Prisoners Tell Us Their New Year's Resolutions

On the outside, New Year’s Day feels like a fresh start. I see it as a chance to turn the page and start a journey to different and exciting new paths. But when I was in prison, it was not like that for me. During my 21 years of incarceration, I never even made a resolution. I always thought that was something reserved for those on the outside, who had more control over their lives. New Year's Day was like any other day marked off the calendar as I eagerly waited for my freedom.

But I don't want to give the impression that all prisoners lack hope. There are a lot of convicts who celebrate a new 365. They just do it in a different way. There are no all-night boozers or crazy parties in the clink-clink. And for resolutions, prisoners often have something bigger on on their mind than swearing off eating sugar or drinking less coffee. They're thinking about finally getting out or developing new ways to better survive life on the inside.

Even though I've been free for three years, I've kept in touch with a lot of my homies in prison who think a lot about the promise of a new year. I reached out to them recently to see what kinds of resolutions they are crafting for 2018. One who is on the verge of being released told me about his desire to bring his family back together. Another former gangster told me all about how he is trying to get to know himself better so that he can make better decisions. The commitment that these men have to their future says a lot about the perseverance of human spirit in the face of adversity.

Here's what they had to say.

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Angel Ocasio
Reg. #00373-748
Serving 23 years for a drug conspiracy at FCI Danbury in Connecticut

My News Year's resolution is to hit the ground running when I get home on January 9. I have two small business plans written out that I want to put into action within days of my release. Sleep is not an option for me. I know things will be tough, but I have to be relentless to get my business off the ground. I am 48 years old and I will be finishing a 23-year sentence. That’s more than 20 years of my life that have been lost that I can't get back. I have to make the most of my time to bring stability to my life and help bring my family back together so I can enjoy my grandchildren and give them some security.

I am looking forward to getting the hell out of prison. Shit will be tough in Puerto Rico, where I’m being released, but I’ll take that over jail. For many years, December 31 has just been another day. But this time I am looking forward to to getting my family back together, to spending time with them, and doing the things we once did. These hopes have helped me overcome some of the darkest days of my incarceration.

Timothy Tyler
Reg. #99672-012
Serving a life-sentence for LSD at FCI Jessup in Georgia (pardoned by Obama)

My New Year's resolution will be to eat only health food. It seems that if I sway from eating proper, my sister matches me in the free world. When I eat right, then she eats right. So I plan to eat healthy just to promote her health. Since I am going home next year, I want to be as healthy as possible and have her healthy too so we can live a decent, longer life.

On the low end, I would like to see my sister recover from depression. We have always been close and she has been severely depressed since I have been in prison the last 25 years. Just seeing her living without depression would be great for me. She’s my best friend and what makes her happy makes me happy.

On another level, when I get out, I would love to have the job of consecrating the people entering the stadium shows of the Grateful Dead in 2018. I could make it a sacred ritual that would raise the consciousness of those attending. Considering I've missed seeing the Dead for more than 25 years, this is something Bob Weir might want to grant me.

Donald Green
Reg. #39747-019
Serving life for a drug conspiracy at FCI Coleman in Florida

My New Year's resolution is to work very hard on my case so that I can win my freedom by 2019 and be free of the madness of prison. I also plan to help those who cannot help themselves in the law library by assisting them in their quest for freedom with what we call The Firm: a group of jailhouse lawyers who help other prisoners who've been shafted by their lawyers and the system.

Robert Rosso
Reg # 05546-010
Serving life for a drug conspiracy at FCI Terre Haute in Indiana.

I've thought long and hard about a New Year's resolution. This year, I've come up with some that I am going to stick with. I plan to watch less news and focus more of my time and energy on getting my writing projects done. For example, for the past ten years, beginning at 6 AM, I watch two hours worth of morning news. In the evening, my news time starts at 5 PM, followed by Inside Edition at 5:30 PM, TMZ at 6, then the World News after that. That's four wasted hours. So, beginning on January 1, 2018, I will reduce this to no more than a half-hour in the morning and a half-hour at night.

This will give me more time to complete some of my writing projects. I started a book that I am just now finishing up and my goal is to get it published this year and start on the sequel. Also, less news will allow me to edit and put into book format a collection of stories that I have been wanting to publish. Also, I want to stay positive for my family. This time of the year can be especially tough for my parents.

Walter Johnson
Reg. #47510-053
Serving Life for Three Strikes Law at FCI Otisville in New York

My New Year's resolution is to know myself better than anyone else. That way, I will be able to tap into my true potential. For years, I did things that I truly didn't want to do, nor did I understand the reason why I did them. I thought that being a criminal was tantamount to being a hero. But as time went by, I came to the realization that the majority of my criminal exploits were out of greed, having an insatiable desire to satisfy myself without consideration for anyone else.

A hero is one who commits acts of selflessness. They place their own lives in danger so that others will be able to live their lives. I now realize that I was born into this world for a purpose, and I almost threw my life away by choosing the wrong people, places, and things. I now know that I can do some really powerful things with my life that help other people find themselves and live out their dreams. I have to make sure that every act committed by me in 2018 is an act that I would be proud to pass down to my grandson.

Follow Seth on Twitter.

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Making Sense of Trump's Surprisingly Old-School Sanctions Regime

Last week, the United States imposed sanctions on 13 people and 39 entities it said were implicated in human rights abuses and corruption worldwide, among them the son of Russia’s top prosecutor. Final passage of the massive Republican tax bill around the same time helped swallow up this news, but even without distractions, word of economic and travel restrictions on a few non-Americans probably wouldn’t have made many headlines. Still, this was a major signal about how the Trump administration will approach human rights and corruption in the years ahead, including when it comes to the country whose election meddling has cast a shadow over Donald Trump’s whole presidency.

These new sanctions represented the first application of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (GMA), among the last significant pieces of legislation signed into law by Barack Obama in December 2016. The law takes its name from Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who uncovered a massive fraud scheme involving his country’s police and other officials before being jailed, tortured, denied medical treatment, and ultimately found dead in his cell in 2009. (His captor-killers faced no justice.) In 2012, Congress passed a bill known as the Magnitsky Act, allowing the executive branch to impose targeted sanctions on individuals or groups involved in his death and similar acts in Russia. (That was the bill Russian agents reportedly lobbied Donald Trump, Jr. to push back on in their infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.) The GMA extended these sanctions—which effectively block access to American assets, make it all but impossible for affected parties to do business with many international banks and firms, and can prevent individuals from traveling to or through the US—to any person or group implicated in similar crimes worldwide.

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Human rights and anti-corruption groups tend to view the GMA as watershed legislation providing a powerful tool with which to combat bad actors. It allows the government to financially whack anyone, even those who escape local justice, with serious consequences, without unfairly targeting wider swathes of the country in which they might be operating. Granted, sanctions writ large are increasingly seen as ineffective tools in modern geopolitics; it seems like there’s always a workaround or hitch to them. Still, rights groups have maintained faith that proper targeting can screw up an authoritarian or oligarch’s lifestyle, making them think twice about crossing certain lines.

The problem, of course, is that less than a month after this powerful new tool came online, Trump came into office on his America First platform. In the months since, he has shown repeated sympathy for authoritarians and their tactics, acted in ways that seem downright kleptocratic to many, and shown a repeated disregard for human rights activism. “Some of the rhetoric has been uber-Realist and cynical,” said Daniel Fried, who coordinated sanctions policy at the State Department from 2013 until early this year. He characterized these views as: “Who cares? It’s none of our business.”

Trump has shown ample willingness to use both targeted and broad sanctions in his pushback on North Korea and its nuclear program. He’s also been willing to let numerous old sanctions regimes stay in place. But the new president has put up strong resistance to other new sanctions, especially those that target Russia or Russian individuals. He made an official protest when Congress forced him, via a veto-proof bipartisan vote, to sign a bill in August imposing new sanctions. That law didn’t just go after those involved in 2016 election meddling, but also targeted corrupt oligarchs writ large, among other shady parties.

Trump did send a letter to Congress in April promising to comply with the GMA, which required he draw up a list of sanctioned individuals by this month. Several activists and legislators saw the need to put pressure on him throughout the year to keep that promise anyway. Sure enough, Trump released his list just under two weeks late, and included far fewer—and less recognizable—names than some activists and legislators had encouraged him to.

