There’s something about middle school that sticks with you. You probably had braces, some mild acne, maybe bit of a unibrow, definitely side bangs or an unstyled center part. You were awkward, unsure of the social negotiations of public school because you hadn’t had enough practice. You probably got bullied by the popular kids and embarrassed yourself in front of your first crush—everyone fumbles on their first attempts. These formative memories got pressed into your mind because they traumatized you. For most of us, these cringe-worthy moments have since become hilarious stories in hindsight that we file away, until the open pages of an old yearbook bring them bubbling back up.

Co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle have bottled these exact sensations into Pen15, their Hulu series delving into the pains of female adolescence. The series follows best friends Maya and Anna as they enter middle school in the year 2000, navigating issues like social popularity, communication, sexuality, microaggressions, and white guilt under the pressures of 7th grade life. It’s right on time, taking on the mantle from recent A24 forebearers of female coming of age films like Lady Bird and Eighth Grade. But the show refreshes the genre through a comical conceit: Erskine and Konkle, both 31-year-old comedians, also play their 13-year-old selves.

You might be wondering how two 31-year-old women manage to play 13-year-old girls, especially given that the rest of the middle school cast is actually kid aged. The answer is a mix of on point Y2K-era costuming and pitch perfect performances that captures the strange and embarrassing nature of kid logic. The Japanese American Erskine sports a bowl haircut—Asian viewers may feel personally attacked by this—and a retainer. The bowl cut is Maya’s mother’s (played by Erskine’s actual mom, Mutsuko Erskine) corrective measure to Maya’s self cut “layers,” chopped in the middle of the night before the first day of school in an attempt to channel Sarah Michelle Gellar. Konkle sports braces and inhabits space uncomfortably, with a slouch that passively explains the fact that she’s much taller than the other 13-year-olds around her.

Maya and Anna both actively aspire to be stylish, but are trapped in pre-teen bodies they awkwardly attempt to flatter in early aughts fashion. Erskine and Konkle understand that a realistic physical performance requires some exposed belly, loose low rise pants, and a stolen hot pink thong, as we see in one episode. In these moments, the conceit of these two women’s real ages becomes jarringly funny. And when tackling the matter of a first kiss, the 31-year-olds circumvent anything creepy by never portraying anything on screen—though implying a kiss may have happened—and leaning into their character’s awkwardness to avoid anything that might read inappropriate.

Each episode of Pen15 packs an astonishing density of material in less than half an hour. We’re given a window into the terrible social dynamics of middle school, and the ways a close friendship makes these dynamics bearable. In one vignette, Anna shares her newly purchased Calico Critters—or a similar brand of anthropomorphized animal collectables—with Maya. They intend on playing with the set that evening, a fact that the boys at the table immediately glom onto and ridicule them for. The girls are able to effectively, albeit momentarily, deflect the taunts back to the boys by foisting the reputation of “playing with dolls” onto one of them.

Because there is no greater insult to a young boy than to suggest he is in any way effeminate, the boy decides it’s appropriate to tell the entire cafeteria that the two girls still “play with dolls.” (The mind reels with memories of being told “boys will be boys.”) The entire cafeteria erupts in laughter, forcing the girls to escape to the bathroom where they eat their lunch. While Maya and Anna camp out in the bathroom, the popular girls crowd into the neighboring stall, gossiping and dropping a cigarette on the floor. Seemingly still embarrassed by the boys making fun of their child-like toys, Maya and Anna instead spend that evening at a basement kickback with the school’s popular girls, drinking beer, huffing from a can of computer keyboard cleaner, and pretend-smoking the cigarette.

At that same party, the boys do a schoolyard pick to determine who they want to spend the rest of the night making out with. Anna gets stuck with an eight-year-old who is ”fucking hot,” the girls say. But he’s eight and obviously no one should (or does) “make out” with him. Maya spends her entire session deflecting intimacy by cracking jokes and wearing a jacket while it dangles from a coat hanger. The boys’ ridicule becomes a key moment in which Maya and Anna are forced to abandon their childhood naïveté or risk being uncool.

In fact, Maya and Anna’s desire to “be cool”—or at least not uncool—is one of the major themes of the show. Self-esteem is a constant negotiation, particularly at an age where kids differ in their physical development. The popular girls have smooth hair, wear slim bootcut jeans, and stylish shirts and camisoles. They have boobs. They wear thongs (which, as previously mentioned, gets stolen in one episode in an attempt to absorb its power). Eighth graders are dutifully portrayed with a kind of intimidation and edge, despite being only a year older than our protagonists. Maya’s older brother, who’s in eighth grade, gives her a string of incredible expletives to wield at her tormentors who labeled her UGIS—ugliest girl in school. The clapback beautifully included the phrase “aardvark dick.” However, Maya freaks out and delivers this “bitch-out” incorrectly, eventually panic screaming that his “aardvark dick” is the reason his father died. Unsurprisingly, this does not go over well.

Schoolyard pick at the party. Image via Hulu

Nearly all of Maya and Anna’s attempts at popularity are wrought with this unbearably relatable cringe humor. The girls cuss with diligence to being subversive, because a little rebellion is what makes you “cool.” But—much like the way Erskine and Konkle wear clothing—cursing is an awkward fit. It’s clear about how much they’re thinking about the curse words, in the abstract, without really understanding the impact of the language itself.

Erskine and Konkle also bring to life so many of the unspoken rituals of girlhood—ones that you keep to yourself or only share with your closest friend. Sexual self discovery and pleasure, and the way the girls are scared of seeming dirty or “perverted,” as they refer to it. Even this has a sharp comedic edge, as Maya’s masturbation spree is interrupted by her guilt which manifests as a ghost of her ojiichan (Japanese for “grandad”) watching her. While Anna and Maya’s friendship isn’t perfect, it serves as a realistic home base for them to navigate these challenges of puberty. They’re constantly fighting and making up, as they learn the line between the emotions they feel privately and the ones they share. Through these experiences they also learn that they may not do all of their “firsts” together, as they swear they will at the start of the series. In the case of “first fingers” this is probably a good thing.

The show amounts to a boisterously campy and painful excess of emotion. To be a child is to be, in so many ways, completely powerless and at the mercy of adult caretakers. Events that feel small to an adult have profound emotional impact on a kid. At the age of 13, you just begin to understand prejudice and its inescapable imprint on every aspect of life—to be a girl is to experiences numerous disadvantages, and to be a girl of color compounds these disadvantages exponentially. In one episode Maya learns about racism and immediately vomits upon recalling all of the microaggressions she’s experienced. It’s difficult to watch these episodes without reliving your own torment as a child—the ruthlessness with which peers cast judgment, how bullying escalates, the often uncomfortable transformation of your body, and the way adults are ill-equipped to deal with any of it.

It is, at times, not a particularly pleasant revisit, but that is perhaps what makes it such a successful portrayal—in watching you remember just how much middle school is a time we would all rather forget. Pen15 helps us fondly recall the agony and the excitement of that time.

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“Porn and candy,” James Safechuck says with a sigh in the upcoming HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, recounting one of the countless sexual encounters he claims to have shared with Michael Jackson as a child. The four-hour film recounts his story as well as that of Wade Robson, another boy who says he was groomed to be Jackson’s secret child lover over a period of many years.

In each case, the film alleges, Jackson sought out children who mythologized him, slowly seducing their parents with vacations, houses, and money, while psychologically manipulating the boys into thinking they were liable accomplices in his sex crimes. The boys’ stage performances and sycophancy toward Jackson are endearing (what 80s child wouldn’t fall to pieces when gifted a “Thriller” jacket or “Smooth Criminal” hat?) which makes the graphic and detailed account of their sexual allegations against Jackson all the more horrifying to endure.

James Safechuck first met Jackson when they co-starred together in a 1988 Pepsi commercial. The two became inseparable, with Jackson often staying over at Safechuck’s home, bringing him along as a Mini Me performer on the Bad Tour, and, according to Safechuck, lavishing him with jewelry (including a diamond ring used in a mock wedding ceremony between the two). Safechuck alleges that Jackson supplied him with wine and the two would perform sexual acts on each other on a daily basis, both at Neverland Ranch and in hotel rooms on tour (where his mother was often booked in a separate room).

Around the same time, Jackson met five-year-old Australian Wade Robson after he won a lookalike dance contest. Similar to Safechuck, the Robson family claims that Jackson seduced them with a life of luxury while routinely engaging in sex with their son. When they were apart, Jackson called and faxed Robson every day, often staying on the phone for “six to seven hours at a time,” according to his mother.

The descriptive interviews with both Safechuck and Robson (now in their thirties) about the sex they claim to have had with Jackson leave little to the imagination. Phrases like “bloody underwear,” “squeezing his nipples while he ejaculates,” and “a grown man’s penis in my seven-year-old mouth” are difficult to sit through, but perhaps necessary when considering what these guys are up against in coming forward with these allegations.

The Jackson estate has been working hard to discredit HBO and the director and subjects of Leaving Neverland, releasing a ten page letter to the company citing numerous grievances (including calling Robson unreliable because his father suffered from mental health issues and took his own life).

Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed doesn’t feel that the Jackson estate has any legs to stand on in criticizing his film, and is optimistic that all of this will lead to greater conversation about sexual abusers in positions of power. I recently caught up with Reed to discuss the emotional, legal and cultural turmoil his film has wrought on society, and whether or not we should all stop listening to Jackson’s music.

VICE: There have been so many books, documentaries, and TV specials focusing on the psychology of Michael Jackson and the abuse he endured as a child impacting his behavior as an adult. Was it a conscious choice for you to not explore Jackson’s internal world at all in this film?
Dan Reed: Well it’s not a film about Michael Jackson. It’s about the Robsons and Safechucks and their encounters with Jackson. I never met Michael Jackson, I never interviewed him, I don’t know what it was in his history or his psychological makeup that led him to molest little boys, and I don’t want to speculate on that.

I don’t think that having a tragic childhood determines your behavior later in life. Not everyone who has a bad childhood or was sexually abused becomes a sex abuser. What I was fascinated about with this story is the picture [Robson and Safechuck] draw of the grooming sexual predator. And because that story involves Michael Jackson it will have an incredible reach. And that will bring to light some really important facts about how child sexual abuse does happen. It’s not how people imagine.

That’s why so many people on Twitter are asking: “Why did Robson stand up for Jackson in court? Why didn’t he just run to his mummy and say ‘Michael Jackson did these things to me’”? Well, because that’s not how sexual abuse works. And I think this film shows that in poignant detail. Abusers can make their victims fall in love with them. Like Wade says how he lived his entire life with this fantasy that Jackson’s relationship with him was a positive thing. But that was bullshit, and it was very difficult for him to admit that.

