Back in the ’80s there was an urban legend of a man/woman who picks up a willing sex partner at a bar/club and takes him/her back to an apartment/hotel. They do the deed, and in the morning the pickup wakes to discover the easy lover has vanished. In the bathroom our protagonist discovers a message written in lipstick/shaving cream/blood on the mirror: “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS.”

That apocryphal tale tapped into the fears of anyone who came of age during the AIDS plague years. It’s this vein that writer-director David Robert Mitchell drains with It Follows, the young filmmaker’s second feature. An indie horror film shot over 28 days in Mitchell’s hometown of Detroit, It Follows tells the story of Jay (Maika Monroe), a 19-year-old girl who sleeps with a boy she likes but awakens to discover that she’s contracted a sexually transmitted monster—one that will continue to slowly stalk her with the aim of brutally rearranging her body parts. Unless, of course, she has sex with someone else and passes the monster to him. But if it happens to catch and kill her next sexual partner, it comes back for her, and so on. The film played to strong reviews at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals, and it will have midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival before a March 27 theatrical release.

“The basic idea of being followed by something that is slow but never stops is from a nightmare I had when I was a kid,” says Mitchell. “I would see someone in the distance, and they would just be walking very slowly towards me, and I would turn to the people around me and point them out, and they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I immediately knew that this was a monster, something that was going to hurt me. And I would run away from it and wait, and then eventually it would come around the corner.… I could always get away from it, but what was horrible about it was that it just never stopped. It was always coming for me.”

The unrelenting pursuer—think the Terminator, or Michael Myers or Pepe Le Pew—is the creepiest thing about It Follows. Mitchell wisely avoids the torture-porn and gore commonplace in modern horror and instead creates a dreamlike setting that references both John Carpenter and David Lynch, with a shifting, synthetic score that moves between melodic passages and controlled noise.

The suburban Detroit setting is also not something we’re used to seeing on film, lending the movie an air of unfamiliarity. It’s hard to put your finger on many of Mitchell’s locations—even the decade. “There are references to things in the ’70s and ’80s. We were going for an outside-of-time feel to take it outside of our reality just enough.” One character reads Dostoyevsky's The Idiot on an e-reader that looks like a birth control pillbox. “I just took a ’60s shell compact and we just turned it into a cellphone,” says Mitchell. “It physically looks like something from the ’60s, but it has a modern element to it. It’s just a little marker to show that this isn’t quite our world.”

This is where Mitchell’s film differs from most other horror movies: If you took a few scenes out, it could in fact look like a magical coming of (sexual) age drama, which in a sense it is. Though Mitchell stopped having the stalking dream when he was young, when it took form as a film idea, the sexual element was added.

The sex monster, it should be noted, must obey some basic physical rules. It can’t move through walls like a ghost, though it can break windows and climb through. And while it’s invisible to anyone it isn’t connected to, it can appear as anyone—a relative, schoolteacher, a weird naked man on a roof—to the person it’s hunting. While it’s inspired by zombies and pod people—things that don’t necessarily race toward you but are still terrifying—it’s one of the most original monsters of late, even if it comes as a grandmother in a nightgown walking toward you. “That’s one of those fun things about a horror film,” says Mitchell. “There are rules, but they have to be created by the people within the world, and those people have their own limitations. Like the things that Hugh [the one-night stand] tells Jay, that’s his interpretation of what he figured out. The info comes from a highly suspect person.”

Maika Monroe stars in "It Follows."Mongrel Media

Which made me wonder how frequently people intentionally deceive their sexual partners about their STD status. “As a general rule, we would say people ought to be honest and forthcoming with any potential sexual partners that they have a sexually transmitted disease,” says Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood. “There are a couple of exceptions to that. Unfortunately, sometimes people feel that they’re in a situation where there may be violence or some kind of abuse, and in that case, of course, then people should not disclose, because they could put themselves at risk.”

Maybe Hugh’s not such a bad guy after all; in a harrowing sequence, he straps Jay to a wheelchair in order to give her pointers on how to avoid the violence that’s about to come her way.

After their encounter, Jay’s reaction to her newfound STD status kicks off a twist on the “final girl” horror trope. In one of the most visual representations of innocence lost, Jay takes to a swing set in a wide-open field, where she can survey the distance for anyone walking toward her.

“Some people maybe read the film as trying to scare people away from sex and trying to make some sort of moral statement, but it’s not that for me,” says Mitchell. “To me, Jay is strong, and she’s done nothing wrong. She slept with someone that she liked, and that’s OK, and all these things that come from that are not punishment for sin. It’s more about the reality of the world.”

As for whether or not people believe that they can pass on an STD to someone else to cure themselves of it, it’s not a commonly held notion here in America, but Kantor says the idea is not completely unheard-of. “There is some mythology in some areas of the world that having sex with a virgin will somehow cure HIV. There’s some pretty scary implications from there, with people trying to have sex with younger teens and things like that.”

“And you’ve never heard of any type of sexually transmitted monster?” I asked her.

“I have not.”

And yet, monstrously terrible things can happen through sex. The fear that you might have a sexually transmitted disease looms in the same mental space in which a monster would loom. I acquired an STD in my freshman year of college, and it was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. I never wanted to have sex with anyone again. For an 18-year-old boy, that’s saying a lot.

“Even when I was a teenager thinking about it, I thought it could be really fun if it was something that could be shared in some way, almost like a game of tag,” says Mitchell. “And then I thought that sex connects people physically and emotionally. And I sort of like the way that people have physical and emotional connections to people that they have slept with, and those things stay with us.”

It Follows is really about mortality and morality, because you can escape the monster by giving It to someone else (at least temporarily). This would cause all kinds of interpersonal problems with real-world STDs. If I could have been free of my own affliction by simply bedding someone else, would I have? I asked Kantor about the infected-stranger urban legend.

“Most people are very responsible these days when it comes to their sexual lives and taking measures to prevent STDs,” she says. “As an example, 80 percent of young men use a condom now the first time they have sex. That’s really become a norm. This is not happening in a widespread way. There are a lot of STDs out there, but most of them are out there not because people are trying to give them to someone else but because they don’t know they have them.

“It’s true that people have sex for a lot of different reasons,” Kantor continues. “While it sounds like a simple point, it’s actually a pretty profound point. It runs the gamut, from wanting to connect deeply with someone to raging hormones.”

Which, of course, brings us back to Dostoyevsky. “We aren’t here forever,” says Mitchell, speaking of the reference to the great Russian novelist. “And one of the ways that we can keep our fear of death at bay is through sex and through love. These are ways in which we can find a way to be OK with the fact that our lives are limited. And it’s something that these characters are maybe just starting to become aware of, that it’s something we all live with.”

The Vice empire’s nearly year-old hard-news channel, Vice News, took a step into the future this week when it announced it had created the first-ever virtual reality (VR) news feature.

Digital artist and video director Chris Milk partnered up with Vice’s creative director (and noted film director) Spike Jonze to produce the film Vice News VR: Millions March, which places viewers among the thousands of people who took to the streets of New York City on December 13 to protest police brutality.

Vice’s 360-degree, immersive feature was unveiled on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, which has a dedicated venue to showcase 11 VR films this year.

Viewers at Sundance were provided with “wraparound-style headsets” to view the films, but because Oculus Rift is still far from reaching the mass market, Milk created his own solution for distributing Millions March to a wide audience: the VRSE app.

The app, which is part of Milk’s Vrse.farm project, has two modes: It will either configure its display to be used in a makeshift VR headset (like AirVR, which encourages users to strap an iPad to their heads) or become a sort-of camera itself by allowing users to view different parts of the picture by moving the device around.

“We’re hacking into the audio and visual systems of your brain,” Milk told the New York Times. “A major part of journalism is painting people a picture of what it was like to actually be there. With this, the audience actually feels like they are there.”

Vice recently invested an undisclosed amount into Milk’s venture, and plans to collaborate more on VR journalism projects. In a phone interview with Newsweek, Vice News’s editor in chief, Jason Mojica, elaborated on how the channel’s VR feature came to be and future plans to incorporate VR into its work. Edited excerpts follow:

Who at Vice News got the ball rolling with using virtual reality?

It’s something we’ve been floating around for a while…. But really, as per usual...when someone starts saying ‘we are going to do this this week, let’s stop talking about this, let’s stop theorizing it, let’s go out and do it,’ that’s usually when it happens…. It was Spike Jonze and Chris [Milk] who were really pushing us on this.

When you’re just sitting around talking about virtual reality, it’s something that’s easy to be skeptical about because it sounds like a gimmick. But I think that the first time that they showed it to me and what it could do, when I put on the goggles and I really understood what was possible, then that sent my mind into overdrive and I just started thinking about tons of new ideas and ways of storytelling.

What are some of those ideas? How are you going to integrate VR in the future?

You can use VR to do something that you already do but in 360 and 3-D and that is pretty incredible in and of itself, but I think we are trying to challenge ourselves to kind of think in VR -- and by that I mean really think about the medium and what it offers and what it can do that a traditional camera cannot, and what we can’t do in...time-locked documentary form. So it kind of opens the door to new types of storytelling.

I mean I think back to the development of photography and people like Jacob Riis using photography to kind of illuminate how the other half lived and the world around us and use it to show things that there never really was a tool to show before. I’m really excited by the idea of being able to put someone in the middle of a situation for a significant period of time and let them drink in what that experience is like.

Some things that come to mind are, we did a documentary in the Dominican Republic recently and one of the scenes there on the DR/Haiti border and they’re waiting for the gates at the border for daily trading, it’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen; just this wave of humans flowing in opposite directions and kind of crashing into each other. It’s just this amazing mass of humanity. And to be able to drink that in for 30 minutes, for an hour, without narration, without commentary, without even a correspondent -- just being able to look all around you and take it all in would be interesting.

I’ve also done a lot of work in Afghanistan and the idea, this is dark, but the idea of putting someone in a hospital in Afghanistan in the aftermath of a suicide bombing and just letting it roll seems like it would be pretty powerful.

Is there a timeline for your VR use?

Not really at this point. We’re still just developing the practicality and also just trying to work out some of the technological aspects to make it sing. So it’s kind of one part story development and another part what Chris is developing with his proprietary camera.

With the consumer version of Oculus Rift headsets still in development, how do you expect people will view your VR news?

