Monday, December 31, 2018

Vengeful Women Dominated Pop Culture in 2018

Since the Harvey Weinstein story broke in late 2017, #MeToo has dominated the cultural dialogue, with a record number of women speaking out about sexual assault and harassment this year. While the reckoning that ensured has rippled through Hollywood and beyond, onscreen the patriarchy has been deposed by a violent matriarchy. In many of the movies and TV shows that came out this year, there was an uptick of angry, female protagonists wreaking revenge on their male abusers.

Kickass ladies in pop culture aren’t new, exactly. But on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Alias from the 90s and early 2000s, for example, there were extenuating, often magical, circumstances to explain a heroine’s proficiency with a crossbow or whatever. The warrior women of 2018, by contrast, largely used force as a means of defense or to enact revenge.

There’s a good chance this trend is partly Hollywood executives cashing in on the trendiness of feminism. But the legion of vengeful women in pop culture this year also felt like the result of decades of pent-up anger, and watching them offered collective catharsis. Here are a few of the movies and TV shows featuring violent femmes that we enjoyed this year:

Assassination Nation

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Photo courtesy of Monkey Pack Films

While many reviewers lumped this film in with the "rape/revenge" thrillers of the 70s, there's a lot more going on in this powerful, bloody action flick. For one thing, it doesn't lean into torture porn tropes, which reduce women to objects of male violence. The audience doesn't actually see the main character being raped, but when she miraculously survives a murder attempt and begins hunting her male attackers, we're treated to every single bloody detail of their demise.

The gore in Revenge isn't superfluous, it feels earned and necessary. The same can be said of many films and TV shows from this year that feature vengeful women: the carnage is rarely just for kicks. It's a last resort, a means of protection, and a reaction to the instigations of violent men.

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The Ten Most Blood-Curdling, Heart-Pounding Movie Screams of 2018

The last 12 months have essentially been one ceaseless, unending shriek. The news was dominated by stories of school shootings, wildfires, climate change, volcano eruptions, poverty, income inequality, that Eagles fan who ate horse shit, Brett Kavanaugh, and children in migrant detainment camps. The list could go on and tortuously on.

Intentionally or not, Hollywood responded in kind. This year’s movies included unusually high-quality screams that capture the mood du jour in the United States and beyond. Bellows, howls, shouts, cries, hollers, roars, squeals, wails, and yelps conveyed dark shades of emotion for which words are simply too weak.

Some of the best screams come from movies that won’t win Oscars, or even Golden Globes, come awards season. But this list is about the screams themselves. These aren't mere jump-scare grunts, blurted out of gut instinct. Ranked below are the ten most powerful, earth-shaking, soul-wrenching verbal utterances we heard in theaters this year. Beware of spoilers.

10. Venom

You know something’s about to go down when an MRI machine shows up in a movie, especially a superhero movie. Either someone’s getting a devastating diagnosis, or something really creepy is about to happen in that machine. Tom Hardy as journalist Eddie Brock lets out a literally inhuman shout as he almost transforms into the unhinged beast that makes this Marvel film so fun.

9. Mandy

In a year where Nic Cage is on screen and screaming, it would be a grave offense to not include him on a list like this. He’s got a lot to holler about in Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy, a psychedelic occult horror vengeance film involving apocalyptic bikers, niche religious zealots, a giant crossbow, and a homemade battle ax. After a devastating blow to his hermetic life as a lumberjack, Red Miller (Cage) goes on a coke, vodka, and LSD-fueled rampage. In between the devastating events of the setup and the devastating carnage of the resolution, Cage delivers a devastating, carnal howl while swigging liquor and wearing only his underwear and a shirt with a tiger on it.

8. Black Panther

As in every Marvel movie, there’s a lot of screaming in Black Panther. There’s the time King T’Challah fights Erik Killmonger, loses, and falls off a cliff, the time King T’Challah fights Erik Killmonger, falls off a cliff, and then wins, and of course, “WHAT’RE THOOOSE?” But there’s no yelling in this movie more iconic or memorable than the monkey king M’baku’s rhythmic war chant. It shows up again as one of the most thrilling moments in Avengers: Infinity War, and someone even remixed it into a song. Delivery is this guttural bellow’s biggest strength, since it’s such an addictive rhythm for creating hype in any competitive situation.

7. Blindspotting

The strongest part of Carlos López Estrada’s hallucinatory statement about the criminal justice system, cultural appropriation, gentrification, friendship, masculinity, and mental health was Daveed Diggs’s performance as its star, Collin. For most of the movie, he absorbs the overwhelming number of topics Blindspotting addresses while serving his last few days of parole. He lets loose a climactic scream when he’s face-to-face with a cop he saw gun down a black man earlier in the film. The catharsis is tangible.

6. The House That Jack Built

Lars von Trier’s latest film was so violent, 100 people walked out of one festival screening. He got in trouble with the MPAA for screening an ultraviolent version of the film. One of the most devastating screams in a movie full of serial killer torture and murders is when Matt Dillon’s Jack invites his victim to belt her guts out when she realizes he’s going to kill her. Given von Trier loosely based the premise of the film on the moral depravity of the Trump presidency, it’s a highly relevant scream.

5. Sorry to Bother You

Lakeith Stanfield is wonderful in this movie and pretty much every project he’s part of. One of his screams in Sorry to Bother You comes at a pivotal moment when the movie transforms from quirky corporate satire a la Office Space into something bigger and weirder. It’s the kind of scream you only let out when the entire nature of your reality has been flipped on it’s head. So like, every three months of 2018 tbh.

4. A Quiet Place

Every single loud noise is gut wrenching in John Krasinski’s directorial debut, A Quiet Place, which takes place in a world where aliens kill anything making a sound louder than a whisper. If your first thought at this premise was, “Well then how does childbirth work,” then Emily Blunt’s climactic scream toward the end of the film is for you. The predominantly quiet film leading up to the moment Blunt’s character is literally trying to have a baby silently is designed to make this scream impactful.

3. Hereditary

The saddest scream on this list comes courtesy Toni Collette, who delivers a howl so raw it'll make your throat hurt just listening to it. It’s also unique as it happens offscreen, as she discovers her daughter’s now headless body in the car her son was driving the night before. Shit is whack.

2. Annihilation

One of the most disturbing scenes in Alex Garland’s biological horror art film Annihilation was when the death knell of a traveling companion is somehow absorbed by an undead-looking bearlike monster. The bear uses the devoured woman’s voice to lure in its human prey, and in one scene it bellows directly into another woman’s face with the voice of her dead friend. Cannot unsee or hear.

1. A Star Is Born

The moment in A Star Is Born's breakout hit "Shallow" where Lady Gaga just fucking unbuckles and belts out the thick, juicy “Ahhhh aaahhhh aaaaaaAAAAAAAA” is the scream we should all aspire to scream. Maybe next year.

