Sunday, April 30, 2017
VICE Without Context: 'Go to Hell, Martha Stewart'
As copy editor of VICE.com, it's my job to read every word that appears on our site and make sure everything is in its right place—that all the commas and semicolons are where they need to be, names and places are spelled correctly, and "fuccboi" is written in the proper style. Over the course of the day, some sentences from our stories catch my eye, usually because they're good or funny or odd or compelling in some way. Often they're about sex. Here they are now, presented with zero context, for the week of April 24. To find out why they exist or how they were used, simply click the link for the full story.
- The uniformed soldier getting sucked off.
- The man you're looking for has never had a girlfriend.
- I thought it would be easier.
- I would say that I am a composite of the two but not as pretty as either of them.
- People are so into labeling right now.
- His autopsy report showed it was the only non-drug substance in his stomach.
- And if they got a job, it was something like opening letter bombs.
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A Killer Whale Pod Is On a Killing Spree Off California’s Coast
One should not fuck with an orca.
Orcas are the wolves of the water: they are smart, they are strong, they are vicious. I mean, we call them killer whales. A pod of these water locked marauders are living up to their name as they go on a killing spree in California's Monterey Bay according to Nancy Black, a marine biologist in the area.
The pod involved in every single one of the kills is about nine strong. Recently, the pod treated a crew of whale watchers to a lifetime of nightmares when they slaughtered a grey whale calf in front of them.
Black said that since April 20 they have taken down five grey whale calves in ten days and that an orca she calls Emma is leading the attacks.
"It's her mother, (Emma) her daughter, and her granddaughter, plus another couple of her offspring," Black told the Mercury News. "So it's a whole family, because killer whales do live in family groups."
Emma and the rest of her fam have been joined by other orcas who want in on the fun. The first kill involved about 33 of the creatures—the hanger-ons probably came after hearing folktales of about the the crew. As for why this particular pod is so bloodthirsty, the explanations vary. It may be because the grey whales were late migrating to the bay this year so the orcas were particularly hungry for their traditional meal of baby grey whale, or they may be teaching their young to hunt.
Read More: Thanks to Climate Change, Killer Whales May Become the North's Top Predator
Either way, Black said that the Emma and her pod are "very good" at killing. They were able to murk a grey whale calf in 20 minutes the other day—something that takes a typical pod several hours.
It is unknown whether the orcas will continue their killing spree but, for good measure, take my hand child, let us pray they never find out about their brethren we keep in captivity.
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Stop Calling Ecstasy-Related Deaths Overdoses
On a Saturday night two weeks ago in Toronto, a 24-year-old woman died after collapsing in a nightclub in the city. Four other people were also hospitalized that same night after they were all taken ill—one in the same venue, and three in a different one. The local papers reported that woman who died and the people who wound up in hospital were all the victims of suspected drug overdoses involving MDMA. The press also reported that these incidents were likely caused by "a bad batch of street level drugs."
This description of events is fairly typical whenever there's a drug fatality in the nightlife scene, and is true of Canada just as much it is of the UK and US. Ecstasy deaths are often immediately reported as overdoses, before toxicology reports are available, and attributed to super-strength tablets that have been laced with toxic substances and are infiltrating nightclubs.
There is a big problem with this narrative: it's usually inaccurate at best and gives the public a superficial view of the actual dangers of taking ecstasy and how to mitigate them.
Ecstasy fatalities grab a lot of attention, despite being one of the rarest types of drug deaths. The most recently available from the Center for Disease Control showed that 52,404 people in the US died of drug-related causes in 2015. Opioids (prescription and illicit) were the main driver, contributing to 33,091 of those deaths. While the CDC doesn't record ecstasy deaths, a 2009 study estimated about 50 occur a year. How drug deaths are reported on in the media—and in turn how they are discussed in common parlance—is often misleading and sensationalized, loaded with prejudice about drug users and perpetuating potentially dangerous urban legends. Even the term "overdose," when used to describe the fatal results of taking MDMA, is often imprecise.
"The word overdose is misleading in a lot of situations, but particularly with MDMA," Henry Fischer, policy director at drug policy think tank VolteFace told THUMP. Fischer said the term is generally unhelpful when talking about deaths caused by illicit substances because an overdose is the ingestion of more than the recommended amount of a drug, and there aren't "doses" of illegal drugs, as such. "If you've taken more than you should have to enjoy the effects, if you've had an unpleasant time, is that an overdose?"
Read the full story at Thump.
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The Creepy, Insane, and Undeniably Romantic World of Cryonics
I'd expected to hear a lot of convincing arguments that would persuade me to sign up to have my body cryogenically frozen when I die, but proving that I'm more rational than Paris Hilton wasn't one of them.
"About ten years ago there was a rumor going around that she had signed up to have her body preserved, so my colleagues and I worried that perhaps Paris Hilton was more rational than us," says Anders Sandberg, a research fellow with the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. Sandberg is an expert on human "enhancement" who himself is signed up to be frozen one day.
On one level, of course, doing anything because Paris Hilton pressured you into it is a really bad idea, Sandberg admits. "But we humans are emotional beings, so the fact that some of our Oxford academic pride was wounded really did spurn us to bite the bullet."
As insane, or perhaps creepy, as it sounds, hundreds of people in the US are 'frozen,' stored in stainless steel chambers at a cozy -196°C in liquid nitrogen. Their cases are checked daily while they're kept "in stasis," as cryonic believers call it, waiting until new medical technologies can cure or repair whatever ailed them, whether it be a heart attack, dementia, or perhaps even cancer. At the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale Arizona, 150 "patients" are frozen in time, and another 996 have signed up for the same fate.
The Cryonics Institute in Clinton township, Michigan holds a similar number—150 humans, plus more than 100 pets. "Maybe the idea of reviving people who are cryogenically frozen sounds far-fetched, but in my field, you know that you can bring back the dead all the time," says Dennis Kowalski, a director at the Cyronics Institute who works as a paramedic by day. "I've been able to take a lot of what I learned from emergency medicine and integrate it into cryonics. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Death is a process, and we simply slow that process down. I like to say that we provide the ambulance to the hospital of the future."
Moreover, Sandberg points out, there are thousands—if not millions—of people alive today who were once frozen sperm or egg cells, or frozen embryos. "In a sense, those people were cryonically frozen, and yet they are today alive," he says. Moving up in size, scientists demonstrated last year that embryonic rabbit kidneys could be frozen, thawed, and grown into full-sized and fully functional organs, capable of transplant into living animals.
In the wild, Canadian wood frogs annually freeze solid, thanks to special proteins in their blood that act as a natural antifreeze and prevent the formation of ice crystals that would cause cell damage—so it is theoretically possible for an entire body to be kept below freezing temperature and later revived. Cryonisists have already been replicating this strategy for decades: All preserved bodies are not technically "frozen," because all the blood is drained out the moment they legally die, and slowly replaced with a biological antifreeze (along with a cocktail of more than a dozen different drugs) that perfuses into the body and prevents ice crystals from forming and damaging cells. Hence why a body that would be a toasty 32°C can be kept at -196°C potentially indefinitely. But sperm, eggs, kidneys, and frogs are one thing. What about that most human of organs, the brain? There's no point in being revived if your memories, knowledge, and personality don't come with you.
Read the full story at Tonic.
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Saturday, April 29, 2017
Seth Rogen Is Working on a Movie About a Terrible Music Festival
So, turns out that Seth Rogen and the Lonely Island crew are working on a movie about a music festival going to shit. Talk about serendipitous timing, given they couldn't ask for a better marketing campaign than the dumpster fire that was the Fyre music festival.
"This seems like a good time to mention the movie we are making with [the Lonely Island] about a music festival that goes HORRIBLY WRONG," Rogen tweeted.
Read more: Help, I'm Still Stuck in Hell, AKA Fyre Festival
The Lonely Island followed up with a tweet in which they jokingly said they were thinking about suing the people behind the festival.
