“When I was younger I felt like I could communicate better in photographs than I could in words,” Rose Marie Cromwell says. “It was the the first time I really had a lot of self-confidence in what I was expressing.”

Her most recent book of photography, the Light Work Photobook Award-winning El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, speaks volumes, giving readers an intimate look at life in Havana. The title translates to “The Supreme Book of Luck,” and it's thematically inspired by a booklet rooted in Cuban culture explaining La Charada, a system of symbols that attributes significance to numbers 1 to 100 and is also used to play numbers in an underground lottery. Depending on one’s life events or objects encountered, you might choose to play a different number. A clock is notated by number 85, for example, whereas “old prostitute” becomes number 98.

With her book, Cromwell has both found and created images that evoke the randomness of the lottery itself and in doing so creates a vibrant portrait of Havana. By incorporating objects in this specific expository context—like in La Charada or in a photograph—she give them meaning they may have not had before. Subjects are no longer just a bright yellow fan against a mauve backdrop, a collection of fruits under a white sheet, or a woman with bright red lipstick staring up at the sky. Instead, they now represent a collection of experiences and visuals that reflect whatever chaos or capriciousness we face.

This photography collection has also influenced all of Cromwell's work that's followed, by making her look at the world differently. “That experience and working on that project has informed all work afterwards. Even in photojournalism you can’t insert yourself so much, but you can find an act of performance in somebody’s gesture,” she says. “[You’re] paying attention more to how people move and communicate if you’re photographing a person." Cromwell says she is the most confident she ever has been. “I think the work I made for my book was essential for finding a photographic voice and asserting myself a little bit more as a photographer and listening to my intuition,” she says.

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Cromwell is happiest when her images toe the line between conceptual and documentary work. She began working as a documentary photographer during a Fulbright fellowship in Panama in 2007, drawn to the country by its history of U.S. intervention, a growing consciousness of world trade, and a desire to chronicle the effects of globalization. “I think that there’s such high inequality in the world because we’re just consumers and everything, for example, that passes through the Panama Canal maybe is passing by communities that don’t have water,” she says.

Getting her MFA in art photography at Syracuse taught Cromwell theoretical frameworks for approaching photography in new ways, and she began thinking more conceptually. “I think there can be poetry and journalism, there definitely is,” she says. “It’s just something that’s innate.”

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Cromwell hopes to tell stories about the effects of globalization by making global issues feel personal. She creates images that, in telling the close-up stories of individuals, also draw attention to larger economic and political systems at work. “How do you tell a story, like [how] somebody’s life is informed by globalization, and in what ways?” she asks. “How do we make it personal for other people to relate?”

Cromwell's ongoing series “King of Fish,” for example, tells the story of the son of a pastor and reformed drug dealer living in Panamanian public housing. In doing so she also tells the story of how a marginalized community is affected by the governing body meant to protect it. Her newest ongoing work, “IMAIM,” chronicles the portions of Miami not regularly covered by media or travel resources. She shows her audience that not everything is sparkling, sanitized clubs and Art Basel—there’s detritus and poverty and demolition, too.

“I can only hope that if people haven’t paid attention before maybe [the work] provokes something in them to think about a place in a different way,” she says. “I am really concerned about certain issues in the world and sometimes I feel the best thing to do is work towards expressing your feelings about those things.” And for Cromwell, the best way is and has always been through images.

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

Photo by Rose Marie Cromwell

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One time I was in Austin, Texas, as an anime convention rolled into town. I ended up at some Russian vodka bar with my friend, and the only other guy sitting there had a giant drawing from Warhammer 40,000—a tabletop game played with tiny figurines and dice, set in a dystopian universe—that he'd bought at the show. Anyway, we started talking to this guy, Jayden, and it turned out my friend knew a ton about the game. If you don't know the plot of 40K, it is, as I learned that night, about a "god emperor" who's kept alive by a special throne and a bunch of factions who kill each other in comically large numbers. The tagline has to do with a "grimdark" far future in which there's war all the time.

We talked to this guy for several hours, before he started getting super drunk and ranting about how Texas was the only economically self-sustaining state. Then my friend, whose dad is a cop and also knows a lot about weapons, mentioned that our new comrade had the outline of a handgun in his pocket. Though the proudly conservative anime nerd we met that night was named Jayden, I will forever refer to him in my head as Jade Helm. We left the bar, I eventually came back to New York, and at one point I tried to watch a bunch of explainer videos about 40K. I almost immediately lost interest, because the lore is insanely hard to follow and way less interesting when you're not drinking vodka and otherwise taking in the local flavor in Austin.

Lost interest, that is, until now. Apparently some artist in Italy turned Donald Trump into a 65-foot-tall puppet version of 40K's aforementioned "god emperor" for Tuscany's Carnevale Di Viareggio, which means thousands of people were treated to one of the strangest sights I've ever laid eyes on. Behold:

Is this some kind of MAGA tribute? Is this satire? Did Jade Helm move to Europe and commission an Italian man to make this monstrosity? I don't know! At first blush, everything about this truly bizarre puppet that someone built, for some reason, doesn't make any goddamn sense.

"He brandishes this weapon of the economy, it says ‘dazi vostri,'" Galli told NOI TV. "It's a joke, but in fact, he’s trying to destroy nations with the economy instead of nuclear missiles. This is one of the strongest actions, let’s say, that powerful people like Trump can use.”

Does that make a lick of goddamn sense? Not really, but hey—that's pretty much all Galli said about the thing, so I guess we're SOL. Suppress your impulse to try to parse out what the hell this thing is supposed to signify, and instead treat yourself to these deeply, deeply disconcerting images:

Welp, I guess that does it. Happy Carnivale Di Viareggio, everybody!

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Lena Headey is a presence. Not surprising considering a mere raise of her devilishly arched eyebrow sends all of Westeros into a panic on Game of Thrones, where she plays the cunning and frighteningly sinister Cersei Lannister. Though in real life, stripped of Cersei’s icy blonde wig, chalice of wine, and giant sidekick ready to crush some skulls on her command, that devilish brow raise comes with the delivery of some well-timed f-bombs and jokes about brother fucking.

Sitting in a hotel room in Midtown Manhattan, where right outside horses and carriages line up on the street to take tourists on romantic rides through Central Park, Headey talks about pile driving her only daughter in a musty wrestling ring. Well, her fictional daughter. The actress co-stars in Fighting With My Family, a comedy based on the life of Saraya-Jade Bevis (played by Florence Pugh), most famously known as WWE superstar Paige, who grew up in a family of wild but loving wrestlers in Norwich, England. Headey plays her mom, Julia, a pro wrestler and promoter who goes by the stage name Sweet Saraya. Paige, along with her brother Zak (Jack Lowden), dream of becoming big stars in the world of wrestling, idolizing the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who produced and appears in the film). The siblings get their shot at the big stage to vastly different outcomes, and we all see the rocky path Paige took to become the major WWE star she is today.

The film grew out of the documentary The Wrestlers: Fighting With My Family, which followed the Bevis family. Johnson caught the doc on TV during a restless night while in London filming Fast and Furious 6 and saw the big screen potential. Headey, too, caught the doc and was enamored by not only the story of the family, but with Julia, who overcame abuse, addiction, rape, and living on the streets through wrestling and the love she shared with her husband, Ricky (played by Nick Frost).

For the film, Headey trained tirelessly to become a wrestling powerhouse, flexing not just her camel clutches and chokeslams on screen but also her comedic chops. She sat down with VICE to talk fighting, lycra thongs, and finding yourself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: So, did you ever think you’d end up pile driving your fictional daughter at some point in your career?
Lena Headey: I would have never had said that. Stranger things have happened. Have yet to happen.

VICE: Like?
Headey: I mean, you have sex with your brother and you pile drive your daughter. Is there a theme?

VICE: Familial relationships have been an ongoing theme in your career. [Editor’s note: For those not familiar with the ins and outs of Game of Thrones , Cersei Lannister has an ongoing sexual relationship with her brother, Jaime Lannister.]
Headey: She walks the line.

VICE: You know, it keeps things interesting. So I guess first off, how did you prepare for this? How did you come into this role?
Headey: I watched the documentary many years ago when it first came out and loved it. Loved it and loved the family. And because they are the most honest people I’ve ever seen and their love is out there. They’re sort of fuck-ups out there. Nothing is hidden with them. Then the script was written nine years later and I love Stephen Merchant [writer and director of the film, who co-created The Office] and he’s brilliant. His writing is brilliant and I loved it. I was like, I have to play Julia. I have to.

VICE: Specifically what about the role was the thing that grabbed you the most?
Headey: She, like Paige, is a really impressive woman. When you start to research Julia, I watched a lot of interviews of her, you understand her life and where she came from. It wasn’t easy. She survived a lot. And again, even talking about that part of her life, she’s vulnerable and full of strength. Well vulnerability is strength. There's such honesty and purity about her. And then you get this kind of bawdy comedian that she is. She’s kind of all sorts of things.

Nick Frost (left) and Lena Headey show off a makeshift Paige action figure. Photo courtesy of MGM.

VICE: As I watched the film, I thought there were so many moments of alluding to this very long traumatic history and being at a point of having really overcome a lot. I mean, I don’t know the full extend but yeah, was there anything you felt about that?
Headey: Yeah. Obviously the film wasn’t about that part of Julia, and Stephen was like, "even when she’s telling you these things, they’re kind of tinged with like…'anyway, do you want a cup of tea?'” And you're like, wait, did she just tell me something really deep and shocking? But that’s always in somebody. Your history comes with you. It doesn’t define you but you carry it.

VICE: Now I was very impressed with your moves. You know I’ve seen the bad bitchery in full effect on some of your other projects, on Game of Thrones, but this was another level. Like look at you throwin’ moves, knockin’ your daughter and your son and your husband out. Were there any moves in particular that you worked on and were like, I’m gonna nail this down?
Headey: Well I wanted to do some of the harder stuff, but you know they’re like “you might break Florence's neck or something" and you’re like, "OK, fair enough." But when you’re doing that physical stuff, if you love it, it’s really frustrating when they’re like, you can’t do that. I’m like “no, I can. I think I really can.” Also we did that fight really early on, so we got to know each other really well and that helped bond us as a family. Punching the shit out of each other.

VICE: If there’s one thing, I suppose, that’s going to do it.
Headey: Beating each other up and wearing lycra. Wearing stages of lycra. I was saying it’s disgusting. I could totally recognize every one of them by smell.

VICE: So the smells, Nick had a smell of...
Headey: I don’t know if I want to share the exact scent.

VICE: I’m just saying we could bottle this. Some merch opportunity here.
Headey: If you bring them in we can do this.

VICE: Well, you alluded a bit to the fashion. There was a very pop-punk look going. The red hair, the studded belt. This was a very era-specific look. How was it for you wearing that?
Headey: I mean, lovely. I enjoyed it. Julia’s ring persona, Saraya, is such a bad bitch. In the documentary she wrestles in denim hot pants that are up her ass. I was like “please, if you let me, please no. I can’t.” They were kind of there but they’re like up Julia’s ass. What I love about her is that she doesn’t give a fuck. She just engages with everybody. Kids. All women. She’s like “awww yeah.” That part of her I love when she’s out in the ring. Everybody’s fair game for her.

VICE: Are you planning on making any appearances at WWE?
Headey: If we could step in the ring a minute, it would be fun as fuck.

VICE: I mean, once again, just the gold lycra options.
Headey: Options. A big gold thong. I’m joking. Never.

VICE: You’re so funny in this movie. We kind of talked about this a bit before but there’s that alluding to Julia’s past and what saved her. Is there anything that had that deep of an impact on you?
Headey: Uhhh, yes. They’re pretty intense. But yeah, I’ve had moments like that.

VICE: It often puts you in a position where it’s like, this is where I’m at now and this is great. Headey: I think things happen and it’s a tricky one. They are some things that take a while to work through and some things never find the thing. I think it’s human resilience. And, in the end, loving yourself and realizing that you are what you are so you’ve got to accept that at some point, scars and all, and just persevere. Things are shit and things are great. Things are shit and things are really great. Things are fucking really shit. And that’s just, that’s the way.