It seems like this is not so much a story about Jackson’s [alleged] abuse revelations, but more of a story about these two men contending with the abuse they endured as children.
Exactly. That’s where the film lands, when Wade and James reveal to their families the abuse they endured. To me, that’s where the emotional peak of the film is, even more than the horrible detail of the sexual transactions. It’s in the release of Wade finally telling his family and his wife the truth, which he’d lied about for so long.

Michael Jackson fandom breeds a particular kind of intensity. What has the backlash to the film been like from them?
So let me be clear about one thing: There are tens of millions of Michael Jackson fans out there in the world. People who love Michael’s music and have great memories of dancing to his music at their weddings or bar mitzvah or the last time they saw their mom. His music is interwoven into the fabric of people’s lives around the world. And a majority of MJ fans are just people who just really like his music.

But there is also this league of fans who are almost like a cult, and they say very nasty things [about the film] on social media. And their words echo the two-decade long rhetoric of the Jackson family and legal team, which is shaming the victims. It happens often in these cases. It’s what they do very aggressively and relentlessly, and I don’t think you can get away with that in 2019 like you could in the past.

The majority of Jackson fans are people who will be really shocked to hear this very compelling case of abuse by Jackson, as I was. When I first came into this I had no prejudice against Jackson, I had no fixed opinion about whether he was or wasn’t a pedophile, he could’ve been innocent. I believed he was a good guy, made good music, seemed nice to children, and I think most people were in that grey area. Sadly, it turns out he was a sexual predator, and I think a lot of people are going to rethink their view of him.

And I’m sure your next question is going to be: Should people stop listening to his music?

That is on my list of questions.
[Laughs] I wouldn’t say that there should be any hashtag to ban Michael Jackson like there is with R. Kelly. I think Jackson’s music is too woven into the fabric of American and British life, and others around the world, to just rip it out like that. Do you want your children’s party soundtrack to be MJ songs? I don’t know. I wouldn’t. But should it be banned? I don’t think so. It’s great music, he was a great artist and entertainer. He was also a pedophile.

Were those the real sequin glove and "Thriller" jacket that Robson was burning in the final credits of the film?
I wasn’t there when Wade burned those items, but the photographic evidence suggests those were the real deal, yeah.

Seems like those would be profoundly valuable items, which is particularly interesting since the Jackson estate is claiming Robson is telling his story for the money.
Sure, but I don’t think [the burning of memorabilia], in itself, validates his position. I think you have to look at the wider picture, which is that he and James weren’t paid and have no financial interest in the documentary, for a start.

They also criticize your film for not reaching out to anyone for a counterpoint to Robson and Safechuck’s story.
We included plenty of critics of Wade from Jackson’s fans, statements from Jackson while he was alive where he denied all child sexual abuse allegations, and statements from the lawyers during both investigations. I think we comprehensively represented the positions of Michael Jackson and his lawyers.

Right. There just weren’t any contemporary interviews done for the film.
Yeah, but the Jackson estate’s position, to my knowledge, hasn’t changed. They maintain that Jackson is innocent.

It seemed like it was important to you that the film include a lot of explicit detail about the [alleged] sexual acts between Jackson and these boys, and not just rely on the generic statements like “he sexually abused me.”
We had to establish that actual sexual activity was taking place. For so many years Jackson claimed that he shared a bed with children for completely innocent reasons. If we hadn’t had these very graphic, shocking descriptions of the sexual activity that took place people might just think that it was only hugs that were a bit intimate, or slightly inappropriate brushing of cheeks. We thought it was important to make clear that this was sex, not just affectionate touching.

Did you get the sense that any of Jackson’s handlers knew about or even helped facilitate aspects of this?
Well, just to be clear, I didn’t come across anything to suggest that anyone else participated in the sexual activity. If you’re asking: Were people who worked with Jackson complicit in this? That’s a question that must be asked, but it’s one I don’t have an answer to. Jackson’s life was closely managed almost 24 hours a day by his staff. Were they all completely oblivious to the sexual abuse taking place at Neverland and on tour? What did they think Jackson was doing with a boy in his bed every night?

Did you get the sense that Robson and Safechuck’s experiences were just a drop in the bucket?
I believe there were many other victims. We wanted to focus on James and Wade, and their families, who had very long relationships with Jackson. I’m sure there are others out there who will come out when the time is right for them. We’ll see.

How did Jackson’s death impact the viability of this film?
It may have been more difficult to make if he were alive today. People are still very much afraid of Jackson and his lawyers. As I went around speaking to people who were associated with the investigations, they were afraid of Jackson’s people’s ability to shutdown a lot of the victims. They employ unscrupulous PIs, and are very litigious. The power of his machine is very terrifying.

Beyond Jackson’s death, society’s handling of sexual abuse survivors is wildly different than in 1993 when the first accusations surfaced. Do you think the #MeToo movement had an impact on the reception of this film?
Oh yes, it’s incredible. And there’s a British angle to all this as well: There was a very famous, and very creepy children’s entertainer in the UK called Jimmy Savile who was knighted by the Queen, but it turned out that he was a violent, prolific child rapist with hundreds of victims. And it took a long time for that to be accepted. So by the time I made this film that case was already well known.

And then just before Sundance the R. Kelly documentary was broadcast. So we’ve been kind of blessed that there’s been this wave of believing victims of sexual abuse, instead of smearing them. I don’t think today Jackson would’ve gotten away with what he did in the 90s.

How are Robson and Safechuck doing? Are they getting away from everything while this film premieres?
Oh no. They’re stoked. The premiere at Sundance was a turning point in their lives. There was a standing ovation for them after the film, with people shouting “We believe you!” They had tears in their eyes. I think they were shocked because it was the first time they had that validation. They were so used to not being believed and being denigrated. This is a real moment for them.

Interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

Leaving Neverland part one premieres on HBO March 3, with the following installment released the next day.

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Madam Tussauds in Times Square is where unlucky tourists go when they have literally no idea what to do in New York besides wandering around Times Square. Still, the wax museum is a certain kind of New York institution, a reliable spot to take weird selfies or celebrate Valentine's Day by snuggling with a terrifying waxwork Tom Hardy, if that's what you're into. Over the weekend, it also became the scene of an unhinged, bafflingly violent crime.

According to the NYPD, a man started shouting at a statue of Diddy at Madame Tussauds on Saturday night, knocked it over, and fully decapitated the thing, NBC New York reports. He then, uh, mercilessly stomped Diddy's wax head to a pulp and ran away.

Police are on the lookout for the unknown assailant, who was reportedly dressed in jeans and a black hooded jacket at the time. He was also, presumably, sporting a pair of very waxy shoes. Other details about the incident are pretty scarce at this point, leaving us with some pressing questions—so, so many questions. First and foremost:

What did Diddy do to you?

Was this a premeditated attack? Were you incensed over Diddy's back and forth about changing his name to "Brother Love"? Have you not read the music mogul's surprisingly sweet tweets about how much he loves you? The Diddy statue was reportedly on the ninth floor of Madame Tussauds—the place is huge—so you would've had to make your way through floors upon floors of other wax statues, John Wick-style, until finally reaching your target. What kind of weird rage could have possibly carried you up all those stairs?

When you step on a wax head, does your foot get stuck like stomping on a pumpkin, or what?

What's inside a wax statue, anyway? Is there some kind of skeletal frame made of chicken wire or whatever, or is it just wax through and through? From the look of the one and only crime-scene photo, it appears to be hollow, gumball-style—but it's unclear if the wax was hard enough to shatter right away or if the first stomp put you ankle-deep in Diddy's noggin. And after the deed was done, when you finally came out of your blind Diddy fury and fled Madam Tussauds, did you slip and slide across the floor, your shoes slick with Diddy wax? These are important facts. These are things we need to know.

Are you a frustrated wax artist jealous of how stunningly lifelike Diddy's statue is?

Most wax statues are fucking terrifying. Just look at the goddamn horror that is this statue of Donald Trump, or that uncanny army of Jimmy Fallons. But somehow, Diddy's statue looks... actually really good? How is that even possible? There's a chance the attack wasn't aimed at Diddy—perhaps it was some kind of weird, envy-fueled response to the incredible artistry behind the statue itself. Maybe the sheer magnificence of the replica sent our assailant spiraling out of control, filled with an unbearable jealousy, knowing that his puny hands could never carve such a perfect facsimile of the human form.

So someone has to carve a whole new Diddy statue now?

Man, that sucks. Ostensibly, some poor wax artisan woke up to an emergency text late Saturday night containing a dire message: Diddy is gone. We need a new Diddy. Also, someone has to scrape this squished wax off the floor. Maybe bring a putty knife or something? Thx.

Were you just pissed about having to pay $30 to look at some giant candles?

It costs $29 for a basic ticket to Madame Tussauds. If you want the whole package deal, you're going to have to shell out upwards of $50, which is a pretty hefty price tag. Could that have been enough to compel a man to scream into the lifeless eyes of a waxwork Sean Combs, rip off its head, and stomp the dismembered skull into oblivion? You're in Times Square, man. If you don't want to spend money, go literally anywhere else.

Do you, dear reader, have answers to any of these questions? Are you the mysterious wax Diddy assailant himself? If so, please hit us up. We'll update this post if and when we learn more.

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Check out more of Walt's work on his Instagram.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

Let's say you wake up one day and decide to start your own drug lab. You bribe a farmer in a remote area, take over one of his barns, and install yourself inside. Now what?

Take to the dark web, of course, where all questions about both making and selling drugs are answered. Where it is perfectly acceptable to ask: "Can you recommend a step-by-step video tutorial on how to make speed?"

"Dread" is a dark web platform where you can find information about the many boring things involved in manufacturing and selling drugs. Like: If you want to send out an unsuspicious-looking envelope, do you write the address by hand or go for a printed sticker?

Obviously, it's impossible to know exactly who is answering these questions—it could be a 12-year-old having fun for all you know—which is one of the many reasons that it would be unwise to take anything on the forum as sound advice.

Most questions on Dread's d/DrugManufacture forum are about the machines that make ecstasy pills. For instance, how in the world do you make pills that have two different colored layers? The answer is pretty simple: "To make two-colored pills, you need an industrial pill press. It's a press with two molds that hold the powder, which are pushed together at the same time," says a forum member. That inspires the next logical question: How do you get your hands on a machine like that?

Screenshot of d/DrugManufacture, with ads for drug dealers on the right.

You can imagine that ordering a pill press online and having it delivered to one's house might spike the interest of customs agents. The subforum on Dread provides answers. One tip: "Don't order it in the United States," because apparently they heavily monitor pill press orders.

Not so long ago, Reddit was the place to talk about drugs on the regular internet. Since the start of this year, however, talking about buying drugs on the site has become strictly prohibited, so the community has made its way to the dark web, where nobody cares what you talk about. This transition has brought a few changes, especially when it comes to privacy. All shared information is encrypted several times before it's sent to the forum's servers. Search engines no longer show any responses on threads and the forum double-checks privacy settings. If they need to be changed, a message pops up to warn a user: "Be careful, your identity could be exposed."

