lately, the 37-year-old actor is interested in projects that tackle "the big questions," as he calls them. That's how he ended up following his acclaimed turn as David Foster Wallace in 2015's The End of the Tour with the lead role in The Discovery, the second full-length feature from Charlie McDowell, the director behind 2014's mind-bending marriage thriller The One I Love.
The Discovery depicts a world in crisis: A scientist (played by Robert Redford) has proved the existence of an afterlife, which spurs millions of people around the globe to commit suicide, just so they can cross over to the other side. This dystopian premise is the bleak backdrop for a romance between Segel's character and a woman who's fighting the urge to self-destruct, portrayed by Rooney Mara.
Describing the plot in any further detail would spoil the film, but suffice it to say, Segel's latest movie indeed deals with some big questions. It's a quiet film, one that tries to offset its melancholy with humor, and one that's draped in fog as it ponders what makes life worth living and what happens after we die. In the spirit of The Discovery, I recently tried to get some answers to these questions from Segel himself. Our discussion is below and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
VICE: Did working on The Discovery force you to re-examine your ideas about the afterlife?
Jason Segel: I think that one of the big problems with the world today is that we don't often acknowledge that any idea that we have about the afterlife is a guess. And anyone who proceeds with assuredness in their point of view, they're sort of missing the point that this is a mystery. That's the wonderful point of it—you're supposed to surrender to the mystery of it all, and the second you try to name it, you've really missed the beauty of it in a lot of ways. For me, what's cool about the movie is that it asks questions as opposed to giving answers, and to me the function of art is that you experience the piece and then you go and have a discussion. But I didn't go in with any particular belief about the afterlife. I think what's sort of hard about spirituality... David Foster Wallace put it best in "This Is Water" — the fish don't know what water is. And one of the things that's hard about spirituality is you want to look outside for it, but you're right in the middle of it, so it's very hard to see. You're in it right now.
What's interesting to me is that I don't even know if you can really describe the scenario the film puts forward as "an afterlife." It doesn't conform to the dichotomy of either being in paradise or being punished.
It's funny, because we've talked about the afterlife a bit in talking about this movie, and when you examine a lot of views of the afterlife, some of them feel like this duality of the best thing you can think of versus the worst thing you can think of. It's a little like a Warner Bros. cartoon: When the good guy dies, he floats up to Heaven and there's people playing harps, and all your loved ones are there, and there's a banquet of all his favorite foods, and the bad afterlife is hot pokers and you're burning in fire and all that. I think that as religion and science start to converge—which is what's happening now; there are semantic differences, but science is starting to talk about multiple dimensions just as religion always has—you start to wrap your head around more sophisticated versions of an afterlife, where maybe the worst thing isn't fire, maybe the worst thing is nothing.
What do you think happens after we die?
I think really the only thing that I've been able to deduce from my short time here is that there seems to be some value in being good to the people around you. And there seems to be a lot of relief found by living in the present. That's really as far as I'm able to go in terms of drawing conclusions.
Were you raised in a very religious household?
I was raised with a Jewish father and a Christian mother, going to Episcopalian school in the day and Hebrew school at night.
So you got a few different perspectives.
I did, and I was very interested in comparative religion when I was younger, and still am now, and I read a lot of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and all that sort of stuff, and it really seems like in the venn diagram of spirituality, being selfless and kind seem to be the ones that really emerge.
That sounds simple, but it seems to elude a lot of people.
Yeah, I think if you get too caught up in what God does and doesn't want you to eat, you're sort of missing the point, you know?
Did you take comfort in the idea of the afterlife in The Discovery?
I don't know that I took comfort in it. I really take a lot of satisfaction in making movies, or books, or being involved in art that broaches some of the big questions. That's been one of the things that has been really interesting to me over the past three years, when I took a minute—my TV show had ended, I had more time on my hands, and got to think about what I wanted to do, and realized I wasn't in my twenties anymore, and I wasn't scared of girls anymore. Making movies where that was the premise didn't really apply to what my life was like anymore, being a grown man. [ Laughs] I thought I should start making things I watch. And when I got this script, this was a movie that I would put on the moment that I saw it was available.