Chris’s app. It either makes a bifurcated image...Google Cardboard allows you to turn any smartphone into a VR viewing device...or as something where you are just pointing your phone around, almost like a camera, and seeing everything around you. Those are a little more acceptable ways right now, and we’ll see how many people end up with Oculus Rift in their home.

Updated | More than half of the world's population lives in cities and by 2050 urban dwellers are expected to boom to 66 percent of the total, up from 34 percent in 1960. Urbanization is happening fast and 12 percent are now packed into mega-cities of more than 10 million people.

A new photography series by Panos Pictures, #FutureofCities, is capturing the changes that have become necessary as more people try to naviagte around sprawling and growing cities and nature redefines the urban landscape. 

Photographer Adam Dean captured Beijing's 46-year-old subway line, which transports 9.7 million daily commuters across 17 lines on 289 miles of track. Dean, who lives in Beijing, said he chose the subway as it's an attempt to remedy the notorious pollution and traffic problems that regularly choke the city of 11. 5 million. 

"I rarely use the subway here in Beijing because I tend to cycle most places, so it was interesting for me spending time underground and riding the trains," said Dean. "It is very croweded, especially at rush hour, but a lot of the system is new and fairly well-organized. In some ways, it can be a more pleasant experience than riding on older, more rundown subway systems like in London and New York."

While Beijing's commuters were largely unfazed by Dean's camera, a Sony A7R that he describes as "discreet," some security guards objected to his shooting in their stations. A simple remedy was at hand: quickly jumping on the subway and riding to other stations.

More than 7,000 miles away, transportation is also a concern for the 10 million residents of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Enter real-life robocops, 8-foot-tall machines that give visual and audible directions for human and vehicular traffic.

Designed and built by Women's Tech, a company run by local entrepreneur Therese Korongozi, the robots, which can't catch a break and work 365 days a year, transmit traffic footage back to police headquarters and have been so successful that other countries in the region are looking into employing their own robocops. Crucially, they also don't take bribes.

Heading north 4,000 miles to London, photographer Abbie Trayler-Smith took to the city's rooftops to capture the action of urban beekeeping, which is growing in popularity there. Overall in the U.K. there are 44,000 beekeepers helping 274,000 bee colonies produce 6,000 tons of honey. Globally, the number of honeybees is dwindling, but without them humanity would be at risk because they help to produce $30 billion in crops.

Trayler-Smith said the bees went about their business and were "mezmerizing" to photograph; as summer rolled into autumn, the bees became sleepy as hibernation time drew closer.

"I'm planning on revisiting in the spring when the hives are re-opened, so we'll see how difficult it is when they're wide awake and hungry," she said. "Capturing the whole operation against an urban backdrop was what I found interesting. Because I only discovered this story as the bees were off for their big sleep, I'm looking forward to returning in the spring and capturing some more of the story."

#FutureofCities is an initiative by Sony as part of their ambassadors program, in collaboration with Panos Pictures.

Scientists at the University of California Irvine have developed a way to unboil egg whites by “untangling” their proteins, a development that has the potential to significantly reduce costs for any biotechnology process that requires the folding of proteins.

“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” UCI biochemistry professor Gregory Weiss said in a statement. “We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order.”

In a paper published Friday in the journal ChemBioChem, Weiss and his team of chemistry students describe a method capable of pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold.

Proteins are the workhorses within human cells. They copy DNA, and make it possible for the body to read the DNA. The folding of proteins is key to several fields; industrial chemists use it to make chemical reactions possible, and the medical industry needs to fold proteins for therapeutic treatments of diseases such as cancer. Often, though, when scientists attempt to fold proteins, they come out as “scrambled messes,” Weiss says.

“When they’re produced, they’re being jam packed into the cells at the same time as they are trying to synthesize. They get tangled up with each other and it’s a complete mess. That process is called ‘aggregation,’ and that’s what happens when you boil and egg,” Weiss explains. “This drives us nuts, as scientists, because it’s really hard to disentangle them later. Often times we have this protein that we want to study and it comes out and they’re just goo.”

To solve this, Weiss and his team invented a way to gently apply mechanical energy to pull the tangled proteins apart and give them a chance to refold.

“We start with egg whites and dissolve them in urea, so they go from a white solid to a liquid. Then we put them into a machine called a Vortex Fluid Device that spins the solution at a high speed, so the proteins are sort of gently pulled apart,” Weiss says.

The process doesn’t result in a gooey raw egg you would want to cook up and eat, because the egg white has been dissolved in other compounds. But one of the key proteins found in egg white is returned.

Weiss and his team have filed for a patent, and are raising funds to scale up the process to meet the needs of biotech companies. If all goes well, the invention has the potential to save several industries a lot of headache, and money.

“If you went and looked at the right time of day, the whole farm would be silvery with slime.”

That’s how pest consultant Gerard Troisi describes the slug dilemma in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Outbreaks of the snotty pest are troubling the state’s soybean farms, and it seems as if Troisi’s phone buzzes more frequently each spring, as people seek his expertise. This year, he might add a new recommendation: fewer neonics.

Neonics—or neonicotinoids—are a popular type of neurotoxic insecticide, and a recently published report shows that slugs can consume the compounds and survive. The slimeballs then act as a poisoned meal for predatory ground beetles, which typically keep the slugs and other farm pests in check. After the poisoned beetles perish, the slugs that didn’t get eaten run amok and damage farms. It’s the first evidence that neonics travel via the food chain, from one animal to the next.

Neonics cover about half of America’s soybean seeds and 95 percent of corn seeds, the two biggest cash crops for commercial farms in the country. They are designed to ward off seed-munching insects, and in theory, shouldn’t bother carnivores like predatory ground beetles, which eat slugs or other bugs. But in recent years the compounds have been found to have some unintended environmental effects. In 2013, Europe suspended neonic use for two years after the pesticide was linked to the die-offs of honeybees, vital crop pollinators. Though they are still in use in the States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded this past October that “these seed treatments provide little or no overall benefits to soybean production in most situations.”

“One of my main concerns with neonics is that they’ve been used regardless of need,” says insect ecologist John Tooker of Pennsylvania State University, who co-authored the study published in December 2014 in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

His co-author, ecologist Maggie Douglas, says their discovery was a bit of an accident. Three years ago, Douglas was in a lab studying which beetle species are the best natural predators for slugs. She borrowed a few soybeans from a colleague as slug food, not knowing that they were precoated with the neonic thiamethoxam. “When I came back the next day, most of the ground beetles in the soil plots had died,” says Douglas. When they moved the experiment outdoors and into crop fields, they found that neonic-fed slugs killed 31 percent of nearby beetle predators during the first month of the farm season. With beetles out of the way, the slugs multiplied. And when the slug population exploded, the farms fell apart: Soybean densities dropped by 20 percent, and crop yields overall fell 5 percent.

Douglas conducted the tests on no-tillage farms, a brand of sustainable agriculture that’s expanding in the U.S. If you’ve ever seen a tractor plow a field with a row of rotating blades, that’s tillage. The process aerates the soil and rips up weeds, but also releases carbon into the atmosphere and causes erosion that washes agrochemical runoff into water supplies. A nationwide push has steadily removed tillage practices since 2000, especially in mid-Atlantic states in order to preserve the water quality of the Chesapeake Bay. No-till farms now account for over a third of U.S. crops (and 58 percent of Pennsylvania’s).

No tillage creates a lot of leftover crop material, “which is fantastic for field production and good healthy soils. But one trade-off is that it leaves great food for slugs,” says ecologist Andy Michel, an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Meanwhile, a warmer and wetter climate over the past few years in Pennsylvania has compounded the issue—slugs love moist weather.

Yet the influence of neonics isn’t confined to commercial farms. The compounds can wash into general water supplies: “As little as 2 percent of the active compound [in neonics] is taken up by the plant,” says Jonathan Lundgren of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The rest resides in the soil or washes into waterways.”

Neonics are tough to remove from the environment, sticking in the soil for up to six years. They’re also the millennials of the agrochemical world, with most being patented in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. When given jobs, the compounds squelch insect pest outbreaks, but as new arrivals, their societal influence remains undefined.

The extent of the human repercussions of neonic spread remains controversial. Farmers briefly exposed to high doses of imidacloprid, a neonic as well as the most popular pesticide in the world, can experience acute illness like dizziness or vomiting, but neonic levels in drinking water and food produce are much lower. However, long-term studies on human health haven’t been conducted.

Based on animal studies, neonics don’t cause cancer, but some do carry a slight risk of adversely affecting the development of neurons and brain structures. On the latter point, European and the U.S. official split opinion. In 2013, the European Food Safety Authority issued a human health warning for two neonics—acetamiprid and imidacloprid—citing a risk of harming child neurodevelopment, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) countered that the “recommendations would not impact the agency’s current regulatory positions on these chemicals.”

Plus if slugs can ingest and pass neonics to predatory ground beetles, other organisms might tolerate the insecticides too and transmit them through the food chain. Over the course of her research, Douglas also detected neonics in earthworms, important food for birds and other animals. Last July, neonics were tied to declining bird populations in the Netherlands.

So what’s the remedy? Neonics are pervasive, and no-till in America is here to stay. One solution might be to douse the fields with metaldehyde, our one and only anti-slug chemical. But that carries its own risks. Metaldehyde is toxic for wildlife and domestic pets if consumed in large doses, plus impossible to remove if it rinses into waterways.

Jonathan Lundgren, a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, argues that the solution is to rely less on chemicals like neonics and more on natural competition between pests and predators. One way to encourage competition is through wider use of cover crops, which farmers plant to maintain soil quality rather than harvest for profit. When planted earlier in the season, cover crops add green matter to the field, says Troisi, which can serve as an alternative food source for slugs so they don’t attack soybeans. Cover crops also provide a habitat for slug’s natural enemies like ground beetles or nematodes, which could boost their numbers and serve as a form of biocontrol.

It could save our crops, our planet and us. “We need biodiversity. For every pest insect species out there, there are 1,700 species of insects that are beneficial,” says Lundgren. Besides pollination, these bugs can bolster farm soil, improve the taste of beer and feed animals, like fish, that in turn feed us. In the end, says Lundgren, “we cannot live without these beneficial insects. Human society would grind to a halt.”

Follow Nsikan Akpan on Twitter @MoNscience.

Do you command a large following on Tumblr? Have hundreds of thousands of those followers been reblogging your GIFs of dogs dressed as Lord of the Rings characters? Management would like to have a word with you.