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Sunday, December 30, 2018

The Worst Anti-Trump #Resistance Pop Culture of 2018

Donald Trump is a demonstrably corrupt and narcissistic con man. Two years into his presidency, this is not a novel thing to say. Actually, you would think that pointing out his loutish personal behavior, destructive policies, or chaotic governing technique as if it were a new observation would be regarded with the same sort of derision reserved for people who still say Nickelback sucks. Yes, and your point is? But one of the trademarks of the Trump era is the Trump haters who have formed an almost symbiotic relationship with the president, a cottage industry of celebs, hucksters, and attention-seeking opportunists who have been feeding this fed horse all the way to fame and fortune—or at least attempted fame and fortune.

Your mileage may vary when it comes to anti-Trump #Resistance art. Maybe you like hearing that other people think Trump is actually bad, maybe it helps you cope with the fact that he's in the White House. But some of the pop culture takedowns of Trump have been so misguided or cringeworthy or even offensive that they almost make you embarrassed enough of the clapback left to give the guy a second term out of spite. Not that you’d actually ever really do that, obviously. No matter how bad this stuff got, it wasn't as bad as Trump. Still, these Resistance works were pretty awful:

The Baby Trump Balloon

In preparation for Trump’s July trip to the UK, artist and activist Matt Bonner concocted an absolutely mental idea, mate. To protest the rise of far-right politics around the world and give the US president “a taste of his own medicine,” the mad lad made—get this—a balloon where it’s Trump, but he’s a baby in a diaper. And before you even ask, yes, that baby does have tiny hands.

If Bommer ever imagined his balloon joining Pink Floyd’s Animals cover in the pantheon of great inflatable political statements (an admittedly small pantheon), its ignominious launch surely brought him back down to earth. Messaging aside, the balloon’s biggest problem was its minuscule proportions. While the van-sized windbag, which was the result of a nearly $40,000 crowdfunding campaign, may have seemed massive on the ground, once airborne and hovering all of two feet above the crowd of protesters, it was instantly dwarfed by every parking structure, Tesco, and tree on the block, leaving it wide open for deserved roasting. Even Nigel Farage got a solid burn in.

'American Idiot' Tops the Charts

There’s a long-running tradition in the UK of willing trash music to the top of the charts in the name of having a laugh. Historically pranked with novelty songs, these charts now incorporate streaming platform plays as a metric for tabulating rankings. Thanks to this, UK music fans have spent the past few years enjoying an unprecedented level of control over the number one spot, much to the chagrin of some music journalists.

Occasionally, these charts are manipulated for the sake of political commentary, as was the case in 2013 when “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” reached number two in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death. For Trump’s aforementioned July visit to the nation, the UK’s political activists banded together to politically game Spotify once again and launch Green Day’s 2003 anti-Bush anthem “American Idiot” to the top of the singles charts. Trump was definitely aware of and affected by this stunt.


J.K. Rowling's Twitter Presence

Elsewhere across the pond, The Casual Vacancy author J.K. Rowling spent her 2018 much as she did her 2017: Responding to trolls with double-digit follower counts and quote-tweeting Trump. Rowling’s run-of-the-mill ripostes earned her many a gushing “yass, kween” roundup article from left-leaning and content-desperate media outlets alike.

Perhaps the author’s 280-character eviscerations of Trump would carry a bit more weight were she not spending an equal amount of time obsessing over Jeremy Corbyn in increasingly strange rants. Undaunted, the self-described “bourgeois neoliberal centrist” now vows to use her platform to fight fascism “on both the left and the right," but in reality has merely established herself as British Jen Kirkman.


Jim Carrey’s Political Cartoons

Everyone copes in their own way. It would be easy to shrug off Carrey’s art therapy approach to weathering this administration were his /r/im14andthisisdeep analysis of politics a private affair. Unfortunately, because he’s an A-lister who’s good at one thing, his not-so-good other thing is lavished with praise and forced upon us by fawning press who treat a depiction of Paul Ryan’s face with “CREEP” painted over it like Guernica. Were that not irksome enough, the typically more discerning art world seems to have now fallen under the same spell. His subtlety-free doodling was recently indulged with a feature exhibition at a reputable LA gallery, even though he's basically a mediocre editorial cartoonist.

Worse still, this newfound artistic attention has turned Carrey into an insufferable, self-important knob. Do we really need to hear about his “process” for creating a magic marker drawing of Trump in Joker makeup? Apparently so. In a recent LA radio interview, Carrey likened his cartooning to “Bob Hope entertain[ing] the troops,” proclaimed that he lives “outside the lines,” and talked about getting into the mind of his subjects before painting them, describing the inside of Trump’s head as “a gigantic child needing a hug.” To paraphrase The Mask: Ssssomebody stop him!

The Krassensteins’ Children's Book

Twitter is rife with #Resistance hucksters and scammers, but the majority of these bottom feeders merely live in the shadow of the undisputed kings of anti-Trump grift, Ed and Brian Krassenstein. The brothers have attempted to shake their alleged ponzi scheming past by taking up the heroic mantle of Trump tweet reply guys. Having amassed hundreds of thousands of new followers with their tag-team approach to “have you no shame, sir”-ing Trump, they did what any opportunists worth their salt would and wrote a book. For children.

Their exquisitely titled magnum opus, How the People Trumped Ronald Plump, was flamed with the force of an atomic bomb blast the second it hit Twitter in July, with the left and right forming a temporary alliance to properly mock the book together. Sloppy, rushed, and artless in all respects, this failed Kickstarter project that didn’t know when to quit is a treasure trove of unintentional satire. Chief among them: Ronald Plump’s apparent rape sack; the book’s closing dedication “to the future of America, our children, and the world’s children”; and the prominence of Robert Moral, an absurdly buff Robert Mueller analog who, for some reason, is shirtless.

Robert DeNiro’s Tonys Speech

At the 2018 Tonys, Robert DeNiro was brought out on stage to ostensibly introduce a Bruce Springsteen performance. Instead, the angry grandpa shocked both the audience and (presumably) the CBS S&P team with a potty-mouthed outburst against the president.

“I’m gonna say one thing: Fuck Trump,” the actor declared. “It’s no longer ‘down with Trump,’ It’s ‘fuck Trump.’” And then everyone stood up and clapped.

The core sentiment of the statement isn’t the problem—spouting impotent bromides as if you’re speaking truth to power is. Setting aside the lingering question of why it took the actor this long to reach "fuck Trump" levels of outrage, the statement fails to offer any positive alternative to the president's atrocities. You’ve got to “yes, and” those thoughts, Bobby. “Fuck Trump, and… I’m donating $500,000 to a legal charity that’s working to get kids out of cages. Who’s with me, fellow wealthy celebrities?”

'SNL'

Though the show saw fit to offer candidate Trump a hosting gig in November 2015, well after he’d called Mexicans rapists and trashed John McCain for getting captured in Vietnam, Saturday Night Live has seemingly spent the years since that awkward “Hotline Bling” dance trying to atone for their sins. In 2017, as the administration’s first waves of unconscionable, norm-breaking moves began to impact the country, a desperate population demanded entertainment refuge from the onslaught. With the help of a squinty Alec Baldwin and long-time Trump friend Lorne Michaels reportedly working behind the scenes to keep those Trump zingers toothless in the run-up to the election, SNL quickly cemented itself as the premiere destination for milquetoast political satire.