For the few people uninitiated into the glory that is the Fyre Festival here's a little catch up: The festival was sold as a "luxury" music festival for loaded young people—one where they could mix with "influencers" and models. It was co-founded by Ja Rule and Billy McFarland. When some peeps showed up early to the festival they found not luxury but an complete and utter shitshow.
The tents weren't fully constructed, garbage was everywhere, there were apparently sharks off the coast, and, among other things, the exquisite culinary experience they were promised turned out to be a salad and some bread with cheese thrown on top. The festival goers went to Twitter to express their horror with the event and the internet, overdosing on rich kid schadenfreude, had a heyday.
As for Rogen's movie, the details remain scarce but it's going to be an uphill battle to write anything funnier than rich millennials 'gramming their bread and cheese plates.
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Sex Roulette to Vodka Eyeballing: Teens on Which Bizarre Trends They Actually Do
While some teens are already activists still living under their parents roofs, others are out getting wrecked on vodka tampons and trying to get high off of special mp3 files, at least according to alarmist local news segments and terrifying web articles warning parents of the next dangerous teen trends.
Most of these reports are written in the name of children's safety and proliferated because everyone loves speculation and feeling in the know about the teens—but do any of these reports ever ask teens what's going on? For Teen Week, Broadly interviewed real-life teenagers about these alleged dangerous trends to see if they actually occur.
Read More: How Meme Culture Is Getting Teens into Marxism
One of the teens I have on retainer is 19-year-old Nabil. He's a student at CU Boulder, where he's also an RA—so I expect him to have seen lots of crazy stuff. He's also asked to be described as a future billionaire and sex symbol, so here I am respecting his wishes. The other teens I interviewed are Kaitlyn (a former camper of mine) and Deirdre: Kaitlyn is 16 and lives in the suburbs of St. Louis, while Deirdre is 17 and lives in Virginia.
Vodka Eyeballing and Butt Chugging
The first supposed teen trend that I ask Nabil about is called "vodka eyeballing." It's pretty self-explanatory: adults believe that teenagers are using some kind of innovative contraption to pour grain alcohol into their eyeballs to get drunk. Nabil says he has heard of this. "One of my residents told me about it, he said one of his friends tried it," he said.
I was very surprised to hear this, as I thought I'd be debunking terrifying teen trends—not confirming them. Future billionaire Nabil picked up on my apprehension and started to explain that his school is a "huge frat university" and that they "have a ton of asuh dudes" before shocking me with another bomb: "That same dude started talking about butt chugging."
Literally everyone I know just drinks and smokes weed.
For those who aren't frat bros familiar with dangerous drinking trends, butt chugging is when you take a funnel and start chugging alcohol through your butt, which then enters your system faster than traditional consumption.
Alarmed, I asked Kaitlyn to verify the reality of these heinous acts. She quickly tells me that she doesn't know anyone who has vodka eyeballed or butt chugged. However, she does know girls that have vodka tamponed, which is when one soaks a tampon in vodka and then inserts it in an orifice to get drunk. Kaitlyn describes those who've vodka tamponed as "the super extra ones" at her school, but is certain that this alarming teen trend really does occur.
i-Dosing
The next trend is i-dosing, which is just a fancy name for MP3 drugs, where teens supposedly download tunes crazy enough that listening to them gets you high. This is definitely not a real thing according to Nabil, Deirdre, and Kaitlyn. "Literally everyone I know just drinks and smokes weed," said Kaitlyn, ignoring the fact that she just told me she knows girls who spike their tampons.
Read the full story at Broadly.
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Fyre Festival’s 25-Year-Old Organizer: “This Is the Worst Day of My Life”
Fyre Fest's organizers struggled to contain a debacle that became a national punchline on Friday after leaving hundreds of customers who had paid thousands for a star-studded "luxury" experience stranded on a remote island in battered tents with little food and no one in charge.
They promised to get all remaining ticket holders back to the United States by 9 p.m. Friday.
In a phone interview Friday evening, the 25-year-old tech entrepreneur behind the festival, Billy McFarland, called the previous 24 hours the "worst day of my life" and described the fiasco, which reverberated across social media, as essentially an act of God.
"Unfortunately we were hit by a storm early Thursday morning that caused some damage to half our tent housing and busted pipes and delayed flights that were arriving to the point where we weren't comfortable in our ability to resolve it, and we decided to postpone the festival," McFarland said.
He did not address the "villa" housing, which was sold on the website, but did not appear to exist.
He promised all guests would be "refunded in full" and promised free VIP tickets to a 2018 Fyre Festival, which he says will be held somewhere in the United States with a portion of proceeds donated to the Bahamian Red Cross He said he planned to donate $1 per ticket, though in another interview the same day he said $1.50.
The apology capped a 48-hour period where well-heeled millennials took to Instagram and Twitter to document failed logistics that left them stranded on tarmacs, wandering around a half-built festival, and at least in one case, locked in a Bahamas airport overnight.
Fyre Festival was intended to be a "once in a lifetime musical experience," where revelers could mingle with models and hunt for treasure on jet skis in between big-name artists' sets on a "remote and private island" in the Bahamas.
Read the full story on VICE News.
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The Five Worst Fake News Stories Trump Has Pushed on America
Welcome back to Can't Handle the Truth, our Saturday column looking back at the past seven days of fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.
As Donald Trump himself has pointed out, this whole first 100 days thing is a "ridiculous standard" for measuring success. He's right, of course: The hundred-day mark, which lands on Saturday, is premised on a meaningless number that humans only care about because the base ten counting system is rooted in the number of digits a primate has on its hands (exhales).
His first 100 days as president would only be worth mentioning if Trump had ever issued some kind of signed document that he referred to as "my 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again," featuring 60 measurable promises, or if he had created a "First 100 Days" section on the White House website, touting "bold action to restore prosperity, keep Americans safe and secure, and hold government accountable." If he did those things, trying to diminish the importance of his first 100 days would be disingenuous at best, or dishonest at worst.
"Disingenuous at best, or dishonest at worst" is practically Trump's motto, of course, right up there with "don't pay contractors" and "I did try and fuck her. She was married." For most of his public life, he's been an unreliable source of information—in fact, he's actually been a pretty reliable source of bad information about things with serious consequences. For instance, when talking about his real estate seminar, he said, "success. It's going to happen to you," but that school was actually a scam. Then there was the time he claimed that an "'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud." But it wasn't. And this other time, he claimed that on 9/11, he had "watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down," and that wasn't true either.
It's exasperating at times trying to hold Donald Trump to some sort of standard of honesty when A) he doesn't seem to care, and B) he has adopted the term "fake news" and weaponized it against organizations that criticize him. Trump's fake news label occasionally gets slapped on examples of bias or error that he's right to criticize. But usually Trump just pulls the term out of his ass to escape from reality. So as part of the continued effort to push back against that rhetorical slippage, here's some of the actual fake news Trump has unleashed on the world during the 100 days he's been President.
His inaugural crowd was the biggest ever
There's not much left to say about this. Trump promised "unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout" at his inauguration. The odds were always against that, given that Trump lost the popular vote and the inauguration was being held in deep-blue Washington DC, far away from most of his supporters.
It's possible that the timing of the viral photos that circulated on inauguration day may have made for Twitter-friendly sight gags that overstated the difference in attendance, but that doesn't change the fact that all available metrics say Trump's crowd was smaller than Obama's in 2009. Still, Trump could have just moved on, and crossed "biggest inauguration audience ever" off the list of possible human achievements he can claim—getting elected president at all is pretty good on its own, right?
Instead, at the first White House press conference of Trump's young presidency, his shiny new press secretary, Sean Spicer, had to devote much of his time at the podium to claims that Trump's had been "the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period." Then, when that was quickly debunked, Spicer spent days refining his attempt to wrongly paint the Trump inauguration as the most-watched of all time, mostly by cherry-picking data.