What would the worst-case scenario afterlife look like for you?
I actually oddly just did a movie about religion, about Hell—a movie about a real minister who started preaching that there was no Hell. It was a This American Life podcast, his name's Carlton Pearson. In that process, we talked to a lot of ministers about their visions of Hell, and the one that really hits me in a very visceral way is eternal separation from God.
I've heard it characterized that way, and I feel like that's the kind of frightening that sneaks up on you.
You know what the best comparison I can think of is? The day after a breakup— forever.
One of the themes in the film is this idea of getting a second chance. If there was one thing or moment in your life that you could change, do you know what that would be?
One of the things that I've learned as I've gotten older is that I am really happy with where I am right now. And any little change you make affects that—it took every mistake along the way to lead to now. I actually think there's a bit of hubris in wanting to change things, or in thinking you should change things. Wanting to change things is very normal and natural, of course, but in thinking that you should change something, it implies that you know better than whatever might be in play here, call it God or whatever you want. I've learned that some of the moments I thought were the worst moments in my life, have turned out to be fundamental anchor points in my life.
Because they're part of the foundation of who you are?
Yeah, and a lot of times they're the incentive for a pivot. The great successes and the great failures, they end up being pretty similar in retrospect.
If it turns out that there is a points system that factors into the afterlife, do you think that being a minister is going to help put you over the edge?
Well, I'm an internet minister—if anything, I think I get negative points for that. I just signed up and paid, like, 25 bucks.
The Discovery is currently streaming on Netflix.
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How an Opera Singing WWII Veteran Founded One of the World's Largest LGBTQ Charities
It's easy to forget exactly how stigmatized LGBTQ people were in the 1950s and 60s. Before Stonewall was a blip on the horizon, queerness was a DSM-classified mental disease, and those who had it were subject to draconian government witch hunts. LGBTQ folks were deemed a national security risk, gay sex was illegal, and bartenders were even prohibited from serving drinks to known homosexuals in some states. While California had legalized gay bars in 1951, police raids were still common, and patrons would be arrested, then outed the next day when their names and addresses were published in local newspapers.
But during a decidedly dark period for LGBTQ Americans, José Sarria was a beam of light. A fearless and outspoken drag performer, Sarria would go on to become an under-celebrated, larger-than-life activist for queer rights—and a founder of the Imperial Court in 1965, which, according to them, has since become the second largest LGBTQ organization in the world. With a blend of high royal drama, queer pageantry and serious activism work, the Court today has over 70 chapters across North America. Each chapter raises funds in their local area through annual balls, the money from which is used to support a variety of causes.
This Saturday, the exhibition, Over The Top: Math Bass & the Imperial Court SF opens at the Oakland Museum of California, featuring Imperial Court artifacts displayed alongside the work of Math Bass, a contemporary California artist. The exhibit will be a portal into decades of essential queer history, but for those who don't live in the Bay Area, the first step to getting to know the Imperial Court is getting to know Sarria.
After being honorably discharged from the Army during WWII, Sarria headed to San Francisco, and began working as a drag queen at the Black Cat Café in the city's North Beach district. Patrons were known to push tables together upon which Sarria would belt out arias from Carmen, modifying the story to suit herself. Then billed as "The Nightingale of Montgomery Street," due to her love of opera, she developed a cult following.
In 1961, Sarria moved into politics, becoming the first openly gay candidate to run for political office in the world, amassing 6,000 votes and finishing ninth out of 33 candidates in a bid for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The show of support crystallized the gay community as a formidable voting bloc, making one of the first historic turns in the gay rights movement.