Though it’s no longer enjoying the ratings of its “Trump bump” glory days, SNL still religiously adheres to the formula that garnered such success. Each Saturday the cast runs through a checklist of whatever bad, funny, or oddball things happened in Trump News that week, parroting quotes, mimicking gestures, and offering little else by way of jokes. SNL’s comedy has sunk to such lows that founding cast member (and noted asshole) Chevy Chase recently described its current viewership as “a whole generation of shitheads laugh[ing] at the worst fucking humor in the world.” If finding yourself agreeing with present-day Chevy Chase doesn’t convince you we’re living in the darkest timeline, what will?

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Friday, December 28, 2018

The Moments That Defined 2018's Surge in Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism has been a steady undercurrent in black American culture for decades, mostly kept alive by a handful of creatives who use technology and outer space to imagine a sci fi-empowered black future. But in 2018, mainstream mega stars also found it to be the perfect vehicle for escaping the woes of President Trump’s second year in office.

Black Panther buoyed the year with an imagined world that a number of other artists interacted with through their own projects. But the philosophy was present in many corners of the real world too, from celebrity fashion to major live performances and even an increasingly famous black female robot, Bina48, forcing the artificial intelligence community to think about coding blackness.

Jay-Z helped ring in 2018 with his futuristic Wakanda-inspired music video for “Family Feud” directed by Ava DuVernay and released just two days before the new year. It opens on a key James Baldwin quote: “The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.” Afrofuturism is the resolve to never become extinct. It’s a vehicle for turning inward and reconnecting with a long history of survival to project a future that would be the ultimate survival. It creates distance from oppressive immediate surroundings without retreating. Each cultural moment below helped give the concept new meaning for 2018.

Janelle Monae
From Janelle Monae's video for "Django Jane." Photo credit: Bad Boy Records, Atlantic Records

Afrofuturism in Art

Much of the year in afrofuturism also bubbled up in new exhibits around the globe. In Dortmund, Germany 32 global artists participated in “Afro-tech and the Future of Re-Invention,” an exhibit further exploring the innovations within afrofuturism. While back in the states, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography hosted an exhibit, “In Their Own Form,” that brought together thirteen visual artists from the U.S. and abroad to share their visions of technology and heroism in afrofuturism. Also in Chicago, the first ever WakandaCon brought hundreds to rejoice in the themes and art of Black Panther. At Art Basel Miami, Urban Philanthropies non-profit took up the job of organizing an exclusively afrofuturist exhibit amidst the festival’s sprawling displays of black creativity in all forms. OG afrofuturist artists continued to shine too, like Lina Viktor who got into a spat with Kendrick and SZA earlier in the year for allegedly plagiarizing her art in “All the Stars,” but closed out the year gloriously with a solo show at the New Orleans Museum of Art that explored the intertwined history of Liberia and the U.S.

Beyoncé's Global Citizen Fest Performance

Rounding out a year where African Americans were considering their ties to the mother continent, Beyonce performed in South Africa to honor Nelson Mandela’s legacy at the Global Citizen Fest. She opened her career-defining Coachella performance wearing a Nefertiti headdress, and followed that aesthetic in South Africa by donning another show-stopping series of looks, including a black, feathered crop top emblazoned with Egyptian hieroglyphs and leather shorts. Big cultural moments like Beyonce’s performance and the other phenomenons that brought people together this year give shape to a global connection that binds people of the diaspora as they embrace the power and beauty of their blackness. It’s often mistaken as manufactured, but is impossibly real.

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My Top Ten Addictions of 2018

I gave up drinking in 2016, and I probably talk about it too much, considering how many other addictions I've maintained and picked up since. Sadly, freeing myself of my boozehound ways didn't mean my proclivity toward overdoing things magically disappeared. 2018 was the year of many things, but for me, it was not one of moderation. Although I didn't find an addiction that utterly fucked up my life quite like alcohol—fingers crossed for 2019—I managed to go hard on things that I didn't even realize were habit-forming in a hazardous sort of way.

1. 'Words with Friends'

Tetris Effect
via Tetris Effect

I grew up in a no–video game household, and as a girl, never had much interest in them. I didn't know the difference between an Xbox and a Playstation until I entered a long-term relationship with a man who has spent the last two years convincing me to like gaming.

And I do! My favorite of the year is Tetris Effect for Playstation 4, which has the most galaxy-brained visuals and a killer soundtrack. "This game is relaxing!" I said when I first played. But after entering a comatose mental blur of endlessly falling tetriminoes, I realized I had a problem, and decided not to get help.

10. The Internet

I used to enjoy the internet very much, and then I spent more time on it and found a job that was like, "Look at this hell box for nine hours a day" and then I was like, "Wow I hate this" but I still ended up looking at it all the time, even when I wasn't working. I truly think online is making us sick and we'd be better off without it. I have grossly basic fantasies of who I'd be if I grew up in the 1980s and wasn't mentally destroyed by technology at such a young age.

I have no excuse for my internet abuse. Please shame me for it if you see me online.

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Inside the Trauma-Filled Camp of Migrants Waiting at the US Border

Last week in Tijuana’s largest migrant shelter, I found myself advising desperate people of their increasingly bleak chances for refuge in the US. I was one of three volunteers—two of us law students, and one an immigration attorney—who had taped a paper sign offering asylum information to an awning between the filthy port-o-potties and overflowing trash cans. The camp held over 1,500 men, women, and children who had crossed Mexico as part of a “caravan” and hoped to find safety, at last, in the US. They lived in hundreds of small dome tents crammed together on the concrete ground of what had once been a roofless nightclub called El Barretal. Our stand was the only place that day where they could get US legal consultation.

That morning, on my way to the camp, I’d read a brief press release from the Trump administration announcing that migrants would be required to remain in Mexico for the duration of their asylum proceedings. No details were available yet, and I wasn’t sure what I should tell the people in the camp. I’d emailed several experienced immigration attorneys while in the car, and anxiously awaited their response. Meanwhile, one after the next, people lined up.

“Can my husband and I get asylum? What should we do?” one five-foot tall, five-and-a-half month pregnant woman, a civil engineer from Honduras, asked me. She explained that her mother-in-law had run for local office and lost, so the opposing political party had threatened to kill her whole family. “What will happen to us?”

“It depends,” I said, repeating my usual, painfully inadequate response, and explaining I could give her basic background as a volunteer with the bi-national immigration legal organization Al Otro Lado, but I was not a lawyer. To qualify for asylum, I told her, you must fear returning to your country because you have faced or will face persecution on account of your identity, meaning race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group—not just because everyone in the country is facing violence.

A few more attorneys also volunteering with Al Otro Lado had tried to enter the camp with us that day, but the camp manager told them she could not approve them until the next day—and by then they’d be back in the States.

Though I lacked details about Trump’s new policy, I knew it stood to dismantle any chance this pregnant migrant, or any other migrant in El Barretal, had at asylum. Our government has shut the door on thousands of asylum seekers desperate for safe, normal lives in the US, and has trapped them in perilous, unsanitary camps in Mexico to languish indefinitely. I’d covered immigration for years as a journalist until outrage at unjust policies drove me to begin law school this fall, but this new policy deprives people of their legal right to seek asylum more than any I’ve seen. We must hold our government accountable for its own laws—and above all, we must remember that everyone making this journey is human who deserves the basic human rights of safety, peace, and freedom.