“The Trump administration has chosen to target one or two persons per country, as well as affiliated entities, rather than systematically go after a large number of individuals from a single country,” said Anton Moiseienko, a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London who studies targeted sanctions. “This approach arguably enables the administration to make a statement, but also minimizes the possible political fallout. [And] it includes some individuals who have already been accused of corruption by the governments of their respective home countries. If the purpose of the GMA is to address impunity,” then these may not have been ideal targets for this new sanctions tool, he argued.

Even so, human rights groups have praised the list. Fried noted sanctions documents often run a bit late, and that the first ones assembled under any new law tend to be tricky to put together. It also made sense to him that the administration might keep the list tightly focused on cases of flagrant abuse and corruption that should withstand international pushback and scrutiny.

That’s not to say the Trump administration’s new sanctions hit-list doesn’t have its critics. John Glaser, head of foreign policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, cited its selectivity, suggesting it targets traditional American “enemies” but passes over abusers in nominal ally countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Fried acknowledged that there is a legitimate debate to be had on how high sanctions should shoot, or how to balance strategic concerns with human rights in countries the US has traditionally worked closely with. But, he added, this is “a discussion I suspect would have taken place if this had come out under a Hillary Clinton administration," as well.

The consensus among experts I’ve spoken to is that Trump and some of his advisers may well have preferred to sidestep these sanctions and roll back others, especially those targeting Russia and Russian individuals. But cooler heads seem to have steered the White House away from its most explosive rhetoric and toward a relatively conventional human rights and sanctions policy. Glaser expected the administration to continue rolling out GMA sanctions on an annual, or semi-annual basis, and to target the same types of people any other administration would have.

This approach seems to be fairly consistent when it comes to how the new government is deploying its sanctions arsenal generally, even when it comes to Russia. In fact, the Trump administration added five names to the 2012 Magnitsky Act's list in recent weeks, including key Putin allies, drawing bipartisan applause. “I think on Russia, they’ve ultimately been forced into doing the right thing,” said Fried, alluding to a mixture of popular outcry over the traditionally radioactive country and congressional pressure amid the Mueller probe.

Still, it’s worth noting that the administration as recently as a few weeks ago appeared to be dragging its feet on that new round of anti-Russia sanctions Congress foisted on Trump, and could find ways of slow-walking them even if they do comply with the law. And the America First types in the administration could push back on and limit future lists of sanctions targets under the GMA or other laws.

But the same domestic political dynamic that has so far encouraged a conventional sanctions policy should still be at work in the years to come. That serves as a source of optimism to longtime observers of US human rights and anti-corruption policy. As the former Obama administration sanctions expert Fried put it, "Isn’t it a relief to have this kind of a normal discussion in reference to this administration, considering some of the things they’ve actually said about human rights?"

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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VICE Meets Rashida Jones

On The VICE Guide to Right Now, VICE's daily podcast, we delve into the biggest news of the day and give you a rundown of the stories we're reading, working on, and fascinated with.

Parks and Recreation star Rashida Jones established a lovable reputation with roles in hit comedies like The Office and I Love You Man, but over the past few years, she's also ventured into writing and producing films. VICE had a chance to hang out with Jones to talk about her shift to working behind the camera and the documentary she recently produced on Miami's amateur porn industry, Hot Girls Wanted.

You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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It's So Cold Outside That Sharks Are Actually Freezing to Death

As climate change ushers in another year of extreme global temperatures—a phenomenon President Trump seems a little confused about—cities up and down the East Coast are facing record-breaking snowfall and subzero temperatures. But while city dwellers might be able to hide indoors and crank up the heat, some animals aren't so lucky.

According to the Cape Cod–based Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, it's gotten so cold that sharks in the area have been washing up on the shore and essentially freezing to death. This week, the organization responded to three thresher sharks that likely suffered "cold shock" in the surrounding waters.

As Masslive.com reports, organisms suffer cold shock when they're exposed to extreme dips in temperature and can sometimes experience muscle spasms or cardiac arrest. Scientists believe the sharks swimming off the coast of Cape Cod—where temperatures have dropped to 6 degrees—suffered cold shock in the water, and then wound up getting stranded on the shore, where they likely suffocated.

"If you’ve got cold air, that'll freeze their gills up very quickly," Greg Skomal, a marine scientist, told the New York Times. "Those gill filaments are very sensitive and it wouldn’t take long for the shark to die."

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy is currently working alongside the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the NOAA Fisheries Service to find out more about how the three 14-foot male sharks died—a process the frigid temperature hasn't made very easy.

"We hauled the shark off the beach and it is currently thawing at NOAA Fisheries Service to be dissected later," the conservancy wrote on Facebook about the most recent shark discovery. "A true sharkcicle!"

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'It's a Gothic Party Even If You Don't Want It,' Today's Comic by Benji Nate

'Phantom Thread' Is Weird, Wonderful, and Peak Paul Thomas Anderson

You can play a bit of a parlor game when matching up each Paul Thomas Anderson film to the work by Robert Altman (his clearest influence) it most closely echoes. Under those auspices, his new picture Phantom Thread feels like his Gosford Park: a British period piece that finds the filmmaker working in a distinctively classical style. Gosford Park was also one of Altman’s few genuine commercial hits, alongside The Player, M*A*S*H, and… very little else, though he worked steadily and frequently for four-plus decades.

This, alongside the aesthetic and thematic concerns, seems to be one Anderson’s big takeaways from watching (and, later, working with) Altman; after a few early, half-hearted stabs at box-office success, he seems to have resigned himself to making movies for himself, and whomever else decides to play along. Phantom Thread is, to put it mildly, well within that career trajectory.

In the picture’s striking opening, an army of women march into the multi-level home and workshop of the British couture designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis), ascending the stairway and walking single-file to the sewing tables and machines. They go about their work intently and precisely, as does the man himself, who sketches at his breakfast table and cannot be bothered to talk to Johanna (Camilla Rutherford), the beautiful young woman who is, presumably, some sort of romantic interest.

“Where have you gone, Reynolds?” she asks. “There’s nothing I can say to get your attention back at me.” “I’m delivering the dress today,” he responds impatiently, clearly irritated that he even has to explain himself. “I simply don’t have time for confrontations.” Later in the day, once the storm has passed, Cyril (Leslie Manville), his right-hand woman, gets to the point: “What do you want to do about Johanna? I mean she’s lovely, but the time has come.”

What’s abundantly clear, in these laser-sharp opening scenes, is that Mr. Woodcock—yes, that’s really his name—treats the matter of female companionship as the same locked-in routine as everything else in his life. It is a dance of formalities he can no longer bother with, and when he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress in the seaside town where he keeps a second home, the seduction that follows feels, more than anything, well rehearsed. “I’m a confirmed bachelor,” he tells her. “Marriage would make me deceitful. I don’t ever want that.” But when she proves an acceptable companion, he brings her home as a combination model, muse, and handmaiden. The relationship eventually begins to crumble, in what seem to be the usual ways. And then Alma shakes it up.

“Maybe he’s the most demanding man,” she admits, and he is, you might say, a bit of a prickly pear; when she brings him surprise tea in his workshop, she’s severely chastised and sent away with spite (“The tea is going out; the interruption is staying right here with me.”) Cyril makes excuses for him, saying things like, “If breakfast isn’t right, it’s very hard for him to recover through the rest of the day,” but tension and hostility develops between them, and finally explodes over a private dinner argument, the kind of spat where the words get so out of hand, you end up humiliating yourselves rather than each other.

So Alma takes some action. The curvature of Anderson’s script here is worth contemplating; what we’ve seen up to this point has been, when you get down to it, a comedy of manners, and keeping her precise intentions hidden is… a risk. Yet that is, to these eyes, where Phantom Thread finds its juice: in the unpredictability of the third act’s turns from sweet to sour, and the corresponding tone of the movie itself, where suddenly, thrillingly, all bets are off.

The film’s visual style is ornate yet formally austere, which makes the moments when he lets the camera careen (playfully at Alma’s fashion show, haphazardly as they attempt to remove a dress from an unworthy wearer) all the more affecting. Jonny Greenwood provides the music (his fourth straight Anderson film), constructing a score that’s jazzy and mellow but forcefully involved, a reminder of the manner in which, in every film since Magnolia, Anderson has used the music as a motor – not only carrying us from one scene to the next, but propelling us.