The following year, Sarria and gay bar owners from across the city formed the Tavern Guild of San Francisco (TGSF)—the first gay business association in the country—to combat police harassment of gay men and gay bar patrons. As recounted by historian Nan Alamilla Boyd in Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 , TGSF grew into "a marketplace of activity that, in order to protect itself, evolve(d) into a social movement."
As a member of the group, Sarria convinced gay men to demand fair jury trials instead of quietly pleading guilty after police roundups. As a result, San Francisco's courts soon became so overloaded that judges began requesting prosecutors produce evidence before going to trial. And when cops arrested drag queens under an archaic city ordinance that outlawed men who cross-dressed with an "intent to deceive", Sarria distributed name tags to fellow drag queens that read "I am a boy." Offending queens need only display the tag to disprove an intent to deceive, and Sarria successfully helped put a halt to discriminatory police raids.
Sarria collaborated with TGSF to raise funds through social gatherings, dances and events. Chief among them was the legendary annual Beaux Arts Ball, and in 1965, TGSF members showed their appreciation for Sarria's contributions by crowning him queen of the ball. But Sarria wanted to be more than just a queen, and during the ceremony, she proclaimed herself to be the "Absolute Empress of San Francisco."
As Empress, Sarria worked with TGSF to establish "The Imperial Court," as a project that focused on raising money for civic causes. Sarria formed a council to govern her office, and based on European royalty, appointed "czarinas" to preside over San Francisco's historically LGBTQ districts: Polk Street, South of Market, and the Castro.
The Imperial Court system evolved and proliferated in the early 1970s, establishing courts in Vancouver and Portland. In 1972, the Court began crowning Emperors, too, with each elected leader reigning for one year. Over time, District courts steadily spread across the country. Empresses rode live elephants through the city's Gay Freedom Day parade, and celebrities like Mel Brooks emceed Imperial Court festivities. In 1978, Carol Channing was crowned Honorary Empress of California.
As the Court grew, Sarria never lost his flair for dramatics. At some point, he assumed the suffix "The Widow Norton"—a reference to Joshua Norton, a San Francisco oddball and local celebrity during the 19th century who once proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States. Thus, Norton was posthumously declared the father of the Imperial Court, in the same way that Sarria is considered by the group as its mother. Sarria started an annual pilgrimage to Woodlawn Cemetery in Colma, California to visit the grave of her imagined husband, with coronation ceremonies for San Francisco's elected royalty taking place at the site.
In the 80s, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, the Court assumed a more serious tone, concentrating their fundraising efforts to support HIV/AIDS research and services. Sarria's annual pilgrimage to Norton's grave assumed new meaning as the LGBTQ community began participating to mourn their dead.
In the years since, the Court's fundraising has touched countless causes beyond HIV/AIDS. According to the Imperial Court SF's official historian, Matthew Brown, the organization has dedicated funds for everything from victims of domestic violence and the homeless to emergency relief rescue dogs—even the construction of a youth swimming pool in the city's Hunter's Point district.
Sarria passed away in 2013 at the age of 90, having lived, he said, to see the Court evolve past his wildest aspirations. And the Court has since aimed to expand and reinvent itself while still retaining Sarria's penchant for theatrics. Current Chairman John Carrillo said one key to the Court's future lies in inclusivity. "We've created "Mizz" and "Mizter" titles and drag king categories, so lesbians, trans people, and our straight allies can participate as well," Carrillo said.
This year, the reigning Empress and Emperor of San Francisco, Mercedez Munro and Nic Hunter, have created a collectively-owned scholarship program for trans students. "I want the trans community to know that we see them, and that they have an ally," said Munro. "We are most definitely stronger together. The LGBTQ community is my family. And when we see each other as family, we can accomplish great things." It's a sentiment Sarria would surely love, and one that lay at the heart of his life's mission.
Over The Top: Math Bass & The Imperial Court is on display at the Oakland Museum of California from April 1st to July 23rd, 2017.
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Heroin-Esque Fish Venom Could Be the Next Big Painkiller Breakthrough
This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.