VICE: Honestly, that came through in the movie. It came through really beautifully...in a movie where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is screaming at people.
Headey: I mean, it’s one of my favorite moments.

VICE: It was really good.
Headey: Paige said today, I think it was Dwayne that said it to her, “your superhuman power is being yourself.” That really moved me. I was like, that’s true.

Fighting With My Family hits theaters Friday, February 22.

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Many Americans in recent years have had little choice but to consider the power and appeal of organized, far-right extremism. Perhaps most notorious among the groups that have made headlines for coordinated hate is Atomwaffen Division, a far-right group that, as the New York Times reported, has been linked to at least five killings in the United States, including that of a Jewish student, Blaze Bernstein. VICE has covered Atomwaffen in the past, detailing how alleged members of the group—which has some ties in my home country, Canada—were among the far-right activists involved in a larger burst of online organizing, in some cases to practice guerrilla warfare tactics in order to prepare for a possible “race war."

But I wanted to better understand the broader spectrum of militia-style organizing in the US. So, leaning in part on a list of “anti-government” groups compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), I proceeded to make contact with a number of less-conspicuous outfits who take on the aura of armed forces. According to the SPLC, such groups may tend to "engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines." But the SPLC also notes that listing them "does not imply that the groups themselves advocate or engage in violence or other criminal activities, or are racist."

Many groups rejected my requests to photograph their activities. But I eventually found four who apparently felt they had little to hide, even allowing me into their closed Field Training Exercises (FTX). They were: Carlisle Light Infantry, Arkansas State Militia Corps (ASMC), Indiana Volunteer Militia, and Arkansas Defense Force (I found the latter two on Facebook, rather than via the SPLC). While there's always the possibility such groups might be putting on a show for an outside photographer, many members from these groups claimed they were normal, hard-working members of society who just wanted to be prepared to protect their communities in the event of a government breakdown or natural disaster.

The first group I visited, the Carlisle Light Infantry, appeared primarily interested in preparedness for natural disasters. Even so, it took weeks of speaking with their commander—who called himself "Gus" and like other members of these groups asked he not be fully identified for fear of retribution at his job—before they allowed me to attend an FTX. (I quickly learned the “M” word, militia, is often rejected by members of these groups, who do not necessarily want to be associated with anti-government extremism.)

I eased into Gus's camp rather quickly. And despite the race-baiting so central to national politics and the reputation militias have for generous overlap with the extreme right, members did not seem overly obsessed with immigration. The thing that was most palpably right-wing about them was their persistent focus on and fondness for a sweeping interpretation of the Second Amendment.

When I asked Gus about his political views, he explained he supported Bernie Sanders because he seemed like just an “average guy.” With Sanders (at the time of our conversation, at least) off the campaign trail, Gus said he identified as “Just Nothing.” He added that his group avoided political discussions, because it would erect a divide amid the common goal of coming together in the event of a disaster.

After my meeting with Carlisle Light Infantry, I headed first to Indiana and then to Arkansas. Bernie Sanders was not as popular around those parts. But again, the chief consistency I could discern between members within the two Arkansas Groups and Indiana Volunteer Militia was their fixation on and love of gun rights. One Indiana Volunteer Militia member explained that he was “not included in [the government’s] best interests,” hence his interest in arming himself with ammo and skills that could “protect his rights.” On my next FTX, I was told by an upper-level figure of Arkansas State Militia Corps that the Second Amendment “is like an insurance policy: You pay the premium but don’t really appreciate it until there is a disaster.” He explained such a disaster could be a “terrorist organization gathering a sizable force with the intentions of taking over a town.”

That same member said applications to join the ASMC had risen since the Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives last fall.

What follows is a selection of my photographs with these groups. Among other things, I tried to explore whether members’ apparent paranoia—an integral part of the movement as I experienced it—was more or less of a threat to the social fabric of society than the “shit hits the fan” scenario so many of them were worried about.

John, who was in the upper-level command of the Arkansas State Militia Corps, checks out his gear at a hotel room before a training exercise

Daniel, who said his parents immigrated from Mexico, grew up in Compton, in California, and described himself as the only conservative in his family. He said he joined the Indiana Volunteer Militia in support of strong borders with Mexico.

A woman holds an Airsoft rifle during a room-clearing exercise during the Indiana Volunteer Militia's FTX, which took place in North Vernon, Arkansas

Members from the Indiana Volunteer Militia walk into their Commander's home to debrief after a weekend of training

Outside North Vernon, Arkansas. a man named David, commander of the Indiana Volunteer Militia, sits with his wife inside their house. David said he served two years in the US Army Reserve and nine years in the US Marine Corps.

A man who belongs to the Indiana Volunteer Militia stands outside during an FTX with headlamps shining upon him

A young man who resides in Little Rock, Arkansas, stands with a paintball gun before a training exercise with the Arkansas State Militia Corps. They use paintballs for a "live-fire" training exercise.

Outside Piggott, Arkansas, two men in their early 20s fire guns. Both of these men claimed prior military experience overseas. They said they came to trainings with the Arkansas Defense Force for the camaraderie.

A view of the Arkansas Defense Force at the beginning of their training day. They make a morning array and give allegiance to the flag. Their ranks included a mix of civilians and those claiming past military service. The group had the highest concentration of those identifying as ex-military of any I met with.

Justin, a member of the Arkansas State Militia Corps, with his collection of firearms. A former professional bull rider, he now lives on a small hobby farm hosting a few horses. Most of his immediate family is involved in the ASMC, he said, and they shared a desire to help their community in the event of a disaster, as well as connect and have fun together.

A portion of the Arkansas State Militia Corps drills in the forest. This simulates a patrol scenario, where troops move from one area to another, with the possibility of being ambushed. Some carry real weapons, with no ammo inside, while others carry paintball guns.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

The night I met Walter* we were both booked on a storytelling show. Storytelling shows—if you're unfamiliar—are a lot like stand up comedy shows except if someone tells a joke and if falls flat they just pretend they were being interesting. Occasionally, people will eschew humor entirely in favor of dramatizing personal anecdotes: a deathbed confession of a curmudgeonly uncle or maybe a particularly poignant moment from a grade school production of Cats. The gig that night was a slog. Performers came underprepared, mumbling through half-thought-out tales with little response from the crowd. But all of that changed when Walter got called up.

He came barreling from the back of the room with his arms outstretched. Before getting on the stage he high-fived the first two rows of patrons, greeting everyone with a toothy smile accompanied by little Ric Flair woos. The audience came alive, starting to laugh before Walter had even begun his set. The vibe of the place changed instantly. For the next ten minutes, Walter had the audience in stitches with a heartbreaking and hilarious bit about childhood bullying. The story was masterfully told, punctuated with cringeworthy self-deprecation and thoughtful reflections on growing up. I could totally see why Walter had earned the headlining spot for the show. Afterward, I introduced myself. From there, we became friends.

The comedian was as warm on stage as he was off. He was the type of guy who would help you move apartments without complaining about it. He listened attentively when you spoke and supported gigs regardless of whether or not he was booked. One time during a set he described himself as the friendliest man in comedy, which would have seemed like a weird thing to say if it didn’t feel kind of true. In a scene that was fraught with bitterness and resentment, Walter was beloved. People genuinely wanted him to succeed. During the two years, we knew each other I watched him parlay his winning attitude into commercial bookings, independent film parts, and auditions for big-name producers. It seemed like a rare case of a nice guy getting ahead, which is why it was such a shock to see his name on the local news.

Walter was charged with the possession of child pornography.

I found out about the charges from a screen in a subway station. There beside an advertisement for Burger King was an announcement from the police. It had Walter’s name, age, and a location close to his house. The screen said that he had accessed, made available, and possessed child sexual abuse material. Then it flipped over to another story.

Putting together this piece I debated about using Walter’s real name, but ultimately decided against it. The reasoning was simple enough: using his real name might cause problems for people who were formerly a part his life—family members, partners—and just because I made the decision to talk about this, doesn’t mean they should have to.

At first, I assumed there had been a mistake. It was impossible to reconcile the person I knew and the charges I had seen. This wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. Walter was the pal you called if you got a flat tire. He was the comedian with the perfect head lice joke. The guy who had equally funny takes on pro wrestling and different types of apples. But more than that, he was my friend.

When I stepped out of the subway station my heart was racing. I thought about calling Walter directly, but when I went to punch in the number I couldn’t do it. Instead, I looked for his social media accounts. Each one of them was gone. OK. Not good. From there, I started to text our mutual friends, but by the time I began typing my phone was abuzz. Did you hear what happened? Do you know what’s going on? Is it true? We all grasped at straws, running through hypotheticals. Eventually, someone confirmed the worst. Yes, it was him. Yes, he’d been arrested. Something in my stomach dropped and I waited for an explanation. In some ways, I feel like I’m still waiting.

During the months that followed there was a lot of gossip. What exactly was on the computer? What about his girlfriend? Would Walter be going to jail? I was told he pleaded guilty and was later released to the custody of family with severe restrictions/probation, but I never followed up on the exact details. People expressed their feelings in a lot of different ways. The comedians made jokes about it. Industry people bemoaned the fact they’d have to pull entire ad campaigns from the air. Others thoughtfully spoke on the victims in the pornography. During this time, the term pedophile got used a lot. While it was the appropriate term I still cringed whenever I heard someone say it. Walter was a pedophile. That was impossible to believe. It was also true. That fact was just one of many contradictory thoughts I held about the subject.

I didn’t know the specifics of the crime or who else was impacted. What I had pieced together is that Walter had acted on his impulses. He made a horrible, life-altering, choice. The consequences he was facing were nothing compared to the kids who were likely harmed by the pornography he consumed. I couldn’t imagine how that had impacted their lives or how they might be harmed by it. But I could imagine the emotional consequences for Walter. What he did was awful and living with it meant the end of what had come before.

In the course of a few days, he had gone from among the city’s top young talent to someone absolutely reviled. He lost his friends. He had become completely unemployable in his field and more or less every other occupation. That must have felt incredibly lonely. Even if he deserved to deal with all that, I still felt sympathy… then as soon as that sympathy would pop up I’d feel disgusted with myself. That disgust would lead to more anger with Walter.

I understood everyone who felt angry. While not every pedophile is a child abuser or even acts on their impulses, Walter was responsible for downloading material preying on some of the most vulnerable people within society. Friends had also let him around their kids. Were I put in that situation I could see how anger—rage, maybe violent rage—would be an appropriate response. I understood the feelings of betrayal. Walter had given himself the title as the friendliest man in comedy. We had all believed him, booking him on shows and sharing the stage… and now this? There was also the despair of the whole thing. The fact it brought up terrible memories for some people. How it messed with others’ concept of trust. And I understood all that, I really did, but still amongst everything there was still a part of me that felt intensely sorry for Walter.

If you’re offered a situation as a hypothetical it’s easy to say how you’d deal with it. If you told me a stranger was downloading child porn it would be easy to write them off as a monster. It’s one of the most vile things I can think of. When it’s someone you’ve dealt with personally it gets more complicated. Not that the action is excusable at all. It’s not. But despite what he did, I still remember good things about Walter. His actions weren’t carried out by someone cartoonishly evil and without remorse, they were done by someone who has nuances, and I can’t decide whether I think that’s better or worse.

Since the incident, I’ve tried to compartmentalize the feelings I had both about Walter and his actions. At some point, it was too much to give attention to. There wasn’t anything else to be done except try to move on. This would have been easier if not for two things.

Months after the incident I got an email from Walter. He apologized for how his actions might have impacted me. He said that if I wanted to get coffee, to tell him anything, he was willing to listen. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. The email sat in my inbox as a reminder of just how much things had changed. I replied asking when. I didn’t know if I’d show up, but figured at the very least it was a chance at closure. After two more emails talking exclusively about time and location nothing ever came of it.