Yet all of these gestures towards conventional critical form—ah yes, the plot, the performances, the direction, the music—are essential an obfuscation of the key takeaway of Phantom Thread, which is that it’s such an exhilaratingly, unabashedly odd film. This should not come as a surprise to his admirers; his last feature was the bafflingly complicated and borderline nonsensical postmodern noir adaptation Inherent Vice, and it followed The Master, a film that steams along for two-plus hours like a pressure cooker that’s about to explode, yet never grants its audience (nor its characters) that release. Even There Will Be Blood, his previous Day-Lewis collaboration and biggest box office success (though still bringing in a fairly modest $40 million domestic), is a spectacularly idiosyncratic piece of work played in an often off-putting key, impudently thumbing its nose at conventional redemption arcs and the niceties of prestige drama.

Yet when he was anointed “the next Quentin Tarantino” before the release of his breakthrough film, 1997’s Boogie Nights, it was presumed that his big sophomore effort would replicate Pulp Fiction’s $100 million-plus box office. It didn’t; it stalled at $26 million. He put the biggest movie star in the country into his next picture, 1999’s Magnolia, and it made even less. He followed that up by making a film tailored specifically to the biggest comedy moneymaker in the business, and it made less than both of those. After a run like that, it’s hard to blame him for giving up on connecting with a wide audience, and focusing instead on weirdos like himself. (And me, and perhaps, if you’ve read this far, you.)

To be clear, Magnolia was not a typical Tom Cruise movie, nor was Punch Drunk Love a typical Adam Sandler movie—that’s what made them so compelling, to see their onscreen personas (and respective baggage, both positive and negative) married to Anderson’s singular sensibility. But by the time he was preparing Blood, it seems the path was determined, and that path brought him to Phantom Thread. It’s a film so gleefully peculiar, so brazen in its disinterested in convention or meeting audience satisfaction, that it sort of takes up residence in its own atmosphere. Some will read that as praise; others as a warning. Go with God.

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The 1997 Movie Season Ended with a Bang and a Whimper

The fall of 1997 was, simply put, one of the most remarkable movie-going seasons of our time: Boogie Nights. Jackie Brown. The Sweet Hereafter. Wag The Dog. Eve's Bayou. Good Will Hunting. The Ice Storm. Amistad. As Good as It Gets. Gattaca. And so many more, culminating with what became the highest-grossing movie of all time: the long-delayed, oft-trashed, yet eventually unstoppable Titanic . Each week yielded another remarkable motion picture—sometimes two or more, taking bold risks, telling powerful stories, introducing formidable new talents, and reaffirming the gifts of master filmmakers. This series looks back at those movies, examining not only the particular merits of each, but what they told us about where movies were that fall 20 years ago, and about where movies were going.

I must confess that, when I put together a list of great movies from the fall of 1997 to revisit 20 years later, I didn’t anticipate the most controversial and difficult selection would be Wag the Dog. Barry Levinson’s snappy political satire was a critical favorite late in the year and a sleeper hit early in the next one, thanks in no small part to its inadvertent analogues with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

But it generated headlines of a different kind earlier this month, when a panel discussion at a 20th anniversary screening turned into a heated tête-à-tête between moderator John Oliver and co-star Dustin Hoffman, who has been the subject of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Part of the reason for raising the issue, Oliver explained, was that the film they were there to celebrate concerned sexual misconduct by a powerful man.

And does it ever. In its very first scene, Washington fixer Conrad Breen (Robert De Niro) is brought to a political bunker several floors below the White House and briefed on the situation: the President has been accused of sexual misconduct with an underage girl who was visiting the Oval Office with her group of “Firefly Girls.” Breen doesn’t care if the story is true: “What difference does it make if it’s true, if the story breaks, they’re gonna run with it.” The president is less than two weeks away from certain re-election, so Breen’s strategy is simple: “We just gotta distract ‘em… Change the story, change the lede.”

A scandal this big requires a big distraction, he reasons, so he comes up with one: a war. Not an actual, expensive war, mind you, but the appearance of one. And for that, he goes to Hollywood, where he appeals to super-producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman). “War is show business,” he tells him, and Motss gets right to work, putting his team together for a brainstorming session. They work up slogans and campaigns, record hoary ballads and country songs, and fake a piece of ubiquitous news footage (featuring Kirsten Dunst, who, in a single scene, does a marvelous little satire on biz-savvy child actors).

The Oscar-nominated script, adapted by Hilary Henkin from Larry Beinhart’s book American Hero and re-written heavily by David Mamet (his second big script of the fall), is full of tasty Mamet bon mots like “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow,” and sharp exchanges like this one: “Our guy did bring peace.” “Yes, but there wasn’t a war.” “All the greater accomplishment.” De Niro and Hoffman trade those lines like jazz musicians, and Anne Heche gets the film’s signature Mamet Curse-Out, giving it to Hoffman from both barrels when one of his plans finally goes off the rails.

Wag the Dog works as satire because of a political world that keeps running the same plays on the media—who, in turn, keep falling for them. If anything, in the years since its release, the worlds of politics, entertainment, and news media have grown even more intertwined in which narratives are carefully controlled and expectations are minimal. Much of that commentary was missed in early 1998, as viewers and pundits honed in on the parallels to the Clinton affair (there were even similar photographs of its President and his beret-clad accuser). But now Wag the Dog takes on a more sinister undercurrent; it is, after all, the story of a machine of enablers working to cover up the sexual misdeeds of an important man, and we’ve been hearing variations of that story all fall. Put into that context, the laughs stick in the throat—and Hoffman’s catchphrase in the face of disaster, an assured “This is nothing,” sounds less like a running gag and more like a refrain of complicity—or, in his particular case, the shrugging dismissals of an accused predator.

James L. Brooks’ As Good As It Gets similarly hasn’t aged quite well. It takes great pains to paint protagonist Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) as something of a 90s Archie Bunker—a “politically incorrect” but lovable curmudgeon who says “fudgepacker” and “fag” and “colored,” but in ornate, well-paced comic speeches, delivered under the devilish eyebrows of good ol’ Jack.

To be sure, Brooks does try to make Melvin a genuine S.O.B.—the picture does open with him dropping a cute dog down a garbage chute. He also suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and difficulties with social interactions; one of his best acting moments comes early, when Brooks lets the actor take an eternity to realize he’s said the wrong thing to someone, and react.

That someone is Carol, the only waitress who will tolerate him at the only restaurant he’ll eat at. She’s played by Helen Hunt, who is very good in a near-impossible role. Brooks’s script requires her to be saintly in her patience with Melvin, while standing up to him when it’s necessary; she also plays the concerned mom to a sick kid as well as the magical muse for Melvin’s artist neighbor (Greg Kinnear), inspiring him back into productivity by letting him draw her nude. (It was a big year for nude drawing.)

As Good As It Gets is an odd film. On one hand, it’s Brooks’s film that most betrays his TV sitcom roots, thanks to its one-liners, the cutaway-reaction style of its shooting and cutting, and moments of broad stereotyping, particularly by Kinnear and Cuba Gooding Jr. Butt it’s also one of his more ambitious works, packing in subplots and subjects by the handful—indicative of a filmmaker who seems to genuinely struggle with the confines of the genre.

It’s a sticky movie, in which its maker forces himself into straight-up contortions in order to arrive at the “love conquers all” ending—quite a contrast from that of his Broadcast News a decade earlier. It’s an unfortunately conventional conclusion, and unconvincing too—just watching the insult/apology/reconciliation pattern of these two is exhausting, so it’s hard to imagine choosing to experience it. Yet the performers are top-notch, several individual scenes are gems, and if nothing else, “Sell crazy someplace else—we’re all stocked up here,” remains both a great line of dialogue and a helpful rejoinder for use in one’s daily life.

For many of us, that Christmas Day also brought the gift of the most exciting release of 1997: Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited feature follow-up to his game-changing 1994 smash Pulp Fiction. And, in many ways, it’s right in the tradition of his breakthrough—a lengthy, sometimes leisurely crime picture, resurrecting a big star of the ‘70s (Pam Grier) matched up with force-of-nature Samuel L. Jackson, backed by a supporting cast of big stars, forgotten faces, and points between.