Not only are people fleeing real threats in Central American nations where gangs, corruption, and drug trafficking rings (fueled by US demand) control governments—now they are caught in camps where they face further violence, and where health problems can be life-threatening.

There is no question that conditions here are unsafe. At El Barretal last week, I watched members of the caravan drag out a man who’d infiltrated the camp and begun harassing children. “He’s not from the caravan!” the crowd yelled as the man, fiery-eyed and seemingly drunk, puffed his chest and flailed his arms, nearly coming loose before police circled him for questioning.

I’d learned hours before that overnight, an anonymous attacker had thrown tear gas into the camp, injuring a woman. The weekend before my arrival saw the most grueling incident of all: Two unaccompanied minors, a 16- and a 17-year-old from Honduras, were tortured and killed, and their bodies were found in an alleyway in Tijuana with signs they had been stabbed and strangled. As Mexican cops investigated the crime, rumors circulated about what happened, and some youths said the culprit had lured the teens out of the camp by pretending to offer legal help. No one knew who to trust.

Unaccompanied minors face some of the gravest danger—not only because they are young and alone, but because Mexican immigration officials have begun apprehending them if they find them approaching the US border to put their names on the list of people waiting to seek asylum. The US government is legally required to grant unaccompanied minors immediate protection if they arrive at the border and are from countries other than Mexico or Canada—but US Customs and Border Protection has been turning them back instead, according to a report from advocacy organization Human Rights First.

The migrant camp
Photo of the camp by author.

As I looked around El Barretal, where just a handful of port-o-potties service the whole population and kids play in fetid puddles, a health crisis also seemed imminent. This week, the second migrant child in less than one month died in US custody, this time of flu-like symptoms. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen responded by deploying medics to examine children who have just entered the US, though that is not a remedy for locking up kids in immigrant detention facilities. Meanwhile, what about everyone who must wait in camps like El Barretal for months, or even years?

The scope of this humanitarian crisis, which our government has helped create, was overwhelming—but I tried to rein in my focus, to provide the most basic asylum information. One immigration attorney I reached advised me to wait before mentioning Trump’s new policy until we knew more, and instead simply warn people they likely would face months waiting in US detention or in Mexico.

Already people knew they would be waiting—the Trump administration had created a list on which migrants must sign up at the San Ysidro port of entry, after which they take a number and wait their turn to request asylum. It’s like the DMV, though the stakes are much higher and the wait times are extreme, if not infinite. About 5,000 people are on this list, and the day of Trump’s remain-in-Mexico announcement CBP called up around just 35 (it was unclear whether those migrants would return to Mexico for their immigration cases or be processed in the US). The only way you find out how to sign up is by word of mouth—and the only way you find out what number CBP is calling is by asking other people, or by going to the border, which is about an hour’s drive from El Barretal.

There is no transport from the camp to the port of entry, except for one organization informally offering rides each morning. Al Otro Lado and other organizations are currently suing DHS for systematically depriving migrants of even the chance to apply for asylum through a variety of means, including the list, which plaintiffs say “creates unreasonable and life-threatening delays in processing asylum seekers.” Some migrants still don’t know the list exists.

“What was the last number called?” one young Guatemalan man asked us at our makeshift legal stand, and then motioned to his makeshift hygiene stand, which doled out soap and band-aids. He offered to write the number on a piece of paper and tape it to the stand. This is now basically the only way El Barretal residents can keep track of the list.

One group of a few hundred migrants had tried to stay close to the list in downtown Tijuana by the border—where the entire group had first been stationed, before conditions deteriorated and Mexican officials relocated most people to El Barretal. But at around 3 AM the morning of Trump’s new policy, the Mexican cops also cracked down: They stormed the border camp with their dogs, arresting over 20 migrants, destroying some belongings, and sent the holdouts to El Barretal. Defeated and depleted, they pitched torn tents in El Barretal’s center, squeezing into the only open corridor letting people cross the camp.

In the chaos of the crowd—music emanating from different tents, teens kicking around a soccer ball, TV news cameramen scanning the scene—people kept coming up to share their stories, to beg for a chance. I warned them I knew just a little, that the situation was in flux, and that what I wished for them was likely much different from what my government did. And I listened, imagining Honduras, where most were from, and where I’ve reported and seen whole neighborhoods empty from murders.

I met a Honduran man who pulled his shirt up to show deep scars from multiple gunshot wounds, and said gang members had killed his two brothers and told him he was next. Then I spoke with two siblings who’d been attacked for leading protests for women and children’s rights, and then a man who struggled to walk since he’d been shot in the back. I told them all they had a chance, and tried to explain the basics of asylum law, but one grew frustrated, mirroring the ridiculousness of my vague words.

“A chance of this, a chance of that, well how am I to know what to do?” he sighed.

“I’m so sorry, this is all I know,” I told him.

Needing a break from the line of questions, I took a lap around the camp, and walked to a back section designated for women and children. A few women sat at a table, and I decided to approach, asking them what they planned to do.

“Do you know anything about asylum?” I asked, to which they tentatively nodded, and then replied in silence when I asked if they had gone to put their names on the list. “What is asylum?” I asked, and they gazed back blankly, so I outlined the basics. One El Salvadorian woman stopped me with a question.

“So, two of my children were killed, and I’m here alone. Does that mean I qualify?”

It’s complicated, I explained, so we began talking more about her experience: She’d taught her children to avoid crime but two had fallen into a gang. One was killed by military police while another was killed by a rival gang member. After the second murder, police repeatedly showed up at her home accusing her of crimes, and one began to rape her other daughter before neighbors showed up at the door.

“Do you think they’ll come back for you?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I think so.” There were so many more facts I needed, and as a first-year law student whose main immigration knowledge is through reporting, I admittedly didn’t know her odds of winning a case—particularly in this environment.

“So what do you think?” she asked again.

“I think there’s a possibility… First, have you gotten a number from the list?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

She just gazed down at the table, quiet. I realized she was exhausted.

“It’s very hard to lose a child,” she said, her voice staying steady but her eyes welling up. “But that’s life.”

I watched her cheeks grow wet with tears.

“Why don’t you just go get a number?” I encouraged her. “You've come this far, you have nothing to lose. It’s one more possibility, it opens a possibility.”

I spent several minutes giving her a pep talk to go get that number, though I knew the number wouldn’t be called for months, the new US policy could make that process futile, and her chances of getting asylum were incredibly slim. But she’d had enough hope to travel 2,700 miles from home to reach Tijuana, and I wanted her to keep her hope, even if it was illusory. At least it might save her sanity, for now.

“By the way, what’s your name? I asked. “Mary,” she told me.

“I’m Mary, too!” I responded: In Spanish I am “Mary,” since it’s easier to pronounce than Meredith. She touched my shoulder, smiling, and we drew each other close for a long hug. We are the same.