A few weeks after the email there was a phone call. It was my friend Peter*, a well-known stand up in the comedy scene. Peter sounded distraught, talking quickly and with a lot of breath in his voice. He had just run into Walter. He was standing at a red light and up walked Walter on the other side of the street. Peter explained the range of reactions he had. He’s got a kid himself and it had made the charges that much more visceral. He had considered physically harming Walter, roughing him up as comeuppance for what he had done. He thought about following him down the street, yelling about what had happened, letting everyone know a pedophile was among them. But what Peter actually did was different.

As the light changed and the two began walking toward each other. Walter tried to make himself as small as possible, crumpling up his body and hunching his shoulders as he moved forward. As the two were briefly beside each other Peter turned to Walter and said, “Hey man, we all just want you to get the help you need.” Apparently, Walter nodded and then walked away.

On the phone Peter apologized for calling me. He just wanted to know whether I thought he had said the right thing. He wanted to know if he should have done something differently. I told him I didn’t know. I still don’t. But I think about it all the time.

*Some names and details in this story have been changed.

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Last November, a Texas teen climbed out onto the edge of a bridge to snag a quick selfie in front of the Dallas skyline—and wound up taking a terrifying fall that nearly killed him, CBS affiliate KTVT reports.

After a Dallas Stars hockey game last winter, 18-year-old Triston Bailey and his friends decided to sneak out onto the Margaret McDermott Bridge to take a few photos, because that's what the youths are doing these days, I guess.

"You see [dangerous selfies] all over social media," Bailey said at a press conference, according to KTVT. "On Instagram and Facebook, people with really cool cameras. We wanted to have our own."

The next thing Bailey remembers is waking up in the hospital, he said.

"They say we stopped on the side of the bridge to take some pictures and that I was going over the concrete barriers," he continued. "They heard me scream and they thought I was joking."

He wasn't joking, unfortunately. The teen slipped off a concrete barrier and plunged 50 goddamn feet straight to the ground while his horrified friends watched from above. "I broke my pelvis, I had a rib fracture, a punctured lung," Bailey said. "I broke my face a whole bunch, and I had lacerations on my spleen."

He reportedly hit the ground so hard he left a mark in it, Wile E. Coyote-style, but somehow, Bailey survived the fall. If he'd have landed any differently, he could've been paralyzed—or killed.

"It’s amazing that he didn’t snap his neck," J Darryl Amos, a doctor at Methodist Dallas Hospital, told KTVT. "It’s amazing that he’s not a paraplegic—or broke his neck. It’s truly miraculous."

Miracle or no, Bailey still got pretty brutally messed up. He's spent the past four months recovering from his injuries, but, thankfully, he's on track to make a full recovery.

"I could have easily passed away that night," he said. "I could have easily been gone."

It's unclear whether Bailey ever actually got the selfie that night, but at least the guy was lucky enough to survive. It should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be said: Quit hanging off buildings and climbing on trains and swimming with goddamn sharks for a photo op. The only thing lamer than the internet is dying for it. Teens!

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On Wednesday, NowThis News released some unaired, leaked footage of Fox News host Tucker Carlson fully losing his shit when historian Rutger Bregman called him out for being a "millionaire funded by billionaires," and it is really, truly remarkable. In the clip, Carlson yells "go fuck yourself" at Bregman and calls him a "tiny-brain" and a "moron," all while Bregman politely refrains from laughing at Carlson's meltdown and continues to roast the hell out of him.

Now, Carlson has spoken out about his unhinged rant—and he says he, uh, stands by it?

“There is some profanity and I apologize for that," Carlson said in a new video response. "On the other hand, it was genuinely heartfelt. I meant it with total sincerity.”

According to Carlson, the reason for cutting the interview with the Dutch author wasn't because Carlson got extremely butthurt about someone calling him on his own shit. No! He just didn't like that he said some bad words in the process.

"I did what I try hard never to do on this show and I was rude. I called him a moron and then I modified that word with a vulgar Anglo-Saxon term that is also intelligible in Dutch," Carlson said. "In my defense, I would say that is entirely accurate, but you're not allowed to use that word on television. So once I said it out loud, there was no airing the segment."

Carlson then tried to frame Bregman as the bad guy in this whole situation for sneakily taping and then leaking the clip—though it's a little hard to make the person screaming "you were too fucking annoying!" seem like the righteous one here.

At least we now know that Carlson is a dexterous wordsmith who can choose his expletives so they work in both English and Dutch simultaneously, even if he appears to just be going apeshit and screaming "fuck" at a guest. Incredible!

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This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Albrecht Becker lived to tell the tale. In 1935, the photographer was imprisoned by the Nazis for being gay, a crime that was punishable by death in Hitler's Germany. Yet more than 60 years later, in 1996, he sat down to film Rosa von Praunheim's short documentary Liebe und Leid (Love and Suffering), smiling, to share what life was like as a gay man under Nazi rule.

Becker, a rather dapper 90-year-old man at the time, wore a light blue shirt with a loosely fitted bow tie. A dark tattoo peeked out from beneath his collar—a sign of the second half of his story. After landing himself in a bunker on the Eastern Front, he became a radical artist, tattooing himself and discovering the pleasures that can be found in pain.

Some of Becker's self-portraits look like photoshopped images from the sub-genre of the internet that tries to imagine what people with full-body tattoos will look like when they're elderly. Becker was proud of his sexuality, his body, and his experiments, even those that failed—including one that left his penis permanently disfigured. This is one of the reasons the art world has rediscovered his work. From March 7 to 10, 2019, Becker's photographs will be shown at the Independent Art Fair in New York.

Becker would often paint over his photographs.

By the time he died, in 2002, Becker had left behind several interviews, his autobiography, and eyewitness accounts that tell us a bit about his life and what motivated his work.

In Liebe und Leid, Becker explains that being gay wasn't really a problem at the start of Nazi rule in Germany. Paragraph 175 had forbidden sex between men, but nobody really cared in Würzburg, where Becker lived in the 1930s. He and his lover, a professor who was 20 years his senior, slept together without going to great lengths to hide it. He says the Nazis weren't interested in him, and politically, he wasn't interested in them either.

However, all that changed in July of 1934 after the Night of the Long Knives and the murder of SA commander Ernst Röhm. With the elimination of Röhm, Hitler's power was consolidated. The persecution of those who didn't fit into the National Socialist worldview began. Shortly after Christmas the same year, the Gestapo summoned Becker and his lover. "We went in unknowingly and we didn't return home until three years later," Becker says in the film.

WATCH: Inside LA's Craziest Pansexual Nightlub

"I'm gay and everyone knows it," he told the Gestapo interrogator. Even then, in his late 20s, Becker was sure of himself. But that confidence brought some naivety. "Unfortunately, I gave up the names of friends I had slept with." He didn't think anything of it at the time.

Becker got lucky and was sentenced to three years in prison in Nuremberg, probably because he didn't deny his "guilt" and because, in the process, he denounced others. "If a gay person was taken to Dachau concentration camp, that was without a doubt the last you'd see of them," Becker told the USC Shoa Foundation when he was interviewed about the Nazis persecuting gay people.

Once released from prison, Becker slipped back into his old way of life. As a decorator, he brought a bit of color to the windows of Nazi Germany, and then bought himself a Leica to photograph his friends. But in 1940 he was drafted, and posted to Russia, just outside Stalingrad. Becker joked in his autobiography that he was at least looking forward to being surrounded by young men again once he got to the front.

He stayed in Russia until the summer of 1944, but says he never fought at the front. He also didn't find any lovers in the army. Nevertheless, he explored his masochistic side while he was there.

Becker gave himself a Prince Albert piercing using the Boreno tribe for inspiration.

Becker said that during the war he quickly realized he couldn't openly reveal his sexual orientation, in fear of being shot dead or sent to a concentration camp. In other words, he didn't have sex for four years, which turned him into something of a sexual explorer. In a bunker, he tattooed himself for the first time: flames on his dick. He used three sewing needles, some woolen thread, a pencil, and black ink.

He pulled the curtain across his bunk for privacy and realized how much tattooing excited him. "I lay there and tattooed myself, and afterward, I came. The other guys were playing cards. I found it all strangely funny," Becker explained. From then on, he became obsessed with tattooing.

Becker's life on the frontline came to an end when a piece of shrapnel pierced his arm as his division retreated during an air raid. In the military hospital, he got to know art director Herbert Kirchhoff. For the next ten years, they were a couple, living and working side-by-side.

Becker designed dozens of film sets with Kirchhoff and they were awarded the German Film Award twice. This is the well-known, well-documented side of his life. The other side took place in tattoo shops and the queer art scene in Hamburg. Becker moved there in the 1950s and dove headfirst into the world of sadomasochism.

Becker's body canvas was gradually covered with motifs, which he displayed as art. He photographed them, sometimes in costume, more often naked and sometimes during sex.

At a time where Germany was fragmented, the Berlin wall was going up and the world was recovering from devastating warfare, Becker created a world of his own. He had read about a Borneo tribe that ritually pierced the tip of their penises and wore jewelry in the holes, and it fascinated him. It took him two years to train himself to be able to manage the pain, and an entire hour to finally get up the nerve to push the glowing hot needle through the tip of his penis. He threaded a surgical suture through the hole and widened it an inch in diameter. As an old man, this was one of Becker's favorite stories.

In the mid-60s, Becker persuaded himself that his testicles were too small. "I injected them with paraffin," he says in Liebe Und Leid. He had heard that doctors were using liquid paraffin for cosmetic surgeries, but what he hadn't heard is that paraffin can spread throughout the body. Becker injected four liters over several years, until it finally settled in his penis, forming, as Becker put it, a second belly. He could no longer have normal sex or get a proper erection. It was as if his penis had disappeared into a large paraffin bulge.

"My penis was 18 centimeters [7 inches] long, but in the end, it was only six centimeters [2 inches]," Becker says in the film. He once asked a doctor to remove the bulge, but by then it was too late—the paraffin had absorbed into the tissue. Rather than trying to hide his penis belly, he took more photos of himself, which became the lasting results of his experiment. Documentary filmmaker Hervé Joseph Lebrun, who worked with Becker for four years, claims that this is when Becker truly became an artist.

Becker didn't hide his deformity or seem to care much about what people thought. He also had a pretty big ego, even at the age of 92, when Lebrun first met him. In 1998, Becker called Lebrun, who lived in Paris at the time. He had seen some of the filmmaker's work and invited him to come to Hamburg.

"After our first phone call, he sent me many photos of himself in sadomasochistic situations," Lebrun tells me. "That was my first impression of Albrecht. It was great!"

So Lebrun traveled to Hamburg to see him.

"Albrecht lived in a beautiful house with a garden," says Lebrun of their first meeting. The house was full of books about tattoos. Then Becker opened a large cabinet to share his impressive dildo collection with him. They talked about photography, sex, and the war. "I listened to the stories that this warm-hearted person had to share—and I looked up to him," Lebrun says.

He and Becker took photos every day. "Every morning when he woke up, he wanted to create something new." They collaborated for the next four years, until Becker's death on April 22, 2002, when Lebrun was giving a speech at their last joint private viewing in Lyon.

Albrecht Becker had no close relatives and bequeathed a portion of his photographs to Lebrun. The rest he left to the Schwules Museum in Berlin, which is dedicated to showcasing LGBTQ culture. "I miss him," says Lebrun. "He was a bright light for me, and for all the people around him."

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

It all started with a Columbine meme.

The meme showed the dead bodies of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as they laid sprawled in the Columbine library. Under the gore read a caption—”I can’t live without my friends.” ‎When Lindsay Souvannarath—the meme’s proud creator—posted her artwork to Tumblr, she used the hashtag #columbine.

Meanwhile, almost 2,000 kilometers [1,243 miles] away from Souvannarath’s Illinois home, James Gamble was trawling through Tumblr in his bedroom in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Using the same hashtag as Souvannarath, Gamble soon came across her post, was impressed by it, and followed her.

The two hit it off instantaneously and an online romance blossomed, with the two sexting and planning to meet up. Within seven weeks, Souvannarath would board a plane to Halifax en route to meet Gamble. Once together, they planned to lose their virginity to each other and, the next day, commit what they hoped to be one of the most horrific mass killings in Canadian history.