Yet he specifically, pointedly chose not to make a Pulp Fiction 2. At the time, there was some resistance and disappointment among fans, who took to that embryonic version of the movie internet to express frustrations about the film’s pace, style, and approach. And to be sure, while it runs about as long as Pulp Fiction, it’s a slower movie—because it’s moving at the pace of its protagonists, Jackie Brown (Grier) and her bail bondsman-cum-partner in crime Max Cherry (Robert Forster), the former approaching middle age and the latter just on the other side of it.

And Jackie Brown is slower because of the time Tarantino takes for human moments: charismatic villain Ordell (Jackson) in the front seat with a man he’s about to kill in the trunk, taking his time and popping in his Brothers Johnson tape; Ordell carefully thinking through how his plans have gone awry when he’s in the van with Louis (De Niro, again); Jackie’s moment alone after she hangs up with Ordell, contemplating the confrontation she can no longer outrun; and most of all, the closing shot of Jackie sadly singing to herself as she drives away from a good man (and holding on a face as a song plays—and holding, and holding, a moment Paul Thomas Anderson seems to echo at the end of Magnolia two years later).

Because Tarantino was hot off of Pulp Fiction, he had the power to cast Pam Grier, who hadn’t fronted a major movie since her ‘70s blaxpoitation heyday—as well as casting Forster and De Niro in lead and supporting roles, rather than the other way around. He also had the resources to buy the rights to and adapt Rum Punch, a novel by his storytelling idol Elmore Leonard, merging his nostalgic sensibility with Leonard’s real-time concerns.

There are flashy and funny scenes all over Jackie Brown, but when I think of it, I think of the casual morning coffee chat between Jackie and Max, sitting at her dining room table. They talk about not only aging, but growing more comfortable with yourself as you get older. It’s two great actors bringing their own personalities and experience to bear on a fictional scene—Jackie and Max talking, but also Pam and Robert, about trying to age gracefully and remain employable in the entertainment industry. And it just wouldn’t play with the same truth if it were between two big-time movie stars.

Jackie Brown didn’t turn Grier and Forster back into marquee players the way Travolta did after Pulp Fiction, which was probably to be expected as it didn’t have the same cultural or commercial impact. But it kept them working steadily for years thereafter, and fans who found Jackie Brown too stately or deliberate would be more than satisfied by his next film, the blood-spurting two-part Kill Bill epic. Those films are a lot of fun, and so are most of his works—but Jackie Brown may be the only Quentin Tarantino movie that gets noticeably better with each viewing. That’s not a knock on the other work, but a testament to this one; to repurpose the Dazed and Confused line, I keep getting older, but Jackie and Max stay the same age. Each time I go back to it, they’re sitting there sipping their coffee, waiting for me to catch up.

Jackie Brown wasn’t a giant hit that fall, but then again, not many of the movies we’ve looked at in this space were—aside from Titanic, its $600 million domestic gross more than doubling that of the year’s second-highest grosser, Men In Black. Good Will Hunting ended up with $138 million, a slow but steady performer that picked up steam as it accumulated year-end accolades and awards; ditto As Good As It Gets, which put up $148 million and ended up winning Oscars for both Nicholson and Hunt. Aside from those three, the only fall movie in the year-end top 20 was Disney’s Flubber remake.

And the numbers are where we find the lessons Hollywood learned from this extraordinary fall of 1997, because that’s what they pay attention to—not reviews, not awards, but money. The runaway success of Titanic that December marked a sea change in how movies were placed on that calendar. Its prestige trappings and length aside, Titanic was more considered, at that time, a summer movie than a fall/winter one (and it was originally scheduled to debut there). But it was such a juggernaut that it not only cleaned up with the holiday crowd but continued to steamroll the traditionally weak new releases in the early months of the following year, remaining in the #1 box office slot for a staggering fifteen weeks before finally dropping to #2 the weekend of April 3, 1998.

The takeaway was that while Titanic had been a big risk—at a heretofore unheard of $200 million budget—it had also reaped a big reward. The studio releases of the fall of 1997 were, comparatively speaking, modestly budgeted; L.A. Confidential cost $35 million, Amistad cost $36 million, The Game, $50 million. They made back their money, and a little besides. Titanic, though costing several times more than films like those, also out-grossed that gap several times over. In the years ahead, studios would shift to a model of bigger bets, spreading their money over of fewer movies that cost more, as well as looking to alleviate those risks by investing in familiar properties with tentpole potential.

The four-tiered system that made the fall of 1997 such a fruitful period—low-budget indies like Eve’s Bayou and Happy Together, higher-budgeted and higher-profile films from the “mini-majors” like Boogie Nights and Good Will Hunting, mid-budget studio prestige pictures like Gattaca and As Good As It Gets, and big-money blockbusters like Titanic and Starship Troopers—would, in the years to come, collapse into two: the super-pricey and the super-cheap, with the latter taking on most of the movies in the middle. When something like As Good As It Gets gets made today, it’s for a quarter of that cost, tops; something like Kundun or Amistad might not get made at all.

Have the movies suffered? Maybe not; I’d put the class of 2017 up against the class of 1997 without much hesitation. But those heady, pre- Titanic days do feel like the end of an era, in which big risks weren’t verboten, complexity was encouraged, and an environment was fostered in which vibrant, exhilarating, yet personal works like Jackie Brown, L.A. Confidential, and Boogie Nights were not only possible, but commonplace. It’s probably a naïve perception, and the alignment of masterpieces over those four months was more coincidental than engineered.

But then again, movies like these make you feel like anything’s possible.

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Mobster Implicated in 'Goodfellas' Heist Going to Prison for Road Rage

Vincent Asaro, a member of the Bonanno crime family who was acquitted on charges tied to the JFK airport heist featured in Goodfellas, was sentenced to eight years in prison on Thursday for a 2012 road rage incident.

According to the New York Times, the 82-year-old mobster escaped punishment for a number of crimes he was allegedly involved in dating back to the 1960s. In 2015, Asaro wound up in court on racketeering and theft charges for allegedly taking a direct cut from the $6 million stolen from JFK in the 1978 Lufthansa heist—the same job that inspired Martin Scorsese's 1990 film. He was also charged with murdering a man in 1969 who was thought to be an informant and burying the body at the home of mobster James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, but was acquitted of both crimes.

But it was a 2012 road rage incident that ultimately landed the mobster with prison time. On Thursday, the same judge that presided over the Lufthansa heist trial sentenced Asaro to eight years in prison after he pled guilty to ordering his underlings to set fire to a car that had cut him off at a traffic light in Queens.

According to the Times, prosecutors said someone with access to a law enforcement database gave Asaro the driver's address after the mobster provided the car's license plate number. The next day, prosecutors said the grandson of former Gambino crime boss John Gotti, John J. Gotti, and another man went to the house, poured gasoline on the car, and set it ablaze.

"It was a stupid thing I did and I'm terribly sorry," Asaro said Thursday. "I was on my way home—it happened. It just got out of hand."

Judge Allyne Ross, who said Thursday she remained "firmly convinced" Asaro was guilty of the 2015 charges, handed down the lengthy prison term and said the crime showed that even in his old age, Asaro had a "desire to carry out revenge."

At 82, Asaro may very well spend the rest of his life behind bars after spending years connected to real-life crime drama that will remain immortalized on the screen.

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How to Watch ‘Black Mirror’ Season Four

The Fourth Season of 'Black Mirror' Is the Most Hopeful One Yet

What does hope look like in the bleakest of futures? Staring down the barrel of the unknown,
where all is threatening to go wrong—or is going wrong—there’s a tendency to imagine only the
worst. Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has often been accused of presenting only the worst-case scenarios in his anthology sci-fi series, and there's been a certain fatigue at the idea of more bleakness when entering into the show’s fourth season, which premieres today on Netflix—especially given the current state of the world. But there’s a sense of hope intruding into Black Mirror, finally.

The first glimmer of positivity came last year with the celebrated “San Junipero”, about two
women finding each other through time and then spending the rest of eternity together in a
virtual heaven. Not without its own moments of darkness and despair, “San Junipero”
nonetheless offered a vision of what technology might offer humanity that wasn’t just a nasty
poke in the eye.

Buoyed no doubt by the positive reaction to “San Junipero”—but perhaps also as a reaction to
The Times We’re Living In—Brooker appears to have internalized the lessons of pushing back
against total despair. If nearly the entirety of Black Mirror’s run has been defined by asking what
the worst possible aspects of humanity would be because of technology, the show’s fourth season adds one more element: resistance.