But then 3 PM arrived—the time the camp manager had mandated we exit. I left, US passport in my backpack, knowing the border was merely a bridge for me to step across at any hour I wished, all because of the luck of where I’d been born. Mary, along with thousands of other migrants, have lost everything and traveled nearly 3,000 miles for a chance to come here for safety. They’re so close, but our government is not even giving them a chance.

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The Best Thing on TV This Year Was: 'Atlanta'

After a slow winding second season that sometimes seemed more preoccupied with stand-alone episodes than pushing forward the main plot, Atlanta’s finale tied up all loose strings with an epic closing scene in its season finale episode, "Crabs in a Barrel," that was truly one for the books. Leading up to the finale, up-and-coming rapper Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) was considering firing his cousin Earn (Donald Glover) as his manager, who was admittedly doing a janky job but who also has no other career prospects to support his family. In the finale Alfred ominously weighs his cousin’s fate from an unusually cold distance as Earn scrambles to get the crew ready for their first European tour. The tension wearing the duo down somehow transversed the screen, making me feel like even I needed one of their smoke breaks. But the payoff was in the way the episode artfully turns their dilemma into a larger question about what black people owe one another and how their fates are intertwined.

When a stressed out Earn asks Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) if he’s going to get fired, Darius responds: “You’re learning and learning requires failure. Alfred’s just trying to make sure you ain’t failing in his life. Y’all both black so you both can’t afford to fail.” His profound assessment illustrates what Atlanta does so well. The show exposes the high stakes in “ordinary” situations without exaggerating them. Both Alfred and Earn reach for their goals like they have a ticking time bomb on their back. Knowing how little room they each have for setbacks, as black people and young adults, makes Earn less of a loser and more sympathetic when he’s in a frenzy trying to corral all the wild logistics of the trip.

Atlanta
Photo courtesy of FX Network

That makes the climactic final scene even more stressful when he finally gets to the airport only to realize he has a gun in his backpack seconds before going through a metal detector at TSA. He can’t seem to catch a break. Earn stares blankly into the distance and appears to keep moving normally, somehow not setting off the detector with his own bag, but calmly walking away as chaos erupts in the background. On the plane, Alfred tells Earn he saw him stash the gun in another person’s bag, creating suspense that Earn may finally be getting fired. But it turned out the gun debacle reminded Alfred that he needs someone like Earn around that he can trust.

It was a cathartic ending to an episode, and a season, where characters are constantly unsure of their fate. Plus it offered a new take on age-old unresolved questions in the black community: Do we blindly support black people at any cost? The episode answered that doing so is actually best for everyone at the end of the day, and a hustler mentality at the very least means failure is not an option.

One of Atlanta’s signature styles has been showing the most deadpan realistic version of typically dramatic scenes. And simultaneously weaving other moments that reveal the characters’s deep anxieties, which become the real drama as they’re always inches away from their biggest fears coming true. Those persistent fears aren’t usually about getting shot or arrested or caught in some other stereotypically “hood” dilemma. They’re usually much more universal questions about success and failure, and how to be the most poppin’ version of yourself. That’s why even with its winding plot, Atlanta pulled off one of the biggest feats in television this year, turning its hyper-specific story outward to tackle timeless philosophical questions in the black community and beyond that creating a heart wrenching, sympathetic depiction of struggle where any young adult could feel seen.

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My Biggest Revelations of 2018 Came from an Indie Video Game

It’s a rare luxury to play a game where you feel a real sense of kinship with the main character, much less one that encourages you to take better care of yourself. Celeste is both of these things—a bundle of contradictions that somehow meshes self-care, witty dialogue, and devilishly difficult gameplay into a platform game (or “platformer”).

Unlike classic platformers that drag you through levels to rescue the kidnapped princess or to foil a supervillain, Celeste’s motives are purely internal. It’s protagonist Madeline’s own depression and anxiety that drives her to climb Celeste mountain—partially for the punishing masochism of the trek and partially to seek catharsis. Thanks to its focus on mental health, this story is, “quieter, more introspective, and focused on a personal scale,” Matt Thorson, the creator of Celeste, wrote me over email.

It’s clearly resonated with fans, as Celeste has sold more than half a million copies (a large amount for an indie game) since its release January 2018. The unorthodox narrative was inspired by Thorson’s own struggles with mental health. “I was dealing with issues similar to those that Madeline struggles with in the game,” he wrote. “It made sense to construct this character and world, because I find it easier to think about these things in terms of a fictional character.”

As Madeline climbs, Celeste Mountain manifests her mental illness into a physical form. Madeline’s anxiety and depression are transformed into a physical ghostly “shadow” of her own form, and serves as the primary enemy of the game. This “shadow Madeline” taunts you as you traverse the various levels of mountain climbing. She’s condescending and self-defeating, negging you with lines like: “You are many things, darling, but you are not a mountain climber.” Though she’s mortally threatening, this emotional manipulation is far more lacerating than any of the physical damage she deals.

Celeste with Theo
'Celeste' screenshot via Matt Makes Games

Celeste’s developers didn’t consult mental health professionals when building in these tools, leaning on Thorson’s lived experiences instead. But this makes Madeline’s story feel more personal, less calculated. “As someone who has dealt with anxiety for basically my entire life, I learned to focus on my breathing to stay calm a long time ago and took it for granted,” Thorson explained. “It was only recently that I became more aware of the significance of this kind of breathing exercise...Ultimately, the feather couldn't prevent Madeline from falling back into her pattern of running from her feelings, but it still is an important part of her recovery that helps her fight her way back up from the bottom.”

And unlike so many modern platformers, Celeste comes with an “assist mode” that doesn’t demean players for using it. Rather than labeling this mode “easy” or “sandbox” in ways that feel diminutive, assist mode allows you to customize your gameplay—you can slow the gameplay speed down, give yourself an infinite amount of air jumps, or make yourself invincible. You’re invited to use assist mode if the game notices you failing to advance. Similarly, loading screens include peppy messages like “You can do this,” and “Just breathe.” This positivity has been valuable to so many fellow gamers who “connect with Madeline’s story and relate to her so much,” Thorson wrote. “I get emotional when I see posts where people use the game to contextualize their anxiety or depression, talk about it with others.”

Madeline never “defeats” her anxiety and depression. Though you spend the majority of the trek fighting against and trying to escape “shadow Madeline”—or, rather, her self-loathing and low self-esteem—you ultimately crest the mountain by realizing that mental illness isn’t something you can browbeat into submission. Madeline learns that hating her anxiety and depression only exacerbate their effects. By accepting every facet of her personality, and learning to be kinder to herself, Madeline finally climbs Celeste Mountain.

“Creating this game and guiding Madeline through her journey made it obvious to me that acceptance was the only way forward,” Thorson wrote me. We all owe ourselves that kind of realization.

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The Best Shows We Watched One Episode Of

There was a time when, if you missed an episode of television, well, that was it. That time was long ago, however; these days, if you miss an episode of television, you can watch it the next day, or the next week, or years down the road, instantaneously.

But something else you can do is never watch it; the accessibility of the medium has made it so that many of us have less guilt than we ever did about dropping something and not picking it back up. Here are some of the shows we started, and never finished. We wish them the best.