Gamble and Souvannarath would never meet—their plan to firebomb and shoot up the Halifax Shopping Center was thwarted by a timely Crime Stoppers tip and ended with Souvannarath serving a life sentence and Gamble taking his own life. Now, for the first time since being brought to the public’s attention four years ago, Lindsay Souvannarath decided to speak out. The would-be killer gave a phone interview to a true crime podcast—the Nighttime Podcast hosted by Halifax native Jordan Bonaparte.

It’s a chilling listen, as Souvannarath describes planned murders and neo-Nazi beliefs with the same inflection as one would talk about a boring day at the office.

"She didn't pull punches, she was straight and just told the story,” Bonaparte told VICE of his conversations with Souvannarath. "Some of the things she would say, almost in passing, would make the hair on the back of my neck stand up and terrified to go to a mall again but, to her, it was no big thing."

In doing so, she gives us insight into one of the strangest Canadian crimes in recent years.

An Extremely Online Crime

The role the internet played in this crime cannot be overstated. Online the two were able to meet through Columbine jokes, indulge in their darkest fantasies, and plan a mass shooting on a messaging app.

The young woman had a hard time creating connections offline and spent a lot of time surfing the internet. When tracking Souvannarath’s path to a life sentence, it’s her secretive online persona that sought out other outsiders and extreme ideas, which led her toward violent fantasy. It’s how the mixed race daughter of a Laotian father and Eastern European mother could find herself a devout neo-Nazi.

Some of Souvannarath's neo-Nazi art

“[The neo-Nazi beliefs] just started by chance on this art website when I came across this one painting and thought, whoa, that’s a really cool painting. So I decided to like and comment on it and talk to the artist a little,” said Souvannarath on the podcast. “The artist just happened to be a national socialist.”

Souvannarath, who said this all started when she was 16, would follow this artist and become more exposed to his beliefs and neo-Nazi artwork over time. This art was her gateway into “meeting more national socialists,” bonding with them, and tumbling head-over-heels into communities where hate is celebrated.

From here, Souvannarath got deeper into the online neo-Nazi community, accepted the ideology, and eventually found herself on the most infamous extreme-right forum, Iron March—a site that would eventually radicalize its own murderers. Here, she allegedly had an online relationship with the site’s founder, an influential neo-Nazi figure, Alexander Slavros—a relationship Souvannarath would seemingly describe in the podcast as, “a really stupid superficial relationship that I probably took more seriously than I should have.” She would eventually end up running her own blog called Cockswastica, where she would post about her beliefs.

The homepage of the Cockswastica blog

At the same time as she was building this far-right belief system, Souvannarath was writing macabre short stories—some of which later became well-known creepypastas—including one called "If a Skull Could Blush." She decided to include a school shooting into this story, and began researching Columbine. For whatever reason, Columbine struck her in a certain way, and much like her relationships with neo-Nazis, she was able to find community with those who romanticized the killings—a group of people called Columbiners.

“When I started posting in the Columbine tag and kind of networking with the other people posting there, I just made so many friends there that I had so much in common with. We all connected over this one thing, there were other things too. It just became very significant for me.”

This isn’t to say that Souvannarath was a death worshipping neo-Nazi in her regular life—instead, in court documents, her family described her as someone who would “obey rules to a fault sometimes.” Like many of us, Souvannarath was a different person online and offline.

“It's almost like a different person. I think if this crime had have been planned, and have all happened on the telephone instead of on Facebook Messenger,” said Bonaparte. “I think this would have been different. I don't think any of this would have happened."

Primed for the Attack

After finding this community, Souvannarath would idealize Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and soon start creating memes to iconize them. It was here she met James Gamble, a depressed 19-year-old man from Halifax who was on a similar journey involving neo-Nazis and Columbiners as Souvannarath. Gamble, fatefully liked that post and followed her, then she followed him back and messaged him. She said that the two originally began chatting as friends but, as they were both Columbine fans, when the topic of them meeting and committing a mass killing came up Souvannarath “started feeling strongly attracted to him.”

Gamble

“We were originally talking about our clothes and how we liked to wear clothes that intimidated people. I asked him if he kind of had any regular hangouts so I could show up and people would be like ‘oh God, there’s two of them now,’” said Souvannarath. “He kind of came up the idea of maybe carrying out the attack while we were dressed in those clothes and I found myself on board with it.”

For the seven and a half weeks leading up to the plot the two spoke every day, sometimes for multiple hours on Facebook Messenger—where their relationship almost entirely existed. Amid the typical things a new long-distance couple would do, like sexting and sending photos, the two planned their attack. As Bonaparte, who has read the entire Facebook Messenger log puts it, the rate it went from “quickly they go from, ‘oh you're kind of cute’ to 'yes I will get on a plane and we'll use your parents guns and go shoot up the mall and kill each other like Eric and Dylan from Columbine,’” is incredibly fast. They were essentially primed for this moment.

The two continued to build each other up online talking about not just the crime itself but the legacy they would leave behind. Over time, it seems she began to disassociate from reality and began to believe that she and Gamble were being taken over by the spirit of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

“I believed I had the mind of Eric Harris inhabiting my body somehow, and that as time went on and as I was planning things more and more he started taking over me more and more,” said Souvannarath.

The two discussed where to do the crime. They discussed a library, but that was too similar to Columbine; an elementary school, but that might send the wrong message; a hospital, Souvannarath said this sounded fun but decided it was pointless. Finally, they decided on the mall as it was “the most fun” and “like it would be a protest against capitalism, consumerism, and greed.” Furthermore, the mall would allow them to find their “ideal victims”—for James, “middle-aged Christian woman;” and for Souvannarath, who was obsessed with eugenics, “anybody that was particular dysgenetic looking.”

The agreed statement of facts in Souvannarath’s case lays out the plot: “On February 14, 2015, they would go to the area of the food court of the Halifax Shopping Center, and throw Molotov cocktails. Next, Gamble and Ms. Souvannarath would indiscriminately shoot whoever was there, with a lever action .308 hunting rifle, and a single action 16 gauge shotgun respectively. Gamble would kill any wounded persons with a hunting knife. Their intention was to inflict as many casualties as their ammunition would allow.”

The shooting would only end with Souvannarath and Gamble killing themselves on the count of three—one final homage to Columbine. The weapons they would use were to be Gamble’s parents guns and he would kill his mother and father the night before Souvannarath arrived. Once she was in Halifax she would stay with Gamble, they would lose their virginity to each other, and then, the next day, they would pull off their plot. They were to be helped by Gamble’s best friend Randall Shepherd—he is currently serving a ten-year prison term for his role in the plot. In the end, they hoped they would inspire more of these shootings and be remembered like the Columbine shooters.

For the lovebirds though, perhaps more importantly than the details of the shootings was the aesthetics that surrounded it—the clothing they wanted to wear and the message they wanted to get across with the killings. Their clothing was planned meticulously intended to pay homage to Harris and Klebold but give them an identity all their own.

The shirt and skinny jeans Souvannarath was planning on wearing.

Then they had to pick a day, at first it was February 1, 2015, but that had to be changed when Souvannarath didn’t buy a ticket in time before the price skyrocketed. With that pushed back, Gamble suggested, well, why not Valentine’s Day, as it would add an extra layer to the crime. Souvannarath agreed and booked a ticket.

‘It’s Going Down’

Online the two began to leave bread crumbs hinting at their actions, the most infamous being a photo of the two—one in a scream mask, the other a skull bandana that’s since become associated with Atomwaffen—with the caption “Valentines Day it’s going down.” Souvannarath even began to write a suicide note called Der Untergang which would auto-post the day after the killings—it started with the line, “perhaps you have already heard the news of a mass shooting in Halifax.”

Souvannarath and Gamble would never meet in-person.

The plan began to fall apart the minute they put it into motion. The two were, to put it lightly, shitty criminals. They didn’t keep their plot very secret, boasting about it to several people—meaning a Crime Stoppers tip about the two planning a shooting was called in. While Souvannarath was able to sneak out of her parents house and board a plane to Halifax, she didn’t expect to be flagged by Canadian customs for arriving with no return flight, practically no luggage and didn’t know what to tell the border officials.

“They went through my items and didn’t really like what I had with me. They didn’t like my books, they didn’t like the little hat I had with me that had a swastika on it,” said Souvannarath. “From there, the police actually came and arrested me for uttering threats.”

At this point, Gamble was already dead. While Souvannarath was still in the air, the police went to Gamble’s house to confront him about the tip. His parents had confirmed that he was home and police surrounded the house, called in, and told him to exit. A single gunshot rang out and when they entered the home, police found Gamble had turned the gun on himself. He did not kill his parents, which he was planning to do that evening.

She said she found out her online boyfriend was dead after answering a cop’s question with “I don’t know, ask James;” one of them told her he “blew his head off.”

The plot would soon be brought to the public’s attention and become a giant story. In the end, Souvannarath would plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit arson, illegal possession of weapons for dangerous purposes against the public, and making threats over social media. She pleaded guilty in 2017 and was sentenced to life in prison without parole for ten years. She’s currently appealing the sentence.

While only four years ago, the plot to kill as many as they can was one of the first cases to force the public to understand online radicalization, extreme subcultures, and the ever-strange world of extreme-right communities. In the end it’s a crime that showcased the power of the internet to build communities in the worst way possible.

"You hear the cliché that someone is gasoline and someone is the match? In this case that's it absolutely, except Lindsay wasn't gasoline she was a old wooden building filled with oily rags, and James Gamble wasn't a match, he was a raging inferno,” said Bonaparte.

“It was the perfect pair to fit together to launch this disturbed plot and only by the grace of God it didn't happen.”

You can listen to the Nighttime Episodes featuring Bonaparte’s interviews with Souvannarath here.

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It's never too soon to try.

Last Sunday morning in the Bronx, bodega owners gathered together and demanded that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo permit them to sell marijuana if and when recreational cannabis is legalized in the state.

"Rather than drug peddling outside of these bodegas, we want to bring them inside," Fernando Mateo, the spokesperson for the United Bodegas of America, said at a press conference, according to the New York Post. "Allow us to become a wholesaler—in other words, let us cut out the middle man."

This was a preemptive strike in what's sure to be a long battle over the legalization of recreational cannabis. In a December speech, Cuomo promised that the drug would be legalized soon. With Democrats firmly in control of the state government, it seems like that would be easy, but other liberal states have had significant trouble sorting out exactly what legal weed looks like in practice. In neighboring New Jersey, for example, lawmakers have been struggling over the past year to iron out the finer points of their marijuana plan, though this week saw Governor Phil Murphy and Democratic leaders finally—yet tentatively—agreeing on a regulatory committee and a tax rate. (It'll probably be $42 an ounce.)

A Monmouth University poll released on Monday found that six out of ten New Jerseyeans support legal weed, but fewer back the proposal currently on the table. Across the country, states have been dealing with ongoing debates about how to regulate the growing and selling of cannabis, and what to do with people who have criminal records related to weed. The high cost of licenses can prevent people of color from opening cannabis businesses, and communities have opposed the opening of dispensaries and farms. (In New Jersey, Ed Forchion, a marijuana activist who goes by the moniker "NJWeedman," is often the person leading the charge for reform—he has called the people already swooping into his home state's pot market "cannabaggers.") The underlying question is: Who should benefit from cannabis legalization?

"I think the idea that [legal marijuana] should be a money maker is a terrible public policy, in general," said Sam Kamin, a professor of marijuana law and policy at the University of Denver. "Look to cigarettes: The settlements from tobacco litigation made, in some ways, the states dependent on continued smoking. So, you don't want to be the person who has to go to the governor and say, 'Bad news, people are smoking less pot."

Working all this out takes an inordinate amount of time. It wasn't until two years after Massachusetts voters cast ballots approving legal weed—and 11 months after the planned start of the new era—that its first dispensaries opened their doors.

"What I think you're seeing in New Jersey and New York is that the devil is in the details, and it gets really hard to lock down one particular model, even if everybody agrees that they want reform," Douglas Berman, the chair of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, said. "That kind of sparring—'I want to it look this way,' or 'I want it to look that way'—really makes it easy for the status quo to persevere. Until it gets to the point that the status quo seems worse to everybody than even the worst version that somebody wants."