Of these six new episodes, four have endings one could describe as optimistic—which isn’t to say they’re all definitively happy endings. This is still Black Mirror, after all. But the darkest of them, “Arkangel,” tells the story of a mother who implants her young daughter with an internal tracker and the ability to see through her eyes and pixelate out anything offensive in her life. She eventually witnesses her daughter’s most private teenage moments, and starts meddling in her life. In the final scene, the daughter discovered what her mother has done and runs away, with the tablet—her only means of finding her daughter—destroyed.

Taken from another angle, the episode imagines a clear breaking point for the misuse of such technology—and for overbearing parenting in general. You can only go so far before human push back and demand better from each other.

The episodes “USS Callister” and “Black Museum” examine how men use AI technology to act out their darkest fantasies, treating the lives of the people around them as playthings. Both also end with the female protagonists pushing back and defeating their male oppressors; “USS Callister” specifically ends with a group of AI copies of human beings, living inside a simulated Star Trek-like game universe, free to explore an infinite universe. Meanwhile, “Black Museum” ends in an act of vengeance; It’s undeniably satisfying to watch a woman turn the tables on a malevolent scientist who tortured her father for decades.

Black Mirror suggests there is meaning in the will to not be bound by other humans's grossest impulses. Sometimes, the show even admits that technology can be positive, too, as is the case in the season’s most fun episode, “Hang the DJ”. The episode focuses on a man and woman signed up for an unique dating app that gives couples the ability to see exactly how long the relationship will last. Once their time is up, they must part. The idea is that the system learns enough about each participant to pair them with their soulmate, but we're actually witnessing an AI simulation (a favorite plot device of Brooker's as of recent) run over and over again, designed to block given matches in the interest of seeing how likely come together despite the odds.

And there's real euphoria attached to the ending of “Hang the DJ,” even if the episode contains societal grey areas of its own. But throughout the majority of its new season, Black Mirror finds hope in the proposition that, despite the odds and our own self-destructive impulses, there’s some fight in us still.

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RIP, Guy Fieri's Times Square Restaurant and NYC's Flavortown

If you thought 2018 couldn't possibly be worse than 2017, think again, because New Year's Eve marks the final day customers can enjoy Guy-talian Nachos and Donkey Sauce at Guy Fieri's Times Square restaurant.

According to Eater, Guy's American Kitchen and Bar will shutter its doors by January 1, after five years of offering tourists and people who don't know any better "hand crafted signature beers, killer cocktails, and rockin' tunes." In other words, the population of Manhattan's Flavortown will soon be zero.

It's sad news, as the restaurant has always remained relatively popular because of—or perhaps in spite of—its bad reputation. In 2012, fellow celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain visited the place twice, where he concluded that "it's single-handedly turned the neighborhood into the Ed Hardy district." That same year, Pete Wells, the New York Times food critic, infamously gave the establishment zero stars, in a review that was written as a series of questions posed to Guy himself:

"Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?"

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

"Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret —a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers—called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?"

Still, the restaurant always attracted its fair share of hungry customers and Fieri fans. In 2016, Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli dined there for two hours and livestreamed the entire thing. And this year, the second annual FieriCon saw its attendance swell as roughly 100 college-aged would-be Fieris barhopped around Midtown until they ended in Guy's own American Kitchen. Before it closes down, those who want to experience the "turbo-charged action you need to make your NYE party go up to eleven" can shell out $119 for a ticket to chow down at the restaurant on its last night and ring in the new year.

It's unclear why Fieri is closing the restaurant and resigning as New York's mayor of Flavortown, but in a statement obtained by the Times, he wrote: "I'm proud that for over five and a half years, Guy's American in New York City served millions of happy guests from all over the world. And upon the restaurant's closing, I'd like to say thank you to all of the team members and guests who made it all happen."

Never fear, though. It's not all a complete loss. You can still eat Fieri's food at places like a beach in Mexico or a casino in Philadelphia, and catch him licking his fingers at diners, drive-ins, and dives across the country. While we may have to say goodbye to his "high octane American roadhouse" in New York, we'll always have love, peace, and taco grease.

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All the Ways Trump Made Immigrants More Afraid in 2017

Mohammad Bagher Gerami is dying of brain cancer in a Montreal hospital. No treatment in Canada, where the 73-year-old retired surgeon is a legal permanent resident, has stopped the spread, and he’s lost his ability to speak and move. The good news: California doctors have told his family that they can help him with a special treatment only available there.

But US officials have so far denied Gerami entrance into the country since he is a native of Iran—one of the countries placed under the Trump administration’s travel ban, which bars visitors from several Muslim-majority nations plus Venezuela and North Korea.

“This is our last hope,” Gerami’s daughter Sophia Gerami, an engineer based in Calgary, told me. She shared a letter from Canadian doctors to the US embassy, which urged them to grant him a visa since “his diagnosis is poor in Canada” and he only has a chance with the experimental treatment in California.

“He’s in a very critical condition—why should they not grant him a visa? It’s humanity,” she said.

Gerami is one of countless foreigners shut out from the US because of their nationality after Donald Trump’s third and latest travel ban was allowed to take effect this month amid continuing legal challenges. The travel ban—created by executive order—is just one of many historic shifts in the US immigration system this year, which is being transformed by a president who seems to think that “putting America first” means converting a nation of immigrants to one increasingly closed to them.

Since Trump was inaugurated in January, he has taken major steps to make it more difficult for new immigrants to enter the country and for those who are already here to remain. Though he has not achieved some of his most high-profile, extreme promises pledged on the campaign trail—such as the construction of a border wall funded by Mexico, the creation of a “deportation force” that would round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants, and an end to birthright citizenship—the president has reframed immigration as a threat to US security and prosperity. Here are the most important ways Trump has affected immigration in 2017:

Trump Has Moved to Restrict Legal Immigration

Trump is the first president in decades to fight for a major reduction in legal—not just illegal—immigration. Claiming immigrants are taking jobs from US citizens, he has begun a series of administrative changes to make it harder to obtain a visa to enter the US, along with supporting legislation that would drastically lower the cap of visas granted each year.

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“The most historic change this administration has made is changing the conversation around legal immigration,” Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “Previously, it was just such a standard that legal immigration is a net positive and so tied up in our heritage. Before the idea of reducing legal immigration was fringe.”

The April executive order “Buy American, Hire American,” which Trump claimed would result in higher wages and employment rates for US workers, called on the government to increase scrutiny of applications for the H-1B, or skilled worker, visa, of which there are 85,000 granted each year.

Since then, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has issued more requests for evidence from applicants to show they serve a role that couldn’t easily be filled by a citizen. This has caused delays in the approval process, Anastasia Tonello, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me.

“Things are very much in flux,” said Tonello, who noted that USCIS had also issued new guidelines for accepting applications from computer programmers and economists.

Approval rates for H-1B visas have already begun to drop: 86 percent and 82 percent of H-1B applications were approved this October and November, compared with 93 percent and 92 percent for the same months last year, according to data shared by USCIS.

“It is true that we’ve issued more Requests for Evidence recently. This increase reflects our commitment to protecting the integrity of the immigration system,” said USCIS public affairs officer Carolyn Gwathmey. “We understand that RFEs can cause delays, but the added review and additional information gives us the assurance we are approving petitions correctly. Increasing our confidence in who receives benefits is a hallmark of this administration and one of my personal priorities.”

Still, Gwathmey said the annual approval rate for visas remained above 10 percent, and she noted that USCIS is still considering new measures to further implement Trump’s “Buy American Hire American” order, including a “thorough review of employment based visa programs.”

Trump has just begun his efforts to slash legal immigration, and more drastic cuts appear on the horizon for 2018, Pierce projected. This month Trump called for an end to “chain migration,” or visas based on family ties, and he has already begun the process of rescinding work authorizations to the spouses of H-1B recipients. And he has thrown his support behind legislation that would cut legal immigration in half (that bill, the RAISE Act, seems unlikely to pass).

To Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports reductions to legal and illegal immigration, Trump’s proposals are “long overdue.”

“Legal immigration is simply too high and badly run,” he told me. “What worked during our country’s adolescence doesn't work in our maturity.”

Trump Has Made More Undocumented Immigrants Vulnerable to Deportation

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were protected under the Obama administration are now in limbo, or being told to leave, after Trump decided to end two pivotal programs shielding them from deportation.