The eight-year-old microblogging platform, which has long eschewed conventional web ads in favor of “sponsor products,” has unveiled a program to pair its most popular and “creative” bloggers with interested advertisers. Dubbed Creatrs by Tumblr, the program, first disclosed Thursday, aims to benefit both marketers, who can tap into Tumblr’s network of heavily followed users, and artists, who will be paid directly by the website.

Making Tumblr a more advertiser-friendly space could ruffle feathers on the site, just as its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo unnerved large swaths of Tumblr’s user base in 2013. But David Hayes, head of creative strategy at the company, said the initiative is consistent with Tumblr’s longtime mission.

“At the end of the day, if our mission statement is to empower the world's creators, then there's nothing more powerful than giving them an opportunity to do what they love all day long and make a career out of it,” Hayes told Newsweek.

Hayes explained that there are two separate initiatives involved: Creatrs and Creatr Network. The former is an “art-meets-content collective” in which Tumblr itself will partner with the platform’s most prolific artists and designers to help execute campaigns “that are dear to our hearts as a company.”

Creatr Network is a larger group of about 300 artists who will be partnered with brands and advertisers. The move reflects a larger industry trend in which social networking and content sites work with advertisers to create ads uniquely geared toward their platform. BuzzFeed, for instance, routinely works with brands on sponsored or branded listicles.

“We have not had a single incident where an artist has been uncomfortable,” Hayes said, adding that artists “routinely trip over themselves” to partner with Tumblr’s own marketing initiatives. “Because they know that we're all about creators,” he added. “That’s probably the second most important word in our canon, after Tumblr.”

Federal immigration arrests hit an all-time high of 85,458 in 2012 — and now account for half of all federal collars, according a new Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) analysis of the most recent data available.  Drugs offenses ranked second in federal arrests, at 15 percent.

The previous high reported by the BJS, 84,749 federal immigration arrests, was recorded in 2009. Annual increases in federal immigration arrests had slowed in recent years, but the long-term upward trend is dramatic, jumping from 8,777 federal immigration arrests in 1994 to the most recent figure.

The immigration offenses being calculated include “illegal entry, illegal reentry, alien smuggling, and visa fraud,” the BJS states. (Note: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University compiles its own data on immigration prosecutions and has more recent numbers, reporting 86,574 in fiscal year 2014 and 97,384 in fiscal year 2013. TRAC couldn’t be reached by press time to discuss how it developed these statistics.)

This upswing has contributed significantly to an overall increase in federal arrests. They surged from 80,450 in 1994 to 172,248 in 2012, the report states. These arrests are concentrated in the Southwest. According to the report, “The five federal judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border (California Southern, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas Western, and Texas Southern) accounted for 60% of all federal arrests in 2012, up from 45% of all arrests in 2006.”

A Pew Research Center analysis of sentencing data suggests that a single immigration offense has fueled the surge in federal prosecutions: unlawful reentry into the United States. Per Pew:

Between 1992 and 2012, the number of offenders sentenced in federal courts more than doubled, rising from 36,564 cases to 75,867.  At the same time, the number of unlawful reentry convictions increased 28-fold, from 690 cases in 1992 to 19,463 in 2012. The increase in unlawful reentry convictions alone accounts for nearly half (48%) of the growth in the total number of offenders sentenced in federal courts over the period. By contrast, the second fastest growing type of conviction—for drug offenses—accounted for 22% of the growth...

Analysts interviewed by Newsweek, as well as Pew data, indicate the increase in unlawful reentry prosecutions stems from a shift in Border Patrol policies. Before 2005, authorities often released immigrants caught at the border “without any penalty,” the Pew report points out.  They have since ramped up prosecutions under a program named “Operation Streamline.”

The Pew analysis explains that the program "allows up to 40 unauthorized immigrants charged with unlawful reentry to be prosecuted at the same time. This program alone has accounted for nearly half (45%) of all federal immigration-related prosecutions in Southwest border districts between 2005 and 2012.”

The BJS report comes amid intensified calls for immigration reform. For advocates,  criminalizing these offenses belies President Barack Obama’s recent promises to deport “felons, not families.”

“They've transformed what we've traditionally treated as civil offenses — and let's face it, nonviolent status offenses — into a matter of criminal justice,” Mark Fleming, national litigation coordinator for the advocacy group Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center, says. “It’s like the war on drugs in the '80s and '90s when you saw rampant increases in people arrested for possession.”

Claudia Slovinsky, an immigration lawyer in New York City, says federal charges for immigration offenses often do not fit the crime. A mother bringing her child across the border could be charged with immigrant smuggling, she says, and an immigrant with a tourist visa who stays beyond the expiration date could face a visa fraud charge, for misrepresenting the visa.

“This is a shocking statistic,” she says. “It’s criminalizing a whole sector of society.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson defended the policies, telling Newsweek in a statement: “Criminal federal prosecutions are sought in order to demonstrate that there are serious consequences for those who violate our nation’s laws with respect to our borders. Securing our borders is a national security issue. DHS remains focused on smart and effective immigration enforcement which prioritizes the removal of criminals and threats to national security and public safety.”

Deportations reached an all-time high of 438,421 in fiscal year 2013, according to DHS data.

Just past happy hour o'clock on a gusty Friday evening, the intimate basement room under New York's swanky Ace Hotel was alive with an intimate crowd, all of whom seemed awed and empowered by the three veteran rock heroes – Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney -- sitting in front of them. The prolific Olympia, Washington-hailing rock trio disbanded in 2005, but they are back with a new album, No Cities to Love, and it's as though that fateful ten-year hiatus never happened. With the new record, the three continue to embody what rock 'n' roll was originally intended to be: irreverent, feral and sure.

That’s perhaps why they keenly selected two equally unapologetic voices -- the masterminds behind the brash, paradigm-shifting Comedy Central scripted series Broad City -- to interview them in front of the small audience this night. The engaging chat between the comedians and the musicians was ramshackle and loosely scripted. Instead of asking canonical questions, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson inquired about improvisation and touring, which appropriately spiraled into tangents as diverse as Iggy Pop, pooping on the tour bus, being a former jam band fan and James Baldwin novels, in addition to the development, process and thinking that went into the band's first album since their recent reunion.

Despite the magnitude of the forces onstage, though, the collective feeling was less of being dwarfed than of being elevated.

There is a blanket sense that ascending to the status of a rock legend requires technical skill, classic training and/or ample connections in the industry. Sleater-Kinney had none of that. This was a band that was born and bred at the grassroots level and stayed that way. Spawned in 1994 by Brownstein and Tucker (who were friends and share vocal credits in the band), Sleater-Kinney was catalyzed by the pair's youthful yet urgent dissatisfaction: with the status quo of the culture that surrounded them, and with the perception that women couldn't play aggressive, challenging, punk music. So they decided to create their own kind of melodic noise, one that championed the other, the excluded, and ultimately found triumph buried deep in the struggle.

Their efforts were anchored by a slow-forming group of equally frustrated and inventive musical peers, part of what would eventually be named "riot grrrl," a movement operating with a do-it-yourself ethos that encouraged all to join in, to participate, to book shows and be a part of discussions that took the middleman out and put the girls front and center. Drummer Janet Weiss came along in 1997, and was intrinsic to the band's golden era of music, including 1997's sensational Dig Me Out that garnered them acclaim and fame and inspired countless creative folks, the actors of Broad City included. “I feel a little bit like we couldn’t be a show without you guys,” confided Jacobson. “Even though you’re music and we’re comedy, I feel empowered by you guys.” Chiming in, Glazer deadpanned: “It’s the zeitgeist, baby.”

Sleater-Kinney, alongside their peers Bratmobile and Bikini Kill, are among the most resonant voices of that storied Pacific Northwest rock era, if not the most resonant. After an illustrious career, they tabled the band in 2007 for, well, life: motherhood, new career opportunities (Brownstein stars in the television series Portlandia and Amazon’s Transparent) and a much-needed rest. But coming together now, Sleater-Kinney is the same tribe as when they began as young women -- while of course having evolved; admittedly, they are less confrontational, more cemented in their mission, and more open to improvising with each others’ ideas. “We’ve approached the process with a little more patience,” says Tucker. “For each other and for ourselves.”  

Decades after their debut self-titled album, their newest No Cities to Love listens just as urgently: It shakes with rage, unsettlement and clarity, suggesting that the battles against sexism, inequality and exclusion are far from over -- but it was far from easy. Listening to Sleater-Kinney talk about the record’s process, you got the sense that this was a record they had to get out of their systems. "We are in constant sense of agitation about the world," says Brownstein. "We are still in very tumultuous times, and Sleater-Kinney, to me, is the soundtrack to that." Echoing this, Weiss chimes in: “This record sounds desperate. Writing it was not comfortable. We were in a small, airless room, writing these songs that we really worked on, worked over, edited, and tried to make them as potent and daunting as we possibly could.”

Powerful, too, is the acclaim for Broad City, the series from Upright Citizens Brigade alums Glazer and Jacobson. Produced by Amy Poehler, the show cleverly tackles social issues by way of gags and the cringingly real scenarios that two women, trying to make sense of themselves and the world amid the madness that is New York City. Inadvertently, the show has become central to a resurgence in deconstructing the notion that somehow "feminism," which simply boils down to equality between the sexes, is a bad word. "Guys, I'm going to ask a feminism thing. Don't get uncomfortable!" Glazer quipped, directing a knowing look toward the few men in the audience.

Sleater-Kinney are unafraid and unabashed feminists, and actively dispel the stereotype of soft-spoken women, shy in a corner while the boys mosh around, puffing out their chests. "There is an unapologetic obliteration of the sacred," says Brownstein, who plays jagged guitars, when asked by Glazer about the music's relation to gender equality. "It feels powerful."

After the interview, the crowd converged and chatted excitedly; one got the sense that alliances were being formed and ideas were being shared, the roots of change planted. And so powerful was the conversation that I, after years of letting my guitar gather dust in the corner of my apartment, later picked it up and began to strum once again, letting the notes take on lives of their own.

MAIDUGURI/BAUCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigeria's military repelled multiple attacks by suspected Boko Haram militants on Borno state capital Maiduguri in the northeast, security sources said on Sunday, but the insurgents captured another Borno town.

The assault on Maiduguri, with a population of around 2 million, began just after midnight. Sources at two hospitals said at least eight people had died and 27, mostly civilians, had been injured. A second attempt to take the city's airport in the afternoon was also repelled.

A raid on Monguno, 140 km north, began later in the morning and the town fell under militant control by the late afternoon.