Dread has banned sharing personal information, according to a pinned post at the top of d/DrugManufacture. Another rule: Don't tell anyone where you get raw materials to make whatever drug you're cooking up. If that information gets out, the police could track down the suppliers, which "ruins it for everyone."

After reading through the rules of the group, users are allowed to ask as many questions as they want.

"A popular way to get cocaine across the border, is to turn it into a liquid and spray it on your clothes."

Say you have been able to successfully follow the steps outlined to make cocaine; the next question could be how to get it across a border. The most popular recommendation is to turn it into a liquid and spray it on your clothes. But what do you use to liquify the cocaine? Acetone? No, says one forum member: Cocaine doesn't dissolve in acetone but in water.

Though you could ask almost any question that comes to mind about making, smuggling and selling drugs, offering drugs in exchange for money is off limits on Dread. According to the moderators, Dread is a forum, not a marketplace.

In the subgroup d/DarkNetMarkets, you can find reviews of drug dealers on the dark web. Additionally, a "vendor super list" has been created that aims to split the trustworthy from the scam artists, while detailing specific dealers' delivery times and the quality of the drugs they sell.

Dealers aren't allowed to offer their products for sale on the platform, but there are no rules against advertising their business. The Psych Charm, for instance, tries to lure the site's users into their web, where they sell LSD. Or Dutch Drugz, a dealer from the Netherlands who says he sends drugs like 2C-B, DMT, and ketamine to a lab first to make sure the quality is up to par, then sells them for "a low price."

These ads point to a new internet trend. Ten years ago, every drug dealer with an online presence sold on one central market place: Silk Road. That first crypto market was kind of like Craigslist, but for illegal goods. Drugs, weapons, passports, all were bought and sold through the one single crypto market. Those days are over; there are now dozens of these sites—like GammaGoblin, the largest LSD retailer on the dark web.

WATCH: Gangsters in Paradise

Last year, Dutch police announced a joint sting operation with other countries, which resulted in the simultaneous shutdown of the two largest crypto markets: Hansa Market and AlphaBay. Over the course of a few weeks, detectives secretly took control of the two digital marketplaces, accessing conversations that are usually encrypted. Some users who'd ordered drugs got a surprise visit from police, while those who'd ordered more than they would need for personal use were prosecuted. Law enforcement wanted people to know that even the dark web doesn't guarantee protection.

Ultimately, though, the result of the police sting was that a few Dutch teenagers got a scare and two founders of Hansa Market and AlphaBay were arrested. But online criminals already seem to have forgotten all about that episode; there are still plenty of people buying and selling drugs on the dark web as if nothing happened.

Disclaimer: We do not recommend you start manufacturing your own drugs, even if you've gathered all the relevant advice on a dark web forum.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The bench: not quite a chair, not quite a sofa, but an uncomfortable in-between where people relentlessly ask you for cigarettes.

In British culture, benches are for three things. First, they are for taking a nap. Second, they are for formative hooking up—who among us has not done hand stuff or at least been felt up on one? But what goes up must come down, and when not hosting sexually-active youth, benches are used for the opposite of romance—they are battlegrounds for breakups.

A bench is a horrible place to be dumped. I, myself, have been dumped on many, so know that there are different types of benches you can be dumped on, and each is painful and humiliating in a different way. For instance:

The park bench

Photo: VICE

While parks are typically reserved for falling off bikes, doing poppers, and taking your dog to shit—depending on what kind of life you lead—they are also widely used for breakups. The park bench is a neutral go-between, perhaps where you had picnics or kissed up against trees in your earlier days of frolicking and fucking. In the eye of the dumper, these happy memories make the park seem like something of an ideal location—and in some ways, it is. One of the most common pieces of advice in times of stress is to go outside and immerse yourself in the soothing arms of Mother Nature, so if you’re going to be dumped, at least you’ll be surrounded by trees and many nearby dogs to pet for comfort before you take the short, lonely walk back to your hovel.

Despite being the most scenic, however, the park bench is actually a particularly merciless location. Sure, there are leaves, but the reality is you'll be sitting on a bench that's probably dedicated to someone's dead relative, having your soul ripped out to the sound of joyful children at a nearby playground.

Pro: You can make a huge scene.

Con: That huge scene takes place in front of children and other happy couples, highlighting you as the sad social pariah you really are.

The bench outside the train station

Photo: VICE

This type of bench is a particularly calculated dumping-ground, as it shows your partner is expecting a nice and timely ten-minute trashing so they can catch the 6:15 train back to wherever the fuck they came from. Station dumping is also particularly cruel because one could be forgiven for thinking that the two of you were off on a surprise jaunt somewhere nice, like the seaside, but instead you've spent £1.50 [$1.95] on a bus to a station to be dumped, and now have to spend an additional money getting the bus back so that you can cry alone in peace.

Pro: Good transport links to inner-city areas.

Con: Crying hysterically in front of emotionally repressed commuters is not a good look.

The cafe bench

Photo: VICE

The café bench is a wonderful place. Sitting outside a cafe with a nice hot drink in your hand and some comfort food at the ready, you will be dumped in a fairly civilized manner: "We can't see each other anymore. Would you like another coffee while we talk about it?" 'FUCK YOU!' you scream internally as you say aloud, "No thanks, just a diet coke."

Pro: You get a free drink.

Con: It’ll taste like shit because it’s full of salty tears.

The museum bench

Ah yes, the thinking man's dumping spot. As well as being the most aesthetically pleasing, this type of dumping is very well thought through, as the other person is hoping that the silence and general austereness of the surroundings will stop you from crying hysterically and lying on the floor yelling, "Please don't leave me!" Unluckily for them, they have picked the Tate Modern, where it is perfectly acceptable to do this, as people will think that you are a piece of performance art.

Pro: You might make it on to some art blog about heartbreak in the modern age.

Con: Tourists taking pictures of you in your lowest moment.

The beer garden bench

Not technically a beer garden but our office is in East London and it's February, so. Photo: VICE

Probably the place where you also met. And where you will now religiously frequent in the hope that you might bump into one another again—"Wow, I did NOT expect to see you here, but seeing as I have, can we talk?"—and reignite your sad little romance. This bench is particularly grim; people around you are eyeing up their bumble matches and you're being dumped.

Pro: You don't even need to move after it's happened; you have already arrived at your post-breakup destination. Congrats, drink up!

Con: You didn't realize it was possible to have a shitty time at your favorite place in the world (the pub), but it is definitely possible: It is happening now.

The School Bench

Where the depressing trend of being dumped on benches all began. The OG bench. The bench before all other benches. You are in fourth grade and have spent the morning blissfully engaged to Joseph in fifth grade. It is now lunchtime, and Joseph has heartlessly called-off the playground marriage that was due to happen this afternoon. Where did it all go wrong?

Pro: Never mind, you secretly didn't really want to have to hold his hand anyway, and if anyone asks you can say you're just sitting here on time-out from a game of tag.

Con: None. It is good to learn from a young and tender age about heartbreak and how this will be your new reality, over and over, until you finally meet the one or end up alone like your weird aunt.

The bench that pops up 50 minutes into the ominous 'walk.' They ask you to sit down and suddenly you know what's coming, but you're so tired from the long walk that you really do want to sit

Photo: VICE

To conclude: If your lover ever offers up a bench as a rendezvous point, say no. Taking what we now know about benches into consideration, it's probably best to remain standing.

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Darcelle Slappy got crushed in 2018. Republican incumbent Aaron Bernstine defeated her by 56 points in the Tenth District race for Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives. Slappy, a lifelong Democrat, is a member of the Big Beaver Falls Area School Board, but she didn’t know how to make the transition to a higher office, and only had a few months to learn.

She got schooled by Bernstine, who in an unusual move won the Democratic primary through a rare write-in campaign, meaning he had the nomination of both major parties. He was going to run unopposed in the general, but in June, at the urging of local Democratic leaders, Slappy jumped into the race as the Green Party candidate. However, because she had switched affiliation, the Democratic Party in her suburban Pittsburgh district couldn’t help her. That meant no money and no assistance with campaign infrastructure, and the result was the kind of shellacking that would turn some away from politics.

Determined to rebound from her landslide defeat, Slappy attended an all-day course held by the National Democratic Training Committee (NDTC) earlier this month.

Founded in 2016 by longtime Democratic operative Kelly Dietrich, the NDTC is a hybrid PAC that aims to deepen the Democrats’ bench by providing free online and in-person classes to activists, campaign volunteers and staff, and candidates. The NDTC has 55 trainers spread across the country, with years of experience as political consultants, field directors, and community organizers. Last year, the organization held 64 free events in 46 states, and Dietrich said he hopes to schedule 80 more and hit all 50 states in 2019.

VICE shadowed Slappy during her training to understand how the NDTC intends to help keep the blue wave of 2018 rolling. Sixty-six people from western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio attended the event, held at the Community College of Beaver County, a 45-minute drive northwest of Pittsburgh. They were divided into four groups—volunteers, staff (campaign and local party infrastructure), and two classes of candidates—and each took four 75-minute courses on fundraising, communication, field work, and social media.

Heading into the day, Slappy, 43, was planning to run for Beaver County controller, a position that oversees the county’s financial affairs, instead of challenging Bernstine again in 2020. “Maybe I’m more suited for a smaller office right now,” she said. But Slappy began to doubt this idea during the first course. Titled “How to Develop Your Story of Self” and taught by Brittny Baxter, a coordinator for Maryland Working Families, the session focused on articulating “who you are and why you’re running.”

As Baxter used Stacey Abrams as an example of a politician who explained why they were seeking office through their personal story, Slappy questioned if she could relate to people looking for a controller. “I’m not passionate about being a controller,” Slappy said. “Education’s my passion, and I could improve schools in my district from [the state] house.”

Here’s Slappy’s story of self: Growing up in Beaver Falls, she dreamed of attending Georgetown University. But she dropped out of high school during her senior year because of an at-risk pregnancy. Doctors diagnosed her with twin-twin transfusion syndrome, a rare condition that occurs when identical twins share a placenta and blood flows unevenly between the fetuses. Slappy gave birth four months prematurely and one baby died. Over the next decade, Slappy earned a GED, attended a culinary school and then a beauty academy while raising six children with her husband, whom she had started dating at 13. In her 30s, she received an associate’s degree in criminal justice from community college and was offered a scholarship to finish her bachelor’s degree, but she had to turn it down. It was too much time away from her family. Slappy said that when she was a teenager and in her 20s, she didn’t receive guidance about continuing her education. She got into politics to make sure working-class students like her are aware of their options and to create more opportunities for them.

“I’ve been at the bottom,” Slappy said. “I can help because I know what it’s like to have people think you’re not worth their time, to have to do twice as much to prove yourself.”