Sharp Objects

I really phoned it in on Sharp Objects. I know I made it through more than one episode, but I definitely didn’t commit to all ten. I probably watched three, got busy or bored, and then abandoned the Gone Girl/Ozark mashup without a second thought towards Amy Adams or the staggering amount of booze she consumes and somehow still manages to hold a job as a reporter. I did something sneaky though: I cheated and found out how it ends. It wasn’t really on purpose; I’d been away on a trip and came home to find my roommate and a friend on our couch watching the finale. I didn’t have the burning desire to spend seven hours catching up, so I plopped down and watched with them. (Spoiler alert) Turns out the crazy daughter was tiling the floor of her dollhouse with human teeth? Weird flex, but okay.-Kara Weisenstein

GLOW

I watched Season 1 of GLOW, and liked it. I don’t know if I loved it, but it was captivating and fun and interesting and all of it was available at once. And then Season 2 came, and I said, yes I’ll watch this again. And then I finished Episode 1, and said “NOPE!” As many have noted, the show immediately dives back into the action, meaning that the women involved with Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling try to take on more control of their careers, and are immediately shut down in ways ranging from ostracization to sexual harassment. I was so stunningly depressed by one episode that I didn’t stick around to see what happened next, and honestly, probably still won’t. Sorry. I don't need TV; I’ve got reality.-Kate Dries

Altered Carbon

The mind-bending cyberpunk series Altered Carbon is Netflix’s answer to the mind-fuckery of HBO’s Westworld. Based on Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel, the story follows a former terrorist whose mind is slurped out of his body and dropped into another one so he can solve the mysterious murder of the richest man in the world. It’s full of interesting action sequences, puzzling mysteries, complex geopolitics, and enough brooding stares to fill a Stephenie Meyer novel. Or at least that’s how it seemed based on the first episode, which is as far as I got into the series. The schlocky futuristic noir thing is extremely my shit in films like The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell, but for whatever reason, Altered Carbon didn’t get me to smash that Next Episode button. Maybe I would if there weren’t 700 new shows coming out every damn year.-Beckett Mufson

Lost in Space

The first episode of Netflix’s Lost in Space reboot tells you everything you need to know about the show. It has pretty special effects, and it’s about a dysfunctional family of scientists who are going to be almost dying a lot. I tuned in for a nostalgia boost, but when I got to the part where the robot (who’s an ALIEN now??) says “Danger, Will Robinson,” it was all wrong, so I stopped.-Beckett Mufson

Jessica Jones (Season 2)

The first season of Jessica Jones is enthralling—perfectly paced, full of dark comedy and a kind of violence that hits you on a guttural level. I seriously anticipated the second season, and admittedly, I watched all of it. But it felt more like getting an expansion pack to the first season than a new story. Jessica is still a raging alcoholic with PTSD and attachment issues. These are very real problems that require space to process and explore. But the noir-loving sycophant in me wanted more refreshingly twisted plot developments—something as audacious as a room full of people being directed to hang themselves followed by a young woman stabbing herself in the neck with a broken wine glass.

The plot of Season 2 doesn’t really coalesce until halfway—in fact, I don’t even remember what happened in the first half of the season. And all I remember from the second half is that Trish, the only good character and arguably the show’s moral center, becomes insufferable. But the middle episode of the season is phenomenal, and I can recount it basically scene for scene. In that sense I effectively only really watched one episode of that season. I’d recommend that one.-Nicole Clark

Maniac

With Netflix now dropping a new show every five picoseconds, I’ve become tactical as a general preparing for battle when selecting content deserving of my precious time. I’ve started regarding friends, colleagues, and trusted critics as pop culture scouts, biding my time at camp until they report back from the front lines of Stranger Things Season 2 with recommendations to retreat, “especially if you didn’t like Season 1.” It’s an increasingly rare occurrence for my reconnaissance teams to suggest charging forward on a show, and rarer still for unanimity, but Maniac was one such exception. The reports were packed with encouraging omens: Cary Fukunaga directed it; Patrick Somerville wrote it; “it’s weird.” Emboldened by their dispatches, I began a head-on assault of the oddball miniseries. The campaign started strong. I immediately loved the show’s Cold War futurism design and quirky performances. Halfway through the episode, however, my resolve began to waiver. At some point, in the fog of war, I’d lost the narrative and was struggling to reunite with it. It eventually ended, leaving me confused but undeterred. I’d rally and re-watch the ep before pushing on, I promised myself. Sadly, that promise went unkept. The content production machine never tires, and fresh battles beckoned me daily, leaving Maniac a senseless casualty in my endless, Sisyphean entertainment war.-Justin Caffer

Making a Murderer (Season 2)

Just like every other true crime obsessed creep, thirsty for the blood of others to be spilled upon the hands of their shitty husband (it’s always the husband) or deranged ex (if it's a woman, the bangs will be terrible), I was chomping at the bit when Netflix announced a second season of its wildly popular documentary series. Making a Murderer follows the possibly wrongful, maybe questionable arrest of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey for the 2007 murder of Teresa Halbach in the podunk town of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. Between all the yeah’s and truly remarkable fashion that filled Season 1, viewers caught an enthralling story about the criminal justice system and accusations of police and government corruption in a small town seemingly bent on keeping one man behind bars. Season 2 was to take up where they left off, only now Avery and Dassey are national celebrities, with hundreds if not thousands of people sending them letters, scrapbooks, and at least one weird blanket emblazoned with odd, yet (I imagine) cozy photos of Dassey. The first episode looked at the celebrity and notoriety gained, the new hot shot attorney they managed to score to defend them, and what the next steps are in the case. As the people of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, often say: yeah, I dunno. It was just a lot of information and legalese, and I couldn’t get past that first episode because it required me to pay attention. That’s just not something I could commit to after a long day. But for those who can stay awake and love true crime, seems like a solid bet.-Alex Zaragoza

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Thursday, December 27, 2018

If You're Into Subtle Asian Traits, You'll Love 'Kids Table'

“Kids Table” is one of the newest entries in the stable of Asian American-centered online entertainment, a five episode series that follows a group of Chinese American friends and their conversations over dinner at the “kids table.” They fight, they make up, but most of all they eat while dishing about what it means to be Chinese American. It’s the perfect holiday binge for twenty somethings who are stuck at their own family’s “kids tables” and want the feeling of solidarity that only good internet content can give.

The web series uses the comfort of the sitcom format to openly explore matters of identity. Part of this is explicit—in the first episode they joke about who is a “good” or a “bad” Asian, citing things like a stable job and a Chinese significant other, which would net them positive points. They also tackle subjects like whitewashing and commodification. One of the best conversations centers around a mala peanuts, and whether it’s okay for such a product to be sold at Whole Foods. Who made the product? Who is the intended audience of the product? Does it support or hurt Chinese American—and more broadly Asian American—communities? Should we support the product by buying and eating it? These are the kinds of questions the series engages with, and it’s easy to follow because the cast and the setting always stay the same.