The militants also simultaneously attacked another town, Konduga, which is 40 km from Maiduguri, but the military was able to repel the raid.

The army's inability to quash the Sunni jihadist group is a major headache for President Goodluck Jonathan, who is seeking re-election in February and who visited the state capital on Saturday as part of his campaign. Opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari had been due to arrive on Monday.

The elections are expected to be the most hotly contested since the end of military rule in 1999 with many fearing violence in the aftermath.

KERRY VISIT UNDERSCORES U.S. CONCERN

U.S. secretary of state John Kerry arrived in the commercial capital Lagos on Sunday to urge the candidates and their supporters to respect the election outcome, underscoring U.S. concerns that post-poll violence could destabilize the country and undermine the fight against Boko Haram.

The five-year insurgency, which aims to carve out an Islamic state in Africa's most populous country, has seen thousands killed.

At around 9 a.m. (3 a.m. ET) on Sunday, a Reuters witness in Maiduguri said shelling could be heard and that military helicopters were circling the city, but by the early afternoon calm had returned.

Scores of militants and soldiers were killed in the clash, a military source and a civilian joint task force leader (JTF) said.

"We're still combing the bush for their corpses, we pursued the Boko Haram men until Auno, 12 km outside the city... some fled towards Mainok," said the civilian JTF leader who declined to be named for security reasons.

Nigeria's defence headquarters tweeted on Sunday morning that coordinated land and air operations were being used to repel the attacks and a curfew had been imposed on Maiduguri.

The militants began the attack at the edge of the city in the Njimtilo area and tried to take the airport which services the air force as well as civilians, security sources said. Boko Haram last attempted to take Maiduguri from the same area in December 2013.

Along with much of Borno, the militants control some areas of neighbouring Adamawa and Yobe states, and recently took control of the town and a multi-national army base at Baga by Lake Chad.

The government said 150 people had been killed in that attack but local officials say the figure is far higher and some have put it as high as 2,000.

In Monguno, some 50 km from Baga, security sources said that the military was being overwhelmed by Boko Haram's firepower. Houses in the town were also being set ablaze.

"Boko Haram has more power than us and are shelling the town ... our colleagues are fleeing," a soldier in Maiduguri said after speaking to friends fighting the insurgents in Monguno.

Residents of Monguno have had to flee the town.

"We saw the mobile police and soldiers also running away, some of them telling us to find our way out as they have been overpowered," Madu Bakur, a Monguno resident, told Reuters.

A security source said insurgents arrived in Monguno at about 3.30 a.m. in a convoy of pickup trucks, throwing explosives and shooting into houses.

"We lost some soldiers and many people died," the security source said.

Borno state governor Kashim Shettima said the government was screening and taking records of survivors from Monguno in order to accommodate them as internally displaced people.

A local government official in Konduga who declined to be named told Reuters the insurgents stormed the restive town at about 6 a.m. on Sunday. "The military dealt with them, killed many of them," he said.

CAIRO (Reuters) - At least 15 people were killed in anti-government protests in Egypt on Sunday, the anniversary of the 2011 uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak, security sources said.

In the bloodiest day of protests since Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was elected president in June, security forces and plain clothed police fired at protesters, witnesses said.

The anniversary is a test of whether Islamists and liberal activists have the resolve to challenge a government that has stamped out dissent since the then-army chief Sisi ousted elected Islamist presidentMohamed Mursi in July 2013 after mass protests against his rule.

After nightfall, gunfire and sirens could be heard in central Cairo as armoured personnel carriers moved through the city centre.

Gunmen in a car opened fire on a security checkpoint near the Pyramids, killing two policemen, security sources said.

Protesters set fire to a government building on a street near the Pyramids, state media said.

Dozens of protesters were killed during last year's anniversary. Again this year, security forces fanned out across the capital and other cities.

The heaviest death toll was in the Cairo suburb of Matariya, a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold. Special forces fired pistols and rifles at protesters, a Reuters witness said. Eight people, including one policeman, were killed, according to the health ministry.

People in Matariya chanted "down with military rule" and "a revolution all over again." Demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails at security forces and fires raged.

Riot police backed by soldiers in armoured vehicles sealed off roads, including those leading to Cairo's Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the 2011 revolt.

In downtown Cairo, riot police with rifles and plain clothed men with pistols chased protesters through the streets.

Six people were killed in separate protests in Alexandria, Egypt's second biggest city, Giza governorate outside of Cairo and the Nile Delta province of Baheira, security sources said.

A bomb wounded two policemen stationed outside a Cairo sports club, the sources said.

Signs of discontent built up as the anniversary of the revolt against Mubarak approached, and a liberal woman activist, Shaimaa Sabbagh, was killed at a protest on Saturday.

About 1,000 people marched in her funeral procession on Sunday. The Health Ministry said she had been shot in the face and back and Interior Ministry spokesman Hany Abdel Latif said an investigation into her death had begun, adding: "No one is above the law."

"Shaima was killed in cold blood,” Medhat al-Zahid, vice president of the Socialist Popular Alliance party thatSabbagh belonged to, told a news conference.

CRAVING STABILITY

Sisi's crackdown has neutralised the Brotherhood but failed to end an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula near the Israeli border.

A curfew imposed in north Sinai was extended for three months, authorities said. Islamist militants based in the Sinai have killed hundreds of police and soldiers since Mursi's removal. They have pledged support for Islamic State, the ultra-hardline group that seized parts of Iraq and Syria.

After four years of political and economic turmoil following Mubarak's fall, many Egyptians have overlooked allegations of widespread human rights abuses and praised Sisi for restoring a measure of stability.

Sisi, who served as military intelligence chief under Mubarak, has also taken bold steps to repair the economy, such as cutting costly fuel subsidies.

But his critics accuse him of restoring authoritarian rule and repealing freedoms won in the uprising that ended three decades of iron-fisted rule under Mubarak.

"The situation is the same as it was four years ago and it is getting worse. The regime did not fall yet," said engineer Alaa Lasheen, 34, protesting near Tahrir Square.

In a televised address on Saturday, Sisi praised the desire for change that Egyptians showed four years ago but said it would take patience to achieve all of "the revolution's goals".

Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born cleric based in Qatar who supports the Brotherhood, called for protests on Sunday and said Mursi was Egypt's legitimate leader.

Qaradawi's outspoken support for the Islamist movement has fuelled a diplomatic rift between Qatar and its Gulf Arab allies which, like Cairo, consider the group a security threat.

On a sunny summer day in July 2013, a 5-year-old boy and his family visited relatives in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. The last thing on their mind was a brain-eating amoeba. The boy played outside for much of the day on a slip 'n slide, as kids do. All was well until nine days later, when he started to vomit and complained of an excruciating headache. He developed a high fever: 104 degrees. Tylenol didn’t help.

The symptoms were concerning, but still could have passed for a bad case of the flu. But then the boy had two brief “staring episodes,” where for a few seconds each he gazed straight ahead, unresponsive.  

His family took him to a New Orleans hospital, where his condition worsened. The doctors suspected meningitis, a swelling of the membranes surrounding the brain, which can be caused by infection of viruses or microorganisms like bacteria, and he was put on several antibiotics. They performed a CT scan, a spinal tap and other tests to try and narrow down the particular type of infection, but got no clear answer. Several days later he suffered seizures and doctors performed emergency brain surgery. But the infection—whatever it was—and the inflammatory immune response was just too much. He was declared brain dead and the family agreed to cut off life support, five days after the boy was first admitted.

Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) soon suggested that the culprit was Naegleria fowleri, also known as the “brain-eating amoeba.” It has earned that moniker for a good reason, since it can effectively digest neural tissues, says Jennifer Cope, a medical epidemiologist for the CDC in Atlanta.

While the microorganism is normally harmless and found in warm freshwater lakes throughout the South, it can infect the brain if it gets far up into the nasal passages. Once there, it passes through a porous bone separating the sinuses and the brain and begins to break down nerve cells. This triggers brain-swelling, and the resulting syndrome, called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), is nearly always fatal. Luckily, it’s always very rare, killing between zero and eight people each year in the United States.

In a study published this month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers from the CDC and elsewhere confirmed the boy died of PAM and described the case in full. This is the first confirmed instance in which somebody acquired the deadly infection from tap water, says Cope, a study author.

In the majority of cases, the amoeba is acquired when people swim in warm lakes in the summer and get water up their nose. Victims tend to be disproportionately male and young, with a median age of 12. But in the past few years, new routes of transmission are popping up, including this instance.

Two years before this case, two people who also happened to live in Louisiana died of PAM after using neti pots, which are used to flush the sinuses with salty water. One of these cases also occurred in St. Bernard Parish, and researchers suspect it may be due in part to the fact that Hurricane Katrina inflicted lasting damage to the water system, making it more prone to leaks and contact with soil (where these amoebae can also be found). But they can’t say for certain that the storm was to blame—no water system is a completely “closed loop,” and microorganisms from the environment often find their way into the water, Cope adds.

In 2012, a Muslim man practicing ritual ablution (which includes cleansing the sinuses with water) also came down with the fatal infection in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The CDC generally now recommends using bottle or sterilized water for nasal rinses, though the relative risk of getting PAM from a sinus rinses is very, very small. You are much more likely to get struck by lightning, for example, Cope says.

Water systems use chlorine to kill these microbes, but in this case it appeared that the chlorine levels in the house were low due to evaporation of the water-dissolved gas. Since 2013, Louisiana has started more aggressively chlorinating and testing for N. fowleri, and there hasn’t been a case in the state since then.

The amoeba is on the move, perhaps because temperatures are increasing. Once only found in the South, the microbe and the infection it causes have popped up in Minnesota, Kansas and Indiana. Perhaps strangely, given its spread, the number of cases of PAM don’t appear to be increasing.

Francine Marciano-Cabral, a microbiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies N. fowleri, is investigating how the amoeba becomes infectious. “This is a free-living amoeba that doesn't have to infect anybody, it's perfectly happy feeding on bacteria,” she says. “What we want to find out is why in some people is it so pathogenic and deadly and what makes it that way?” No answers have yet emerged. Perhaps surprisingly, most people that have been tested (albeit in a few small studies in the South) have antibodies against this amoeba, suggesting they’ve been exposed to it at some time in their life, Marciano-Cabral says.