Still, she was on the fence about what to run for. She could be county controller. She once owned a beauty salon. But the next course, “How to Fundraise Effectively,” convinced her to run for the state house again. Trainer Dallas Thompson, a political consultant who founded Bright Compass, an organization that advises campaigns on workplace policy and campaign operations, emphasized why potential donors need to hear why you’re running for office and what makes you uniquely qualified for that position. As an example, Thompson talked about how she responds to candidates who call her for a donation but fail to sell their vision.

“I’m like, ‘OK. Good luck with that,’” Thompson said to the class. “Maybe, ‘Here’s 50 bucks,’ but I know they’re not going to win.”

Thompson continued to lecture about organizing donor lists and practicing how to ask for a donation over the phone, but Slappy dwelled on that anecdote. She felt that if she ran for county controller, she’d receive a lot of “good luck with that” wishes. The realization that she should challenge Bernstine again in 2020 combined with the course material made her grateful she had signed up for the training.

“I wish I’d had something like this last year,” said Slappy during a break. “I was basically on my own and got over 20 percent [of the vote]. Imagine what I could’ve done if I knew what they’re teaching here.”

The NDTC is not the first organization created to groom Democratic candidates. Democracy for America and Re:Power, formerly known as Wellstone Action, offer similar services. But the NDTC is the only one that provides free in-person training, which is crucial considering many participants are working-class and lack the connections wealthier candidates have.

“Free in-person in states where it’s needed. That’s the golden parachute,” said Sarah Scanlon, an NDTC trainer who worked as the national LGBTQ outreach director on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. “We’re no longer allowing [operatives] to anoint somebody to run.”

Scanlon said Democrats have to take this approach to compete in rural areas, where church-based groups and Republican organizations like the Family Research Council have been grooming conservative politicians for decades. Slappy agreed. As a third-party candidate, she was invited to a few Republican events in 2018. “They operate like a machine,” she said. “Everyone knows their role and communicates.”

The NDTC’s afternoon courses, “How to Identify and Persuade Voters” and “How to Effectively Tell Your Story Online,” reiterated something Slappy had learned the hard way: the importance of campaign staff. In her 2018 race, she led a three-person staff, with a few volunteers who joined near election day. Each staff member shared in social media duties, and they didn’t have enough time to canvas and figure out turnout estimates or identify low-frequency voters, which NDTC trainer Joshua Norris said is crucial information.

When Slappy knocked on doors, she spent half of each conversation explaining why she was a Green Party candidate. “When I run as a Democrat, if I have a staff doing all the little things, then I can go out and meet people and talk about my vision,” she said.

She hasn’t wasted any time since the NDTC training ended. Slappy said she called her former staff and volunteers and started forming a new team the following week. And Slappy has already assigned their first assignment: opposition research on Bernstine, particularly his voting record. She also is filling her calendar with community events she plans to attend. “Church functions, school functions—I don’t care if it’s a yard sale, I’m going to be there talking to voters about my story and my vision.”

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Can a fly twenty-year-old live? On Sunday, The Daily Mail published photos of Malia Obama drinking an $80 bottle of rosé poolside with her friends in Miami. The following day, the tabloid published another article claiming they’ve found Obama's secret Facebook account where she’s been vocal about her gripes with President Trump. The whole saga suggested more people side with Obama than against her, as evident by the flood of responses in the Daily Mail's mentions, in which the obvious point was made over and over again that the former First Daughter is a college student. On vacation. Whomst among us?? Really, we just wish we were drinking rosé in Miami instead of defending her on the lord's day (also known as Toni Morrison's birthday).

The first piece noted that Obama “could be in for a real scolding from her parents, Barack and Michelle, after her pool-side antics,” as if her dad’s swaggiest photos to date are not his college-era photos of him smoking in a fedora. And lets not forget Michelle Obama opening up about smoking pot as a teen in her memoir Becoming.

As if they couldn't be any more degradingly archaic, the Daily Mail chose to give Obama some points back for wearing a “tasteful black bathing suit.” The whole thing set off a 48 hour Twitter storm, with a united front using memes to defend Obama against the publication, calling them out for invading her privacy. Others reminded us not to act like we haven’t had a few drinks while underage ourselves, while many also pointed out the hypocrisy amongst conservatives outraged by Obama's drinking when so many supported Brett Kavanaugh's now infamous admission of his high school love of beer.

More importantly, the Malia Obama photos prove she is light years ahead of the rest of us at 20. She's out here sipping $80 rosé while we were drinking things much less chic. Maybe she too has felt the sting of Four Loko, but we don't know for sure; instead, these photos show evidence of a classy, classy lady. Not a Mad Dog 20/20 in sight. And if she does have a secret Facebook for griping about Trump, she’s more sophisticated than the rest for that too. Besides, who among us doesn’t have a secret space somewhere just for the purposes of shading your enemies? The group chat is where pettiness thrives.

These pieces weren’t the first time that Obama’s private moments became tabloid fodder. In 2016, Radar published a viral video of her allegedly smoking pot at Lollapalooza with the racially-stereotyped opening line “twerking was just the beginning." In 2017, Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton stepped in to defend her when tabloids and conservative media came after Obama after videos of her kissing a boy and blowing smoke rings surfaced. Clinton generally benefitted from a gentleman's agreement between the White House and reputable news outlets when she was growing up in the first family that they wouldn't report on her private life. But it wasn't foolproof, and there were still flare-up moments, like when Saturday Night Live ran a "Wayne's World" sketch in 1992 where Mike Myers jokingly implied she was unattractive, echoing tabloid commentary at the time. The sketch upset the Clintons, and the network edited out the scene in re-runs. After Clinton, despite a similar request of the press by their parents, the Bush twins were fixtures in gossip publications for drinking underage, and it took years for them to shake those reputations.

The Obamas have had their moments calling out the press for crossing lines reporting on their daughters. Back in 2012, The White House sent an email to Buzzfeed about an "unwritten yet widely understood policy," as Buzzfeed put it, following the publishing of a photo of Malia Obama at a One Direction concert. The policy called for neither she nor her sister were to be photographed or reported on unless they were at a public event with their parents. The publication ended up cropping Malia out of the photo and adjusting the story. In 2014, a communications director for Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher resigned after she commented that Sasha and Malia needed to "try showing a little class." But as Jessica Testa later reported for BuzzFeed, those unwritten rules seem to have lessened for Obama as she's gotten older (and as her father has left public office). Only months after Obama's Lollapalooza kerfuffle, she was snapped wearing a “smoking kills” T-shirt while standing next to a giant bong in a University of Pennsylvania frat house. (Radar published that too, of course.)

Clearly, the fascination over what "scandalous" behavior Obama is up to has its historical precedents, its double standards, and is compounded by her being the first black first daughter. But things have shifted slightly: just as gossip sites are starting to ramp up their coverage of her private life, how much their audience cares seems to have shifted. The public is finally stepping in to say they're not here for the public shaming. Perhaps now we can all just kick back, cheer her on, and thank her for raising our standards of what 20 should be looking like.

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When Office Space premiered in 1999, I was still revolving through a series of low-stakes retail jobs on campus where I called in sick at least once a month due to a hangover-related ailment. I finally watched the cult classic a few years later with some Gen X friends who were determined to work their way up in industries that were going extinct even then. We laughed with tears in our eyes about Gary Cole’s smarm-laden request to “go ahead and come in” to work on Saturday.

The movie was spot on about so many things that remain relevant. Cubicles are the worst; women are still being reduced to their sexual desirability and ability to perform happiness on the job for the privilege of being paid less than their male counterparts; tech culture still lacks a moral center; white people are still microaggressing people of color about their names. And above all, corporate executives continue to believe that firing human beings is the only way to maximize profits.

To recap the film, Peter Gibbons—played by Ron Livingston as a breathing approximation of Marx’s theory of alienation—is unmotivated by his boring job at a tech company in one of those indistinguishable suburban office parks that’s adjacent to mid-range chain restaurants. He gets hypnotized one evening and returns to work giving even fewer fucks than ever before. He doesn’t go to work, doesn’t call in, and guts a whole fish on his desk after an impromptu fishing trip. For this he fails upward into a promotion, given by the consultants hired to lay off his co-workers. Peter and his newly unemployed friends use a computer virus to embezzle funds from the company. Mild hijinks ensue. Along the way, the audience is treated to the banality and inanity of white collar and food service work through now-memed phrases about TPS reports, a “case of the Mondays,” and counting flair. Corporate banners that could have been ripped from any number of dystopian flicks posted around the office trumpet “Is it Good for the Company?” and “Planning to Plan.” It’s the late 1990s, so racist, sexist and homophobic jokes abound, though in the present-day, those parts of the movie read less as comedy and more as matter-of-fact documentary about working in predominantly white and male environments.

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Looking back on the movie today on its 20th anniversary, it’s clear that the post-WWII labor model skewered so darkly by director Mike Judge (Idiocracy, King of the Hill) was not destroyed solely by the Great Recession and Silicon Valley. Technology simply blurred the lines of pre-existing exploitation, and of work and personal space until they were indistinguishable. The increase of technological advancements into all labor sectors met weakened unions to create a perpetual state of precarity. Fewer jobs have permanence or the health insurance benefits that the Greatest Generation offered as incentive during the war to retain employees when an Executive Order froze pay raises.

Anyone with a phone or internet connection can be a brand that makes money, or join the gig economy, which promises people freedom to make money on their own time by offering up their homes or cars or personal items for use. On the other side of that, people have to use their homes or vehicles to make money, and use them a lot in order to make the kind of money that keeps food on the table. Not to mention that even when you are at rest, those apps are gathering data on you to further monetize your person and figure out what you’re more likely to buy. Also, the gig economy is rife with inhumane output expectations that can lead to serious health ramifications.

Photo credit: Twentieth Century Fox

At his lowest point, Peter opines that “human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles looking at computers all day.” But in the 20 years since the movie came out, that is increasingly how human beings spend their days—sitting in front of computers, or using their phones, not just to make a living but also because it's become an integral part of living. There exists a deep, rich irony when you consider Peter’s phrase in light of the fact that The Matrix also came out that same year. We could envision ourselves as alienated enough from our labor to flip off our boss or we could choose the blue pill and continue living in a virtual reality while AI harvests our soft, hairless bodies like human-formed Duracell batteries. The movie’s focus on Peter’s developer job and on Joanna’s (Jennifer Aniston) waitress job at the fictional TGIFridays-esque Chotchkie’s in hindsight seemed to foreshadow tech and the service industries as the jobs experiencing strong growth in an economy marked by its deep divide between the 1 percent and everyone else. One industry pays its engineers so well they have negatively altered the social ecosystems in large cities, displacing low-income workers outside of the metropolitan areas. Workers in the other industry are still lobbying elected officials to reach $15 an hour as a minimum wage.