By addressing these concepts in the roundtable format, the web series becomes valuable twofold: Chinese Americans get to see these kinds of affable discussions about stereotypes in the US that happen so often behind closed doors, with close friends, but never are captured on screen. With nearly 5 million Chinese Americans in the US as of 2015, this show has the potential to go straight to the heart of so many. “This felt like the true story we both really connected over, that we wanted to tell for other people like us,” co-creator and co-director Vivian Huang told VICE.

But non-Asians also get a glimpse into an Asian friend group, in a way they might never get to otherwise. In this sense it’s also educational. This web series comes at a time where Asian American films are finally having their moment—Pixar made a Chinese centered short film “Bao,” and Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before both redefined the romcom genre, respectively raking in millions in the box office, and becoming one of Netflix’s most watched and rewatched original films. But Asian American visual media has been booming online much longer, and a more accurate progenitor for “Kids Table” would be the work from Wong Fu Productions, an indie digital production company co-founded by Philip Wang and Wesley Chan. Their work has amassed more than 3 million subscribers on Youtube, and their shows are helmed by A-list talent.

Without the pressures that wide release films might have to appeal to the “mass market,” web productions can be more explicitly framed around identity. Wong Fu Productions made the popular web series “Single By 30,” a romantic dramedy on Youtube Premium about two high school best friends who made a marriage pact. It stars Glee’s Harry Shum Jr. and Youtube famous musician Kina Grannis—both of whom were in Crazy Rich Asians—and often jokes in a way that makes you feel like part of the Asian ingroup. Wong Fu also regularly goes viral with comedy sketches like “Asian Bachelorette,” which calls out the lack of Asian representation in the form of a Bachelorette parody with nearly all Asian contestants. Even these comedy sketches are rich with talent, boasting names like Ki Hong Lee (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Maze Runner) and famous Youtube vlogger Alex Wassabi.

Co-creators, writers, and directors Vivian Huang and Adina Luo originally wrote “Kids Table” as a feature but converted it into a web series because “the ensemble nature of the story lent itself well to something more episodic,” Huang said in a Q&A after a Los Angeles screening. Much like Wong Fu's work, this format was also “more accessible to the general audience,” Michelle Kwong, the Director of Photography, added.

This accessibility helps “Kids Table” successfully marry the personal and the political. Huang and Luo's focus on dialogue makes each character feel real while representing a range of opinions and identities—this range extends from "Constance to Justin, with Constance being someone who is very conscious of how she represents her Asianness,” Luo said, to Justin being more of a westernized goofball. Thanks to the ensemble, Chineseness ends up being part of each of their personalities, rather than a substitute for one. It feels personal, like bitching about appropriation with your best friend or getting a hug from your chosen family. “All of the characters are a sublimation of the people around us,” Luo said, “It was based on the things we went through and saw others go through.”

You grow fond of Anna, the woman who wants to start her own card making creative business, and gets pushback from her friends who mean well but make her feel bad about her decision. This scene is both a projection of the Asian tendency to prioritize financial stability, but also a demonstration of the way this cultural expectation can result in unintentional pain. By episode three, you realize Constance’s privateness is endearing and you cheer along with her friends as she embarks on a romantic relationship. Where Justin and Jonathan were at first annoying, you realize they cut through any scene that’s too lugubrious with their easy charm and stupid jokes. They’ve also clearly taken on a more Western or stereotypically American affect.

It’s the perfect show to watch with your closest friends during the holidays, after you’ve spent a few hours laughing at memes on Subtle Asian Traits, or thumbing through pics of Michelle Yeoh, the Shib Sibs, and screenshots of “Bao” on the “Kids Table” instagram. You'll have "JALA"—the bop in the opening credits, which literally translates to "extra spicy"—stuck in your head until the New Year.

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Inside an Early 1900s Attempt to Catalogue all of the Information on Earth

A short train ride from Brussels, in the sleepy university town of Mons, Belgium, is an inconspicuous white building that houses a relatively obscure testament to humanity’s thirst for knowledge. Called the Mundaneum, the building houses an early-1900s attempt at collecting and cataloging the entirety of the world’s information, nearly a century before sites like Google and Wikipedia made access to such repositories easily accessible from anywhere with a Wi-Fi signal.

Founded by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two Belgian lawyers with big turn-of-the-century futurist ideas, The Mundaneum began as a continuation of the duo’s earlier efforts to create the perfect classification system. Their index card-based Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system—still used in over 150,000 libraries today—improved and expanded upon the existing Dewey Decimal System, methodically classifying all the factions of human knowledge into easily searchable groupings and subgroupings. Utilizing this system, the duo launched their Répertoire Bibliographique Universel or “Universal Bibliography Repertory” (UBR) project in 1895, which sought to catalog any-and everything ever published into a “global city of knowledge.”

Though it would be able to fit on a thumb drive today, this undertaking needed a vast amount of physical space in the analog age. Capitalizing upon the reconstruction efforts following World War I, Otlet and La Fontaine convinced the Belgian state to give them a wing of a government building in Brussels and funding to make their collecting and cataloging endeavor a fixed institution.

Soliciting help from an international network of colleagues, academics, and fellow information science nerds, Otlet and La Fontaine began receiving shipments of published works at the place they’d dubbed "Palais Mondial" or "World Palace.” Though limitations of the era prevented them from fully decentralizing the project, it’s this collaborative effort that’s pointed to when referencing the Mundaneum as a proto-Wikipedia. But it wasn’t just books, research, and newspapers sent their way. The Mundaneum was also cataloging glass photographic plates, films, audio recordings, pornography, and more. As each new work came in, the Mundaneum’s staff wrote up a corresponding UDC index card for walls of draws throughout the building before archiving the original. Over time, the catalog grew to over 18 million index cards.

This collection was not mean to be hoarded away. The Mundaneum’s creators were of the (then radical) mindset that knowledge should be shared with the common man. To that end, the duo founded a 150-room museum that displayed historically significant items and illustrations from the archive and opened it to the public. For a small fee, curious minds could also send queries to the catalog and have a staffer send them the requested info via telegram, sort of like a slower LexisNexis.


By the 1930s, Otlet and La Fontaine’s many cataloging endeavors, by now collectively referred to as The Mundaneum, had moved to a branch in the Hague where it remained through WWII, surviving Nazi Occupation of Brussels relatively unharmed, though some items were destroyed when the exhibit was replaced with third reich art during the occupation. Following one more move to a dilapidated building in the 1970s, where some of the archives suffered mold and water damage, the Mundaneum collection was finally transferred to its current, permanent home in a former department store in Mons where it now serves as a museum to Otlet and La Fontaine’s utopian vision.

A view of the Mundaneum's atrium

The building’s three floors, bordered with the original cabinet drawers containing 12 million of the original 18 million index cards, is more than a mausoleum to an obsolete media storage system. As the museum’s deputy director Delphine Jenart explains, the Mundaneum’s subterranean archives are slowly being digitized by a handful of volunteers and, as nobody is quite sure of what’s in the stacks, the collection is a ticking time bomb of historical significance.

“Some books indexed in the UBR no longer exist or we don’t know or remember about them,” said Jenart. “We also have an index of international organizations that no longer exist that nobody knows ever existed so it will be interesting to see what turns up.”