What the bodega owners do want follows an obvious logic. These convenience stores already sell a variety of basic, everyday items—cigarettes, tall boys, toilet paper—so why shouldn't they be permitted to add cannabis to the inventory? (Some bodegas, of course, already sell drugs illegally, and there's an issue, even in states that have legalized weed, of a competing black market.)

"If you just think about it, if these corner stores, if these bodegas, are able to sell alcohol and tobacco, why shouldn't they be allowed to sell marijuana to adults?" Tom Angell, a longtime weed activist who founded the nonprofit Marijuana Majority and runs the cannabis news site Marijuana Moment, said.

"If activists take seriously what is that frequent talking point, which is that we ought to treat marijuana like alcohol, well obviously—even though we require licenses—we let an awful lot of retailers keep alcohol on their shelves," said Berman. "So it's not foolish for the bodega owners to ask for some of the action, and we take the activists calling for marijuana reform at face value."

"One very interesting thing to consider, though," Berman continued, "is just like we distinguish types of alcohol—this license is, say, for beer and wine, and this one is for the hard stuff—a very smart model to try, but that hasn't really been engineered, is that same thing with marijuana. If you were to say to the public health people, marijuana is going to be sold at a bodega, they'd probably say that's terrible. But if you told them it would be sold at a bodega, but they would only be very low-level THC products, then they could say maybe."

However, "it has to be pretty unlikely," said Kamin. "It's not a model that any state has developed yet, though it's certainly on-brand for New York City."

Weed at bodegas would tap into the Big Apple's corner-store culture—going into a single place to buy your daily essentials, cheaply, with a cashier you're on a first-name basis with, and an old cat purring on a roll of paper towels. Bodegas are New York City; they're like its veins.

But the United Bodegas of America's proposal is also incredibly radical. According to NPR, there are about 13,000 bodegas in New York City alone. For comparison's sake, there are around 500 recreational dispensaries in Colorado, 350 in California, and 220 in Washington State.

"Most states that have adopted adult use have gone to a much more highly regulated, specialized model than that," Kamin said. "What they're proposing is really much more in the post–federal legalization conversation—because it's prohibited federally now, the states have adopted really robust regulations, more more in-depth than, say, they have for alcohol and tobacco."

As legal weed becomes more widespread and accepted, and as states figure out regulatory schemes that work, it's possible that weed could become as normalized as beer, or those sex pills bodegas are always selling. But we're a long ways away from that world.

"I don't think anyone can confidently predict," Berman emphasized, "where we're going to be five, ten, or 20 years from now on this."

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Elizabeth Warren might not seem like the type to regularly appear on Dr. Phil. But even if that biographical tidbit is nowhere to be found on her Wikipedia page, in-between her appointment teaching at Harvard Law School and her election as a US Senator, the 2020 Democratic contender made a handful of appearances on the show that brought America Bhad Bhabie. I'm skipping over a lot of biography here, but what strikes me about this part of her story is that, like Donald Trump, Warren became publicly recognizable—at least in some corners—thanks to a trashy TV show.

Also like the guy she'll be running against if she gets her party's nomination, Warren knows what it means to be in debt.

Obviously, the two couldn't be more different in their backgrounds, and specifically their experiences of what we now call precarity. Warren comes from a middle-class family struggling to stay afloat in Oklahoma, and has focused much of her career on helping people ward off financial predators. Trump, meanwhile, grew his inherited millions—at least some of which were the product of tax evasion—by leveraging debt, like when he borrowed $425 million to buy the famed Plaza Hotel. Warren came up with the idea for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to look out for people getting preyed on by payday lenders and other shady debt dealers; Trump's cronies have been systematically dismantling it.

Still, even if Trump's has been an ugly, right-wing variety, the two both built their political careers on the back of economic populism. And like Trump, Warren has published her share of books full of basic advice about how to approach the world (if not how to mimic her own supposedly spectacular success). As POLITICO Magazine reported, rising academic star Warren got her start as Dr. Phil's financial guru thanks to her 2003 book The Two-Income Trap, co-written with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. But it was the duo's second book, All Your Worth, a more expansive and readable explainer on how to spend responsibly and sustainably, that seemed to set Warren on the path to real celebrity.

The book is a super breezy read based around the idea that 50 percent of your money show go to "needs," a.k.a. bills and rent, 30 percent should be for fun, and 20 percent should be stocked away as savings. But published in 2005, right before the financial crisis blew up the economy and doomed millennials even more than they were already, it also offered a startlingly prescient window into the relentless cycle of personal debt that has helped define what young people sometimes like to call late capitalism.

As one Amazon reviewer of All Your Worth put it in 2012: "Most of us know how bad debt can be, but this mother/daughter duo writes that debt is just plain dangerous." In fact, throughout the 276-book, Warren and her daughter call out cottage industry of financial self-help books for not providing info that normal people could actually use.

"She identified early on the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots," said Liz Weston, a certified financial planner who has interviewed Warren and also appeared on Dr. Phil. "She was kind of one of the first voices I remember raising that issue in the personal finance context. She's still saying you have a responsibility to take care of yourself, but she also pointed out that there are bigger economic forces at play here—a lot of personal finance gurus still don't acknowledge that."

Warren keeps the language simple and even has readers fill out worksheets as they go. The idea is that by getting you to understand that debt is just a missed opportunity for savings, by focusing on dollars rather than counting pennies, and by sticking to a few easy-to-understand ratios, you can spend less time panicking about money. The book did ultimately frighten me into re-thinking how I am going to finally address my student debt head-on, though my main takeaway from Worth was not just that that Elizabeth Warren gets debt, or how to get out of it—it's that she probably gets millennial debt better than anyone else, and certainly better than anyone who's ever run for president.

Warren's mantra is always: But the rules of the game have changed, which is perhaps even truer now that it was 14 years ago. As the POLITICO piece pointed out, she knows, for instance, that the overconsumption myth, or the idea that profligate spending is the reason so many people are in financial trouble is just that—a myth. Although she doesn't use this exact example, it's obvious that despite being 70 years old, Warren is not going to push the line that young people are sabotaging themselves with their fondness for avocado toast. She's definitely not Jason Chaffetz saying people should choose between iPhones and healthcare.

In Warren's vision back then, it was already no given that people would just "build wealth" by buying a normal house and car and working for a set number of years. "Back when your parents were young, it was a pretty reliable rule that if they held together regular jobs and lived regular lives, their money was pretty much in balance," she and her daughter write. This seems clear now, but in 2005, George W. Bush's "Ownership Society" was still fairly mainstream.

"People were not studying people who went bankrupt," Weston recalled about how many in her industry conceptualized debt before Worth's release. "They sort of just went, 'Well those people are deadbeats. Who wants to know anything about 'em? The idea that if you filed for bankruptcy you were a deadbeat was common."

And though the book predates the growing outcry about the student debt crisis by enough time that I can't fault her for not mentioning it very often, when Warren does, she notes the rules have changed since tuition at state college could be paid for with a part-time summer job flipping hamburgers. "Once someone found a job, if they worked hard, they could pretty much count on keeping that job until it was time to collect a gold watch at retirement," the pair write. "No one trembled in fear over the prospect of mass corporate layoffs that swept out even the hardest-working employees."

There are of course parts of the text that might seem a little hokey, or outdated. Warren at one point seems to suggest the reader put down the book and go cut up their credit and debit cards with a fervor that is more than a little odd in the age of rewards hacking and cash-free restaurants. (Then again, Millennials may have even more credit-card debt than they do student-loan debt.) But in other episodes, the text is almost bizarrely farsighted. Though the book came out some time before the financial crash, Warren warns people not to borrow on their home's equity, and argues deregulation of the credit card and home-loan industries has set up a ton of Americans to fail on purpose. "If your parents tried to buy a home that cost more than they could mange, the bank just wouldn't lend them the money," she and her daughter write. "Mom and Dad and their friends didn't have to worry too much about getting in trouble because it just wasn't possible to take on a mortgage that was more than they could afford."

Besides Barack Obama, who is now flush with Wall Street and Netflix money but was still paying off student loans as recently as 2004, very few presidents have visibly dealt with debt. Warren is obviously relatively wealthy now, too, but she at least understands the overconsumption myth and that deregulation has gutted the middle class and an entire generation of voters. In her book, the advice she gives to people in money trouble is pretty boilerplate: stay in control, react quickly, and start calling creditors to negotiate. But Warren's initial 2020 policy proposals, like a European-style wealth tax, could feasibly fund free public college in America. She's also the best positioned of any candidate—except maybe Bernie Sanders—to explain how corruption in the political system hurts regular people. To that end, even before she announced her bid, Warren was pushing major ethics legislation and for employees to have a spot on corporate boards. She's also outlined plans to provide federal money to help people put a down payment on a home in historically redlined neighborhoods; this speaks to communities of color in particular but also the larger millennial problem of feeling completely unable to contemplate home ownership.

What we're still waiting to see is how Warren translates the larger arc of her vision into more specific proposals that address people with, say, runaway existing debt, and how—besides beefing up regulators—she would address thorny questions like the gig economy.

If nothing else, though, young people angry at a system they feel screwed them are in for a show. A 2005 Senate hearing on bankruptcy reform in which Warren squared off with one of her potential rivals over debt provided a look at how she might challenge old myths about personal responsibility. When she seemed to be suggesting creditors were essentially legal loan sharks, Joe Biden—of the credit-card state, Delaware—bristled.

"Maybe we should talk about usury rates, then," he replied. "Maybe that is what we should be talking about, not bankruptcy."

"Senator, I will be the first," Warren responded. "Invite me."

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In a little room near the ocean, five dozen people sit on the floor with their eyes closed. They are in lotus pose. Some lightly sway. A few hold their hands over their hearts, or raise their hands in the air, or do both. They clap along with a beat kept by a man in white linen playing a hand drum on the small stage at the front of the dimly lit space. They are deep in it—the prayer, the meditative bliss, the private interior place of sacred calm that’s easier to access when you close your eyes. My eyes are closed too.

Our mouths, however, are open, because everyone is singing. “Shri krishna sharanam mamah,” the crowd chants over and over, repeating the name of the Hindu God Krishna until the words achieve a hypnotic quality. In time the tempo picks up and the crowd stands, dancing and jumping up and down as the band—two drummers, a backup singer, a bass guitarist and a dreaded man on harmonium—hits its ecstatic peak. When the song subsides, everyone cheers. The temperature in the room has gone up ten degrees.

This is Monday night kirtan at Bhakti Yoga Shala, a Santa Monica yoga studio that since opening in 2009 has served as a primary hub for LA’s kirtan scene, an often barefoot spiritual music community that took root in Los Angeles more than 20 years ago and continues to thrive in yoga studios, private homes, and desert festivals around SoCal. In an expensive, competitive, lonely, dirty, and often abrasive city, kirtan is like hiking or going to the farmers market or driving fast up the PCH, in the sense that it makes life in Los Angeles more bearable for those who do it.

“Gathering together with people to sing, dance and open our hearts, for me makes Los Angeles the most amazing place,” says Govind Das, who was born in Maryland as Ira Rosen and is leading tonight’s kirtan. He, along with his wife Radha, founded Bhakti Yoga Shala. “Having spiritual community in Los Angeles is so important,” he continues, “because without it, it can be a very difficult place.”

Bhakti Yoga Shala in Santa Monica. Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Such earnestness can make people uncomfortable, but what Govind Das is describing isn’t so different than a night out at any LA nightclub, except the music here namechecks Shiva and Vishnu, the cover charge is cheaper (a suggested donation of $10 to $20), and everyone drinks coconut juice instead of alcohol. A practice said to have originated from the gods themselves, Kirtan—a Sanskrit word meaning “to sing, to praise”—is a Hindu tradition that exploded in popularity in 16th century India. Once done only by the priestly Brahman class, in this era kirtan was delivered to the people. For the first time, anyone with the desire could sing the names of the Gods and have a direct experience with divinity. Religious hierarchies were shaken as society realized the spark of consciousness existed in each individual. Plus, people just really loved singing.