Office Space actually ends on a hopeful note, with Peter in a new construction job enjoying fresh air and physical labor after a truly disaffected worker literally burns the company to the ground. In the real world, people are flexing worker muscle to make things happen. Last year saw the highest number of worker strikes on record. Six states saw teacher union strikes in 2018; media companies, including VICE, are unionizing, as are workers in academia as a result of the increasing numbers of temporary workers hired to teach. Most recently, the flight attendants union and the air traffic controllers (who called in sick but could not strike as government employees) were credited for helping end the longest government shutdown in history.

The lasting legacy of the movie isn’t just that jobs can be horrible; it’s that individuals can pull together collectively and create the jobs and working environments that we want to have. We can create working environments that integrate care-based ethics, that offer men and women equal paid time off to start or care for their families, that have livable wages, that value people enough to pay them fairly for a hard day’s work, and jobs that value the labor of maintenance and understand systems need to be cared for over a long period of time. Unless it’s the printer with a PC Load Letter message. That can fuck right off.

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If you have student loans in 2019, you also have a somewhat distressingly large number of different ways to pay them back. Besides the standard repayment plan, in which the government calculates a monthly bill based on what you owe, there's a graduated plan for people who want to pay more later, which is somehow different from what the system calls paying-as-you-earn and income-contingent repayment. In other words, deciding to take on debt for what hopefully will be a worthwhile degree is just the first in a series of complicated decisions that may dictate what much of your adult financial life looks like.

Now Lamar Alexander, the Republican chairman of the Senate committee that deals with education issues, is pushing a proposal—one that stands a non-zero chance of passing—promising to condense repayment alternatives into just two clear options. But it could also let the government dip into borrowers's paychecks, making the already-harrowing story of America's student loan system potentially more precarious for people of limited income.

"The option I believe most borrowers would choose would be a repayment plan based on a borrower's income, which would never require the borrower to make payments of more than 10 percent of his or her discretionary income," Alexander told an audience at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute early this month. "And it would make sure that if there was no money earned, there would be no money owed, and that would not affect negatively on the borrower's credit. The other option would be a ten-year repayment plan with equal monthly payments, a lot like a ten-year mortgage."

Alexander, a conservative Republican but not exactly a Trump guy, has signaled he intends to push this change through as part of a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act before he retires at the end of next year.

Automatic payroll deduction is just one example of the student loan reforms being debated in Congress, which also include potentially expanding the tax code so employers can contribute up to $5,250 tax-free annually to workers' balance and making the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) less convoluted. But it's the part that's gained the most traction in the press, not all of it negative. In fact, some experts have argued it could be a real help to the country's $1.5 trillion student debt problem, or at least that it's time for Americans to start thinking of debt payments in the same way they do Social Security—socked away for them whether they like it or not.

"I think this proposal is likely to become law, after some tweaks," student-loan expert Mark Kantrowitz told CNBC.

One potential upside here is that automatic deduction might not require people re-certify their income every year (or else lose access to an income-based repayment plan). This can be an incredibly stressful process—loan servicers are supposed to remind you to do this, but in my personal experience they often do not. In fact, multiple states and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have sued servicer Navient for, among other things, allegedly confusing borrowers intentionally about repayment in general and recertification in particular so that they could bilk them for more money. (The company has denied the claims and sought, unsuccessfully, to dismiss at least some of the suits.) Meanwhile, missing paperwork or obfuscated deadlines is one of the main reasons that fewer than 1 percent of the 30,000 people who applied for public-service debt forgiveness last year actually received it. It makes sense to eliminate some of this confusion and streamline the process.

But what consumer advocates have begun to warn about is that extracting loan payments from paychecks amounts to "mandatory wage garnishment." It may not be possible under this new scheme to account for people, say, facing unforeseen medical emergencies to keep more of their paycheck fast. In fact, the National Consumer Law Center quickly filed a policy report called The Dark Side of Payroll Withholding to Repay Student Loans not long after Alexander's speech. In the paper, the authors argue forcing people in the gig economy or with otherwise unstable employment into a system like the one proposed could force them to choose between payments and rent, heat, or food. They also argued it would disproportionately affect people who were middle class or barely scraping by—teachers, cashiers, basically anyone not rich—to begin with.

These are legitimate concerns, though it's worth noting that a much-worse version of this kind of garnishment already exists. If you default on your loans, the entire balance is immediately due in full, plus collection charges up to 24 percent of your balance. That also means the federal government—a.k.a. the world's most powerful loan shark—can just take up to 15 percent of your paycheck. Not quite a baseball bat to the kneecaps, but potentially crippling nonetheless.

The debate may be entirely moot: As Inside Higher Ed noted, getting anything to pass in a hyper-partisan Congress is a challenge. Still, unlike some of the other proposals that have floated in recent years—like eliminating the exemption that makes it so people can't file bankruptcy on student loans—this suggestion by an old-school, business-minded Republican did not immediately seem like a nonstarter on Capitol Hill. Though a similar proposal was dangled but never enacted during the Clinton years, according to the Washington Post, we live in different times. Alexander's idea could catch on given that nearly 40 percent of borrowers were expected to default by 2023—and because it could maybe sort-of speak to anger about the loan system without appearing to let anyone off the hook.

But even if aspects of the proposal might be appealing, it would amount to a tweak of an enormous problem at the margins. This plan wouldn't cancel or forgive anyone's debt. It wouldn't make (some) higher education tuition-free, as just-announced presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has promised. And it definitely would not address the macroeconomic forces that caused the generation-crushing student debt issue to begin with. In that sense, it's a perfect policy for this distressing late capitalist moment—a reform that's too modest to get excited about, full of potential landmines, and might even be doomed anyway.

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Last month, we launched our new fellowship program for college journalists. The VICE Fellowship for Collegiate Reporting connects our newsroom with college journalists across the country to publish content on a focused topic. For its inaugural semester, the VFCR will focus on mental health.

We received more than 400 pitches for this new program, validating our conviction that mental health coverage for and by college students is a crucial area of focus for us. The pitches came from more than 200 different colleges and universities across the country. We’re grateful for all the students who shared their ideas with us, focusing on everything from immigration and wait times for on-campus therapy to meme culture, suicide rates, exercise and more. It was a tough decision — in a good way.

We’re excited to announce the four students that we’ll be working with this semester: Jenna Siteman from the University of Michigan, Sasha Charlemagne from Howard University, Vania Castillo from the University of Texas at El Paso and Reid Champlin from the College of William and Mary.

Each student will be paired with one of our staffers — Kate Lowenstein, Susan Rinkunas, Rajul Punjabi and Ankita Rao —who will mentor them through the storytelling, reporting and production process. Projects will be published across the VICE network by the end of May.

Congrats to the selected students! We are so pumped to develop this program further with them.

A man sitting at a piano in the backroom of a London bar plays a gloomy tune to a room full of shell-shocked listeners. If that sounds like a bleak scene, it's because it absolutely is: We've just sat through a two-hour event in which speakers explained how the collapse of civilization as we know it is nigh, and how we are headed for extinction because of a climate catastrophe.

It is a Monday evening. This is a heavy topic to confront at the start of the week. Still, that hasn't deterred the dozens of people who feel compelled to learn about the reality of what the planet and humankind itself could be facing. Every seat is filled, and people spill out onto the floor, into each corner of the small, dark space, to listen to members of grassroots climate activism group Extinction Rebellion (XR)—which made headlines in November of 2018 after blockading five bridges in central London and promoting civil disobedience as a way to force the government into taking action on climate change.

Most of us are privy to some of the damage being done to the planet. We frequently read about pollution, the problems with plastics, mass deforestation, and the melting of ice shelves. Today, though, XR urges us to become truly conscious of the potential societal breakdown that could occur in as soon as three years, and the "existential threat" that some scientists predict we are perilously close to encountering.

Halfway through the two-hour event, we are allowed a moment of silence to process what we have just heard, and to "grieve." It's a welcome respite. The grim details of the talk are startling—there is no sugarcoating here—and, worse still, they're backed up by science.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that global warming could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius [34 degrees Fahrenheit] in 12 years. Going past that guardrail temperature could have catastrophic consequences. However, another group of scientists from the University of Washington and the University of California go further, suggesting that less than 2 degrees Celsius [35 degrees Fahrenheit] warming by 2100 is unlikely. They say the probable range of global temperature increase is between 2 degrees Celsius [35 degrees Fahrenheit] and 4.9 degrees Celsius [40 degrees Fahrenheit] within the lifetime of children today.

Attendees an XR meeting

The consequences are expected to be unfathomable, including the burning down of the Amazon rainforest at about a 3 degrees Celsius [37 degrees Fahrenheit] rise. Rapid flooding and desertification sparked by the continued melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice is also predicted to lead to unfeasible global mass migration, with one in nine people forecast to be on the move by 2050. The sixth mass extinction in the history of Earth is already underway—people are dying in wild fires and floods around the world—but it will get worse if nothing changes. The rise of widespread civil unrest and fascism is mooted, as well as the possibility of human extinction within the next ten years.

Gail Bradbrook, one of the founders of XR, shares a frightening analogy of what could be to come: "You've got polar bears rampaging in Russia trying to get fed, and what are [the authorities] doing? They're killing them off. It sounds like an extremist thing to say, but what do people think is going to happen to human beings when there's not enough food? Who's going to be killing who? We're fucked, is the shorthand way we say it."

This is "emergency mode messaging." The data presented in the talk could be dismissed as alarmist, but XR focuses on observations by leading mainstream scientists, including Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber—who has acted as an advisor to the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Pope Francis—to convey its message.

Anna Hughes, 36, found out about XR through a Google search only an hour before the talk began. "I kind of knew this stuff, but it's always terrifying to hear it," she says. "You look at it and think, What are we doing? It’s very hard-hitting."

Attendees an XR meeting

As the talk comes to a close, the room is a mix of emotions. Some people rest solemn-faced in their seats, seemingly paralyzed as the gravity of what they have just heard incubates inside them. Others are motivated, completing forms to put into writing their commitment to taking action. They vow to join XR in using the tools of civil disobedience to pressure the government, which they believe is failing to protect society and the environment.

Among them is 29-year-old Domi Wisniewska, who lives in Hackney. She is signing up to give a few hours of her time each week, around her work in the bakery and charity sectors, to steward events, support others, distribute information, and form roadblocks. "Joining movements like XR just feels right," she says. "It might be just another climate walk, another street protest, but we have really got to press government. The more people join, the more impactful it will have."

Joining XR makes Wisniewska one of more than 1,200 people in the UK—and around 1 million people in 65 countries across the globe—who are willing to get arrested and potentially sacrifice their liberty in the name of climate activism. "It's a small price that some of us might pay for being seen and heard," she explains, "[for] showing a real concern about years and years of government and business ignorance. I’m not even scared of this affecting my life. Even if I'm taken by the police and charged with civil disobedience, I'm totally fine with it. Obviously, it would be better not to get to this point. For too many years I felt resigned and in a state of inertia. Those years are lost. I've got to a point in life where I decided to be active and rethink my participation in the world."