This study will help doctors to be more aware of PAM, despite its rarity, says Marciano-Cabral, who wasn’t involved in the work. In suspected PAM cases the CDC now makes available a drug called miltefosine on an emergency basis, which has some effectiveness against the amoeba. Use of this drug, which isn’t yet commercially available, may have helped cure an Arkansas girl infected with the amoeba in 2013. She is one of only three known American survivors of the affliction.

If you think the Best Picture Oscar field seems lame this year, just wait. Movies are only going to suck more.

Economic and technological forces are pushing the peculiar art form of the movie toward the same fate as opera and epic poems. Art forms rarely die, but they do get out of step with the times and wind up huddled in a niche, shivering in the cold.

As that happens to movies, talent will flow into more popular and lucrative art forms. It’s no coincidence that Woody Allen just signed a deal to produce a series for Amazon.com. As the best talent leaves the movies, the quality of movies will plunge.

The economic side of movies already looks like Tokyo after a Godzilla constitutional. In 2014, the number of people who went to the movies was the lowest in two decades. In 2002, movie attendance in North America hit an all-time high, as theaters sold 1.57 billion tickets. Last year, that dropped to 1.26 billion—down 300 million tickets. Revenue is down 5 percent versus 2013, the biggest decline in nine years. Revenue from other sources, like home video and international showings, isn’t saving Hollywood’s tuchas like it used to. Americans are watching cheap streaming movies more and buying movies less, and overseas audiences love our cartoonish flicks like The Avengers and Frozen but don’t give a crap about stuff like Selma or Boyhood.

At the same time, movies keep getting more expensive to make. Universal Pictures brags that it focuses on “modestly budgeted” films like Unbroken, yet even those cost about $70 million. Now that social media spreads opinions about new movies instantly, a movie has to win a big audience the first weekend or that investment is sunk. There is no middle class in moviemaking—only the few blockbusters, then everything else. The top 1 percent take all. Where’s the Occupy Hollywood movement?

These economic troubles are not a blip. They are a trend driven by technology, and the technology is not going away unless some massive cyberattack fries every last digital device.

First of all, theaters have always been the financial locomotive of movies, and technology keeps making them less and less relevant. At this month’s Consumer Electronics Show, dozens of companies showed off huge, curved, 4K TVs that display movies as well as any theater screen. Combine that with HD streaming, microwave popcorn and a bottle of Chianti, and there’s only one reason left to go to a theater: to see a movie the day it comes out.

But even that advantage is going to fade away. Sony simultaneously released the apparently awful The Interview online and in theaters and made $15 million in four days. Other studios are calculating how long before that release strategy is the norm. “Everybody has to take a look at it because the world has changed,” Nikki Rocco, who just retired after nearly 50 years as Universal’s head of domestic distribution, told The Associated Press.

The plight goes much deeper than just theaters. Late last year at a conference in New York, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos got talking about why books can be a tough sell in today’s market. As he sees it, books don’t compete against other books. Instead, books compete against every other way you can spend your time. For a lot of the population, the time investment in a book is too much to ask. Even if books were free (and, they are, at the library), the reading of books would not significantly increase.

The movie as we know it is generally a 90- to 180-minute, one-off production—a single, long work meant to be watched beginning to end. How does that format make sense today? A huge and growing amount of entertainment is being consumed on the 7 billion mobile devices swarming the planet. People peering into phones and tablets want stuff in smaller doses. Movies are too long for that medium. Money and young talent are flowing to short-burst programs like Smosh and RealAnnoyingOrange. The duo behind Smosh. which you’ve probably never heard of, is worth nearly $6 million.

Yet every civilization needs long-form storytelling, rich in character and complex plot lines. Over the past decade, audiences and talent have been drawn to series like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. As long-form visual storytelling, that format is better than movies for our time and technology. A single show, meant for home or portable screens, is an hour or less, which makes it more competitive against other lures for your time. One show in a series pulls you into another—a hook missing from movies. With streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, you can watch these stories anytime, anywhere—one at a time or all night on a binge.

The center of gravity in entertainment is shifting. Matthew McConaughey did True Detective, Tea Leoni is in Madame Secretary, Netflix signed up Adam Sandler, and Amazon nabbed Woody to create an unspecified series. (I’m rooting for an update of 1973’s Sleeper: After 42 years in the future, Miles Monroe returns to New York in 2015 as an old guy and invents the orgasmatron.) The best talent will increasingly want these kinds of long-form gigs. The prestige is there. The money is there. The artistic freedom is there. And most of all, the audience is there.

If McConaughey or Allen—or Christopher Nolan, Robert Downey Jr., Meryl Streep—tie up with a series that goes on for a few years, they’ll have less time to make movies. If the most talented directors, writers and actors make fewer movies, then more movies will be made by the second string. More movies will suck, and so will the movie business.

To borrow a phrase, we’ve seen this movie before. It goes like this: New technology changes the way media is consumed. Declining revenue leads to cost-cutting, which drives away talent. That leads to a lower-quality product, which sends audiences elsewhere, which inevitably results in more declining revenues—and the negative spiral keeps feeding on itself.

I actually had a bit part in that movie a decade ago. It was called Newspapers.

New York — Ritchie Torres is strolling through the toughest public housing project in the poorest neighborhood in the Bronx, unafraid.

It’s not because, at 26, the youngest City Council member in America’s largest city is ready for a fight. Torres is only 5’10 and 140 pounds, and would be lucky to survive a serious throwdown in one of these dank stairwells. It’s because he was born in a place like this, in the Throggs Neck public housing project a few miles away -- with defective water boilers and peeling paint exposing a dangerous mold -- and lived there for most of his life.

Now that he’s made it somewhere, he’s determined to aim his clout not at sprucing up the Bronx Zoo or enticing more hipsters to Fordham Avenue, but squarely at the constituents who need him the most: the Bronx poor whose 40 percent poverty rate is double the citywide average.

In only a few short months in office he's convinced the feds to pony up $100 million to fix water boilers damaged by Superstorm Sandy. He has introduced legislation to reform the NYPD by requiring officers to identify themselves and inform those they stop and frisk of their constitutional rights. Earlier this month, a center for LGBT seniors opened in the Bronx, an effort spearheaded by Torres. And when his term is up as a City Council member, three years from now, you can expect to find Ritchie Torres either cruising to re-election or bound for bigger things. Some whisper he’ll be the country’s first gay president.

“The future is boundless to him,” says fellow councilman Jimmy Vacca, who gave Torres his start in politics after meeting the youngster in high school. “He’s thoughtful. He’s grounded, he’s reflective. And he’s relentless.”

As he walked to the entrance of the Twin Parks West projects on a sunny day last April, Torres passed a community center that once gave the project’s children a place to play. Now it’s vacant, unfunded. He wondered if he’d be able to get inside the main building. This center is supposed to be secure, accessible by residents only. But the door opens, allowing us in.

One window is cracked, another broken. Wires hang from the ceiling, sheathed in their protective coating but otherwise completely exposed. The staircases reek of urine and the hallways of a stale dead air that induces a headache. It’s a maze allowing junkies or anyone to hide.  

Twenty percent of the city’s violent crime occurs in public housing, even though only 5 percent of its residents live here. In the 1990s, New York state lawmakers voted to walk completely away from their investment in the largest public housing stock in North America: 178,000 units, 404,000 households. The state capital, Albany, does not plow one dime into their budget, as conditions deteriorate in these buildings that represent the last thin line between hundreds of thousands of residents and homelessness.

Torres is determined to do something about that, a quest that would seem quixotic if you didn’t know his own story: of a stepfather abandoning his family, crippling bouts of depression during his childhood and adolescence, and a coming out that became something of a sexual identity crisis.  

“I have overcome,” he told me. “That’s the story of the Bronx.”

Torres and his twin brother were born in the East Bronx. He was named for the late singer Ritchie Valens, after his mother watched the movie La Bamba. His father wasn’t around at the outset, because the man was married to someone else. The only father Torres knew was his stepdad, the family’s primary breadwinner, who walked out on the family when Torres was 12.

Throggs Neck was a rough place. Torres got jumped for his Pokemon cards in the fourth grade, and was beaten again randomly in the sixth. But the worst of his childhood was inside his apartment; the leaking roofs, the mold creeping up the walls, shooting spores out into the bedrooms and infiltrating the boy’s lungs. He spent much of his early life battling asthma as a result. He was hospitalized repeatedly. When his mother called the New York City Housing Authority about the mold, the agency sent out a maintenance man to paint over it.

“Your home is supposed to be a sanctuary,” he says. “I didn’t feel safe in mine.”

Torres didn’t meet his real father until he was 15. The first (and only) full day they spent together came at the request of Ritchie’s two half-brothers. They had joined a notorious Bronx gang before Ritchie even knew them and are now serving terms in federal prison in New Jersey. They asked him to visit, and the youngster obliged, curious. He’ll never forget that conversation.

“I spent about six hours with them,” he said. “I remember them telling me if they got out of prison and couldn’t find a job, they’d go right back to that life.”

For whatever reason, Torres never went down that path. He entertained himself instead by pretending to be a pro wrestler with his friends in the park, imagining themselves Stone Cold Steve Austin or the Undertaker.

Beyond those bursts of silliness and unlike his flippant twin brother, Ritchie was a serious kid. By high school, he’d set his sights on becoming a lawyer, and when he wasn’t aceing his classes, he was winning debates in Moot Court and Mock Trial.

Torres ran for City Council in 2013, becoming the first gay council member ever elected from the Bronx and the council’s youngest member, at 25. William Alatriste

Torres came out in high school, too. His mom was as supportive as she could be, but lamented that he might not give her a grandchild. His twin flipped out, called Ritchie a “pervert,” and the relationship hasn’t been the same since. Torres seriously considered staying in the closet after that — “I thought maybe it would mean an easier life” — and didn’t tell anyone else he was gay until he was in his 20s. The Bronx may lie in one of America’s most gay-friendly cities, but it is not a gay-friendly borough.

“You have known ‘gayborhoods’ in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens,” Torres says. “Here, it’s much more homophobic. It’s a population in the shadows.”

So Torres kept his sexuality to himself, until college. After just a year at New York University studying philosophy and political science, depression reared its head and left the teenager so paralyzed he couldn’t get out of bed on many days. All of it, the pain of losing his stepfather, the struggle with his sexual identity, combined to knock Torres out of school.

“I felt like my IQ had fallen 20 points,” he said. “If you can’t trust your father, your stepfather, who can you trust? It pushed me to turn inward, to be more of a loner.”