On January 23, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway gave a jaw-dropping interview to Chuck Todd saying team Trump hadn't been providing falsehoods, but "alternative facts." Conway's Orwellian slip of the tongue was a fitting kickoff to life in Trump's America.
There was significant voter fraud during the election
On January 23, Trump revived an idea he first tweeted shortly after the election: that his election win would have been even winnier if millions of people hadn't voted illegally. In a private meeting with Congressional leadership, he "claimed without evidence"—newspaper-speak for "probably a lie"—that 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants had cost him the popular vote. Two days later, Trump tweeted that he would try and devote government resources to investigating voter fraud.
For many years now, right-wing activists have spent a great deal of time trying to prove the assertion that voter fraud is a massive problem in the US. You, the person reading this, may be part of the almost half of Americans who believe in their hearts that election fraud is a problem in the US.
The revived right-wing fury over fraud at the polls led to new crackdowns on voter fraud, like Arizona's. And there are new voter ID laws now, like the one in Iowa.
But did Trump's actual investigation reveal widespread fraud, leading to his humiliating popular vote defeat by Hillary Clinton? No one knows, because that investigation never happened. But state-wide investigations have turned up nearly no fraud—just dozens, or possibly hundreds of instances. In an election involving almost 140 million ballots, that's pretty slim.
Sinister liberal imposters have been infiltrating town halls in red districts
On one hand, Trump's February 21 tweet is sorta right: Liberal groups were very much part of a groundswell of anti-Trump fury directed at lawmakers in February when they held events in their home districts. But calling them "so-called angry crowds" paints them as insincere. And saying the events are "planned out" makes them sound underhanded. When the conservative media ran with the story, it became a minor conspiracy theory: Liberal "plants" were ostensibly showing up and conducting a misinformation campaign at what should have been conservative town halls.
Republican lawmakers, mind you, are supposed represent their entire constituencies, not just the people who voted for them. So when a group like the Michigan People's Campaign shows up to express anti-Trump sentiment at an event in Detroit held by a Republican representative, that's not an evil campaign of misinformation from George Soros. That's just what democracy looks like (sorry).
People are being paid to protest Trump
Along similar lines, Trump would have you believe the protesters who showed up on tax day to demand his tax returns were "paid for." This goes back to something Trump told 60 Minutes in November about the people at anti-Trump demonstrations being "professional protesters."
This is a popular accusation in Conspiracy Land. A post on Infowars for instance, claims to have "proof" that anti-Trump protesters have been "utilizing paid protesters financed by George Soros." What it actually shows is that a liberal organization is hiring organizers. It's normal for an organization—the National Right to Life, for instance—to fundraise, and then use that money to organize a demonstration—the March for Life, for instance. It doesn't mean the people participating in a demonstration don't believe the stuff on their signs.
The narrator of the video embedded in the Infowars post wants to know why Hillary Clinton won't "command her SJWs to stop protesting" now that she's lost. To Trump and his fans, it's taken as an article of faith that no one would, in their heart of hearts, dislike Trump's policies enough to protest for free. This type of astroturfing is probably familiar to Trump, who appears to have planted supporters at presidential speaking engagements.
The Federal Elections Commission investigated Trump for paying actors to cheer at a campaign event in 2015, but they stopped investigating the matter because, not because the accusation was false, necessarily, but because Trump isn't alleged to have spent very much money.
Obama wiretapped Trump's Campaign
After Trump tweeted on March 4 that President Obama had his "'wires tapped' in Trump Tower" during the campaign, the Trump administration and other officials bent over backwards trying to retcon Trump's assertion into something true. Or if it couldn't be "true," something adjacent to a concept with a drop of truth in it. Or if it couldn't be a drop of "truth" per se, a drop of truth-flavored falsehood.
FBI director James Comey almost immediately asked the Justice Department to refute Trump's accusation. So then Conway tried to backpedal away from the whole idea of wiretapping—the surveillance state has many tools, she said, including smart microwaves. Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, concluded that there'd been no wiretap. Then Trump himself walked back the claim that there'd been a wiretap, pointing out that "wires tapped" was in quotes in the tweet, whatever that means. Then Spicer quoted Fox News talking head "Judge" Andrew Napolitano, who said the surveillance was carried out by British intelligence, but the British called that claim "utterly ridiculous."
Then Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee received a tip from a source that appears to have been the White House itself telling him that the deep state had conducted surveillance on members of the Trump transition team (though not his campaign) when they were communicating with targets of surveillance overseas. But there's nothing startling about that if you know how the US surveillance state works. "What would truly be 'startling,'" wrote Jon Schwarz of the Intercept, "would be if the US intelligence apparatus hadn't picked up many Trump staffers speaking with foreign targets of surveillance."
In other words, Trump's claim that "Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory" was not true, or based on anything remotely true.
But the effort more or less succeeded, since, according to a CBS poll, 74 percent of Republicans believe Trump's utterly false claim.
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Trump Voters Explain Why He's Doing Great, Actually
The mainstream media wants you to believe Trump's first 100 days in office have been a disaster. Courts have repeatedly blocked his immigration executive orders, using his own tweets as evidence that he wanted to instate a Muslim ban. His first attempt at repealing and replacing Obamacare was a comedy of errors. He's flip-flopped on many of his foreign policy stances, recently telling the Wall Street Journal, "Hey, I'm a nationalist and a globalist." This week he even admitted to Reuters that he thought the job of president would be easier than it is.
But most of that sort of analysis of Trump's first 100 days is written by people who didn't want him to be president to begin with—a category that includes me. So I reached out to a variety of Trump voters to see how they saw his presidency. (Since supporting Trump can be controversial in various workplaces and communities, several subjects asked not to be identified by their full names.) Here's what they told me:
Mo, a fifty-something healthcare professional in Tennessee
VICE: Which of Trump's campaign platforms are most important to you? Do you think he's made good on them?
Mo: Trump provided a list of over 20 names that he said he would choose from for the Supreme Court. He kept that promise. He has more than three and a half years to go in this term. I think the big government status quo mindset of politicians, including Republicans, are holding him back.
Something this administration did that I am very thankful for is the first-ever arrest for female genital cutting. The physician involved is believed to have been doing this since 2004. The law has been on the books since 1996. But it is the Trump administration when the first arrest is made.
What's the most important thing you want Trump to accomplish in his presidency?
Another conservative, constitutional Supreme Court justice appointment...or two. Plus more conservative justices in the lower courts.
As a healthcare professional, what do you make of his healthcare policy?
I don't fully know Trump's healthcare policy. I don't know if he fully knows it since what should be done and what can be done is not yet settled. I agree that ACA needs to go. It is already in the insurance death spiral that was predicted years ago by its earliest critics. People are insulated from the true cost of healthcare by health insurance and health prices are inflated to pay for those who receive care but do not/can not pay for it. Healthcare is not a right. We have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We do not have a right to the goods and services of others.
Have any of Trump's decisions in the first 100 days made you disillusioned with his presidency?
No. I do not regret at all that Hillary [Clinton] is not our president.
Chris, a 23-year-old bank teller in Vermont
VICE: Why did you vote for Trump?
Chris: I voted for Trump to weaken the moderate left. After the primary, the mood was that Hillary was going to easily win office. A Clinton victory would have set back the left wing of the Democratic Party for years, at the very least until 2020. Having won both the primary and the general election by wide margins, the party establishment would have had an excuse to sweep Bernie [Sanders]'s "revolution" under the rug, never to be seen again.
How do you feel about the mass protests against Trump?
They're a little too focused on social justice for my taste. Don't get me wrong, those issues are important, but the whole point of making sure Hillary lost was to promote socialism. The Democratic Party already has a solid set of positions on things like minority rights, women's rights, and abortion. Where's the march for healthcare, or Occupy Wall Street part two?