XR members at an action in Hackney.

The rapid growth of XR is staggering. It has come a long way since last May, when 15 people met in a cafe to devise a strategy and define a clear set of demands. These include that the government tell the truth about the climate emergency and reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025. The group also insists on the creation of a national citizens' assembly to oversee the changes needed, which XR suggests would require a mobilization similar to that seen in past emergency situations, including during the Second World War.

XR officially launched at the end of October last year, and within a month thousands of its members had already staged one of the largest nonviolent direct actions the country has seen in a generation. They all but brought central London to a standstill when they occupied five of the capital’s bridges—Blackfriars, Lambeth, Southwark, Waterloo, and Westminster—on November 17.

The mass act of peaceful civil disobedience resulted in 85 people being arrested, mostly for obstruction under the Highways Act. Those arrests followed more than 60 others at XR-coordinated acts of rebellion—including 22 arrests when protesters spray-painted "frack off" tags and glued themselves to the windows of the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy—in the two weeks leading up to the bridges blockade.

Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook

The arrest tally now sits at around 160, but getting arrested is really no big deal, says Roger Hallam —one of the founders of the movement—when I meet with him and Gail Bradbrook in the northwest London home where Hallam is staying.

"You go into a police van, go to a building where they’ll ask you some questions, put you into a cell —you can take your books in so you can have a nice read and a rest. You go for a short interview where you can say, 'No comment,' then they'll let you out," he explains. "You might get a piece of paper in the mail with a court date. You go to court, you might get a small fine, then that's it."

Bradbrook, who is due in court on February 28, charged with criminal damage for daubing graffiti on a government building, describes her stay in custody as a "spa break." "I did yoga in the cell, meditated, and slept well; somebody brings you some food and drink," she says. "I've been arrested four times now."

Kids at an Extinction Rebellion action in Hackney.

Not everyone immediately takes the same view of being arrested as Hallam and Bradbrook; for some, there are important parts of life that can't be managed from a jail cell. Still, once they know enough about the cause, many members change their minds. At XR's first street party—a "creative roadblock" in Hackney—I meet 35-year-old Estelle from north London, who has an 18-month-old daughter wearing an XR-branded hi-vis vest. This is her first action for the movement, after recently watching the XR talk online. It hit her hard.

"The discussion of civilization breakdown, mass rape, mass migration—all of that stuff is real, and we need to think about it and talk about it," she says. "That has had an impact on my day-to-day mental health, but not in an especially negative way. What I mean is that if you’re engaging with that kind of truth and reality it will affect your ability to exist within a comfort zone and project your life into the future.

"Making plans when you’re faced with that kind of uncertainty—especially when you’ve got a young child—that can be really difficult. It’s not affecting my ability to function, but I am finding myself crying and thinking about my daughter and worrying about it all. The talk convinced me that it’s not going to be like a Hollywood film; there’s not going to be a big event and then you’re going to have time to do something about it. It’s happening now and the signs are everywhere. I am compelled to do something."

The street party attracts hundreds of people and goes ahead without any resistance, including from the authorities. Some police officers even appear to give their veiled approval of the action. "They're exercising their right to protest," one tells me. "Climate change is a worry, isn’t it? Something has got to be done about it, but as police we have to stay neutral."

Extinction Rebellion members at an action in Hackney.

This gathering and other events—from the swarming of London Fashion Week this past Sunday to "die-ins" in major shopping centers—are, however, just precursors to what is being branded as a sustained, full-scale international rebellion, starting on April 15, to demand action on the climate emergency. The preparations include training people in nonviolent direct action, teaching them how to de-escalate tense situations, how to interact with police and what to do if they face arrest.

William Skeaping, a member of XR, says: "All these events going on at the moment have a purpose: bringing people together, asking them to sign up, getting the conversation moving in a way that appears to be vocal and out in the streets. At the same time, it's normalizing the idea of protest, to see people blocking roads, for police to be standing round without a confrontation. The entire process means nonviolent direct action can become something that appears to be much more accessible and is happening on your doorstep.

"Moving toward April, we're testing and pushing to see how we can best encourage people to realize this is a part of everyone's lives. Asking people to jump from watching something on TV or reading a newspaper article to suddenly running out on the streets and getting involved is quite a major leap, whereas if the concept of nonviolent direct action has become part of the daily conversation, we're in a much stronger place. The barriers to entry are lower and it's much easier to make that leap."

The daunting prospect of that dive must be overcome if XR is to stage the "major political event" it is attempting to manifest in April. Hallam says the plan is to gather about 10,000 people in central London alone to create a "Glastonbury-esque" atmosphere, and permanently occupy several roundabouts day after day, until the government creates a response in a substantive way to XR's demands. Negotiators representing the group will be on hand to talk to the government.

"If the government doesn't meet our demands, central London will get progressively more blocked off through mass participation actions, which could mean people sitting in the road forever, not going," he adds. "The idea is that the elite, the corporate media and the government get a shock and realize that people power is on the way. The logic of what we're going to achieve here is going to be either an economic blockage of central London and/or mass arrests."

A young XR member at an action in Hackney.

The possibility of mass arrests is not a bad thing for XR, according to Hallam: "Arresting thousands of people means [the government] will have a major legitimacy problem on their hands. That may also backfire [for the authorities] and more people could come down out of solidarity and curiosity. It's going to be a big, chaotic mess for them, and the way out of it is to take their responsibilities seriously as a British state and say they're going to call a citizens' assembly to find a way out of the crisis."

While not typical in the UK, this action, says Bradbrook, is common and has led to change in the global south. "People say they've had enough and they get on the streets and they stay there until it’s sorted," she explains. "That's going to be the deal."

The group highlights movements—including the suffragettes, the civil rights movement, early trade unionists, and the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade—as past examples of mass civil disobedience getting positive results. But is it enough to trigger the enormous shift needed to save the planet from the certain doom being foretold?

Bradbrook says it's great that the UK is leading the rebellion, but that the protest will need to go global, with amendments in international law, trade agreements and climate agreements crucial. "I also personally think—as do many others—that a shift on consciousness is needed toward one where we understand that we are in a relationship with the earth and all living beings, that we have agency," she adds. "That life is worth fighting for."

Hallam says it is inevitable that such tactics could bring governments to their knees in western democracies. "It's a piece of piss to bring down the government," he says. "We will have initiated a new form of resistance in political culture, and people will be looking at that around the world. Sooner or later, the government is going to have to move on this and challenge the power behind the elites."

Whatever happens in April, Hallam believes the movement will have already won because of what they can expose by adopting a "dilemma action" approach. "We create a dilemma for the government, which is either leave us alone and have the embarrassment of having their capital city closed down, or they use repressive action and basically show they are willing to act in order to maintain the interests of the elites. That would be very damaging because it shows them up for what they are, which is engaged in the greatest crime in humanity: not acting on the climate emergency. It brings radical evil into the open."

For some of XR's newest and younger members, this rising up together is extremely empowering, particularly at a time when they feel locked out of so many of the other discussions that affect their future. Famke, 17, is at the Hackney street party with her dog, Kojak. This is her first action. "I want to change our relationship with climate change," she says. "I think politics is the way to get this change."

Paul, 20, who's from the US and studying in the UK, is getting fired up for the mass rebellion. He says he believes XR could help save the planet. "This is a group that is doing something that might actually have an impact," he tells me as the street party, also his first action too. "Anything could happen in April."

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We are living in an individualistic era. The President is intent on building a border wall; the UK will be Brexitting in five weeks.

With all of this feeling as though it's happening above our heads, it seems natural that for some—especially millennials—a predilection for solitude has bled into daily life. Many of us line up for self-checkout lanes because, given the option, we’d rather not talk to a stranger. The attention we pay to the technology in our hands, and to digital avatars over our flesh-and-blood selves, is making us sick and neurotic in droves. As it’s so often stated: In an era where we can connect in seconds, we’ve potentially never been more marooned.

Film and TV streaming platforms like Netflix make up an interesting part of this particular breed of mass isolation. On one hand, they keep us separated, watching, watching, watching—on the sofa or in bed, eating pasta; on the train, blocking out the commute happening around us. From another perspective, though, they encourage community by constantly providing new pieces of popular culture for us to gather around.

And so, Netflix, in all the questions it poses, is an interesting platform for the show Russian Doll, the comedy-drama it released in full earlier this month, which stars and was cocreated by Natasha Lyonne (following her star-making role as Nicky in streaming success story Orange Is the New Black). That’s because though Russian Doll begins with a blackly funny Groundhog Day scenario, it ends with a profound moral about how, fundamentally, being human is about our real, lived bonds with others, and our relationships to ourselves. In this way, it cuts through our current moment with warmth and hope.

The overview is this: Russian Doll’s main character Nadia Vulvokov (Lyonne) gets trapped in a time loop when a car mows her down in New York’s Alphabet City. Instead of dying at the scene with nothing but oblivion to surround her, Nadia finds herself transported back to the bathroom of the party she’d been at that night—her own 36th birthday celebration.

She continues to die and return over and over again, until she learns to let go of the pain in her past while opening her heart to others in the present, rather than detaching herself. It’s only at this point that she can go back to linear life, existing, finally, as the universe wishes her to (in the show’s primary timeline, at least).

All of this could be trite or confusing if it were badly executed, but it’s testament to Russian Doll’s (all-woman!) writer’s room that the show pulls this all off via humor and expert pacing—we’re drip-fed the mysterious central plot, but the rapid dialogue and punchy editing means it never feels slow—with Lyonne’s electric vigor at its center.

And a moment, please, for Natasha Lyonne and her astonishing performance in this show. Let me take you through my vision board. Natasha Lyonne in a oversized duster coat; Natasha Lyonne wearing porn baron aviator sunglasses; Natasha Lyonne saying “cockroach” but giving it an extra NYC syllable so that it comes out more like “ka-ka-roach;” Natasha Lyonne with an honest-to-god phenomenal haircut, the sort of hair that is heaven-sent—hair teased into perfect, fire-red spirals by the chubby little fingers of the angels—and the only fringe in human history that doesn't feel like it was the direct result of an identity crisis. Every time she appears on screen, Lyonne’s sheer force of personality lights the whole thing up: The entire endeavor rests on her shoulders, and she magically makes carrying that weight seem effortless, even as she traverses difficult emotions and heavy existential realizations.

These realizations are hard, slapping like a palm to the face each time Nadia, and her de-facto partner in crime, Alan Zaveri (played deftly by Charlie Barnett) live and die and live again. And really, in our hyper-distracted world, it would be easy to never take time on these realizations at all. So it's all the more affecting that even though Nadia and Alan are having supernatural experiences, what they are forced to confront is not a monster or malevolent entity, but themselves.