That could have been the beginning of a long downward spiral for Ritchie Torres. But a few years earlier, his principal at Lehman High School had chosen him for a program called “District Manager for a Day,” wherein he spent the day shadowing future New York City councilman Jimmy Vacca. Vacca does this each year, but on this day, this youngster stood way, way out.

“I was just floored,” Vacca says.  “ He was much beyond his years. He enjoyed the day tremendously. Asked a lot of questions, participated in meetings, knew the community. I was totally taken.”

The two kept in touch and Torres volunteered for Vacca when he ran for City Council. After he dropped out of school, Torres reached out to Vacca, who immediately offered him a job, as a constituent liaison.

Before long, the youngster had assembled small legions of residents, from whom he gathered complaints and credibility. Torres quickly became known for taking snapshots of poor conditions in various housing projects and then threatening the Housing Authority with sending those pictures to the New York Daily News, if the problem wasn’t fixed. He calls this “dramatizing” the problem, and says his practice pretending to be a pro wrestler taught him how to do that. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he says.

Torres ran for City Council in 2013, becoming the first gay council member ever elected from the Bronx and the council’s youngest member, at 25.

With this new power, Torres intends to galvanize public support for major retrofits to the city’s public housing — there’s as much as $18 billion worth of work needed — and he has done much to raise awareness about the issue, even convincing his colleagues to hold the first-ever New York City Council meeting inside a public housing project, on Coney Island.

Shortly after taking office last January, Torres made an issue of the defunct water boilers that were forcing residents after Superstorm Sandy to use their gas stoves to heat their apartments — exposing them to carbon monoxide. Within a month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to spend $100 million to replace dilapidated boilers throughout the city.

He has also recently called for the installation of $520 million worth of intercom systems throughout the projects, to address a recent jump in the crime rate of 31 percent since 2009 (as opposed to the 4 percent increase citywide). And in May, he co-sponsored the “Quality Housing Act,” which would toughen the penalties on New York City landlords who allow their buildings to fall into disrepair.

NYCHA declined a request for an interview for this article, but released a statement praising the council member’s “leadership” on public housing issues.

Leadership alone often isn’t enough, and Torres knows the fixed boilers are only just the beginning of the fight for those in public housing. But there are small victories. He even got his old apartment fixed; the one where his mom still lives. A phone call from Councilman Torres led to the Housing Authority sending someone out to tear down an entire moldy wall instead of painting it over like when he was a kid. It was a nice thing to do for his mother, Torres says. But you tend to believe him when he says he’d do the same for anyone in the Bronx. 

The house where the novel lives today had its foundation laid about 1,000 years ago by Lady Murasaki, with a little help from Homer and the ancient Babylonian scribes who punched The Epic of Gilgamesh into clay tablets. Henry Fielding helped with the walls, Cervantes added the windows, warped glass and all. The great 19th century Russians raised the sturdy roof beams. Dickens and Austen added a fireplace and drawing room. Proust, Joyce and Woolf built a somewhat severe modernist wing. Pynchon plopped down some prurient lawn gnomes.

But no house stands forever, and, lately, the novel has started to tilt toward oblivion. That’s largely because it has been supplanted as the primary means of telling stories. For pure narrative whiz-bang, it’s hard for the page to compete with the screen. All the way back in the cultural prehistory that was 1996, Jonathan Franzen worried in a landmark Harper’s essay that “we are truly up against what truly seems like the obsolescence of serious art in general.” And that was before The Sopranos, before Grand Theft Auto, before Twitter and Facebook and even Friendster. Franzen wrote on paper, for people who read on paper, for whom reading was still the primary gateway to unreal realities. Little did they know. Little do any of us, ever.

The death of the novel has been much discussed, like the plight of a once grand mansion that has since become an eyesore. To talk about the end of fiction, to churn out think pieces about its certain demise, is to evince a cool knowledge of impending disaster, to meet cultural disaster with sangfroid. Did another bookstore just close? Did you read the latest report on Americans’ reading habits? To the laptops!

But maybe not yet. Perhaps a restoration is possible, if not exactly to the form of those resplendent Don Quixote days, when one could look out over the hills and see no other mansions (now, the gaudy Netflix palace crowds out the views). Reading is a basic human activity: It predates Jeff Bezos, as I understand it, and will persist as long as nerves from the retina lead to the brain. Telling stories is just as central to the human enterprise: stories not just of what happened yesterday but what could have happened, and what happened 1,000 yesterdays ago, and what might happen 10,000 days from now. The novel has served this purpose well, but, facing extinction, it might need a transformation to survive; what digital natives call a hack.

Precisely such a hack was loudly and convincingly suggested four years ago by David Shields in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. An aphoristic, weird work of literary criticism, Reality Hunger argues that to survive, the novel must become less like itself, to just stop with the whole plot-character-theme business. Homeland can do that better anyway, so why even bother trying to keep up, especially without Claire Danes on your side? If you have something to say, say it plainly, without all the juvenile disguises of the novel.

The novel, Shields says, is just a form and “[forms] serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: They’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive.” Shields suggests that creative nonfiction—the essay as an art form, which he calls the lyrical essay—is a solution that retains the novel’s artistry while discarding its artifice. “We like nonfiction because we live in fictitious times.” Along with the lyrical essay, the memoir rides high in Reality Hunger: storytelling as self-examination, à la Montaigne or Joan Didion, true life instead of fake life.

Wait a minute, you’re surely thinking, a novel that isn’t telling a fictional story isn’t a novel. No, I suppose it isn’t. Shields is advocating for some hybrid, a bricolage of true stuff and made-up stuff and thought and observation and rumination and conjecture. He cites portions of both Moby-Dick and Hamlet as showcasing this very quality, forgoing the devices of the novel and simply preaching truth to the reader. But you know the notion of plot that your ninth-grade English teacher taught you, the one that Aristotle first suggested in the Poetics? That, says Shields, is about as outdated as your first Kindle, the one with the panoply of buttons beneath the screen.

Lately, Shields’s ideas about the novel seem to have been borne out by the reading public. Probably the biggest literary surprise of the past three years has been Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a massive six-volume autobiography disguised (but only barely) as a novel. To read Knausgaard for plot is to watch Bergman for the fart jokes, and yet his Shieldsian novels have enjoyed immense popularity, probably because they satisfy a need deeper than what-happens-next-to-the-two-lovers-stranded-in-a-hurricane or I-hope-he-finds-the-bomb-before-it-levels-Baltimore. Reviewing the third volume of My Struggle in The New York Times earlier this year, the American novelist Rivka Galchen wrote, “What at first appears to be the problem of how we as readers have patience for so much information reveals itself, upon inspection, as the problem of how it is that, with so little information, we feel we have witnessed an entire life.”

The essay, too, had a good year, with Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Examsand Eula Biss’s On Immunity: An Inoculationtwo of the most widely praised collections. These are not the sorts of “essays” you had to read in American History 403: The Socio-Poetics of the Louisiana Purchase, nor of the sort you’d encounter in Theoretical Cellular Physics Monthly. These essays are personal, inquisitive, alive, written by young women clearly intent on more than just providing entertainment. For cheap thrills, you can just watch Mad Men.

Reviewing the essays of Charles D’Ambrosio in The L Magazine,a critic perceptively notes that “there’s a reason that essays are having a moment.… [Our] cultural discourse veers from one stridently argued conclusion to the next, an impoverished stream of takes and summations that leaves no room for ambivalence or nuance. The essay is the one forum in which we can find the contradictions, bewilderment, and uncertainty that are the dark matter of daily life.”

The novel still stands, sure enough, but it stands uneasily, a kitschy McMansion whose vocabulary is steadfastly outdated, a form that can only look backward. I can’t think of a single full-length novel published in 2014 that did anything new. Most of the ones I read rehashed the same realistic formula that has held at least since Raskolnikov wandered through St. Petersburg’s dingy courtyards.

So is Shields right? Is Knausgaard our savior? Are essays the new novels? Are novels going the way of illuminated manuscripts? Impossible questions, all. But this is a good time to remember Ezra Pound’s ferocious, uncompromising dictum: Make it new. 

Updated | ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's anti-austerity leftist party Syriza stood on the cusp of an outright victory in Sunday's snap election, commanding a 10 point lead over Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' conservatives, an updated exit poll showed.

Syriza was on track to take 36 and 38 percent of the national vote, well ahead of Samaras' center-right New Democracy party which was seen taking 26 to 28 percent, according to the updated poll by Metron Analysis, GPO, Alco, MRB, Marc.

The updated poll showed Syriza securing between 148 to 154 seats in the 300-seat parliament. An absolute majority for Syriza will depend in large part on whether former Prime Minister George Papandreou's new center-left party manages to cross the 3 percent threshold to enter parliament.

The updated poll indicated that seven or eight parties will make it into parliament, with Papandreou's partysecuring between 2.2 and 3.2 percent of the vote.

The prospect of a Syriza victory has worried financial markets who fear the party's plan to demand a debt writeoff and end austerity measures will trigger a new financial crisis and put Greece on the path to a euro exit.

Centrists To Potami and far-right Golden Dawn were tied for third spot with 6 to 7 percent of the vote, according to the exit poll.

For centuries, shamans and healers have been using psychedelics in sacramental rituals in the belief that the substances have healing qualities and can lead to meaningful spiritual experiences. It turns out contemporary science may back these ancient claims.

A new study conducted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health found that participants who took controlled doses of "classic" psychedelics – magic mushrooms, DMT, mescaline and LSD – had significantly reduced incidences of suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and psychological distress in the long term.

The study, published recently in the Journal of Pharmacology, analyzed data from an annual survey conducted by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health that measures substance abuse in relation to mental illness. The data were compiled between 2008 and 2012, and drew from the experiences of 190,000 adults. Participants took the survey online, answering pre-recorded questions about their individual use of classic psychedelics.

Of those surveyed, 13.6%, or about 27,235 people, reported having used classic psychedelics. The results showed that those who had taken these substances were 19% less likely to have psychological distress in the past month, and their reports of suicidal thoughts in the past year were 14% lower than those who didn’t use the drugs. What’s more, that same group reported 36% fewer suicide attempts in the past year.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that 30,000 people in the U.S. die from suicide each year, and worldwide that number is 1 million. While treatment for mental health disorders has improved markedly in the past century, the suicide rate remains stagnant.

Only two studies to date, this one included, specifically address the relationship between mental illness and psychedelics. In 2011, individuals with advanced-stage cancer were given single doses of psilocybin and were found to have reduced long-term incidences of depression and anxiety.