Which of Trump's campaign platforms are most important to you?
Infrastructure. That's one of the few issues where he and the left overlap, and I'm hoping his own party won't derail his planned infrastructure bill when it comes up for a vote.
Also, healthcare. The ACA made Democrats complacent. If Trump destroys healthcare then single-payer will grow in popularity. You can already see polls where support for it is over 50 percent just from the THREAT of the GOP messing with the ACA.
What do you make of the president's use of Twitter?
"Weaponized Shitposting," the #1 tool of the Australian army and Internet Trolls everywhere. A lot of people underestimate what Trump accomplished by winning over the "Alt-Right" and generally gaining a huge internet following.
April 29 marks Trump's 100th day in office. Do you think he's met his campaign promises? Do you believe he will?
He absolutely has not, and he won't, because he's being held back by his own indifference. All indications so far are that Trump finds actual governance to be boring and he leaves most of the work to rival factions of advisors, many of whom are in the political establishment and don't care about his "agenda."
Spencer Raitt-Forrest, a 23-year-old operating supervisor in New York City
VICE: Do you think Trump has met his campaign promises?
Spencer Raitt-Forrest: I think he's met more campaign promises than pretty much any other president in recent history. He is trying his best, I think his healthcare reform is garbage, and that's why it didn't pass. I'm happy the first round didn't pass. But if you ever read The Art of the Deal, that's all according to plan.
Have any of Trump's decisions in the first 100 days made you disillusioned with his presidency?
No. With exception of his fair trade policy, history shows that this will not work. [Herbert] Hoover tried it, he failed miserably.
Has Donald Trump's presidency thus far made you confident that he will make America great again?
I personally think America was always great. He has done a lot to reduce regulation on business, and as one who has studied economics in depth believe that any barriers of entry that are reduced are for the betterment of the economy. He's fulfilled the promises he could without Congress, and is working towards solutions for the ones he has not met. 100 days is really only a little over three months, that isn't much time at all considering the vast history and governance of the United States.
Jonathan, a 35-year-old insurance agent from Missississippi
VICE: Do you think Trump has met his campaign promises?
Jonathan: I would need a refresh on the promises. I'm sure there are more than 100. But so far, I think he's doing as well as I expected. He's pissing off everybody with his big brass balls and the economic numbers and the fact that Kim Jong Un is thinking twice about starting some shit is pretty great.
Do you think the press has covered Donald Trump dishonestly?
The press is doing exactly what he wants. He gives them stuff to talk about. His incompetence, his hair, his lack of regard for pomp and manners. I'm almost certain some coverage of it is dishonest. He's went out of his way to piss them all off. They are angry and when you can make someone angry you have (at least a little) control over them. Which is more than he had 98 days ago.
Have any of Trump's decisions in the first 100 days made you disillusioned with his presidency?
The whole Russian thing bothers me more than anything. Everything I've seen makes it look systemic. I came up with a theory that after failing at business ventures for years, he borrowed some Russian funds and now he's just trying to clear the debt before.
What's the most important thing you want Trump to accomplish in his presidency?
I want socialized healthcare because my divorce dictates that I'm responsible for my kids' medical expenses. I want him to call the Democrats' bluff on the government shutdown. I want him to fix all the military cuts Obama made. And I want him to campaign on the wall platform in 2020.
The GOP healthcare plan is more or less the opposite of socialized healthcare—people on the left like Bernie Sanders are actually the ones advocating for that. Trump's healthcare plan would make healthcare way, way more expensive and give people less government subsidies. Were you aware of that? Does that change the way you understand Trump? Did you think he would socialize healthcare?
Nah, he won't socialize healthcare. I never thought he would. I would like it though.
Jason, a 32-year-old digital marketer in Oregon
VICE: Which of Trump's campaign platforms are most important to you?
Jason: The biggest issues for me were staying out of the Middle East—Hillary wanted a no fly zone over Syria—and getting rid of judicial activists and putting originalists on the Supreme Court.
Have any of Trump's decisions in the first 100 days made you disillusioned with his presidency?
The two biggest things are Syria and Obamacare. He campaigned on ending nation-building, he can't get involved in regime change in Syria. Obamacare is what flipped me from a Democrat to whatever I am now, so seeing Trump screw it up is disappointing. He needs to either leave it alone until it collapses and forces Democrats to give them votes, or repeal it outright and force Democrats to give them votes. The "let's try to get as much through reconciliation as we can" plan is stupid.
What's the most important thing you want Trump to accomplish in his presidency?
Do not use our military to force regime change in Syria or any other country. No foreign wars.
Has Donald Trump's presidency thus far made you confident that he will make America great again?
I do not trust Trump. His actions on immigration, regulatory reform, DAPL/KeystoneXL, Gorsuch and his tax proposal have given me a small amount of hope that maybe by 2020 I will trust him. I never bought into any of the MAGA stuff, so I can't speak to that. What I can say is that I have absolutely no regrets voting for him over Hillary.
These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Friday, April 28, 2017
Tonight's 'Drag Race' Eliminee Says She'll Be Back
Last season on RuPaul's Drag Race, we were introduced to the bombastic Puerto Rican queen Cynthia Lee Fontaine, the queen who is seemingly incapable of going five minutes without making a joke about her "cucu." Always peppy, caring, and able to get a laugh with her twisted English, Cynthia was a fan favorite. She was sent packing just three episodes in, however, after daring to grace the runway with what may amount to the ugliest pair of gym shorts in Drag Race history.
Then, after her elimination, she received incredibly awful news: a diagnosis of stage 1 liver cancer. After beating it earlier this year, Ru decided to give her a second chance at the race, bringing her back as this season's surprise 14th queen.
But she couldn't quite turn her revival into a renaissance. In tonight's episode, her appearance as Sofia Vergara in the show's storied Snatch Game (in which contestants are challenged to deliver their best celebrity impressions) seemed poorly planned and wasn't funny at all. This episode, she made her second foray thus far into the bottom two—and while she was saved last week by Eureka's sudden departure due to a torn ACL, this week saw her lip sync for her life against Peppermint, a veritable lip sync professional. Cynthia didn't stand a chance, and ultimately, she sashayed away. She will be missed, but some of us could do without ever hearing the word "cucu" ever again.
VICE: How do you think you're going to feel after watching your second elimination this week?
Cynthia Lee Fontaine: To be very honest with you, I don't know. I put in a lot of effort and enthusiasm on Snatch Game, so hopefully people get to see my energy. This season I'm so happy, because the entire season, I was constantly one of the top three characters they mentioned. The promotion and exposure on season nine, for me, has just been fantastic. I'm very pleased and excited, even if I'm gonna be eliminated.
How was season nine different for you than season eight?
Season eight I was kind of lost because it was something new for me. So on season nine, I was like oh, I'm a pro, you know? I've got the experience, so I know how this goes.
You finally made it to the Snatch Game this time—were you excited to get to do your character?
Extremely. And let me tell you why—because I like to do impersonations. In the Latino American community, in drag, you do impersonations. On the show, in bars, in venues or whatever. I was so excited for my character, because she's Latina and very fun—I'm related to Sophia Vergara because I've been doing her for like a year and a half or two years. And I love to do characters, I love acting.
If you've been doing her for a year, why didn't people think your impression was better than it was?
It's choices, like Tatiana says. The show appreciates a performer or a contestant that appreciates pop culture history. And if you see in the past, there's just only like two or three characters with modern personalities, like Britney Spears. But the winners for Snatch Games are like, great performers from the past, you know? Actresses, faces from the past. And I think the show, and especially mama RuPaul, was looking for a character from the past that she loved, that influenced her history, to become the supermodel of the world. So maybe that's why my character—a fresh character—maybe probably didn't step out to the game on the Snatch Game.
Your lip syncing has been criticized a couple of times this season. Do you think it's harder for you because of the language barrier?