Nadia must unload herself of blame for the premature death of her mentally ill mother (it’s significant that Nadia’s time loops begin on her 36 birthday, as it’s the first age her mother never reached), and the inability for intimacy created by that undue burden she placed on herself. Alan must slough off his perfectionism, and his need to seek self-worth from a relationship that's been long dead. The universe seems to pair them together, via chance encounters in a deli and, later, a broken elevator because they have a little of what the other needs. By processing their trauma and accepting emotional pain, they get to a place where they can learn from and tether to each other meaningfully.

If all of what I’m saying sounds like a load of hippy therapy bullshit, it’s because it... is. So much of therapy is about making peace with your past and moving on from there— Russian Doll expresses that beautifully. But ultimately, redemption comes through Nadia and Alan’s bond, formed of equal respect, of give and take, and what it does for each of them. In our lives that can feel so fragmented—everything from the government actively depriving the most vulnerable, to your small apartment where you eat sad microwaved dinners—Russian Doll shows the value of being good to others, and how that helps us to be good to ourselves.

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The race for the 2020 Democratic nomination is already heating up, with hopefuls from Bernie Sanders to Kamala Harris making moves while Joe Biden presumably gears up to challenge Trump to a literal footrace or something. But it turns out there are more important and pressing questions right now than deciding which candidate can actually beat Trump. Namely: Where's the ranch at?

This week, one noble University of Iowa student became an icon to everyone who's both exhausted by the political grind and, simultaneously, hungry as fuck when she interrupted a campaign speech by presidential hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand just to snag some ranch dressing for her pizza.

Please, enjoy:

The 17-second video of the whole interaction—which went down at an Iowa City sports bar called the Airliner—immediately went viral, and it is really, truly something. As Gillibrand addresses the crowd, the intrepid student carefully winds her way through a mass of supporters, lost in her dressing quest. She tries to slip past Gillibrand, but the New York senator—seemingly mistaking her for a fan—rests a hand on her shoulder. “Sorry, I’m just trying to get some ranch,” the student says, simply, before continuing on her quest undeterred.

According to the student, University of Iowa senior Hanna Kinney, she didn't even know Gillibrand was there, or what the crowd was about. "Being someone who is only 5'2", I can’t really see over most people, so I was like, I’ll just have to push through," she told Washington Post after the video made the rounds on Twitter. "I was just a girl on a mission to get some ranch for me and my friends."

Even Gillibrand supporters at the Airliner wound up rooting for Kinney, interruption or no. "I finally got through and when I came back holding a squirt ranch bottle I said something like, 'I got my ranch,'" she told New York Magazine. "People were literally yelling, 'Yes, queen' and 'She got her ranch!' I was just like, 'Thank you, I’m going to go back upstairs now.'"

"When I got back upstairs, everyone was like, ‘What happened down there?’ and I was like, ‘I really don’t know, man. I got the ranch though, so that’s important,’” she told the Post.

In her interviews, Kinney refused to weigh in on politics, presumably in order to keep the focus on what is actually important: ranch, baby. Ranch.

"The pizza is amazing. The ranch is amazing. Together, it’s probably the best thing you’ll have in the entire world," Kinney told New York Magazine.

And she's right—we may not be able to agree on much in these dark, depressing times, but at least we can all come together to collectively say: If you've got some pizza, dip that shit in ranch. Life is too short to do anything less. Thank you, Hanna Kinney, for the valuable reminder.

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Check out more of Paige Mehrer's work on her Tumblr and website.

The last time the Democratic presidential nomination was seriously in doubt, more than a decade ago, the major candidates all supported a proposal called the "public option" that would allow anyone to buy health insurance from the government. As his party's 2008 nominee, Barack Obama strongly backed a "cap and trade" plan that would require polluters to buy permits in order to emit carbon dioxide. By January 2009, Democrats had the White House and large majorities in both chambers of Congress, and neither of those things happened.

Part of this failure can be chalked up to the Obama administration having to deal with the financial crisis immediately after taking office. But the main culprit was a political system that allows a minority party ample opportunities to block legislation. The public option, wildly popular among Democrats, was passed by the House but killed by a small number of conservative Democratic senators who had an enormous amount of power because Senate filibuster rules require supermajorities of 60 votes to pass laws. A cap and trade bill was also passed in the House but died in the Senate, again largely thanks to the filibuster. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested she wants to pass a cap and trade bill just as she did a decade ago.)

In today's Democratic Party, those proposals seem quaint and tentative. The 2020 presidential contenders often favor more sweeping policies like Medicare for all and the Green New Deal; it's big news when a potential candidate says these ideas are impractical, as Amy Klobuchar and Sherrod Brown recently did. Big, bold ideas are a requirement in the unfolding 2020 primaries, and yet missing from these discussions is a clear explanation about how these progressive dreams are going to become reality. What will a future President Sanders or Gillibrand do to make sure Medicare for all doesn't go the way of the public option circa 2010?

Sometimes candidates are asked how they'll pay for the expensive government programs they want to create, but this is a fairly easy question to answer, especially in this freewheeling political moment. They can tax the rich, which is broadly popular among voters anyway, or else they can point to theories about how deficit spending isn't that big a deal and note that Republicans felt perfectly free to pass deficit-exploding tax cuts. The harder question is how they would legislate anything at all into existence.

Democrats currently control the House and could plausibly take back the Senate in 2020—but they'll almost definitely have a much smaller majority than they did at the outset of the Obama years. This creates a series of enormous challenges for any Democratic president who comes into office having made a bunch of promises about transformative change. Let's use Medicare for all as an example because it's popular both among most of the candidates and the public. The problem is, even if 100 percent of Democratic senators supported Medicare for all, that likely wouldn't be enough to overcome the 60-vote threshold. So what do you do?

One obvious answer is you get rid of the filibuster. But curiously, when asked about this, Democratic candidates have opposed that idea—even Sanders, who told CBS's John Dickerson, “I’m not crazy about getting rid of the filibuster.” He went on to say the real problem in DC is wealthy campaign donors and voter suppression. That might be true—but addressing those problems will also require legislation that will have to overcome the filibuster.

No one can impugn Sanders's leftist credentials or accuse him of not having progressive ideas. But if he's not going to eliminate the filibuster, what's going to happen to his ideas? Does he have a theory about how he could achieve his goals through executive action, as both Obama and Donald Trump have done? Would he try to get more Democrats in the Senate by expanding the number of states in the union, as some liberals have suggested?

A candidate could argue that the executive branch has acquired too much power and that rather than bending rules and upending the way Congress works, the next president should restore normalcy. But given that Republicans will oppose Democratic priorities to the hilt, that view is pretty much incompatible with the priorities most candidates have. You can have Medicare for all or the congressional rules of 2009, but not both.

That's why candidates should be made to discuss their governing plans, not just their goals: Promises are too easy to make. Saying you support a Green New Deal is easy when you know that there's no way such a bill will ever pass Congress. The trickier, and more important, question is about how you would put a Green New Deal into action—what parts could come from executive action, what parts could be passed through the convoluted process of "budget reconciliation," and what parts are not likely to become reality.

Trump got through the Republican primaries promising a border wall that Mexico would pay for, and two years into his presidency isn't even close to fulfilling that vague, nonsensical pledge. If Democrats want to hold the next president to a higher standard, they'll need to ask for a lot more specifics than their GOP counterparts did.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

If you go to YouTube and type in the words “street spinning in South Africa,” you’ll find a bunch of videos featuring late-80s BMWs steaming through the suburbs of Johannesburg with crowds of kids begging the drivers to “spin the car!”

“Spinning” came to prominence in the late 80s as the rise of a gangster culture coincided with the release of the BMW’s 325i, or the "Gusheshe." In its earliest phases, spinning was affiliated with heavy duty criminality—with most of those involved likely to have either kidnapped a person, or stole the car. But today, spinning has morphed into a sport with rules, traditions, and even paychecks, just like any other sport. In 2014, spinning was even recognized as an official motorsport by South Africa’s motorsport association, allowing it to become a spectacle in stadiums around the country. But while this was seen as a huge win for suburban spinning communities to get spinning taken seriously, a lack of formal structure and corporate sponsorship leaves drivers with an income so fickle that it rarely covers expenses.

In his latest book, Tell Them About Me, Melbourne-based photographer Ryan Cookson offers a snapshot of what spinning looks like today, as both a sport and subculture. Shot over two years, the book explores the sport’s tropes and evolution, tactfully avoiding the sensationalist efforts of those who’ve come before him. Looking to reach farther than spinning as a just a sport, Ryan’s series gives vision to the communities that have dedicated decades to its proliferation.

We sat down with Ryan to hear what he learned while gathering photos for the book.

VICE: Hey Ryan, can you tell me how this all came about?
Ryan Cookson: I discovered spinning on YouTube several years ago but I might never have gone there if I hadn’t been given the opportunity by my friends Andy and Jason who run Hillvale—an independent photo lab based in Melbourne. They said, “Hey we want to back you to do a photographic project, and we remember you telling us about your obsession with spinning in South Africa. How would you feel about going there to document it?” Of course, I jumped at the opportunity.

So I went there in August of 2016 for the first time, and it was nerve-racking. Just because I really had no connections there whatsoever. Eventually, I got into contact with a guy named Pule, who said he could connect me to people in the spinning community. So then in 2017, I went back again to photograph more and create an accompanying short film.

How did you first connect with Pule?
I got in touch with him through email initially, and then we had a couple of skype calls. When I first arrived, he had the classic box shape BMW that is synonymous with spinning. Honestly, that [first drive] in itself was an amazing experience. Because when that car—the BMW 325i, or any of those box-shaped beamers—drive through, people just chase them down the street, whistling, screaming, “Spin the car! Spin the car!” It was an incredible experience. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire life; a car can have that kind of an impact on people.

Where did you spend the majority of your time?
I stayed in an area called Pimville, in the southwestern townships of Johannesburg, as I had heard there were a lot of spinners throughout the town of Soweto but I ended up meeting up with people all around Johannesburg and the surrounding areas. Anywhere there was an opportunity to meet people, I was there.

Can you tell me about your subjects and the people you met?
There were three or four crews who I spent the most time with. They were “Seku Rite,” “Rich Gang,” “DK Spinners,” and “Ruffy’s Westside Crew.” A crew is a driver, co-driver and often times someone who will perform stunts and work up the crowd while the car is spinning. Occasionally, the driver will also perform stunts while the car spins. The crews I met were all so well synchronized with each other, it was like a well rehearsed dance, which I didn’t truly get a sense of until I saw it out there. Each of the crews have their own style, and are from specific neighborhoods throughout Johannesburg, which also plays into their style.

Pule was really generous in going out of his way to connect me to these crews. From there, I would just meet other people and other crews. Pule is very much at the center of that community and he was trying to push spinning to become an official motorsport and has started working on building a driving school, as well as an arena where it all can take place, so more drivers can make a living from it.