In September, Trump announced the end of DACA, the Obama-era program providing deportation relief and work permits to young immigrants brought to the US illegally as children. Roughly 800,000 of these immigrants—who often don’t remember a home other than the US—had status under DACA, a protection that has begun to expire.

"Every week since since Trump's termination of DACA, 850 immigrant youth have fallen out of status and lost their protections from deportation, their jobs, their driver's license, their ability to go to college, and peace of mind,” said Greisa Martinez Rosas, advocacy director at United We DREAM, a nonprofit created by and for immigrant youth.

Trump also removed temporary protected status from 60,000 Haitians who were granted it after the country’s 2010 earthquake, along with 2,500 Nicaraguans granted it in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch. That means that within months, these residents—some who have lived here for decades—must leave or they will be eligible for deportation.

Trump’s Administration Is Prioritizing All Undocumented Immigrants for Deportation

Just five days after his inauguration, Trump sent shockwaves through the immigrant community with an executive order making all undocumented residents priorities for deportation. The Obama administration, by contrast, had focused its efforts on serious criminals and recent border crossers.

“Interior enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws is critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States,” Trump’s executive order explained. “Many aliens who illegally enter the United States and those who overstay or otherwise violate the terms of their visas present a significant threat to national security and public safety.”

Within weeks, a wave of raids proved Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents would indeed pick up any undocumented immigrant in their wake. Out of ICE’s 110,568 arrests in fiscal year 2017, nearly one-third—31,888 detainees—had no criminal convictions, according to Migration Policy Institute’s analysis of ICE’s year-end removal data. More than 90 percent of the individuals removed from the interior by the Obama administration in fiscal year 2016 had been convicted of what the administration deemed “serious crimes.”

“We saw a lot of really sympathetic cases of deportations that shouldn't have taken place,” Stephen Legomsky, former chief counsel of USCIS under the Obama administration, told me of enforcement in 2017. “The Obama administration really did focus almost all its enforcement efforts on people who posed a real danger in the US or were apprehended at border, whereas the Trump administration has given free rein to ICE agents.”

Immigrant advocates say these deportations have separated families, struck fear throughout the immigrant community, and given ICE agents too much discretion in their enforcement.

But Krikorian said the change was “clearly a positive” development and “simply a restoration of normal immigration enforcement.”

“Under Obama, only the bad guys were targeted. Ordinary lawbreakers were in effect protected from law enforcement,” said Kriokorian. “That’s essentially saying breaking the law shouldn't have consequences.”

Trump Has Slashed Refugee Admissions

Just as the world reached a record high in displaced people since the end of World War II, Trump used his executive power to slash US refugee admissions to their lowest level in the history of the program. Where Obama had set the annual cap at 110,000, Trump slashed that number to 45,000 in a September proposal to Congress.

“The President has made clear that in the admission of refugees for resettlement, the safety and security of the American people is paramount,” Stephanie Sandoval, a spokesperson for the State Department, told me in an email, noting that all refugees were undergoing “enhanced security vetting procedures.”

To American citizens and politicians wary of the US resettlement program, this reduction was a welcome shift and served to help keep the country safe.

But the extreme reduction in resettlement numbers has been disastrous for the refugee community, according to Melanie Nezer, policy director of the resettlement organization HIAS. Refugees planning to reunite with relatives in the US lost their slots to enter the country, as did thousands of other individuals living in camps abroad.

The Trump administration also withdrew in December from the UN Refugee Pact, signaling “a “lower engagement overall in global refugee policy,” Nezer said.

“The US has always taken responsibility to be part of the solution for people who have been persecuted... rather than put[ing] responsibility all on countries neighboring conflict,” she added.

"For millions of American Muslims this is a message of exclusion that is completely contrary to values our country was founded on.”
–Cody Wofsy

Finally, There’s Trump’s Travel Ban

The travel ban has been one of the highest-profile and most controversial policy changes of the Trump administration since it singled out individuals from specific countries as ineligible for US entrance. After his first two versions of the ban were struck down in court, Trump issued a third version in September that is currently being enforced as legal challenges move forward.

“Our government's first duty is to its people, to our citizens—to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values,” Trump said in his statement about the most recent version of the ban.

The current ban limits travel from six majority-Muslim countries—Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—as well as North Korea and Venezuela.

“For the families affected, this is really heartbreaking—they're facing the prospect of never being able to live with their loved ones in this country,” said Cody Wofsy, an attorney with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. “And for millions of American Muslims this is a message of exclusion that is completely contrary to values our country was founded on.”

Individuals from the banned countries can apply for waivers to be accepted into the US, but Wofson said he had so far not heard of any waivers being granted.

But Department of State spokesperson Virgil Carstens said the ban was integral for national security. Carstens said he could not provide information on the number of visa waivers granted, nor could he share information about Begami’s case, but added waivers could be granted if a visa denial would cause undue hardship, and if the applicant’s entrance into the US would serve in the national interest.

“We will continue to work with identified countries to address information sharing deficiencies that resulted in their recommendation for travel restrictions,” Carstens told me in an email.

Meanwhile, Gerami, whose family has reapplied for his visa, waits in Montreal for word from the US embassy about whether he can seek life-saving treatment in California.

“He’s gotten depression and anxiety, and has lost his speech because of the tumor,” his daughter told me. “Sometimes he just cries.”

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

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This Was the Year You Couldn't Log Off

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

2017 is the year I lost my mind. Or the year I found it. It’s hard to tell the difference nowadays.

I don’t mean “2017” as the literal calendar year. I mean as a historical moment. History is a coat of many colors and our threads started spinning a long time before 2017, and they will continue indefinitely after. But this year is the one where it really feels like we’ve gone through the looking glass that is the 21st century. The world we left is never coming back and our next destination is still somewhere out of sight.

Every day is something new, and every day is exactly the same.

You wake up in the morning and reach for your smartphone. You skim your newsfeeds for the fresh new hell each day will bring. President Donald Trump said and/or did something wacky? Another record-breaking mass shooting? Another international incident between nuclear powers? A beloved public figure committed vicious sexual crimes? White nationalists are marching on Virginia and murdering people with cars? YouTube videos radicalized so many people into believing the Earth is flat that one guy built a rocket in his garage to prove it? A random person that you never heard of 30 seconds ago said something problematic on the internet? Praise the Lord and pass the goddamn benzos: It’s another red-letter day for content.

So much happens in a week or a day or even an hour that it becomes impossible to hold anything in your head. You forget that Fyre Festival happened or that Kim Jong-Un’s brother was murdered in a Malaysian airport by a woman wearing an "LOL" sweater. You forget that Ted Cruz liked a porn tweet or that the US president repeatedly threatened to start a nuclear war because the world is a nonstop horror show beamed directly to your eyes. (Soon it will be superimposed on your surroundings, like Pokemon Go but for anxiety.)

The world has always been a parade of nightmares and bullshit. But once upon a time, you could give all this up and log off and go the fuck outside. Most of us can’t do that anymore. The border between the mad world of the internet and the maddening world of flesh and blood is growing thinner every day. And it goes both ways; your FitBit can be hijacked as part of a Bulgarian ransomware attack on the US Department of Agriculture, and most public discourse has already dissolved into an unmoderated media flamewar that has put the trolls in power.

Every real thing that happens is broken down into a million ephemeral shards that endlessly slice through our screens. A series of algorithms, built out of the pieces of your life scattered across the internet, ceaselessly brings you new content designed to provoke you into interaction, distraction, and consumption. Anger, sadness, laughter, joy, disdain, nostalgia, fear—whatever. Like and share and hashtag. Click, click, click. Welcome to the arms race to monetize the human brain.

This is a strange moment in social life when we can feel the ground shifting beneath our feet and see the void peering up through the floorboards. Nobody is who they seem, and nothing is what it appears. Time feels distorted—fast and slow and stopped altogether. Anxiety is everywhere. The present is unbearable, but the future is unthinkable. Small wonder mass culture is trapped in an endless nostalgia loop, desperate to clamor back into our 1980s Eden. The Emperor wears no clothes, and the King has left the building. There is no social operator’s manual and there are no adults that you can call for help.

There is no time to catch your breath. The mad masterless machine we call late capitalism must smash forward through the bodies of the poor and the limits of the Earth and the fragile trellis that holds the human mind together. It is clearing the path for the world it makes in its own image. It is racing us toward the edge of something, some great blind hill on a cliffside, pedal to the metal, spinning out of control. Everyone is scrambling for the wheel. Nobody is reaching for the brake.