The "heroin-like" venom of a fish found on the Great Barrier Reef could be developed into new painkillers, say researchers from the University of Queensland. While a bite from most poisonous fish will inflict excruciating pain on its victims, the fang blenny—a small, fearless fish found on the GBR and around the Pacific—appears to only use its venom to slow predators down.
The study, published Thursday in Current Biology, reveals the blenny's venom has a very strange effect on its victims. Immediately after a bite, blood pressure drops by around 40 percent. But it doesn't last—the venom merely incapacitates a predator long enough so the fish can escape the threat. Scientists believe the venom's unique chemical makeup could be used to develop new painkillers.
"Its venom is chemically unique," says UQ associate professor Bryan Fry. "The fish injects other fish with opioid peptides that act like heroin or morphine, inhibiting pain rather than causing it."
Associate professor Fry says the fang blenny is one of the most fascinating fish he's ever studied, particularly its fearless nature compared to its small size. "Their secret weapons are two large grooved teeth on the lower jaw that are linked to venom glands," he says. The UQ study, which involved collaborators from the Netherlands and the UK, found these fangs make the blenny fairly unique within the animal kingdom. While most venomous creatures use their poison to kill predators or to stun prey to eat, the blenny's fangs are purely for self-defense.
Bryan Fry argues the uniqueness of the blenny, from its venom to its evolution, highlights why conservation of the Great Barrier Reef is vital. "If we lose the Great Barrier Reef, we will lose animals like the fang blenny and its unique venom that could be the source of the next blockbuster pain-killing drug," he says. "This study is an excellent example of why we need to protect nature."
Recent studies of the Great Barrier Reef have found it's dying at a far faster rate than scientists initially believed. Terry Hughes, director of the Australian government-funded Centre for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, told the New York Times his team found two-thirds of the reefs in the GBR's north were already dead. "We didn't expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years," he said.
In March, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority announced the reef is experiencing yet another mass bleaching event. It marks the first time bleaching at this scale has happened two years in a row. The Australian Government's plan to save the reef—which focuses on improving water quality and land management—has faced broad criticism that it fails to tackle the underlying problem that's killing Australia's iconic reef: climate change.
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I Meditated Inside NYC's Quietest Art Installation
A whisper is 40 decibels, a normal conversation, 60. A loud brunch reaches 70 or 80, while a screeching subway clocks in at around 100. A screaming jet engine is 110 decibels. Sound waves higher than 10 decibels are absorbed by pyramids and wedges jutting from walls, floor, and ceiling like stalagmites and stalactites inside Doug Wheeler's PSAD Synthetic Desert III, now open to the public at New York's Guggenheim Museum. It's the quietest room I've ever been in, and according to architecture consultancy Arup, among the quietest places in the world's 7th-loudest city.
I know this from personal experience, having lived exclusively next to major subway stations in my years. If it's not the train itself that wakes you up at 3 AM, it's the aggressively drunk partiers shouting about how much fun they're having. That's why, when I heard about the Wheeler's new installation, billed as the quietest room in the city, I hauled ass to get there. Synthetic Desert is a semi-anechoic chamber filled to bursting with a sound absorbent material called basotect. Standing inside a specially-designed room tucked into the heart of the Guggenheim simulates Wheeler's own journeys into the barren desert of northern Arizona. I exit a noisy subway platform, and breathe a sigh of anticipation.
Wheeler is a 60s-era minimalist painter-turned-light and space artist similar, in some ways, to James Turrell. He's concerned with peeling back human perception, using soft light, rounded corners, and rigid standards of cleanliness to cultivate otherworldly experiences. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles, then spent years funding his groundbreaking works out of pocket, one at a time, well before "immersive experience" was a buzz word.
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New York Is Getting Serious About Closing the Hellish Jail on Rikers Island
Americans have been hearing horrible stories for years now about life on Rikers Island, the miserable New York City jail complex where suspected criminals often languish for years and sometimes die. After fighting, with some success, to improve conditions there, reformers gravitated toward a more drastic solution in 2016: shut the hellhole down. And now they seem to be on the cusp of some kind of victory, with City Hall poised to get on board, the New York Times reports.