Johannesburg has a high rate of violent crime. How did you feel about your safety while you were there?
A part of me did initially feel a bit uneasy. Documentaries I’d seen and things I had heard did play on my mind a bit. But in the end because I was with Pule and other local people, I felt safe and comfortable in their presence wherever I went. I took cues from them and listened to everyone I met there and it was a warm, friendly and incredible experience. Looking back now, I really love that spinning became this gateway into meeting so many people throughout Johannesburg and that they were open and warm enough to let me hang out with them.

How many of the drivers you met make/are making a living off spinning?
A lot of people throughout South Africa are so used to seeing spinning that it takes a lot of talent to really stand out from other spinners and make a living off it. The crowds watching spinners will quickly let someone know if they’re not good. Lucas from the crew “Seku Rite,” who I documented, makes a living off spinning. The other crews I was with also get paid to spin at events, but they also have other jobs on the side.

Is there a female spinning community there too?
There’s definitely a lot of female spinners. Stacey-Lee May is probably the most well known and one of the best spinners in South Africa. I met her briefly in 2016, we hung out briefly and I took some portraits and got to watch her spin at a big event which was great to see. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet any female spinners that were doing it on the street at that time, and my series really was focused on capturing that. As interesting as spinning in arenas is, I felt there was already a lot of stuff out there which covers what happens in the arenas very well, with Top Gear etc.

I did meet an amazing spinner, Rio, who would spin with his daughters in the car in their neighborhood; Florida. I have this one photograph of one of his daughters hanging out of the car while it’s spinning. The photograph doesn’t feature in the book—I wanted to save some unseen images for my upcoming exhibition in late-May.

Where does the title come from?
Lucas, who I mentioned earlier, has a sticker on the side of his car that reads "Tell Them About Me," which you can see in some of the photographs. You have to look real closely, though.

Where do you think the future of spinning is headed?
I really feel there's a big difference in seeing spinning happen spontaneously on the street with people rushing out of their houses to watch compared to within the confines of an arena. I wouldn't say it's a shame but just there's a difference between the two experiences. I appreciate that it can also be very dangerous for spectators without the safety measures put in place in the arenas. From what I was told, people have been seriously injured and even killed, and the risk for drivers getting arrested is now also far greater. In the past police would stop and watch when it was happening on the street, but now there's zero tolerance for it outside the arenas.

Tell Them About Me was launched at the New York Art Book Fair last year through Knowledge Editions and Hillvale, and will be exhibited at Hillvale Gallery in Melbourne alongside a short film in late-May.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Quebec.

Every week, Louis G.* goes to the post office with his car filled with crates of Crush cream soda bottles. The Canada Post officer looks at him incredulously, trying to understand why the young man is sending all these drinks to the United States, at great expense. But what she does not know is that he gets close to $200 [$152 USD] for each of these cases. In Quebec, a case goes for about $15 [$11 USD].

In September 2018, Louis created the Instagram page Rare Drank. He published some photos of soft drinks exclusive to Quebec, such as the Sprite peach and Kiri Cola. Quickly, he received requests from users ready to pay a big price for Crush cream soda. "The first day, I already had orders for five crates, with only a hundred subscribers," he says.

Louis was inspired by the success of the American company Exotic Pop, a website on which you can find dozens of soft drinks from around the world. A simple bottle of Fanta can be as much as $50. The company also installs vending machines in the United States.

The craze for these luxury drinks is inflated by rappers like Lil Pump, Travis Scott, Migos, or Drake, who show them on social media and talk about them in their songs. This craze is also closely linked to the consumption of lean (also called purple drank or syzzurp): codeine syrup mixed with soft drinks. Since the 1990s, this opioid has been associated with the hip-hop community in the southern United States.

"The majority of my clients are either lean dealers, rappers, music labels or studios," says Louis. "Before, these people went to the convenience store to buy 35 Sprites so that everyone had something to drink. Now they order a box from me and sell it for $15 to $20 a bottle."

A bottle of 500 milliliters of lean can go for more than $1,200 on the black market. "The kind of consumer who wears chains at $30,000 doesn't care to pay [for] a $20 bottle to put 60 ml of syrup in it. It's more baller on social networks. For him, it's better than Dom Pérignon."

Louis has made Crush cream soda his favorite brand. The translucent product is a Quebec exclusivity. He sells 15 to 40 cases a week. Even Lil Pump drinks it. "The dye-free beverages are flying off much faster as lean lovers can see their syrup fall into the bottom of the bottle and put the image on social networks. It's really more a story of image than of taste."

However, exporting dozens of crates of soft drinks to the United States has proved much more complicated than expected for the young entrepreneur, who previously worked as a social media manager for influencers. In September, his first shipment was a complete failure.

"I knew absolutely nothing about customs," he says. "The Food and Drugs Administration had intercepted my stock. I received a call from the Department of Homeland Security. I did not have an importer number and everything was seized."

Quebec's Rare Dranks.

According to the Canada Border Services Agency, it is legal to export soft drinks by mail. "It is the responsibility of the exporter to verify the eligibility of these products in the country where the product will be exported," says communications advisor Jacqueline Roy. "Exports of unrestricted commercial goods such as soft drinks that are valued at less than $2,000 [$1,520 USD] do not need to be declared for export."

However, under US law, Rare Drank is completely illegal. To cross the border, shipments of beverages must be registered with the FDA and the United States Customs and Border Protection. Louis did not have any of these authorizations and has not applied for them.

Smelling easy money, he had no intention of letting his profit fly away so quickly. He had just left his old job to devote himself entirely to Rare Drank. He filled his car with cream soda bottles to cross the border in person. He makes the customs officer believe that he is a representative in the food field. Once in Plattsburgh, he goes to the post office to send the precious liquid to all his customers.

The ploy did not last long. "In January, a customs officer gave me a letter from the US Department of the Interior that required me to obtain an import permit. I exposed myself to a fine of $5,000. "

Louis now turns to Canada Post to deliver his cargo. Every week he sends hundreds of bottles through the regular mail system. And he crosses his fingers so that they are not intercepted once they arrive in the United States. "Today, it costs me about $100 [$76 USD] shipping per crate. It's heavy, liquid. When I sent it directly from the United States, I paid $40 [$30 USD]."

The "soft drink dealer" also tried to reach Pepsi's Canadian offices and Coca-Cola to offer them a partnership. "In the United States, there is a Crush drink with the image of Travis Scott and Exotic Pop. There is a market for that and the industry does not understand it. VICE Quebec also contacted the representatives of the two multinationals, without success.

Even if its "artisanal" delivery logistics are more and more complex, Louis is still trying to diversify his offer of exclusive products to Quebec territory, through its new website. There is now a batch of seven boxes of Paw Patrol cereal for $110 [$83 USD], eight bags of ketchup chips for $100 [$75 USD] and even bottles of Red Champagne, the official carbonated drink from Lac-Saint-Jean.

"The business is getting way too big for me to let go," he said, taking a sip of an apple-flavored beverage. "The sky is the limit!"

Simon Coutu is on Twitter.

* Louis G. asked us to preserve his anonymity given the illegality of his activities.

If you were looking for a delightful little video to help carry you through the rest of the week, good news: Tucker Carlson has you covered. On Wednesday, NowThis released leaked footage of the conservative pundit and panda-sex alarmist going apeshit during an unaired interview with historian Rutger Bregman—and the thing is deeply, deeply unhinged.

In the eight-minute clip, which looks like it was filmed on a cell phone aimed at a control room monitor, Carlson starts by chatting Bregman up about how the historian owned a bunch of rich people at Davos last month by telling them to actually pay their fair share of taxes. The conversation starts amicably enough, but when Bregman calls out Fox News and Carlson himself, the host completely melts down, telling him to "go fuck yourself" and calling him a "tiny-brain... moron."

"You are a millionaire funded by billionaires, that’s what you are," Bregman says, setting Carlson off. "And I’m glad you now finally jumped [on] the bandwagon of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC, but you’re not part of the solution, Mr. Carlson. You’re part of the problem, actually."

That gets Carlson heated, and he tries to defend himself—but Bregman just rips into him again. "You’re all like, 'Oh, I’m against the globalist elite, blah, blah, blah,'" Bregman says. "It’s not very convincing, to be honest." At that point, Carlson completely loses it.

"Why don’t you go fuck yourself," he screams. "You tiny-brain—and I hope this gets picked up, because you’re a moron! I tried to give you a hearing, but you were too fucking annoying."

Bregman took a victory lap on Twitter once the video dropped to admit that he was the one who leaked it, slipping in a nice little Noam Chomsky quote while he was at it.

Unfortunately, the footage only includes audio of Carlson's rant, and the interview never made it to air, so we can't see the spittle fly as he bellows out a litany of F-bombs and insults. But that's what imaginations are for. Give the whole video a watch above and enjoy listening to a rich guy get very mad when someone calls him out for being rich, everybody.

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Game of Thrones loves to test its audience’s limits for blood and gore, which makes their newest SXSW installation even more fitting. The show’s final season will be promoted with a “Bleed For the Throne” campaign, described as an “immersive blood drive experience” in an announcement from the Red Cross website. It’s in collaboration with the American Red Cross, which fell behind on blood donations this winter after freezing temperatures forced them to close down hundreds of drives across the country. The announcement reads: “For seven seasons characters of Game of Thrones have bled for the throne. Now the Red Cross is joining the battle for the living by asking all eligible individuals to help alleviate blood shortages in the real world.” Credit to the Red Cross for cooking up one of the strangest and smartest charity partnerships that takes advantage of Game of Thrones fans’ (shall we say) unique thirst for blood and sacrifice.

The “Bleed For the Throne” promotion will be at SXSW, which returns to Austin, Texas, March 7-9, for its 32nd year. Fans can schedule donation appointments online. After they've bestowed their crimson gift to the American Red Cross, donors can “walk in the steps of the characters” that made their own sacrifices, according to HBO’s press release. What exactly that means is part of the mystery, though hopefully not a Red Wedding situation. The network did add the cryptically vague statement, “Those who earn an audience before the Iron Throne will be recognized and rewarded for their bravery.” In conjunction with the SXSW installation, the Red Cross will also hold blood drives in 43 states, including nine colleges and universities, from March 7-12. Donors in any location could win a trip to the premiere of the final season of GoT.

The whole thing, especially its eerie promo video and bloody marketing photos, is decidedly creepy. But it’s ultimately for an incredibly important cause— the organization lost over 11,000 donations this winter, creating what Red Cross spokesperson Stephanie Rendon called “an emergency need.”

The blood drive isn’t the only interactive project GoT is rolling out with its final season. The show also has a world-touring exhibition displaying its artifacts, which is currently holding down fans in Germany. Knowing how fans keep throne-themed pop up bars packed to the brim, the Red Cross likely won’t have any problems getting fans to come out. And this time, it’s for a bigger reason than an (admittedly fire) Instagram post on the iron throne.

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