Los Angeles-based kirtan pioneer Dave Stringer first went to India in the early 90s, finding that the transformative experiences he was having through yoga and kirtan blasted through the limitations of his rational mind. He was hooked, becoming, he says, addicted to the serenity-inducing neurochemicals that flood his brain while singing kirtan.

When Stringer returned to LA in the mid-90s, the city’s yoga scene was exploding, with Yoga Works—a studio then on Main Street in Santa Monica—taking a cue from nearby Hollywood and promoting its instructors like movie stars. While not without controversy, this marketing campaign turned teachers like Shiva Rea, Bryan Kest, and Seane Corn into yoga world celebrities. Stringer played their classes and was amongst a community of artists, performers, health enthusiasts and other myriad seeker types. It was the same far-out vibe of Laurel Canyon’s singer/songwriter scene of the 1970s infused with raga, Indian meditative practices, and ecstatic chanting.

“Suddenly the yoga scene had a soundtrack,” Stringer says. “People fleeing conventional religions still missed the experience of singing together.”

“We were all into world music,” recalls Donna De Lory, a songwriter and venerable kirtan performer who’s also toured extensively with Madonna. “I learned my first mantra, ‘Ganapati Om’ from Dave at one of his Hollywood Hills parties.”

Kirtan at Bhakti Yoga Shala in Santa Monica. Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete.

Extending primarily out of Yoga Works and other independently owned studios in Venice and Santa Monica, this yoga/kirtan community extended the tradition of SoCal as a nexus for freewheeling spiritual exploration. Eastern influences had taken root in LA decades prior, with Sridhar Silberfein setting up his Center for Spiritual Studies out in Topanga Canyon in the 1970s. Here, heavies like Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Bhagavan Das, and Ram Das—armed with knowledge gleaned from their gurus—shared Eastern mysticism with rapt Californians. (“California and Los Angeles are way ahead of the curve in most spiritual aspects,” Siberfian told me in an email from India.) Rick Rubin produced Krishna Das’ 2003 kirtan album Door of Faith, while George Harrison’s 1970 spiritual “My Sweet Lord” introduced mantra—“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna”—to mainstream listeners.

The connection between India and Los Angeles that started when yoga first became fashionable in Hollywood during the 1930s has never really gone away. Kirtan has long been sung at the Hare Krishna Temple in Culver City. Meanwhile, Siberfian amalgamated the practices that transformed him from Steven of Long Island to Sridhar of Topanga into Bhakti and Shakti fests. Happening each fall and spring in Joshua Tree for the last decade, these festivals—“the Coachellas of kirtan”—are major gatherings for the SoCal scene, with thousands of acolytes arriving each weekend to dance, sing, meditate, burn sage, spin around in circles, and stretch.

“More and more people each year are coming to LA craving authentic community in a landscape that has such a reputation for fakery,” says Shiva Baum, a music producer and Head of Music Programming at Bhakti Fest. “Add to that the historically strong yoga practice in studios all over town, constant teacher trainings and the greatest kirtan venue in North America [Bhakti Yoga Shala] and you have the recipe for a thriving movement that’s showing no signs of slowing down.”

Larissa Stowe and Govind Das at Bhakti Fest. Photo by Christina Torigian.

Larisa Stowe has headlined Bhakti and Shakti many times. Based in Long Beach, she was an accomplished LA singer/songwriter until 9/11 redirected her path. “I just lost my desire to continue singing in that secular Hollywood environment,” she says. “I felt this desire to dive into prayer.” She found kirtan and quickly rose through the scene, finding a community—“my peeps, my tribe”—more in sync with her values. It was then as it is now—healthy, friendly, genuine and largely free of music industry posturing. Like Stringer and De Lory, Stowe tours the United States playing kirtan at yoga studios, festivals, and venues, and also did a series of shows at the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. After one of these “peace concerts,” Stowe got a call from a former inmate.

“He told me he had gotten out of jail, went on to a deep yogic path and met his girlfriend in a yoga studio,” Stowe recalls. “Kirtan had completely transformed his life.”

Indeed, despite its reputation for vapid superficiality, Los Angeles is also weirdly and wonderfully deep. One seems to demand the other. Unlike many of the crowds at fancy parties and nightclubs and Soho House, people in the kirtan scene are nice, sometimes aggressively so. They smile at you when you walk in the room, make eye contact, and end their emails with salutations like “blessings” and “all love.” Certainly there are hucksters and charlatans in this so-called “conscious community,” but at least most of them put their phones down while you’re speaking.

Angel Cantu has also found community through kirtan. A yoga instructor at Bhakti Yoga Shala, Cantu says she had a hard time “authentically connecting” with people when she first moved to LA from Washington state. Alone on New Year’s Eve 2015, Cantu Googled “yoga near me” and saw that Bhakti Yoga Shala was having a seven-hour kirtan to ring in the new year. She went alone, finding great affection for the music, the atmosphere and the babies asleep in the arms of their mothers as the clock hit midnight.

Kirtan at Bhakti Yoga Shala in Santa Monica. Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete.

“I found my people here,” she says, “my community, my practice, my partner, my livelihood.”

In fact there’s science behind why kirtan so profoundly moves its participants. At its most fundamental level, the practice causes a large group of people to breathe in at the same time and rate, which, Stringer says, “causes people to link up in certain interesting ways.” As social creatures, humans have both a biological ability and imperative to link in this way. “That's part of what's powerful about kirtan,” Stringer says, “because people who can sync up can cooperate. People who can cooperate are able to survive.” Meanwhile, the neurological effects are simultaneously calming and thrilling, an experience similar to sex.

Stringer's notion of survival perhaps reveals the key to kirtan’s popularity in Los Angeles, where just getting across town during rush hour can be a lesson in existential malaise. (“A friend of mine in LA calls kirtan the best cure for road rage,” Stringer says. “There are a lot of people driving around on the freeways chanting.”) Tech-industry driven gentrification has largely forced the hippies out of Venice and Santa Monica, where juice is now $19 and most yoga doesn’t involve singing. Yoga Works, the former center of the scene, was sold and turned into a corporate chain. But there are still a lot places to find kirtan in Los Angeles. A hard city requires potent antidotes. (“Bhakti Yoga Shala is for Kirtan what the Fillmore East and West were for the '60s rock and roll hippie revolution,” says Baum. “It is ground zero for the movement.”) Stringer emphasizes that one need not believe in God for kirtan to work. If you’re willing to just sit down and sing, your body and brain will respond in a way that has more to do with physiology than spirit.

Kirtan at Bhakti Yoga Shala in Santa Monica. Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete.

“In chanting these mantras,” says Govind Das, whose mellow vocal tone emphasizes his point, “the presence of fear, anxiety, and worry has been replaced with faith and trust that everything is unfolding in cosmic order, exactly as it should.”

Los Angeles can be an anxious city. It’s scary to wonder if you’ll ever achieve the dreams you moved here in pursuit of, to pay thousands of dollars in rent, to compare yourself with others who seem to achieve more, to see the homeless encampments downtown, the plastic garbage washed up on the shore of Venice Beach, the fire smoke rising out of the canyons. To believe in cosmic order in Los Angeles can feel absurd, self-indulgent, the directive of someone just singing with their eyes closed. But when I leave the kirtan, I do feel better, more grounded and less distracted by thoughts of my past and hypothetical future. In a city fueled by the rise and falls of trends, it's not hard to see why kirtan has maintained a steady presence all these years, and why people still seek it out today.

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A few weeks ago, Jordan Peele became the surprise MVP of an otherwise boring-as-fuck Super Bowl when he made his first appearance as the host of the Twilight Zone reboot. The brief teaser was exciting, but it was just that—a teaser. There was no actual footage from upcoming episodes, just 60 seconds of Jordan Peele walking around the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, whispering ominously like some kind of ASMR Rod Serling.

Now, finally, CBS dropped our first real look at the series in a brand-new trailer—and it looks like this thing is going to be legitimately terrifying.

Sure, the original Twilight Zone was scary for its time—the giants from "To Serve Man" are spooky as hell, and both the ventriloquist dummy and that roving slot machine are the stuff of nightmares. But this new footage looks ominous in a whole different way, like it borrows more from horror than Rod Serling. Seeing as how it comes from the mind of Jordan Peele, that's probably a good thing.

The trailer gives us flashes of just about everyone from the stacked cast list, including Kumail Nanjiani, John Cho, Allison Tolman, Taissa Farmiga, and Adam Scott, who's set to fill William Shatner's shoes in the remake of the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Tracy Jordan even makes a short appearance, vaping and asking Nanjiani some deep questions in a comedy club, because, well, why not?

There are quick nods to other classic episodes, too: The creature that haunts Shatner shows up as a doll washing ashore in Adam Scott's episode, the devil fortune teller from "Nick of Time " makes an appearance, and, uh, is that Jacob Tremblay putting a new spin on "It's a Good Life"? Who knows! They're cramming a ton into a minute-and-a-half-long clip! Everything is happening so fast!

The first two episodes of Twilight Zone premiere on CBS All Access April 1. Until then, obsessively pick apart the trailer frame-by-frame for easter eggs above.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

The father of an 11-year-old girl, who was found dead in his home last week after he allegedly abducted her, died in hospital on Wednesday night.

Roopesh Rajkumar was facing a first-degree murder charge in the death of his daughter Riya Rajkumar. He’d been in the hospital for a self-inflicted gunshot wound since last Thursday when an Amber Alert was first issued by police to notify the public of Riya’s disappearance.

The alert was issued late on Thursday night after Riya’s mother, who got worried when Rajkumar didn’t bring Riya home after taking her out for her birthday, told police he had made comments suggesting that he could harm himself and his daughter.

Rajkumar was arrested by the Ontario Provincial Police in Orillia, shortly after Riya’s body was found. He was found by police after a member of the public saw his license plate, listed in the Amber Alert notification, and reported it.

Peel police say the gunshot wound wasn’t discovered until he was transferred into their custody and taken to the hospital.

His death came on the same day that hundreds came out to mourn Riya at a candlelight vigil in Etobicoke.

“My daughter Riya was taken from me too early,” Priya Ramdin—who did not attend the vigil—said in a statement read by acting Peel police chief Chris McCord.

“She never liked to be negative and always saw the good in every situation. If I’m ever upset, she would say ‘Mama, don’t be sad, look at the positives.”’

“She touched a lot of lives with her laughter and contagious big smile. It breaks my heart to know I will no longer be seeing that smile, hearing her voice, and never having her in my arms again.”

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Twitter’s favorite large adult son, Donald Trump Jr., produced one of his most thought-provoking self-owns earlier this month, when he attempted to impugn the patriotism of the Democratic women of Congress. On February 6, Trump tweeted a post–State of the Union photo of a white-clad group of congresswomen huddled around Nancy Pelosi with the superimposed caption “NOT ONE AMERICAN FLAG PIN AMONG THEM.” Ironically, Trump also wrote that photo “speaks for itself and no one is at all surprised.”

At the top of his replies, above the cracks about the Trump family’s preference for Russian flags or the gallery of Republican politicians wearing flag pins in mugshots, were a pair of photos from that same SOTU. One was of the Trump children. The other was a crowd shot of the Republican side of the speech audience. Not a flag pin in sight in either picture.

Junior’s posting may have been just another attempt to rile his father’s dwindling base, but he unwittingly may have exposed a noteworthy zeitgeist shift. Could the decades-long rule of the flag pin finally be over?

Pins depicting Old Glory first made their way into politics on lapels of Republican candidates during the 1970 congressional race, according to an old Time piece—a subtle counterpoint to the anti-Vietnam War protestors who were then regularly burning the flag at the time. But it was Richard Nixon who helped usher the accessory to True Patriot shibboleth status. As biographer Stephen E. Ambrose wrote, the president began to wear flag pins after the idea had been suggested to him by his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, “who had seen it done in a movie called The Candidate.” Nixon would wear the pin throughout his presidency, including while lying to the American public about his involvement in Watergate, and later while resigning from office.