There are many days when it feels like the world has already gone over that edge. That it’s been too late since before I was born. That it’s only now in the geological microseconds before The End where we see exactly how fucked up everything is and always has been and how utterly powerless anyone is to do anything about it.

There are some days when I believe that this is true. But as they used to say in Newfoundland: “We have to live in hopes, supposing we die in despair.” Turn the lesson of 2017 on its head: If the old world is coming undone, then there are no fucks left to give. This year has been more than just wreckage: It has been a reckoning. The silver lining on a cloud of generalized nihilism is earnest vulnerability. The sky is falling; let’s pull it down together and storm heaven.

The real watershed moment this year, beyond an impressive display of cruel and craven idiocy by the global ruling class, is that 2017 marks the inaugural year of a new phase in the sexual revolution.

This, too, has been building for years. But #MeToo seems to have finally exposed the vast architecture of male sexual entitlement—as well as its small army of enablers—to those who have otherwise enjoyed the luxury of ignorance. The tide it has loosed in Hollywood will not stop anytime soon. It will roll across the world and sweep through every bedroom until every man worth the title stops and listens and reaches deep inside his heart to renounce the genital rapacity that has been promised him as his birthright.

The dog days are over. God damn you indeed if you skip that long look in the mirror for the roots and seeds of violence.

The process will not be smooth, shot through as it is by a thousand other intersecting political projects. It is an open secret to the extremely online that anti-feminism is a gateway drug to white nationalism and the cold embrace of fascism. Gamergate was the canary in the coal mine for the current digital kulturkampf. The well of reactionary rage is deep and seems unlimited, and the backlash will be fierce and ugly. But a revolution is not a dinner party. No one ever promised it would be easy—only that it would be worth it in the end.

One day all of this will end, and we will come out on the other side. This is how you survive the existential crisis of this year and all the ones to come. You learn how to see, with an almost psychotic clarity, the ugliness around and inside you without losing the golden thread of hope that makes life bearable. You learn to be bent and warped and frayed by the forces beyond your control without ever really breaking. You learn how to stop time; how to hold still in your mind those brief moments of peace and light that can still be found if you understand how and where to look.

This kind of survival is maddening. But it’s also the only way you can remain sane. And if that’s not a perfect paradox to cap off 2017, I don’t know what is.

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The Most Frustrating TV Cliffhangers of 2017

The entire purpose of a TV show cliffhanger is to leave you guessing and in anticipation for the next season. Time was that would've meant "three months after the finale," but new models and the changing ways of the TV world mean that sometimes we have to wait an entire year—or more!—until we find out what happens next. How rude! Here's a few from this year that drove us crazy:

Rick and Morty

Though not officially the final episode, "The Ricklantis Mixup" was the ultimate bait and switch: in the first few seconds, it sent our titular heroes on an adventure off-screen that would last its duration, instead treating us to an all-encompassing deep-dive into the parallel sub-storyline of the Citadel of Ricks following Rick's all-out assault on it in the fraught third season's first, and best, episode. Ricksican standoffs and Stand by Me sendups aside, the social inequality-skewering second-best gave a whole new insight into the depths the Rick and Morty universe is capable of, and the kind of plot-twist-callback-cliffhanger that suggests Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's sci-fi shitshow is only getting started. — Emerson Rosenthal

Bojack Horseman

Bojack Horseman didn't even appear in the first episode of his own show this year. Instead, the supporting characters of his life showed that Hollywoo can tear itself apart just fine without his alcoholic, narcissistic influence. If you thought you were going to dip your toes into season four with a quick episode before bed, chances are you threw the remote at the TV when the credits rolled. After the third season ended with Bojack gazing across a majestic herd of wild 'n free mustangs, galloping through the desert, his life was at an all-time low after witnessing the death of a close friend. Would this be the straw that broke the camel's emotionally numb back? With that question burning in the background, Bojack's best frenemy Mr. Peanutbutter runs a disastrously successful run for governor, and his on-again-off-again ex self-sabotages her first healthy relationship in ages. It's super compelling, but the confounding cliffhanger, for lack of a better word, hangs over the whole episode. It's shameful how quickly I smashed that "play next episode" button. — Beckett Mufson

The Good Place

Every single episode of Michael Schur's loopy, feel-good-feel-bad afterlife sitcom is a goddamn cliffhanger. It's created an addict out of me. If this show ever gets canceled, I'll probably have a heart attack. — Larry Fitzmaurice

Santa Clarita Diet

If you didn't make it to the end of this better-than-you-think Netflix cannibal sitcom from earlier this year, you probably forgot about it already—but if you did, I'm sure you're consumed with "What's next?" This show ended almost too abruptly, proving that a cliffhanger isn't always a good thing. Luckily, it was recently renewed, so we'll find out soon what's next in this domesticated and bloody program. — Larry Fitzmaurice

Twin Peaks: the Return

Eat your heart out, The Sopranos. I'll be thinking about this scene for the rest of my life. — Larry Fitzmaurice

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What We Don't Know About Drugs Is Killing Us

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released the latest annual statistics on America’s overdose crisis, and once again, they were staggering. In 2016, 42,249 people died from opioid-containing overdoses, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier. Illegally-manufactured fentanyl and its derivatives—a.k.a. fentanyls—were the the number one cause of opioid-related deaths, accounting for almost half of these fatalities. That suggests today’s epidemic is dominated by street drug poisoning, not the diversion of pain medication, as some in the Trump administration (and many holdout drug warriors) might have you believe.

But while I’ve written ad nauseam about measures we already know need to be implemented to save lives, researchers are increasingly concerned about the many unknowns looming over the overdose nightmare. In fact, a recent meeting held by the Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of Academic Engagement in Washington, DC focused on the gaps in the literature, and what scientists would study were they not faced with financial or other limits (disclosure: I was a participant).

The lack of information out there on fentanyls alone was shocking.

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Among other things, a key mystery lingering over this saga is why potent fentanyls are turning up in some batches of stimulant drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine and even, perhaps most terrifyingly, counterfeit Adderall. In order to curb the spiraling death toll, Americans need to understand much more about what fentanyls are, why they're spreading, and why people take them.

A 26-year-old medical student recently committed suicide after facing criminal charges in the death of his girlfriend. He’d given her a pill he bought online—only, he said, after she pleaded with him for some of what he believed was the study drug. Despite a lack of clear intent, the man was charged with causing her death before taking his own life.

But why would someone sell a drug that often puts the customer to sleep as a wake-up pill in the first place? “That’s an entirely different experience,” noted Ojmarrh Mitchell, associate professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, adding that selling customers the opposite of what they want is bizarre as a business proposition—yes, even the drug business tends to follow market logic—not to mention potentially deadly.

Law enforcement officials have speculated that dealers might be attempting to make the drugs seem more potent. But that’s another dumb business plan, because if you don’t know what you’re taking, you don’t know how to buy more of it. “Maybe people go back to the same dealer because they end up liking it?” suggested Alex Kral, director of the Urban Health Program at RTI International, a nonprofit research organization. But he conceded this hypothesis seems unlikely because users are rarely faithful to a single dealer.

Of course, the biggest problem with dealers marketing fentanyl as anything other than an opioid is that this makes an already-risky substance even more deadly. Heroin users at least have some tolerance to opioids, which reduces their odds of overdose, but those who have never taken such drugs face even greater peril. And customer deaths tend to heighten legal scrutiny—another reason even sociopathic dealers might prefer to avoid poisoning people.

So, why sell these mixtures at all? Jon Zibbell, who works with Kral at RTI as a senior public health scientist and frequently interviews opioid users, told me that although many people might like to mix coke or meth or heroin in a single shot, users almost always prefer to do the mixing on their own—the market for pre-mixed "speedballs" has never been a major one. (My own experience as a former Speedballer is congruent with this: The key is timing, and if you don't control the mix, you can't control the timing.) For this reason, he suspects most seizures of mixed street drugs involve cross-contamination, not deliberate mixing. That raises even more questions, of course, namely where in the supply chain the problem occurs.

Zibbell noted that the DEA has at least once found methamphetamine and fentanyl being shipped across the Mexican border in the same vehicle. However, based on his work with people who take drugs, he suspects most of the mixing is happening far closer to the street, either by accident or by young dealers who might be trying to find their way in the market.