According to Judge Jonathan Lippman, who headed an independent commission tasked by the City Council with examining how best to reform the jail, Mayor BIll de Blasio is set to announce his own support for closing Rikers as early as this week. This comes after the mayor previously expressed skepticism of closing the place. Meanwhile, the commission's own recommendation, which will be made public on Sunday, is apparently to transfer inmates out of Rikers and into smaller jails throughout the five boroughs at the cost of about $10.6 billion.
Opening a system of modern complexes across the city could improve safety and make it easier for family members to visit inmates—which can be critical to keeping them grounded in society. And the plan could help New York begin to repair its reputation for mistreating people who haven't even been convicted, and focus on redeveloping the notorious island.
"It's good for the quality of justice in this city and beyond," Herbert Sturz, a member of Lippman's commission, told the Times. "Rikers after all these years can change."
Many view Rikers as the epitome of what's wrong with America's jail and prison system. Reports by the media and federal government have painted it as a place where guards beat inmates—especially the young and mentally ill—without cause or punishment, and where merely being on a correction officer's bad side can land you in solitary confinement for long periods. Perhaps most infamously, Kalief Browder, a teenager from the Bronx accused (but never convicted) of stealing a backpack, committed suicide after spending three years on Rikers, despite ultimately being freed.
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A Review of Jamiroquai’s First Show in Seven Years by Someone Who Doesn’t Know Shit About Jamiroquai
This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.
It's the day before Brexit Day, I'm in Paris for Jamiroquai's first live show in seven years—and I have no idea why I'm here. Until a few hours previous, my only reference points for Jamiroquai were the video for "Deeper Underground" which routinely pissed me off throughout my teens as it aired on MTV2 between what felt like every other song, and that scene in Napoleon Dynamite where Napoleon dances to "Canned Heat" in front of an auditorium of bewildered but also extremely impressed peers. At a packed Salle Pleyel—one of his five headline dates that sold out in actual seconds—I essentially played the role of the entire supporting cast of Napoleon Dynamite; bewildered but also extremely impressed.
The thing about Jamiroquai is that, in my opinion, if you break them down into individual components they make no fucking sense. There is the obvious stuff—their name is a portmanteau of "jam session" and a reference to the Iroquois Native American tribe; they had a didgeridoo player for eight years; this music video—but let's consider Jay Kay, for a second. Jay Kay: The group's centrifugal force and main component that catapults them from the realms of "musician's musicians" into the forefront of mainstream pop culture. His voice, his moves, his many, many big hats—these are the things we think of when we think of Jamiroquai. We don't really think of them as what they are on paper, which is a multi-membered funk/acid jazz band born out of a London scene also comprised of James Taylor Quartet and Brand New Heavies. Can you imagine James Taylor Quartet or Brand New Heavies selling out The O2 twice over and sending the internet into a collective frenzy in 2017? No, you cannot.
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ICE's Crackdown on Immigrants Now Affecting Surgeons, Green Card Applicants
After President Trump took office, he promised his immigration crackdown would focus on deporting people here illegally who have committed crimes—or as he put it, the "Bad Hombres." Now it looks like that epithet extends to people who are in the country legally or going through the proper immigration channels, including prominent surgeons and green card applicants.
On Wednesday, five people on their way to meet with officials from US Citizenship and Immigration Services in Lawrence, Massachusetts, were arrested and detained by ICE officials, WBUR reports. Two of the five had no criminal record and the rest had a few parking violations, according to an ICE spokesman. At least three of the people arrested were in the process of applying for a green card.
Brian Doyle, an attorney for one the green card applicants, told WBUR the recent arrests send an intimidating message to those trying to apply for legal residency.