The flag pin returned with a vengeance after 9/11, when grand displays of patriotism were requirements for both Democrats and Republicans alike. This political science phenomenon of increased patriotism in times of crisis is fittingly known as the "rally 'round the flag effect." Even the media participated in the hawkish theatrics of the time. Some pushed back and caught plenty of flak for it: When ABC continued to uphold its longstanding anti-pin policy after 9/11, it resulted in chain emails urging boycotts of the network and its sponsors along with claims the network had instituted a new policy to ban the pins and patriotism itself.

While other outlets pontificated on the ethics of allowing anchors to wear pins, Fox News went all in from the jump. "Why would it ever be inappropriate?" asked Fox News’s Brit Hume. "It doesn't stand for the Bush administration or for a certain party or even the government. It stands for the country. Why is wearing a symbol of the country of which you're a citizen a problem?"

The problem, some people said, was that the flag pins could stand for not just patriotism but also an uncritical view of the US government at a time when the country was marching toward what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq. Those attitudes may have even pushed Americans to seek impartial reporting from foreign outlets. Greg Dyke, the director general of the BBC at the time, noted the increased American audience for his channel’s coverage of the Iraq war and said that “many US networks wrapped themselves in the American flag and swapped impartiality for patriotism,” and in doing so, “misjudged some of their audience.”

By 2007, the Iraq War was no longer being viewed so positively, and a few Democratic politicians began to toy with the idea of discarding the flag pin. One of those was Senator Barack Obama. That October, when asked why he was not wearing a pin on his lapel, the presidential candidate told KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that while he wore the pins after 9/11, he had stopped during the Iraq War after noticing they’d become a substitute for “true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.” He added that he hoped telling Americans what he believed would make the country great would be an adequate “testament to his patriotism.”

This prompted such a huge outcry that Obama changed course and went on to wear a flag pin for the rest of his candidacy and presidency. Stupidly, that did not end the controversy: Subsequent racist urban legends popped up about him sometimes wearing his pins upside-down as a Carol Burnett ear-pull to his Muslim Brotherhood friends.

Seeing Obama attacked for such farcical reasons pushed many on the left to start challenging the flag pin. “New Rule: Show me a man wearing an American flag pin in his lapel, and I'll show you an asshole,” Bill Maher snarked in Salon after the original Obama pin scandal. “Make wearing a flag pin the 28th amendment,” John Roland Martin facetiously suggested in a CNN article about all the hand-wringing.

By the 2016 presidential election cycle, major cracks had emerged in flag pin dogma. The press was again openly challenging the practice and, though the right was still mostly committed to the bit, the Democratic primary debates were nearly pinless, save for Martin O’Malley. And after Donald Trump's election-night upset, the flag pin tradition seems to have sputtered out entirely.

From the administration’s first days, it became clear that the flag pin reverence of the Bush era was long gone. While covering the John Kelly’s confirmation hearing, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa overheard a friend of the general suggest he put on a pin, to which the general replied “I am an American flag.” This bucking of orthodoxy earned Kelly praise from Ann Coulter. A year later, Sean Spicer’s accidental upside-down flag pin during one press briefing spawned jokes about how he was sending a distress signal. Cheapening the brand further was Donald Trump Junior, who was mocked for wearing a flag pin with “deplorable” written across the middle to the 2018 White House Easter Egg Roll.

Brandon Lenoir, a political science professor at High Point University, told VICE it was only a matter of time before this shift happened. "We are now many years removed from 9/11, even though we're still a nation at war, people are not as engaged," he said. "That's why I think we're seeing a loosening of the expectation that every elected official will be wearing an American flag."

That said, Lenoir doesn't see Republican politicians ditching the baubles any time soon.

"We really do have a divide in the political ideologies of the parties with patriotism," he explained. "For some, that means an outward expression of wearing the flag, while others think upholding the Constitution and fighting for the issues that are important to them is more patriotic."

The flag pin's decline might simply show that certain symbols inevitably fall out of favor—these days, conservatives instead stick flag emoji to their Twitter profiles. But it also shows a fundamental change in discourse. Prior to the Trump administration, the Republican Party had largely favored dog whistles rather than coming out with their ugliest views. Attacking Obama over his flag pin was an easy way to target him as alien and un-American without saying that the black son of a Kenyan was plotting to destroy the US. The GOP's new figurehead, Trump, is both unwilling and unable to participate in that approach. He always says the quiet part loud, and only occasionally wears a pin.

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Back in 2000, when Eminem dropped the video for his mega hit "Stan," the rapper couldn't have known that his character of an obsessed, psychotic fan would come to literally define fandom in the Oxford English Dictionary. In the video, former child actor Devon Sawa does his best Single White Female impersonation, transforming himself into the Real Slim Shady, and writing letters to his idol based on ones the rapper actually received from some very intense fans.

Turns out, Eminem (government name: Marshall Mathers) has a few obsessions of his own, particularly Netflix's Marvel Cinematic Universe drama The Punisher. After Deadline reported on Monday that the streaming service was canceling the show, Eminem became the champion of the show's (apparently many?) pissed off fans by tweeting a message to Netflix. On Wednesday night he let them know—IN ALL CAPS—they’re “BLOWING IT.” But more importantly, his impassioned response sounded an awfullllllly lot like it was written by the(almost as if ... he is Stan!).

If Twitter was a thing in 2000, Stan would’ve most certainly tweeted in all caps. He would’ve run people’s mentions into the ground, slid in their DMs, paid for a verified check mark for better sliding access, and maybe pulled some Joe-from-You stalker tricks to get some location trackers going.

I can just see Eminem at home realizing it’s up to him to speak for The Punisher fans of the world (again, who are they?) and writing a bunch of business-style tweets voicing his supreme disapproval. PER MY LAST TWEET, IF YOU DIDN’T WANT TO KEEP THE SHOW GOING YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO. IT IS WINTER AND I NEED MY FAVORITE SHOW TO BRING WARMTH INTO MY MANSION AND HEART. I WILL CIRCLE BACK WITH YOU AND CC THE APPROPRIATE PARTIES. BEST, MARSHALL. He gets up, shakes his shoulders off, paces the room, watches a hilarious fan-impersonation video of himself to get back in the zone, followed by his own diss video for Donald Trump, and continues on his day.

Netflix should honestly watch their back because real stans recognize real stans and you can’t get realer than Eminem combining forces with people that ride for both him and this (apparently) popular show. Maybe bringing a show back from cancelation is more of a feat than the victory Friends fans pulled off in December getting Netflix to re-up the sitcom for at least another year. They certainly haven't been wincing at the uproar over their canceled Marvel shows like Daredevil and Luke Cage. But jeez, will someone please at least honor this man’s impeccably business formal diss tweet with a response? Thanks so much. With regards, VICE.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"You guys seen my bag of pills?"

It's an afternoon in Brighton in 2014. I stumble into the living room and blurt out these words to my roommates. Not, "Hey guys, how's it going?" but, "Where's my pills?" I look at each of them; all their faces are clenched. "You don’t remember?" one asks. I don't.

"She's gone home, by the way, in case you were wondering," says another, disdainfully. "She" is my partner who was staying the night after traveling the length of the country to see me. The penny starts to drop: I've blacked out, again. I see a familiar collage of emotions on the faces of my friends; anger, worry, apathy.

My friends tell me that, at about 1 AM, my partner had run downstairs scared to death because I was convulsing violently and sweating profusely in my "sleep." On my bedside table was a bag of red pills, each containing 2mg of etizolam—an extremely potent sedative available legally at the time as a "research chemical." As soon as they mention "those red pills" the fragments of the night return to me. So too does the creeping blackout dread.

Earlier the previous day, the pills had arrived in the mail, and after popping two of them the same old mantra that any benzo-head will recognize started going through my mind: "I'm not feeling anything." So it was down the hatch with two more—but clearly something was happening because I'd forgotten the imminent arrival of my partner.

After that, nothing. I have no recollection of the next few hours beyond a thought loop telling me I wasn't not feeling anything, before lurching over my bedside to eat more pills.

My friends had no idea how many I had taken when they found me. I was apparently vaguely responsive enough that they didn't call for help. They put me in the recovery position, while my partner called her sister and left to stay with her.

"We don’t want to do this, but we’ve taken them away from you," my friends told me. Usually, I’d flip out at this, but I replied with a solemn nod—they were right. There were 50 pills in that bag at the start of the day.

At that point, it sank in; I came very close to death without realizing it, and the first words out of my mouth to the friends who had saved me were, "Where's my pills?"

My name’s Dan, I'm 28, and I've been addicted to benzos for about five years. What follows is an attempt to recollect fragments of my past lost to amnesia for my own benefit, and to serve as a cautionary tale, or maybe something someone out there can relate to. I remember how it all began quite well, but it's everything that came after that's hard to recall.

Photo: Mykola Davydenko/Alamy Stock Photo

Benzodiazepines are a class of prescription tranquilizers that were once heavily prescribed in the 1960s for anxiety, depression, and insomnia. The most well-known are Valium (a brand name for diazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam), the latter of which has become notorious for its popularity amongst young people . These drugs were eventually found to have serious consequences, including reduced inhibitions and delusions of sobriety leading to risky behavior and compulsive re-dosing; addiction; and an exacerbated return of the treated symptoms after abrupt withdrawal.

Withdrawal from long-term use poses the greatest risk, and if not managed correctly, it can lead to potentially fatal seizures. In the wake of these revelations, benzodiazepines became more tightly regulated in the UK and alternative antidepressant medications with less abuse potential were prescribed instead. Benzodiazepines are now primarily only prescribed for short-term use.

When your mind is plagued with a near-constant state of anxiety and riddled with depressive thoughts, it's far too easy to develop a taste for benzodiazepines if you have access to them. It’s then just as difficult to stop yourself when lost in their blissful tranquility—unaware that your life is disintegrating around you with every pill you pop.

When I enrolled at school, it dawned on me that something was wrong with my mental health. The doctors tried a number of antidepressants, with limited success. I wasn't depressed, but I also wasn't happy, so I gave them up. I figured it was better to feel awful than feel nothing at all.

One day, in the grip of a horrendous panic attack, someone gave me a small blue pill—which I later learned was called etizolam—and within about 20 minutes everything I'd been worried about just melted away. It was euphoric to feel such a sense of relief, to not care about things I should be caring about. I started to use the pills regularly in social settings, and with my inhibitions destroyed I became more confident and outgoing. Eventually, I was given a bag of them with the label still on it. I went home and, with a few mouse clicks, found numerous sources for these wonder pills: 50 etizolam for £20? Ten flubromazepam for £5? I could barely contain myself.

Back then, everything I tried came from the "gray market"—unregulated online shops where you could buy all sorts of chemicals designed to be analogs of illegal drugs. They essentially served as a loophole to drug prohibition laws; change a molecule here and add one there—hey presto! A brand new substance carefully labeled "Not for Human Consumption."

In 2015, thinking that these gray market pills would soon become harder to get, I started to regulate and reduce my use. I found out about the "Ashton Manual"—a guide to withdrawing from long-term benzodiazepine use. I created a rough timetable to reduce my dosage by 10 percent every month to get myself clean within a year, and built up a small stash to avoid the unbearable withdrawal I'd already experienced if I overran.

Ultimately, it was important that I believed I was in control of my problem—and to some extent, it worked. In August of 2015, I graduated, despite being consistently numb to the world around me. I stopped binging and losing countless nights to the fog of synthetic tranquility and began planning where I would go after leaving Brighton. I couldn't afford to stay there without any regular work, and I felt like I needed a fresh start in a new city, so I moved to Bristol.

Before the end of 2015, I started my new life—albeit still carrying my old habits. By sticking rigidly to my withdrawal timetable, two months after the UK government brought in the 2016 Psychoactive Substances Act—which served as a blanket ban for any conceivable substance that had a psychoactive effect—I had fully stopped my abuse of benzodiazepines. At the time, I felt a tremendous sense of pride and integrity; I'd overcome a huge weakness within myself.

But then the depression that had been buried all those years returned with full force. I'd forgotten how to cope with that headspace without the help of some chemical crutch to see me along. Roughly three months later, I relapsed.