Though the Mundaneum archives were compiled by high-minded scholars, they are nonetheless products of their era, and not all the treasure buried beneath the building is of the feel-good variety. Jenart told me that, with the original project focused on voraciously collecting all documents available, a number of documents that would be considered immoral, sexist, or otherwise problematic by today’s standards are present. That said, Jenart praised the “strong values” of the Mundaneum’s “anti-colonist” creators, noting that they “haven’t found anything racist” or anti-Semitic in the digitization process, the one exception to this rule being the propaganda poster section of the collection.

“They had this concern of sharing knowledge, but for the purpose of progressing humanity,” Jenart explained. “They wouldn’t collect things that didn’t serve that purpose.”

Otlet and La Fontaine didn’t live long enough to see their vision for a knowledge-connected Earth come to fruition, dying in 1944 and 1943 respectively, and it’s unlikely they’d be thrilled with the dystopian drawbacks of the information age. But their “paper search engine,” recognized for its historical significance by UNESCO in 2013, paved the way for the easy access to knowledge that we take for granted today, and is increasingly regarded as a basic human right.

“Tyrants or anti-democratic governments don’t like people to be too aware of things, too cultivated, too educated,” said Jenart of how the Nazi party’s disapproval of the Mundaneum ties to the disinformation and withholding of information campaigns happening around the world today. “Information is power. Knowledge is power. And the Mundaneum’s grand plan was to show this to the world."

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The Best Thing on TV This Year Was: 'Pose'

When Pose premiered this summer, it reminded us that a single television episode can pack the emotional punch of multiple feature films. You laugh and cry and swoon and yasss and grab the couch in suspense. Set in 1980s New York City, the central anxiety of the show is how gay and transgender people of color are shut out from opportunities to fulfill their talents, the struggle for them to find a safe, loving and accepting family and home, and the HIV epidemic that ravaged the queer community. But they work to fulfill the very human and very New York desire to make a name for themselves by leaving a legacy in the vogue ballroom scene.

Feeling like a natural follow up to the iconic 1990 ball culture documentary Paris Is Burning, Pose give us a sense of the challenges its characters face trying to get by and realize their dreams outside the ballroom, and how much they need each other to do it. The opulence and glamour of the ball club is a painfully direct contrast to the instability of their financial situation and home life, but they’re survivors.

The best scene of the season was in the pilot episode when the scrappy, passionate transgender protagonist Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) barges into an elite dance academy to convince a teacher that Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain), the boy she took under her wing after he was kicked out of his home for being gay, should be able to audition even though he missed the deadline. Pulling him through the streets, he whines, “this is embarrassing.” She responds profoundly: “We do not have the luxury of shame.” Blanca storms past the receptionist and delivers a powerful speech to the instructor.

“Do you know what the greatest pain a person can feel is? The greatest tragedy a life can experience? That is having a truth inside of you and you not being able to share it. That is having a great beauty and no one there to see it,” Blanca says, and it’s enough to land Damon the audition.

The actual dance number is even more of a tear-jerker as he transforms from an awkward, nervous boy into an unstoppable force of movement commanding the space with the help of Whitney Houston’s roaring voice singing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” He pirouettes, vogues, duck walks, slides across the floor, and struts on top of the instructors’s table. The way he boldly interacts with the judges (making the white people uncomfortable and the black instructor smile) is a reminder of Blanca’s advice that he can’t afford to play it safe. As he flies around the room, freely and gorgeously, he is seen, though the society he lives in wishes to erase him. By the end, Damon is exhausted physically and emotionally, keeled over the dance bar. And the female instructor comes over to him with watery eyes to give him a hug, clearly understanding all that hung in the balance.

Pose
Angel performs at the ball and serves all the face. Credit: FX

As you’ve probably guessed, he gets into the school. But the scene is one of the most memorable in the series because it encapsulates the tension that every character deals with at some point: As much as they would die for their ballroom community, they never stop wanting to be valued in the outside world. That can be heartbreaking at times, like when Angel (Indya Moore) chases after a white man who works in Trump Tower (of all places) only to be hurt when he rejects her. But there are also moments in the series when characters use their talent, community, and street-savvy to get a leg up in their cold world, making each small victory even greater.

Ultimately, the pilot episode tees up a season where Blanca’s sense of urgency (propelled in part by knowing she’s HIV positive) continues to create dozens of wins for people in her house, cementing her legacy and honoring the real people who see themselves reflected in her in the process.

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This Family Won Christmas with Their Wholesome White Elephant Gift Exchange

We’ve all been there: you unexpectedly grab a good gift at your family or office Christmas party during the white elephant exchange, only to have it snatched away by someone wholly unworthy. You are left to pick again, and get something very meh which no one has an interest in stealing. Socks, say. Or a photo pass for a decades-old Guns ‘N Roses show someone picked up last minute at a resale shop.

Enter Adrienne Young, who manages the social media accounts for Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, and her crazier-than-yours family. They have devised an ingenious and so so pure remedy to this very common white elephant problem, and it took the internet by storm on Christmas. In their version, if someone wants to steal your boss-ass gift, they have to first beat you in a game—a unicorn ring toss, a Froot by the Foot eating contest or various odd tasks to be completed without using your hands.

Young took to Twitter to document all the adorable, inventive games her family plays each year—and some on the platform are eager to take part, even if it means marrying into or being adopted by the family. The original tweet on Young's thread has 365k likes and nearly 100 retweets!

The family has kept the tradition going since about 1999, Young's aunt Mary Dam Nguyen, who organizes the games alongside her husband Peter, told VICE.

“When we first started it, we wrote down dares of things that you had to do in order to win the other person's gift, like exchanging clothes with them, doing a funny dance, or getting tickled,” Nguyen said in a Twitter DM to VICE. “Then it started getting really gross with dares like mooning [through] the window, sniffing armpits, or eating disgusting food concoctions. The last dare we did was actually someone shooting an M&M out of their nose and someone else catching it in their mouth.”

But soon enough, the show "Minute to Win It" became popular and the family began pulling games from there instead.

“We revamped the games to fit us better and through the years we just collected items and ideas,” Nguyen explained. “We have three full bins of game supplies and have made funny and provocative names for them too over the years.”

Names like, “How long is my schlong” where players use a tape measure to get ping pong balls into a cup. Nguyen adds Peter is tasked with coming up with new games each year to keep things fresh.

Now even though some of us can’t figure out how to get through dinner with our parents without wanting to scream, the "Dam it, this is BS, I want to Nguyen it" games (dubbed as such after all the names in the family: Dam, Bui and Sharpe, and Nguyen) go off without a hitch or any fights—just pure wholesomeness.

“We have a lot of friends who hear about our epic games and want to either come watch or participate,” Nguyen told VICE. “We're just so excited that everyone loves it as much as we do.”

And Young makes it clear that for all the fun of their competitiveness, there’s more to the tradition than just coming out on top. “While we love playing games, it's not about the prizes or winning,” Young told VICE. “It's just so hilarious to play these games. Sometimes we even challenge each other for bad gifts just to play against someone.”

Or, as one person on Twitter perfectly summed it up:

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