I don't think it's a language barrier—it's about accent, you know? My first lip sync for my life, I got criticized because people said "you don't know the words." It's not about that—it's the way that I do the pronunciation, to exaggerate the sentences or subjects or predicates in the lyrics. That happens to a lot of Latino girls working in the drag community.
There are often Puerto Rican drag queens on Drag Race but no one has ever won. Why do you think that is?
I think the drag community in Latin America and Puerto Rico, generally, is a bit different than here in the USA. Here in US, they look for a complete package—as an actress, singer, you know. In our country it's about, look—yes, it's about performance, because the venues in our country are only bars and nightclubs. But here in America you've got an opportunity to act, to sing. Here you get the opportunity to other stuff in the performing arts as a drag queen.
Don't take me wrong, we have great, great, complete package drag queens in our Latin American countries. But when you go to Drag Race and start filming, you do not expect the impact of "oh, I've got to do another thing, besides look and lip sync and dancing." You know what I mean? So I think it's a shock, and just adapting ourselves to go in that environment and expect to do all the performing arts.
We learned on this season that you battled cancer. How is your health now?
I'm doing great, it's almost two months of remission. I'm not gonna see my oncologist until next year, so that's great news. This cucu is healthy. And you never know. Wait another season or three and this cucu will be back!
Interview has been condensed and edited
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.
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The Support Groups that Help People Process Psychedelic Trips
"How do you come back from a trip?" asks Sherree Godasi, perched on a round cushion in the back room of a Santa Monica boutique that smells of incense and is covered with Tibetan prayer flags and portraits of Buddha. "One way I love integrating is swimming."
It's a Monday night and there's about ten of us sitting on floor pillows in a circle around Godasi, who is from Israel and wears her long auburn hair in two tight French braids. Godasi is what's known as a psychedelic integration coach, and the bi-monthly, donation-based meetings she leads are intended to provide support and guidance after a psychedelic trip induced by hallucinogenic substances. The aim, she says, is to offer a space for thoughtful integration—or the mental processing of a psychedelic experience long after the effects of a drug have worn off. It's an aspect of psychedelic experimentation that's often overlooked in mainstream culture, but that devotees say is equally as important (if not more important) than the trip itself.
The concept of integration has been around in some form or another for nearly as long as people have been seeking enlightenment through mind-altering substances. Modern enthusiasts trace the practice back hundreds of years to Amazonian as well as Native American tribes who took psychedelics in ceremonial settings in search of enlightenment. But in Western medicine, it wasn't until the 1960s that integration became a tenet of the psychedelic therapy movement, pioneered by radical California psychologists like Leo Zeff, a Jungian therapist who saw psychedelics as a tool for self-improvement, and James Fadiman, who co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto in 1975.
But only recently have coaches, therapists, and healers begun to advertise these services more widely and to the general public. Godasi is one of just a handful of psychedelic integration coaches that openly practices in Los Angeles, but groups like hers have started forming in cities across the country. The rise of so-called integration circles coincides with what many practitioners are calling a psychedelic renaissance, signaled by a new wave of academic research into the possible medicinal benefits of substances like psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in mushrooms) and MDMA. Godasi and those who seek her services hope that these above ground meetings will help legitimize psychedelics as real forms of medicine and therapy, rather than just party drugs.
"The field is so new and it's so needed because everyone knows people who drop acid or who roll on molly—right, most of us do—and these people are experimenting with in fact what are considered extremely powerful substances and medicine," Godasi told me in a phone interview. "Why is there a medical system to assist people who take Advil or overdose on sleeping pills, but not one to help someone who felt like they met their own god or became completely in love with their friend while taking MDMA?"
If Godasi today considers herself something of an expert on psychedelics, then it was only recently that she was still taking substances "kind of mindlessly," she says. Then an experience at Coachella three years ago shifted her whole point of view. "I took a huge dose of MDMA that completely changed my life and it was hard to get back into this world, you know, with everything that I understand now," she recalls. "All of the new and incredible universal knowledge and downloads that I received and understandings about the nature of humanity" left her crying the whole drive home, she says. But she had no idea what to make of this experience or how to integrate it into her everyday life.
It wasn't until the following year that she discovered integration during a psychedelic conference in LA called Visionary Convergence. The idea behind it, presented in a lecture by Berkeley-based clinical psychologist Susana Bustos, immediately clicked with Godasi. But when she and her friend Ashley Booth—the founder of the LA-based psychedelic advocacy group Aware Project—noticed there were few places in the city that offered integration support, they launched their own last year. The result is an organization called InnerSpace Integration, which laid the groundwork for Godasi's integration circles (she has since branched off and now leads them under her own independent brand).
"Because of prohibition, people don't have the kind of support and education to be able to make good decisions about usage," says Booth, who adds that those who go on ayahuasca retreats in Peru, for example, where it's legal, sometimes arrive home to find there's nobody else to talk about their experiences with. "We really would like to create these sort of gathering spaces for people to be able to continue to talk about their experience and how their integration process is unfolding," she says.
Most psychedelics are still Schedule I drugs, with LSD, MDMA, and Psilocybin listed in the same category for abuse as heroin. Which is why Godassi begins every integration circle with a legal disclaimer: She is in no way encouraging anyone to procure or ingest illegal substances. She also instructs the group to avoid naming any medicine providers—a preferred term in this community for what others might think of as drug dealers—or disclosing the locations where we may have taken hallucinogenic substances like ayahuasca, which in the United States is often administered illegally during group ceremonies in private homes or other underground venues. There's always a chance there could be undercover cops in the room, Godassi says, before alerting everyone to my presence as a journalist. (The members of the group have asked to remain anonymous in this article, many citing potential professional repercussions as a result of their use of psychedelics).
The integration circle is mostly self-directed, and Godasi says she prefers to sit back and observe rather than guiding the conversation. (She also leads one-on-one sessions that tend to be more intensive.) But getting the group to talk isn't always easy, and even though everyone is presumably here to get something off their chests, the room is frequently punctuated by awkward silences. Godasi scans the room, making eye contact and gently posing open-ended questions to find out who recently had a psychedelic experience they're struggling to make sense of. Once the group finally does start to open up, their anecdotes are sometimes prefaced with notes of caution that they've never told it to anyone before. When one person says he no longer relates to his friends after having done ayahuasca, Godasi jumps in with supportive questions intended to provoke dialgoue. "Our entire life revolves around relationships," she says. "So how do you come back and talk to people?" Think of the experience, she says, as "an invitation to reassess where you are."
"James," a 50-year-old IT recruiter who asked me not to use his real name, is one of the group's more regular members. He says he experimented with psychedelics recreationally when he was in his teens and 20s, but after getting hooked on methamphetamines, he quit drugs altogether and got sober. "I moved away from the area I was in, I just changed my life and led a suburban life for 20 years," he says. "And a couple years ago my life got shaken up and I started looking for myself again."
That's when he turned to psychedelics—and this time he wasn't just looking to get high. He'd been seeing a psychotherapist for a while, he says, but it wasn't until he started tripping on ayahuasca and DMT that he started to have a breakthrough about who he really was and how to be himself—especially at work, where he felt like he was always pretending to be a more likable, corporate version of himself. "That process of becoming more at ease with myself, becoming less inhibited, being more comfortable with my own skin, all of those things have been helped immensely by psychedelics," he says, cautioning that while his own experiences have been positive, psychedelics aren't for everybody, nor does he advocate that they'll help anyone else in the same way. "That's where the practice of integration comes in because you learn things about yourself but you have to figure out what those things mean to you and how to integrate them into your life."
But it's not as if he can tell his colleagues and clients about the time he hallucinated that humanoids told him the meaning of life during a DMT trip. Those are the kinds of stories he saves for Godasi's integration circle, where it's not uncommon to hear from people who say they spoke to God, saw the afterlife, or communicated with the spirits of deceased loved ones during a psychedelic trip. These are the types of anecdotes that Godasi says could get a person diagnosed with psychosis or mania if they were to tell a doctor or a therapist about them—instead, she says, most people choose to keep quiet. Others, like James, seek out an integration coach.