It's only been in the past year that I've acknowledged this as a problem beyond my control and sought outside help through the services available in Bristol.

I'd managed to keep the extent of my use relatively secret for two-and-a-half years after moving here, maintaining a relatively functional existence and keeping my habit hidden from my new partner. It stopped being recreational and I began to justify it to myself as "self-medicating" my depression and anxiety, while failing to recognize that the pills were only making it worse in the long run.

I'd confided in my partner about my prior use, but I lied that I was no longer using and it was no longer a problem for me. Why? Shame, I suppose I was ashamed at being weak-willed and ashamed of not dealing with my problems the way everyone else seemed to be.

Then there's fear. Fear that if I came clean about my use I'd lose her and everyone around me. When you hide a drug problem you convince yourself that you can lie forever about it, that you can keep it hidden as long as you need to.

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My partner found my stash in April of last year and confronted me about it. It finally clicked that I needed to get help, or risk losing everything. I realized how many years had passed since that first tizzy, how many memories I’d lost, how many opportunities I’d squandered, how stupidly oblivious It was that all my friends were well aware of what was going on but had no idea how to help.

After a long talk with my partner, my real recovery began. I spent a few months trying to cut my use again, but with no success, so I searched online for local drug support organizations and found Bristol Drugs Project (BDP).

I spent hours anxiously going over in my head what I would say, and to what extent I would tell them about my problem. I was terrified of any negative judgment and being rubber-stamped as another junkie statistic, as I'd never come clean about this before. Fortunately, whoever I spoke to on the phone was very helpful and understanding. They told me they don't have services to help with benzodiazepine use directly, and referred me to another organization called Battle Against Tranquilisers (BAT), who have been helping me ever since.

They drew up a reduction plan for me to give to my doctor, and it was made clear that I shouldn’t feel pressured to make any cuts to my dose if I didn’t feel ready to do so—and that, by law, I was the one in control of my medication.

I'd like to say I've been attending my group sessions with BAT every week, but holding down a full time job makes it challenging. Not to mention the palpable anxiety I feel when I think about getting that bus to the hospital every Thursday to sit and confront my demons. It's been at least two months since I last attended, but I can say with confidence that if I hadn’t gone at all I'd be in the same place I was in April, if not worse.

Simply knowing that I have a safe space with other people going through those same motions makes this process easier, and I have nothing but gratitude toward BAT and the people who attend those sessions. They give me strength, and strength is a rare resource to find in the depths of withdrawal.

Since seeking help, I've kept reducing my use with the help of BAT, and have come clean to my friends and family, who have all supported me in their own way. I'm also now on a waiting list for cognitive behavioral therapy, to address the reasons behind my self-medication.

I count myself extremely lucky to have not faced rejection as a result of my poor decisions. As for the future, it’s just a case of taking it all one day at a time and knowing there will be an end to all of this.

Daniel Finn is a pseudonym

A version of this article was originally published in the Bristol Cable, a UK-based media co-operative

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After decades of rumors and failed versions starring Tony Hawk, Space Jam 2 finally has an official release date, Warner Bros. announced Thursday. But don't start spit-shining the floors and slugging down Michael's Secret Stuff just yet—we've still got a few more years to wait before the Monstars come back. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Lebron James-starring sequel is slated to hit theaters summer 2021.

As of now, James is the only person attached to the project—or at least the only non-animal/prospector/martian. But the movie has already put together a pretty big powerhouse behind the camera. Terence Nance, the brains behind HBO's Random Acts of Flyness, is set to direct, with Ryan Coogler producing alongside James.

Still no word on whether Bill Murray will be reprising his role for the sequel, but, you know, maybe he'll show up to perhaps be of some assistance.

In an interview with VICE in January, Nance promised that the long-awaited film won't just be a lame nostalgia grab—it's going to "disrupt everything."

"Space Jam is a very unique opportunity because LeBron James is the best basketball player on Earth and a once in a generation performer,” Nance said. “Whoever the greatest basketball player of the next generation is going to be, they are probably not going to also be a great actor.”

"The Space Jam collaboration is so much more than just me and the Looney Tunes getting together and doing this movie," James told the Hollywood Reporter back in September. "It's so much bigger. I'd just love for kids to understand how empowered they can feel and how empowered they can be if they don't just give up on their dreams."

Space Jam 2 is due out July 16, 2021. Everybody get up at your leisure, it'll be time to slam eventually.

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This article is part of a special installment of Deep Dive created in partnership with Jameson Irish Whiskey, telling the stories of bars of yesterday that shaped the neighborhoods of today.

There will always be those storied bars and clubs that speak to the zeitgeist in which they thrived—spaces that synthesize the creative essence of their patrons, and by extension, society. And if we’re talking about New York City, there may never again be a nightlife scene as representative of the city’s freewheeling spirit as downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.

It’s easy to see why we continue to talk about this legendary decade. When remembered through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, the 70s represent the last vestige of New York history in which the city might have been considered egalitarian—when it didn’t matter whether or not you were wealthy, as long as you carried yourself like a star. It was a time when cheap rent meant the artistic class ruled downtown Manhattan, before MTV (and, later, the Internet) commercialized the underground and its creative output.

“Back then, everyone wanted to be fabulous; everyone wanted to be someone,” explains musician Bebe Buell, who, at 18, moved to New York to become a model. “We all gathered together with the same dream.”

It was in the fabled back room at the restaurant-nightclub Max’s Kansas City, opened in 1965 by Mickey Ruskin, that Buell would eventually meet the rock stars for whom she’d famously serve as a muse—among them: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Steven Tyler, who gave her a daughter, Liv. On her fateful first visit to the venue, located in what was then considered a no-man’s-land, at 17th Street and Park Avenue, she remembers being captivated by a red light glowing from a mysterious room. She later returned to the club to see what was inside. Looking around at a room full of the city’s creative elite, Buell did not yet realize the world she was about to enter.

"Lou Reed was very kind, and invited me to come and sit with him and his date. That was also when I met Andy Warhol, who was so charming and funny,” said Buell, then a teenager fresh from Virginia. “He took one look at me and asked me if my parents bred horses!”

Trash & Vaudeville shop, Street scene, St Mark's Place, New York, USA 1981. (Photo by: PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images)

Danny Fields, manager to Iggy and the Stooges and The Ramones, recalls the rise of Max’s, which supplanted predecessors, like CBGB’s, to become the city’s preeminent rock-music destination, opposing the disco-centric glamour of uptown clubs like Studio 54.

“The people in the front—they were what we called the ‘abstract-expressionist heterosexual alcoholics,’” laughs Fields. “But at the glorious height of Max’s, the beating heart of the joint was the back room. All the musical people moved back there.”

“It was just a moment in time where it didn't matter what you were doing, whether you were an artist or whatever,” Holliday continued. “We knew everything happened at night.”

By the late-70s, Max’s was under new management, catering more to New Wave and punk in the spirit of the older CBGB’s. With a generation of kids who’d come of age at the height of these institutions, the underground music scene was given new energy.

Enter the now-defunct Club 57.

Along with its sister club, Irving Plaza, the still-thriving concert hall, this cramped, DIY venue, housed in a church basement on St. Mark's Place, initially sought to fill a void for the alternative crowd, where any artist could rent space to showcase their more experimental ideas. Eventually, it would become an incubator for the artwork of Klaus Nomi, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as a stage hosting the likes of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.

“It started with everybody downtown—it was all the misfits, the artists, filmmakers, actors, choreographers, painters, photographers, heroin addicts, and everyone who was alternative,” says Frank Holliday, an artist who’d designed many of the club’s early sets. “It was just a moment in time where it didn't matter what you were doing, whether you were an artist or whatever,” Holliday continued. “We knew everything happened at night.”

Club 57’s sparse, no-frills digs and eclectic entertainment, including debutante balls and pop-up art galleries, were a nod then to the anything-goes culture of its environ: the East Village. Though often overshadowed by its contemporaries—there’s no mention of it in ‘The Warhol Diaries’—it became a standard bearer for transgressive nightlife spaces inextricably linked to the art being created both inside its walls and beyond them.

Photo of Sophie's interior by Jackson Krule for VICE

As higher-end galleries and studios began taking over SoHo, the East Village became the next destination for young artists and musicians. At the time, the area was largely run by Eastern European immigrants, with dive bars like Sophie’s and Lucy’s—both timeless institutions, which have survived to the present day—dotting the map. In a precursor to today’s sweeping gentrification, artists began taking over the neighborhood’s tenement buildings.

“The people who would go to Club 57 were the people who lived in the East Village,” remembers photographer-artist David Schmidlapp, whose innovative light projections were turned into slideshows featured on the club’s walls. “It was the cheapest place to live. People didn’t come for careers; they came to do their thing, [to] do their art.”

Photo of Sophie's interior by Jackson Krule for VICE

For Schmidlapp, the act of going out was not just about gaining facetime with peers; it was a part of a larger persona. If you wanted to be an artist, nightlife beckoned. “You did not have to be some guy showing a gallery, or a fashion model,” Schmidlapp recalls. “You could be anyone who did ‘art.’”

Schmidlapp’s moving artwork earned him airtime at the Mudd Club, the loft-nightclub in TriBeCa opened by provocateur Steve Mass. While Club 57 and the Mudd Club co-existed in the exact same years—1978 to 1983—the latter launched in larger digs with more mainstream appeal. Part concert hall, part art gallery, the two venues would share similar ethos and crowd, as Mass promoted popular artists to win over the downtown scene.

“There was no separation like there is today, meaning certain clubs for certain types of people.”

In his acclaimed memoir The Mudd Club, Richard Boch, the club’s one-time doorman and an artist in his own right, describes how a creativity-first mentality turned the club into a breeding ground for counterculture. It seems unheard of now, as social media favors calculation over spontaneity: a place, according to Boch, where Mass might, without hesitation, approve an art installation that involved putting guests in cages.

Photo of Richard Boch by Jackson Krule for VICE

Working as a doorman, Boch sought to let in the kind of revelers who represented that forward-thinking spirit. “Whether it was the Mudd Club, or Max’s, or CBGB’s, or even Studio 54 to a degree, it was all about the mix of people,” Boch explains. “There was no separation like there is today, meaning certain clubs for certain types of people.”

Towards the end of the Mudd Club’s reign, nightlife grew commercialized, and the allure of the underground waned. Newer, glitzier venues began popping up across town—including Danceteria, Area, and Palladium, a live-music venue transformed into a glam club by Studio 54 hitmaker Ian Schrager. (It’s now a New York University dorm.) Even Club 57-goers realized times had changed when they began receiving VIP treatment at other venues.

“I remember Keith [Haring] curated a show, and a lot of heavy-duty art world people came in,” recalls Holliday. “There were dealers from SoHo—real movers and shakers. They showed up and started making the artists stars, so it went in a commercial kind of [direction].”

There are still some who obsess over the nightlife of this bygone era. Maybe because it felt like a precipice, before things changed forever: the AIDS crisis would soon shatter the scene, claiming the lives of countless participants, and America lurched rightward in the Reagan years. It seems only natural to long for a time when apartments could be had for as little as $150 a month, even if such glossy narratives ignore a city overrun then by crime and urban decay.

“We’re dealing in mythology now, and mythology is always bigger than life,” Schmidlapp says. “When you get down to it, it was dirty and gritty and competitive... We had fun, but it wasn’t all this constant party.”

27th September 1959, A group of people stands across the street from the Greenwich Hotel, near Thompson and Bleecker Streets in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. (Photo by Larry C. Morris/Larry C. Morris/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

While that downturn created the low prices that drew those would-be artists, musicians, and designers to New York, it was places like Max’s Kansas City, Club 57, and the Mudd Club that made for its shared experience, helping to usher in a force of creative power that defined a decade. And perhaps it’s that urge to party on—to hold on to the glimmer of hope, that anything could happen at night—that still represents the city’s enduring spirit, even today.

“It created a sense of community with incredible energy, where people were doing a lot of things,” Boch concludes. “They weren’t just talking about becoming stars; these weren’t just pipe dreams. It was very do-it-yourself, and people were fearless then.”

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