Terrifyingly, these are far from the only critical unanswered questions about fentanyls. It’s virtually certain that some high-level suppliers and dealers have historically cut the drug more precisely than others. How this cutting is done, however, is not known, even though this information could potentially save lives.

Also, experts don’t even know for sure whether heroin users actually prefer fentanyl and its derivatives or whether these drugs have become so common simply because they’re cheaper to manufacture and easier to transport than heroin. My own interviews with users over the years, however—and those of researchers like Zibbell—suggest the rapid rise of fentanyls in heroin markets has not been driven by demand.

After all, fentanyl users often lose consciousness immediately, which means they don’t even experience a high. Also, fentanyls typically last a half hour to an hour—compared to heroin’s five hours or so—producing uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms much more rapidly. Finally, street fentanyls are clearly far more deadly than heroin—this matters because most heroin users are not actively seeking death.

Even so, Zibbell’s research does suggest there is a small group of people who do deliberately seek fentanyls. When he studied the use of test strips to detect these drugs, most users did not want to find the test positive—but a few were pleased because they liked the intensity of the rush.

While this group appeared to be a minority, more than that is not known—and answers, here, too, have important public health implications. To start, it’s easier to reduce harm by providing alternatives if you know what users actually want. Also, because the high from fentanyls is so short-lived, users may be inclined to inject them far more frequently than heroin, which means greater danger of getting or spreading diseases like HIV and hepatitis. That, in turn, suggests greater use of these drugs is likely to mean more bloodborne disease.

Finally, another major gap in our knowledge about drugs involves a lack of research about the pleasure drugs like fentanyls can produce. While this might seem like trivial stuff, it’s hard to help change behavior if you don’t know exactly why people engage in it, and the spectrum of function and dysfunction at play.

“The biggest obstacle to better drug policy is recognizing that the vast majority of people who use psychoactive drugs are self-regulating, controlled users—over 90 percent of users of all drugs,” said Ingrid Walker, author of High: Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users, and an associate professor at the University of Washington.

As Jules Netherland, director of the Office of Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance, who organized the research meeting, pointed out, “[When] we don’t look at motivations for use, including pleasure, it also means we don’t learn from them why some people can quit on their own and why some can moderate.” For instance, research shows that despair and hopelessness increase addiction risk—while having other sources of meaning and joy seems critical both to addiction prevention and to recovery when addiction does occur. Nonetheless, most drugs research focuses on stopping the drugs, rather than providing healthier alternatives.

Pleasure also should be studied for neuroscientific reasons: drugs work by activating brain areas that evolved to make sex and food enjoyable. But while a great deal of research has been done on how these areas behave during addiction, relatively little is known about how they work when people fall in love or have orgasms. Government funders might be queasy about funding scientists to scan people having sex in fMRI machines. But if you don’t know how a system works when it performs its natural activities, it’s difficult to see what's changed when everything goes sideways.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

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The Eight Best TV Shows We Watched in 2017

In 2017, there was more TV than ever. It's true! Ask literally any TV critic if you don't believe me. Volume doesn't always guarantee high quality, but against the odds, there were plenty of television shows we liked this year. Here's a few of them:

South Park

There were many more important things to worry about than the 21st season of South Park, but longtime fans were weary of where the once-marginalizing, now pronouncedly mainstream bellwether for what we joke about and how we joke about it would go in an ever-persnickety 2017. In short, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's scatological satire still smiles with teeth: from Weinstein reckonings reflected as a "witch pursuit thing" featuring actual witches to a consensual relationship between coworkers being so off-limits that news of it causes townies to literally puke, we're lucky there's still something that isn't afraid to suggest that somewhere in an office in California, someone is picking up a phone with the greeting, "Netflix, you're greenlit." — Emerson Rosenthal

Rick and Morty

Endlessly quotable and memeable, Rick and Morty was a force, for better or worse, that couldn't be ignored in 2017. After two seasons of madcap adventures and nearly two-year hiatus, the show had to live up to a lot of hype when it exploded back onto Adult Swim. Season two ended on the befuddling cliffhanger of Rick in a full-body lock, filed away in prison like forgotten paperwork, and creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland spent the rest of season three systematically tearing apart the anti-hero's all-powerful status. What does a sci-fi superhero do when confronted with therapy? How can you fight an interstellar war and also properly raise a family? What use is all the power in the multiverse if all of your friends and family are dead or hate you? With stunning, acidic visuals and a torrent of Easter eggs, references, and sight gags that are a joy to unpack, it doesn't take a genius to enjoy this show, and you're not stupid if you don't like it—but maybe you are if you don't give it a chance. — Beckett Mufson

Nathan for You

The final episode in the fourth season of Nathan Fielder's reality-prank series caused one of the great documentary filmmakers of our time, Errol Morris, to write, in no less than The New Yorker, "I’m starting to see my own life as an experiment in Nathan Fielder’s weird business curriculum." It was that good. — Emerson Rosenthal

American Vandal

I've never been so grateful that my time in high school predated social media's domination of the internet than watching American Vandal. A true crime story a la Serial, the Netflix series follows crack high school investigative journalists Peter Maldonado and Sam Ecklund getting to the bottom of a seriously funny mystery: who drew dicks on 27 cars in the faculty parking lot? It's an eight-hour dick joke with a lot of heart, and plenty of brains too. Throughout a rib-cracking series of investigations, including a Snapchat story party recreation and a surprisingly graphic hand job simulation, the series also deals with privacy, viral success, and modern relationships. It also delivers thought-provoking lessons about to teach aspiring journalists about the right and wrong way to pursue local stories. I meant to check out an episode while nursing a hangover before I started my day in earnest. Eight hours later I had watched the whole thing and gotten nothing done, and I'd do it again. — Beckett Mufson

Bojack Horseman

I laughed, I cried, I WTF'd. Bojack Horseman is one of the most unique shows you can stream, and in its fourth season it remains as novel as ever. This time it's all about family. Cruel parents, rocky marriages, and unexpected children--or lack thereof. As usual, the crassness of Hollywood--er, sorry, Hollywoo--is the main object of the show's friendly ribbing, but this time it also tackles the superficiality of politics. The season opens as the lovable, but empty-headed, dog Mr. Peanutbutter enters a gubernatorial race that's dominated by misinformation and personality. Sound familiar? Meanwhile Bojack is playing hooky on life and wallowing in the past, until the past comes to him. As a bunch of self-centered entertainment industry rich people, it would be easier to hate the characters than love him, but we do, thanks in part to the amazing vocal talents of Will Arnett, Alison Brie, Paul F. Thompkins, Amy Sedaris, and Aaron Paul. Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg's creation remains one of the strongest and most empathetic representations of mental illness out there, while also packing enough jokes per second to floor the most serious stoic. — Beckett Mufson

Game of Thrones

Sure, without George R.R. Martin's writing, some theorize, Game of Thrones HBO's flagship show isn't as tight or thought-out as previous seasons. But it's still fucking Game of Thrones! Warring factions jockey for power in a divided Westeros. Family hunts family. Characters that have been ignorant about pivotal mysteries for years (R+L=J, people!) struggle to figure out what to do with their newfound knowledge. Cersei remains delightfully evil, and Jamie is crushingly conflicted about it. Arya and Brienne are badass, Sansa is learning to rule, Danerys struggles with the brutality of power, and we get to see Jon (Targaryen?) Snow's butt! Sure, fan favorite Tyrion is kind of a wet rag this season, and many of the central plot points are based on garbage plans, but, again, it's Game of Thrones damn it! A bad episode of this is still better than a good episode of most other shows. We've invested too much time to believe anything else. — Beckett Mufson

Twin Peaks: the Return

I've said enough about this mystical, transcendent, and faith-in-humanity-redeeming work of art—and I'm not sure I want to say any more at this point. After all, with Twin Peaks, the less said the better, right? — Larry Fitzmaurice

The Good Place

Was there any show as good at deploying twists in 2017 as this one? (Twin Peaks doesn't count, the whole goddamn thing is a pretzel.) Michael Schur's ethical mind-fuck of a comedy seems to get better and more bizarre with every single episode, boasting one of the strongest ensemble casts on TV right now. Plus, I made it through (almost) this entire blurb without making a "forking" reference. Not bad, right? — Larry Fitzmaurice

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