As the 90 minute integration circle comes to a close, Godasi presses her palms together in prayer and bows her head down, thanking us all for coming and for sharing our experiences. Most of us just met each other tonight, but nobody is ready to leave yet. We all stand in a circle making small talk, and James asks another member of the group where her accent is from. She says she believes she may have inherited it from a past life. Then, as well all linger in the room, she says she can feel that maybe our spirits have exited our bodies and are now communicating telepathically with one another. Everyone stares at each other in silence.
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Trump's Next 100 Days Won't Be Any Better
President Donald Trump's first 100 days have been a fucking mess. The White House has tried to sell (via error-laden lists) Trump's prolific use of executive actions as proof of profound productivity, and Trump has tried to undermine the 100-day yardstick he himself highlighted on the campaign trail. But there's no denying that Trump hasn't delivered on many of his firm promises to voters so far: Aside from putting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and cracking down on undocumented immigrants, most of his actions have proven to be more showmanship than substance. Trump's wild accusations and erratic behavior may have already damaged the institution of the American presidency. And as I write this, it seems he'll barely avoid a government shutdown (by letting Congress extend negotiations for another week) that there was no need to fly this close to on his first miniscule funding battle. The list of Trump's failures is so long—we haven't even scratched the surface here—that presidential historian Jonathan Alter recently told NBC News "this is the worst, least successful, first 100 days since it became a concept in 1933."
But other presidents, notably Bill Clinton, have had disastrous first 100 days and recovered. Trump's advisers seem confident they're coming to grips with the slow pace of the legislative process, and his supporters still back him. It's possible his next 100 days will be better than this stretch, at least when it comes to his legislative agenda. Given where he is on his apparently steep learning curve at day 99, though, that seems unlikely.
Over the past few days, a media narrative has emerged that Trump has come to grips with the fact that a president is not a CEO or a reality TV show host who can clap his hands and get things done. Recognizing the complexities of Congress and his initial failures, this interpretation goes, Trump has started to develop a subtler mode of operating. Case in point, soon after the implosion of the Republican Affordable Care Act replacement bill in the House last month, Trump reportedly quietly revived it, allowing Vice President Mike Pence to take lead on a softer and more open-ended approach. The result was a negotiated compromise bill with buy-in from conservative Republicans and at least one moderate.
The one-page sketch of a tax reform plan Trump released this Wednesday also read to some as a sign of growth. It was the White House taking point on a priority, but it also offered legislators basic principles to build upon rather than trying to stuff a fully-formed bill down legislators' throats, as in the case of the initial ACA replacement bill.
"It is a step in the right direction," said William Antholis, director of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. "But it's only one step."
The Trump-backed revived healthcare bill failed to secure enough votes to move ahead in the House this week. Antholis notes that the administration could possibly eventually pass this bill through backroom wheeling and dealing, but sees no clear path for it to proceed as is. And Trump's tax proposal has already spooked conservative Republicans who don't know how it would be paid for. "Everyone who's looked at his tax reform proposal says it's dead on arrival," Antholis said.
Antholis suspects that the Trump administration still doesn't have a great deal of legislative know-how on staff. Villanova congressional expert John Johannes added that while Trump seems more capable of wining and dining congressmen than former President Barack Obama, there is still "no strategy for the big picture."
Trump also hasn't abandoned the reliance on public threats, even those these have failed to work for him to date. When he lambasted conservative Republicans after his first healthcare failure, they ignored him. More recently, he hinted that he'd stop making subsidy payments to keep insurers in Affordable Care Act markets if Democrats didn't fund his border wall as part of the 2017 budget—then backed off.
Trump doesn't need to shift fully to soft touches, noted Johannes, but "clever presidents know when to push, when to beg, when to cajole, when to threaten… Trump is a long way from that skill level."
While his latest legislative push has seemingly had more time and breathing room built into it, Republicans reportedly still felt like he was rushing on both healthcare and the release of his tax plan to score points by day 100. And Johannes believes that while some flexibility is good, Trump still seems to care too little about policy details. "He seems too focused on getting something done," said Johannes, "rather than getting it right."
It doesn't help, the experts I spoke to agree, that Trump is so unpredictable; to make deals with Congress, legislators have to be able to trust you. Nor does it help that his administration has yet to fill, or even nominate candidates for, more than 500 key administrative jobs, many of which deal with shepherding policy priorities along. "There is absolutely no evidence that Trump even cares about filling those" positions, said Johannes.
"I have not seen anything that would indicate [Trump] has changed his modus operandi as it relates to legislation," said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former longtime Senate staffer. "He is still learning that it's not quite that easy to take on major policy changes and [have it so that you] snap your fingers and it happens."
Hoagland believes that to actually move forward on any of his key legislative promises, Trump is going to have to learn "that compromise is not a four-letter word [but] a necessary ingredient for a democratic process." He'll have to temper his own positions into a middle ground between whatever coalitions of willing Democrats and Republicans he can put together. Hoagland has heard from people who've worked with Trump that he can be a good listener behind closed doors. However, some observers worry that Trump's initial failures and hostility towards Democrats have poisoned the wells for this kind of pragmatism. "To be brutally frank," admitted Hoagland, Trump "is going to have to invite the Democratic leadership to Camp David—I would hope not to Mar-a-Lago. He's going to have to find some way of reaching out."
Even if he remains as he is—still bellicose, inexperienced, and prone to chaos—Antholis suspects Trump can still score a few legislative agenda wins over the next 100 days, or by year's end. "If you forced me to bet," he said, "it would be the repatriation of foreign earnings for companies. You might also get some sort of marginal corporate tax cut [or] a few other tax changes. For each of those, it's 50-50. It's a coin toss… But those things could happen."
That may be offset by the fact that team Trump is running out of other low-hanging fruits. According to Wake Forest University regulatory expert Sidney Shapiro, Republicans can slash a few more regulations via the Congressional Review Act, which Trump and Congress have used to eliminate several Obama-era rules. But the CRA only applies to rules enacted late in Obama's second term and most of the GOP's top target regulations have, he said, likely already been axed. Shapiro notes that Trump and company will find it a grueling process to actually change rules moving forward, and almost impossible to fully rescind them in most cases.
Though it's only spring, Trump actually doesn't have much time to tackle healthcare and taxes. "Moving not just one but two major pieces of legislation not just through the House, but through the Senate, through the requisite committees, then reconciling what's different is just hard to do that fast," said Antholis. And as the midterm campaign season approaches, some members of Congress will worry about taking risky votes, especially in the service of a president whose approval rating is below 50 percent.
All in all, Trump will be fairly lucky if his next 100 days aren't just as bad as his first. Or as Antholis put it, "as different as these two characters are… he really runs the risk of having a Carter-like presidency."
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The Climate Change Deniers in Congress
What would you think if your government didn't believe in gravity? If your senator alleged that, because they couldn't see it, perhaps it didn't exist. To many, this might seem absurd—the science is enough to know that it's real.
Like gravity, climate change isn't always obvious, but its forces on Earth are increasingly clear. Yet, more than half of America's 115th Congress are climate change deniers, according to a Motherboard survey of their personal testimonies and voting records.
The majority of climate scientists—at least 97 percent—agree that climate change is happening, and is a consequence of human activity. Government and independent climate scientists alike have published abundant evidence showing our impact on Earth's climate. Meanwhile, task forces like the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have underscored the necessity of significantly reducing our global emissions.
Continue reading on Motherboard.
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Milo Yiannopoulous Got $12M to Start a Touring Company for Trolls
A few secret investors reportedly gave former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos $12 million to start a new company to bring right-wing YouTubers on tour, Vanity Fair reports.