In recent years, some scientists, such as this study’s lead researcher, Peter S. Hendricks, have been pioneering innovative treatments to help decrease the suicide rate. Hendricks is a clinical psychologist by trade, but his interest in the use of psychedelics was piqued by working with people who struggled with addiction, particularly lifelong cigarette smokers. He says he became "demoralized" by patients who had little luck quitting with the intervention programs he and his team developed. Hendricks says psychedelics can possibly help patients shift their priorities, or lead to drastic changes in perspective or even spiritual experiences that will help them improve their mental states.

"Those who are addicted to, say, smoking or using cocaine, aren't doing so because it’s their purpose in life; in fact, often that behavior can conflict with what their overall purpose is. So when we administer a psychedelic, what you can say is that you re-prioritize their values such that what their grander purpose is takes priority over some of these more immediate reinforcers like cigarettes or cocaine," Hendricks said in an interview with Newsweek. "So if we mobilize these spiritual resources, there may not be anything we couldn’t do."

The UAB isn't the first study to flirt with this idea. A smoking-cessation trial in the fall found that lifelong smokers who took several controlled doses of psilocybin demonstrated tobacco abstinence rates of up to 80% in the long term. The heightened connectivity to spirituality has also been demonstrated to curb suicidal thoughts and attempts.

A lack of resources and funding is a hindrance to continuing studies, however, as psychedelics are still classified as schedule 1 narcotics in the U.S. and criminal offenses accompany their possession. While skeptics may question the idea of using psychedelics as treatment for psychological distress, Hendricks emphasizes that he does not advocate for rampant recreational use of psychedelics, or widespread legalization. He believes the data support the idea of demoting psychedelics to schedule 3 or 4, and that they can be used in controlled therapy situations.

The study does have shortcomings: For one, the data were compiled independently, so there is a possibility of misreported individual data. Also, the sample size is not large enough to make a definitive conclusion about psychedelics in relation to mental illness. And the effects of psychedelics on the developing brain are still largely unknown, meaning they could pose a threat to people with a predisposition to schizophrenia.

Culturally, psychedelics bear quite a bit of baggage: Timothy Leary’s call to “turn on, tune in and drop out” became a countercultural slogan in the 1960s, and proved damaging to potential research on utilizing the drug to improve mental health for more than three decades. Perhaps this study will be a turning point in how our culture regards psychedelics and mental health. “I know scientists are supposed to be objective and dispassionate,” Hendricks says. “But I’ve seen the data -- it seems to me that psychedelics hold tremendous therapeutic potential.”

When the poet and political dissident Vaclav Havel took over as president of Czechoslovakia he discovered the communists had left a gloomy, sinister government headquarters wholly ill equipped for the task.

There was no car pool and no computers, not even electric typewriters, just a few antiquated manual machines. No staff, no secretaries, no protocol officers, no communications, no analysis and no planning. Yet the whole thing had to be set up and running in a matter of days.

Friends were called and then friends of friends and friends of their friends. Mário Soares, the President of Portugal, donated the first presidential limousine. A few weeks later the US Ambassador Shirley Temple Black brought the news that the US government had donated the first armoured Chevrolet limousine; unfortunately, when its suspension encountered the cobblestoned streets of Prague it made Havel carsick and so was rarely used. Given the deplorable state of Prague Castle security, at least from Havel’s point of view, the US government also supplied a shielded safe room, nicknamed “the fridge,” for secure communications.

As for secretaries, Havel’s people drew from a number of sources, including the pool of young Castle guides, who could at least be expected to communicate in other languages. Wire services were installed, and some time later one of the first office networks in the country, a relatively sophisticated system, whose ethernet  spine was installed through the attics of baroque and Renaissance roofs (over the loud protests of Castle conservationists).

A media operation with a press centre and regular weekly briefings was set up. A small analytical team came in to read the polls and analyse trends. Protocol officers with backgrounds in engineering and nuclear physics were learning the rules of the etiquette.

Some jobs required a professional background. The head of the military office of the president and commander-in-chief had to be a general, but again there were no such officers, other than those who had risen through the stages of Communist training and indoctrination. How to choose a loyal and relatively open-minded professional from among such people?

Havel appointed a recruiting commission made up of me, perhaps because I had been a psychologist in my earlier life, his screenwriter adviser on domestic and security policy Jiří Křižan, his actor adviser on style and image Petr Oslzlý, and Eda Kriseová, who was known to be in communication with the higher spheres of the universe, to address the task.

There were four candidates waiting in the corridor with perspiring brows, looking as if they were as scared of winning as of losing the job. Questions about their military record and background elicited monosyllabic answers, which were identical in their lack of information.

Finally, it occurred to me to ask the candidates about their bedtime reading. One apparently only read the statutes and the order of battle manuals, the second read all the Marxist classics in Russian, and the third, slightly more enlightened, enjoyed reading histories of battles and campaigns from Hannibal to von Clausewitz. The fourth, an anti- aircraft missile brigade commander, hesitated for a long time, after which he stuttered: ‘Catch 22’.

It was no contest. General Tomeček stayed for most of Havel’s time in the Castle.

People light candles and hold the national flag in tribute to late former Czech President Vaclav Havel at Wenceslas Square in Prague December 18, 2011.David W Cerny/Reuters

The physical appearance of the president’s office took as much of his time and attention as hiring the right personnel. Admittedly, the place gave any normal person the shivers. It was vast but almost empty. A good number of the gates and doors were locked, with keys nowhere to be found. Some of the early discoveries included a room full of people with headsets in front of consoles eavesdropping on telephone calls – yes, all calls, even the president’s calls – in the interests of “security”; a tiny locked chamber with a telephone that offered a direct link with the Kremlin; and an underground maze of tunnels, which were apparently designed to provide shelter for the top Communist leadership in the event of nuclear war.

The offices themselves were obviously designed to scare off visitors rather than provide any semblance of hospitality. The heavy furniture looked as though it was made on a butcher’s block, the pictures on the walls documented not so much the bad taste of the previous occupants as the complete lack thereof.

The presidential suite and the adjoining rooms were equipped with a plethora of bathrooms, which would lead any psychoanalyst to speculations about a Pontius Pilate complex.

True, except for the stunning views of the city from the windows, it was a disconcerting, irritating and not a little depressing environment to work in; but so are many other work places. Havel found it unbearable, and immediately addressed the problem, bringing in pieces of modern art from his own collection, sending to the Castle storage for whatever usable furniture could be found, commissioning his painter friend Aleš Lamr to enliven the walls with some colourful graffiti, and in the meantime, spending as much time as possible with his advisers in the Castle restaurant Vikárka and in the Gothic-style castle dungeon that the conservationists had somehow prevented the Communist rulers from refurbishing. His dream was to convert the dungeon into a presidential ops centre complete with maps, wall displays and consoles. The conservationists were against that, too.

Within several weeks the look of the place changed. The heavy curtains were taken down and light was let in. By the time black mahogany furniture arrived, courtesy of German President von Weizsäcker, Havel had an office with a view over the ancient city to kill for.

Nonetheless, he was still not happy. He ventured further and further afield within the Castle walls, all the time discovering new aesthetic atrocities, neglect and abuse. As he tried to apply his perfectionist criteria to a building four storeys high, a kilometre in length, and a hundred and fifty metres wide, with a multitude of satellite buildings, gardens, courtyards, cellars and dozens of miles of corridors, tunnels and hallways, it became evident that he was fighting a losing battle.

He would not give up, strongly supported  by his advisers on culture, architecture and theatre, and equally strongly opposed by his advisers on domestic and foreign policy, media and economy. He ran around the rooms and corridors, personally straightening paintings, which were not hanging at the right angle, poring over blueprints, sketches and designs.

In contrast with his usual demeanour he mercilessly overruled the objections of the bureaucrats and conservationists. “For those who would rather not touch anything because everything is a monument: if our ancestors thought like this, we would have no Castle at all – just some sort of a pagan hearth and a hole in the ground.”

Feeling that, in spite of all the changes he had made, the spirit of Gustáv Husák would not quit his office, he vacated it to me, and moved to the next room, starting a long migration westward that ended up with him finding shelter in the anteroom of the old Tomáš G. Masaryk apartment.

The theatrics continued with the Castle Guard and the military marching band. The drab olive garb and the Soviet-style goose-step offended Havel’s image of a decent, democratic country. It appeared relatively easy to make the soldiers stop exerting themselves and to lower their step. When, before the election of the president, Jiří Křižan instructed General Vacek to effect this change in time for the new president’s first review of the guard of honour, he earned himself lasting enmity of the foot soldiers, who, it turned out, had to practise the new marching step at night.

For the new uniforms, Havel recruited his friend from the Fatherland’s Palette, Theodor “Doda” Pištěk, the Oscar-winning costume designer for Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. The new sky-blue uniforms with white and red trimmings conformed to Havel’s instructions to offer a friendly, non-threatening face of the Castle to the outside world, but they also looked a little like costumes from a Franz Lehár operetta.

The reviews ran from awkward to openly critical, but soon the public and the tourists got used to the new style, as any visitor to Prague can attest. For the new marching music to replace the heavy-beat assault marches, Havel consulted with the rock musician Michael Kocáb, who had the perfect idea to use the allegretto of Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta, undoubtedly equally aware that it had been first dedicated to the Czechoslovak armed forces, and adapted by the avant-garde rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

The positive aesthetic effect of the change was undeniable. The only problem was the high b in the fanfare, always a touch-and-go issue for the military players, not all of them Philharmonic material. Unlike the uniforms, the fanfare did not survive Havel’s presidency, falling victim to an act of petty cultural barbarism in the Klaus era.

Sometimes the concern for style was carried a little too far. Like all great costume designers, Pištěk was not content with designing a single uniform. Instead, he designed a whole line, including a presidential uniform in two colours, complete with golden epaulettes. Although it made Havel look like a character in Woody Allen’s Bananas, it did not take much persuading to make him put it on. After all, he spent most of his childhood drawing soldiers and uniforms and dreaming about becoming a general.

Worse, other friends learned about it. When Vojtěch Jasný, the director of 1960s Czech film classics like When The Cat Comes (1963) and All My Compatriots (1969), accompanied by Miloš Forman, came to Lány Castle to shoot a presidential documentary Why Havel?, they immediately saw the film potential of shooting him in the uniform. The resulting footage was slightly risqué, but tolerably so until the president, exhilarated by the company of friends and a free morning, burst into the Castle kitchen with a drawn sword, which he had received as a present from the Castle Guard, and, to the horror of the local village lady cooks, started to use the ceremonial weapon to chop onions that were being readied for the goulash at lunch.