"If they don't show up [to their meetings], it's what's called abandoned... USCIS just sort of assumes that they don't want to go forward with it," Doyle said. "But now, if they do show up, trying to take that first step and they're detained, it can lead to them being removed."
Then on Thursday in Houston, Texas, immigration authorities told two neurologists they had 24 hours to leave the country after a technical error was made on their immigration paperwork. Dr. Pankaj Satija and Dr. Monika Ummat, a married couple from India, had been living in the US legally for more than a decade and specialize in epilepsy as Texas Children's Hospital. They managed to get a 90-day temporary stay to sort it all out, but the confusion could leave their patients without care.
"I have 50 patients today and 40 patients tomorrow," Satija told Chron. "I'm just concerned they'll be left in a lurch. They could land up in the emergency room."
Both incidents suggest the Trump administration isn't going to be kind to people looking to immigrate to the country legally, and isn't doing a whole lot to instruct ICE to weigh deportation priorities on a case-by-case basis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions added to that sentiment on Monday, vowing to "claw back" federal money from cities that generally offer illegal immigrants a safe haven from deportation—so-called "sanctuary cities" like New York, LA, Seattle, and Austin.
According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 53 percent of Americans believe undocumented immigrants should only be deported if they've committed "serious crimes." Only 22 percent believe immigrants should be deported for "any crime"—like, for instance, getting a few parking tickets.
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Bookmark This Sandwich for the Next Time You’re Starving at 2 AM
Late-night dining is a guilty pleasure that we all partake in from time to time… or four times a week, if we're on the same wavelength. I mean, hey—you go to happy hour, then you're off to a show, then you stop by a friend's house afterwards or get wrapped up in an impromptu Tinder date, and the next thing you know it's 2:06 AM, you're fucking famished, the taqueria is closed, the falafel place is closed, AND the bodega is closed. All is wrong with the world. You feel as though you might die of starvation in your sleep if you don't eat something very satisfying this instant.
But your cupboards have limited offerings within. What to do? What to stock in your fridge and pantry, so that next time, you don't have to resort to eating the tongue out of one of your leather shoes again?
Michael White of the Altamarea restaurant group may be a world-renowned chef, but he feels your pain. And he's got just the medicine: the ultimate late-night sandwich.
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War Under Trump Means More Troops, More Deaths, and Less Caution
While Donald Trump may be having trouble passing big pieces of legislation or getting his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries past the courts, the president has a lot of autonomy when it comes to how the seemingly never-ending wars in the Middle East are prosecuted. Though Trump criticized the Iraq War during the campaign, he also said he'd embrace brutal—and legally questionable—tactics against groups like ISIS, including "going after" the families of terrorists. As with a lot of Trump's worldview, it seemed unclear what he wanted to do in the Middle East.
Two months after he took office, there's a little more clarity: Trump has ramped up the aggression in the global war on terror, and shows no sign of slowing down. He approved a raid in Yemen by Navy SEALs that turned out to be a disastrous failure; a US airstrike against Mosul, Iraq, probably killed dozens of civilians and is being investigated; the rules of engagement in Somalia have reportedly been loosened, potentially putting civilian lives at risk; and though it sent hundreds of Marines to Syria to support anti-ISIS forces, the administration has stopped publicly announcing troop deployments.
America has been at war in in the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan for most of my lifetime, but these moves seem to signal a serious escalation. To sort through what this all means, I called up Omar Lamrani, a senior military analyst at the geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor to ask about how Trump's military policy differs from Obama's.
VICE: What are the major differences between Trump's policy in the Middle East as opposed to Obama's?
Omar Lamrani: We're still in very early phases of seeing what's gonna come out of the Trump administration. In general terms, we're not really seeing a major shift in military policy, the reason being that the Obama administration was already equally engaged in the fight to begin with. It's not like the Trump administration can all of a sudden come up with this brilliant strategy that has not been done before—the United States has been engaged in this fight for a very long period of time, and has tried all the good options.