Milo Inc., which will be based out of Miami and employ around 30 people, is a media company meant to compete with The Blaze and Infowars. But from the sounds of it, the new venture will be less like like a conservative news outlet, and more like Live Nation for trolls, or an American Idols Live tour if all of the singers were replaced with people yelling about globalism.
"I'm the proof of concept," Yiannopoulos told the magazine. "The thing about me is that I have access to a talent pipeline that no one else even knows about. All the funniest, smartest, most interesting young YouTubers and all the rest of them who hate feminism, who hate political correctness."
Yiannopoulos got his start as the instigator of Gamergate and kicked off the current culture war related to free speech on college campuses. He then lost his editing job at Breitbart, a six-figure book deal, and a speaking slot at CPAC after old footage resurfaced of him saying relationships between younger boys and older men can be "hugely positive experiences."
After that happened, it seemed like Yiannopoulous was done. But on April 21, he wrote a Facebook Post announcing a multi-day event called Milo's Free Speech Week planned for later this year in Berkeley, California. He also released a weird compilation video declaring that MILO IS COMING––although there was no real indication of what that meant. But now we now know he's apparently returning to ring-lead a group of racist teen vloggers.
"This generation that's coming up, it's about 13, 14, 15, now have very different politics than most other generations," he told Vanity Fair in an odd choice of words for someone who's career was recently derailed for seeming to condone child molestation. "They love us. They love me, and I'm going to be actively hunting around for the next Milo."
Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.
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People Tell Us About the First Time They Felt Old
If you're looking for a quick way to depress yourself this weekend, you're in luck: Just open up Google and punch in "things that happened 20 years ago."
Yep. With just a few keystrokes, you can be reminded that "Backstreet's Back," "Song 2," and "Hypnotize" all turned 20 this year, or that "Hot in Here," The Royal Tenenbaums, and the first Harry Potter movie turned 15. You too can feel thoroughly ancient in the knowledge that "Back to Black" and There Will Be Blood are now ten years old, and that it's been two decades since Notorious B.I.G. was murdered, 17 years since Bush's first term, and 14 years since this happened.
Think of them as pre-senior moments: not quite on par with forgetting why you walked into a room or shitting yourself in a movie theater, but a quick and painful reminder that it's now been almost two decades since anyone uttered the word "Willennium."
The good news is, we're not alone.
In order to stave off your approaching existential dread, we've collected anecdotes from folks who feel just as elderly as you do. Our peers have dug deep to share their very first pre-senior moments, whether they be physical (things breaking or aching), psychological (Dear God, people born in 2000 are approaching legal drinking age), or simple realizations, like the fact that the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer now look like this.
Because while we may not look like older generations—with their stable incomes, reasonable tuition fees, and actual shot at home ownership—by God, do we ever feel like them.
Xander, 34
"Last spring, I passed a group of teens smoking weed on a bench, and they attempted to hide it when they saw me. Most people know I smoke, and even two or three years ago, kids that age would have invited me into the circle. Now I'm clearly seen as an old man. Whatever. Like I'd smoke with them, or have anything to do with their bunk-ass herb."
Mitch, 31
"The first time I felt old was at a lesbian event. This woman was hitting on me hard, and I knew she was way too young for me. I finally said, 'You're sweet and attractive, but you're much too young.' She said 'No, I'm not.' Then I told her what year I was born. She looked horrified and said 'So was my mom.' Needless to say, she backed off."
Cynara, 34
"When some kids 'ma'amed' me in a hotel lobby in SoHo while trying to convince me to buy them booze at a nearby bodega. This was like five years ago, so I was still in my 20s."
Nate, 28
"One morning, I woke up extremely hungover, with no memory of the night before, and I was startled to discover I couldn't move. My back had seized, and I had to yell for my roommate to help roll me out of bed. I was 24."
Jason, 34
"Meeting a girl in a bar who, after running her hand along my abs, assured me she was 'actually a big fan of the dad bod.'"
Souzan, 32
"A day or two after my 30th birthday, I passed the mirror and suddenly realized my ass was a different shape, and I had laugh lines. It was like a switch went off after 30, because I'd never noticed either of those things before."
Melissa, 33
"When I was walking down the hallway at my work—which also happens to be my alma mater—and I saw kids pointing at grad photos and laughing at the old styles, I thought to myself, I remember doing that in high school. Then I got closer and realized they were looking at my grad class."
Tara, 29
"A few years ago, I threw my back out while trying on shorts."
Aliez, 33
"Being identified as the 'slender, dark-haired, middle-aged lady' at work. Then being told it was meant as a compliment."
Billeh, 38
"I was teaching a college class and mentioned Corey Hart in reference to a student writing about sunglasses. Most of the class looked at me like I was speaking Latin. I asked them to raise a hand if they knew who Corey Hart was. Only two of them knew. This was a few years ago. Now I feel ancient."
Dana, 30
"When my kids told me I was an adult."
Rachel, 24
"I threw my back out in the middle of downward dog and couldn't straighten out. I basically just toppled over onto the floor, wheezing because it hurt so much, and I couldn't figure out why. I was 22."
Eve, 44
"When I became invisible to anyone under 35."
Nat, 31
"When I realized that almost every athlete at the Olympics was younger than me. Also, when I had to explain who OJ Simpson and Tonya Harding are to a college kid."
Dina, 29
"When I started considering that some dresses might be too short for me to wear. I still wear the short dresses, but a few years ago, I thought twice about it."
Ashley, 35
"I threw my back out bending down to get laundry out of the washer. I had to walk with a cane for a day or two."
Matt, 32
"Making Simpsons references and having people—even people in their 20s—ask what I'm quoting. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."
Bill, 52
"I own a 1965 Mustang (same production year as me.) Back in 2002, a lovely woman in her mid 20s was admiring the car. She asked about the year, I told her. She asked if it was an antique, and I said 'yes.' Then she asked if I was the original owner."
Natalie, 33
"I woke up in a hurry, didn't stretch, and literally couldn't move my knee. It hurt so much, and I ended up on the ground in the fetal position wishing I was dead. At first I thought, Shit, I must have twisted my knee. Nope. I did nothing during that week that would involved any kind of knee activity. I'm 33 this year, and my knees will be 75."
Amanda, 29
"A few days ago, after IDing someone born in 1998, then giving them alcohol. Which led to the realization that in less than two years, people born in the year 2000 will be almost old enough to drink."
Marc, 37
"Getting hurt and it never healing. Stepped on a rugby field five years ago for the first time since 1996 (literally). Missed a tackle, slipped, tweaked my medial ligament. Still hasn't healed. Also, the time I got told that I was hot... because she was 'totally into older guys.'"
Harla, 32
"I went cliff-jumping with a 20-year-old and fractured my spine while the 20-year-old was fine. It was a pretty bad compression fracture. Some bone was sticking out toward my spinal cord, which caused some worry at first. I hobbled out of water and back to the car with the help of the other 20-year-old, and I was taken to the larger hospital in Sydney. I was then strapped to a spinal board. I had a back brace for about a month and a half and then restricted mobility for another month and a half. Again, the 20-year-old was totally fine. The worst part is, I was in better shape than they were, but apparently that didn't matter to my bones. This was two weeks after my 30th birthday. That's when I learned that our warranty expires after 29."
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My 14-Year-Old Cousin Taught Me How to Be a Cool Teen
I feel old. I'm looking down the barrel of 30 and I am now closer in age to Jason Sudeikis than I am to Jaden Smith. Part of me still thinks I should feel young—at least because I'm definitely not grown-up in the pension-and-stock-portfolio sense of the word. But I feel the cold skeletal hand of irrelevance on my aging shoulder all the time now. There are things I just don't understand now, like Lil Peep, and I just have to chalk it up to my ongoing decrepitude.
That doesn't mean I'm ready to go gently into that good night, though. So for Teen Week, I've enlisted the help of my 14-year-old cousin David to teach me how to be a Cool Teen.
David isn't just your average cool teen with over a thousand followers on Instagram. He goes to school with the daughter of a famous supermodel. Justin Bieber once played soccer on his school field. In contrast, the last time I was deemed cool by a cultural arbiter was back in 2009, when I was scouted as a model by the store manager of an American Apparel in Williamsburg (RIP). Once, David Instagrammed a picture of himself holding a Supreme beach ball. Did you even know Supreme did beach balls? I didn't.
Continue reading on Broadly.
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An Ivy League A Capella Group Got Booted for Hazing with Icy Hot
Apparently not all of Cornell's singing groups are as mild-mannered as Here Comes Treble. This week the university had to kick its oldest all-male a cappella group off campus for hazing incoming members, alerting the larger world to the fact that A) Cornell has an all-male a cappella group called "Cayuga's Waiters," and B) even a cappella groups haze their pledges.
According to the Associated Press, the Ivy League club made members put Icy Hot on their genitals, forced them to get naked and take a bath in ice water, and gave booze to underage kids. The Waiters also required pledges to "race up and down a street and then consume foods," according to Cornell's judicial report.
When the school launched an investigation into the Waters, members admitted the group had a history of putting pledges through weird rituals dating back at least ten years. In some cases, alumni from the group even came back to help terrorize new members. The University Hearing Board (UHB) called the club's hazing rituals "extremely serious," "dangerous," and "humiliating." After a temporary suspension in 2016, Cornell's University Review Board (URB) decided it was best to shut down the club permanently.
"This behavior has no place at Cornell," Cornell's then-president Elizabeth Garrett said in a statement. "I agree with the URB that dismissal of the organization is appropriate."
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Rural Film Festivals Are the Next Frontier of LGBTQ Tolerance
In the fall of 2015 in tiny Lewisburg, West Virginia, Tim Ward and Jon Matthews were gearing up for the second annual Appalachian Queer Film Festival (AQFF for short). Their mission was both simple and profound: to broaden hearts and minds, to change stereotypical perceptions of West Virginians, and to shed light on what it means to be queer in a rural community.
That same year, they'd received a $6,700 grant from the West Virginia Humanities Council to help fund the festival. It proved significant in helping them garner interest and participation in the festival. With that success and encouragement within the WVHC, they applied for $10,000 for their third year, to be held last October. But a few days before they applied, a Koch Brothers-funded PAC released a report lambasting the state for wasting taxpayer money on arts projects—specifically calling out AQFF for screening "films many taxpayers would find objectionable."
The report was far from an exhaustive study, the Charleston Gazette Mail reported—but it condemned spending for Medicaid, public broadcasting, fairs, festivals, community colleges, athletics and arts programs nonetheless.
As a result, AQFF saw no public funding last year, which had been projected to comprise half their overall budget, Ward said. In October, Ward and Matthews were able to put on a watered down version of their showcase, and remain dedicated to bringing notable queer films to West Virginia audiences.
"On Saturday we're screening Travis Matthews' Discreet," said Ward, which "follows a young man in rural Texas trying to reconcile a conservative culture and his own sexuality. While his plight is not every LGBTQ person's journey, it presents an interesting perspective worth comparing to our own."
When we think of LGBTQ gatherings and celebrations, we conjure images of Provincetown's Carnival Parade or the massive OutFest film festival in LA. But outside Christopher Street or the Castro, film festivals like AQFF and other events are playing a vital role in galvanizing rural LGBTQ communities, where opportunities to celebrate one's identity are limited—and not solely because of intolerance, as one might assume.
Rural queer communities are "often in regions where there aren't a lot of public resources," said Mary L. Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft and associate professor at the Media School of Indiana University. "There's no public infrastructure, there's no tax base to build that—so when communities want to come together there's literally no space to gather."
"There's no gay bar or corner queer bookstore," she continued, "so it's important that film festivals are using what infrastructure is available—an established shared public space—to bring a conversation to a community that otherwise would not have a venue." In this way, festivals like AQFF queer an otherwise universal space: the movie theater.
Every year, the Fargo-Moorhead LGBT film festival in North Dakota takes place in the city's historic Fargo Theater, a point of local pride. Paducah, Kentucky's Cinema Systers Film Festival claims to be the only entirely Lesbian film festival in the US. From Greenville, North Carolina's Teadance Film Festival to Fresno Reel Pride to the Bloomington PRIDE Festival to Colorado West Pride, AQFF is far from alone in making inroads in unexpected places.
These film festivals and others queer their town movie theaters for screenings, Elk's Lodges for fundraisers and churches for meetings. They blur the boundaries of who belongs where and who has claims to be members of one's community.
"The visibility of film festivals reminds the heterosexual members of a community of LGBTQ presence," says Dr. Katie Schweighofer, an assistant gender and sexuality professor at Dickinson College. "The structure brings cultural cachet and tourism dollars that may be useful in gaining support from hesitant community or business leaders."
Moreover, seeing and hearing a moving tale in a dark room offers one of the least confrontational ways to participate in someone else's narrative. "There isn't direct dialogue so much as a dialogue being performed for the audience," said Gray, "so it can be an incredibly rich role modeling of what kind of words can be used around these identities that otherwise is just not a part of day to day life in rural communities."
And with the inauguration of a president with a history of homophobia, it's important to remember the classism that marks many discussions about who belongs where in America. LGBTQ political leaders have for too long paid too little attention to rural communities as places to organize—and where there's more tolerance and support on offer than one might expect.
"There were so few times that we ventured into places where we knew people didn't like us," said Gray, referring to the marriage equality fight. "This is a detriment to queer politics as much as it is to the 'public sphere.' We are limiting our own capacity by presuming that wealth and the power of personal persuasion are our only ways into freedom and equality for all."
There is often a message, or perhaps it's more of an internal monologue, that LGBTQ-identifying people would or should "get out" of their small towns. While some will and can, many don't have it as an option or don't want to leave.
Dr. Schweighofer emphasized that with many of the most significant recent gains in American LGBTQ rights—Don't Ask Don't Tell, Obergefell—having come from the federal level, the time is ripe to focus efforts on rural communities.
"With the new administration signaling they will not be supporting LGBTQ communities—for example, by removing LGBTQ content from the White House websites and changing a proposed addition for adding LGBT to the upcoming 2020 census—LGBTQ communities may find themselves reliant upon local politics for positive change," she said.
Ward, now a full-time student headed towards a medical degree and still a part-time film enthusiast, has gone back to the drawing board with Matthews and their handful of private funders.
"We're taking a strategic approach and branching out into different parts of the state with one-off events, like screening a film and bringing in the filmmaker or doing a talk via Skype," he said, "in hopes of introducing the festival to people that might not have known about us before and would have an interest in driving to Lewisburg."
"As of now, we're still committed to having the larger festival in the fall, the size of which is dependent on our bottom line," he noted.
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Scientists Found Cancer-Causing DNA in Stem Cells Given to Patients
For decades, stem cells have offered rich potential, promising an age of "regenerative medicine." They're being used to in early-stage treatment for Parkinson's disease, macular degeneration, hearing loss, arthritis, and paralysis, among others, with new applications (impotence?) appearing seemingly all the time. They're generally hailed as a motherlode for medical treatment, even as some unregulated clinics cross the line from research into dangerous hype.
But a recent letter in the journal Nature shows that some of the stem cell lines used in these therapies have been found to contain cancer-causing mutations. That raises the concern that patients treated with the cells could face a real risk of developing cancer—though that hasn't happened so far.
To reach that conclusion, Harvard scientists examined 140 stem cell lines, most of which were registered with the National Institutes of Health; each line is a collection of identical stem cells that's reproduced and provided to researchers. They performed DNA sequencing and found that five lines had cells with a cancer-causing mutation, specifically in the TP53 gene. Of those five, at least two have been used in clinical trials of experimental treatments. It's not known how many people received them.
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