Where we do see a difference is in the Trump administration's willingness to be a little bit more aggressive—or less cautious is a better way to phrase it. What we saw in the Obama administration, especially toward the end of his two terms, was the micromanagement of huge military operations in the Middle East and around the globe. Before a US military strike could happen, or before a significant special operations force raid could take place, the last decision was always gonna be on the desk of President Obama. So far what we see from the Trump administration is a far less micro-managing style. Trump doesn't seem to be very keen on being involved in the day-to-day or the week-to-week operations, and is giving his generals much more leeway in directing the fight the way they see fit.
Obama tended to be very cautious and hesitant to allow additional forces, and he was very averse toward the risk of mission creep. That's something that's really removed now. We're seeing the limits to numbers of troops being negotiated or removed, or we're seeing additional US forces being deployed toward Iraq and Syria, we're seeing the increased use of airstrikes, we're seeing increased raids in Yemen and Somalia. There tends to be perhaps a different rate of involvement, but it's still pretty much the same strategy of how you defeat ISIS as it was during the Obama administration.
Watch: Meet the Woman Helping Banksy Bring Art to the West Bank
Recently Glenn Greenwald wrote an article headlined "Trump's War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised." There's also a perception among some that the Trump administration has liberated the military from already very loose rules of engagement. Do you agree with these conclusions?
It's a controversial issue because, first of all, the Pentagon is outright denying that their rules of engagement have changed. That's number one. Second of all, it's really hard to know whether they've changed, because the Pentagon does not release the exact rules of engagement for operational security reasons. When you have an increase in forces deployed, especially when you go into these tough urban environments like Mosul, there is much more risk of civilian casualties. But I don't think we have enough information, frankly, to contradict the Pentagon and say that the rules have actually changed.
Do you think the January 29 raid in Yemen—which resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL and 23 civilians, including an eight-year-old girl—is indicative of the Trump administration's willingness to take on more risk or disregard civilian casualties?
That's actually very different, and it's interesting that you bring that up. When we talk about missions like the one in Yemen, that's not about the rules of engagement, it's more about how much risk the military is willing to take in conducting strikes. That's something we can see is changing, and we can conclusively say that that is happening—we have have evidence from both US policy statements as well as clear evidence from the ground that US military is being more aggressive in its actions against violent extremist organizations across the Middle East.
Do you think generally Trump will ramp up operations in the Middle East?
I think that that will be true, and we're already seeing it. In Iraq there's been talk about removing the force limits that have been set previously by the Obama administration. Already we're seeing increased forces. Recently 300 extra US airborne troops were sent to Mosul, and upwards of a thousand troops landed in Egypt to fight against ISIS in Raqqa. The US is deploying heavy artillery, helicopters, and gunships in large numbers. Many of these things may not have been undertaken by the Obama administration necessarily.
According to Airwars, there's been a massive increase in civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria this month. Do you think this could have happened under Obama?
It's entirely possible that this could have happened under Obama administration. Keep in mind that part of the reason why we may be seeing this, is the nature of the fight on the ground. In Mosul, we're seeing close-proximity fighting, heavy fighting. Basically you're talking about an environment where you have hundreds of thousands of civilians packed into a tight urban environment with close-quarters combat happening all the time. There is a very, very high risk factor there of a strike mission increasing civilian casualties, and that risk factor is increasing as that battle progresses deeper into the old town, where it's very heavily built up. And keep in mind, civilian casualties have happened under the Obama administration as well.
I think it's really dangerous to read too much into the number of civilian deaths and ascribe it purely to Trump's decisions, or Obama's decisions. It has more to do with the battlefield, and the evolution of the battlefield. Where we do see a difference between the two administrations is that Obama's administration was always very concerned over mission creep. They were concerned that the more they got into Syria, the more they got into Raqqa, the harder it was going to be to extricate themselves—as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past decade. The Trump administration takes a bit of a different stance: OK, forget about those kinds of restrictions, we must focus on the fight, and we'll be less concerned over the risk of mission creep.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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