I had been prescient enough to reserve the right of the final cut on the documentary in my role as press secretary, and invoked it on this occasion. I was made to feel like a censor for weeks afterwards, and Jasný would not speak to me for the next two years.

It was no wonder then that the president’s preoccupation with style and aesthetics drove some of his people insane. Not that they did not see a lot of sense in what he was trying to do, or that they were blind to the changes he gradually brought to the Castle, making the place once again a symbol rich in history, culture and humanity. But time was at a premium, and there were countless issues affecting not just the Castle compound but the country at large that needed the president’s focus.

The situation  might well be called The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. The momentous  transformation  that the country and the region were undergoing not only posed enormous demands on the president’s time, but also made him a global celebrity and an obvious object of attention for  sympathizing politicians, fellow celebrities, intellectual visionaries, opportunistic schemers and headline-seeking journalists.

The team did its best to screen him from all but the most worthy visitors, but they were no match for the drive and ingenuity of people who were set on seeing the man of the moment. Most of them meant well, and many had helpful things to say or do. In the first two months of his presidency Havel met in the Castle with scores, maybe hundreds, of foreigners, who sometimes resembled a constant procession of visitors lined up to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

Some of the visits left an indelible memory, for various reasons. It was moving to see Havel reunited with old friends returning from exile, such as Ivan Medek, Karel Schwarzenberg, Pavel Tigrid, Vilém Prečan and Pavel Kohout. It was fascinating to listen to the conversation of Havel with Harold Pinter and his wife Antonia Fraser at a dinner, with Havel as interested in the latest developments in English theatre as Pinter was in the question of how a playwright becomes a president.

Not all the meetings were as enjoyable. Barbara Walters, who interviewed Havel for ABC’s 20/20 news magazine, was positively underwhelmed and underwhelming. She complained about his not maintaining eye contact with her (from his perspective she was just another kind of interrogator) and for not showing any emotion, which she singularly failed to provoke in him. On the other hand, he hit it off immediately with Katharine Graham and Meg Greenfield, the two grand ladies of the Washington Post.

Frank Zappa, “one of the gods of the Czech underground” and a spiritual godfather of the Plastic People of the Universe, summed up the global significance of his host with the words: “You are sending a message to people in America: You smoke!” Havel reciprocated by remembering Zappa’s album Bongo Fury with Captain Beefheart.

As a result of his reception by Havel, Zappa’s status reached cosmic proportions in the country at that time. Ever a rock ’n’ roller, he was able to solicit a letter from the deputy prime minister appointing him the roving Czechoslovak envoy plenipotentiary in matters cultural and commercial. The appointment  had to be withdrawn shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, as far as anyone knows, Zappa did no harm, which is more than could be said about some of the other largely self-appointed advisers, consultants and envoys who made the popular pilgrimage to Prague at that time.

Lou Reed, now firmly part of Havel’s musical Olympus, came to the Castle on behalf of Rolling Stone to conduct what must be one of the most interesting unpublished interviews of all times. It turned out that Lou, the epitome of cool, was so stressed out by the responsibility of interviewing a statesman that he failed to turn on the tape recorder.

He may have lost the interview, but in the first of many meetings with Havel he found a good friend. Eight years later, when Havel came to the United States to provide moral support for another friend, Bill Clinton, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground rebel, along with Mejla Hlavsa, the frontman of the Plastic People of the Universe, got to play in the White House at Havel’s request, albeit on condition that “Walk on the Wild Side’ would not be on the playlist.

This minor accomplishment pleased Havel immensely. Clinton, for his part, acknowledges that Havel’s “raising his flag for me,” along with King Hussein of Jordan, the president of South Korea Kim Dae-jung, king of Saudi Arabia Abdullah and Prime Minister Tony Blair, meant a lot to him at this most difficult time of his political career.

Typically for  Havel, the  event that had the most  far-reaching implications during his first month in office was not any personnel or administrative decision, but another  speech. On 23 January 1990, he revealed to the assembled deputies of both houses of the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly that in his offices in the Prague Castle he “did not find a single clock. There is something symbolic in this: for many years there had been no need for a clock there because time stood still. History stopped, not just in the Prague Castle but in the whole country. Today when we finally freed ourselves from the straitjacket of the totalitarian system, history hurtles forward all the more quickly, as if trying to make up for the time lost. We all, you and I, are just doing our best to keep up.”

Excerpted from HAVEL: A LIFE © 2014 by Michael Žantovský; used with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove.

“Mississippi doesn’t have a huge specialty-coffee business,” says Paul Bonds of Bean Fruit Coffee Company in Jackson, Mississippi. “When I first started my booth at a local farmers market, this guy came by who was about as Mississippi as they come.” For the benefit of the crowd assembled at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theater for the fifth annual Good Food Awards, he adds a bit of local color: “He had on work boots—the kind you work in, not for style.”

Bonds, who was here receiving an award—a pendant in the shape of a coffee mug—for his Ethiopia Yergecheffe Chele’lektu, recalls how he explained the varietals and provenance of the beans he was selling that day. There was the Ennaria, also from Ethiopia, with its honey, orange and lime juice notes, and the Finca los Cauchos from Colombia, tasting of cinnamon and dried apple. But after a minute, the good old boy’d had enough.

“Hell,” he said. ‘“I just wanted regular coffee.”

Mississippi may be a bit of an outlier here, at what has been dubbed the Oscars of the food movement (and Bonds himself is somewhat of an anomaly, being one of the few people of color onstage tonight). But Sarah Weiner, the woman behind the awards and the executive director of Seedling Projects (“a ‘do tank’ for the food movement”), says they always meant to be inclusive. “As of last year, we started having entries from all 50 states,” says Weiner, 34.

Going from Brooklyn to Northern California, as I have in the last year, one could be forgiven for thinking that all the best local, sustainable, innovative food is produced in those two locales. (And I am not too surprised when Amy Bennett of Fort Greene’s Greene Grape Provisions, my former locale in New York, introduces Bonds—and reveals that she got her start at SF’s Bi-Rite Market, sort of a Bauhaus of food movement grocers.) Tonight there are awards given in 11 categories (beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, confections, honey, oils, pickles, preserves and spirits) from points as remote as Vermont (Eden Ice Cider’s Heirloom Blend) and Florida (Royal Gourmet Company’s Mango Marmalade) and as near as here. SF’s Market Hall Food, for instance, won for its Chicken Liver Mousse (the incredibly creamy concoction is available for tasting, along with many other dishes displayed on long tables in the theater lobby after the awards), and the city’s Guittard Chocolate Company is represented by its Collection Etienne 45% Cacao.

Gary Guittard takes his moment at the mic to lecture the assembled on the history of chocolate-making in Europe, beginning with Coenraad Johannes van Houten’s cocoa press in the Netherlands. He adds a special shout-out to John Scharffenberger, the Northern California sparkling-wine maker who brought artisanal French-style chocolate to the U.S.: “It certainly woke me up!” says Guittard, and while I worry for a second that I’ve fallen asleep in study hall, it seems that most of the assembled are paying close attention. It’s an interesting mix of hipsters, entrepreneurs and small farmers, who’ve come for their moment of glory and to meet their fellow foodies.

At times there are dozens of people onstage, each wave of winners having their awards hung around their necks like Olympic athletes by the good-food godmothers, and judges, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl and Nell Newman (of Newman’s Own). Most started their business out of passion. “As a second-grader, I dreamed of being a beekeeper,” says Emily Brown of Arizona’s AZ Queen Bee, who won for its Pure Raw Honeycomb. (She adds later, “I didn’t know you shouldn’t work with bees when it’s raining”—a lesson she learned after being stung 12 times.)

Getting food makers together to compare notes was part of Weiner’s mission. After working for Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food organization in Italy, she took a job as Waters’s assistant and helped the Chez Panisse founder raise the first $400,000 for Slow Food Nation, a sustainable-food event that attracted over 50,000 people to San Francisco in 2008. It was there that Weiner heard a farmer say, “As a preserve maker, I very rarely talk to the cheese people or the coffee people or the chocolate people, and this gave us an excuse to work together and realize how many of the challenges we face are common.”

A lot of this is about the business of being a small food maker and purveyor in a world where the odds favor the big guys. Wendy Mitchell of Avalanche Cheese in Colorado, after reflecting on the path that led her to raising goats and hiring and firing farm managers (“and sharing an office with a guy who wants to listen to the Mets all day instead of Beck”), gets the biggest laugh of the night when she quotes Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In her closing remarks, Weiner (whom the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed a “hipster pixie,” whatever that is) salutes the assembled food-crafters. “Ignoring business as usual, you build companies that feel like families, transform cities into tight-knit communities and support every social cause with a keg of beer or a wheel of cheese,” she says. “You pay more than fair trade prices to people living thousands of miles away and are the No. 1 customers of farmers down the street. Your goats have names, and you call your bees ‘ladies.’”

Growing up in St. Louis, Weiner always hated milk “until I was 16, summer backpacking through Europe, and drank fresh milk in Switzerland.” Most foodies have a moment like this—for Waters it was an epiphany involving apricot jam on a baguette in France—but it’s always about the flavor, not the locale.

“One of the most common criticisms of the food movement is that it’s elitist because it’s expensive, but it doesn’t have to be,” Weiner tells me later. “I always say, ‘Buy less, buy better.’ With the same budget you can eat well, and don’t have seven jars of jam open in your fridge and then five of them go bad before they’re gone.”

But how did she see inside my refrigerator?

The New York Public Library recently started an Instagram series featuring questions that people posed to librarians in the days before Google. Apparently, librarians stored the more interesting queries for decades. So far, the series has featured etiquette questions (“When one has guests, who kisses whom first?” someone asked in 1946) and a health and science inquiry from 1962 (“What is the gestation period of human beings in days?”). As antiquated as this analog method seems, millions of people in jails and prisons with no Internet access still rely on librarians for answers that could be found in seconds online.

In an office building near the NYPL’s central library, with big windows looking out on the famous marble lions, a team of four people answers questions from inmates through the library’s Correctional Services Program. The program started decades ago and now runs lending libraries in prisons and publishes a guidebook to help people upon release. Responding to as many as 60 weekly letters isn’t an official service, but it seems to be growing in popularity. “By word of mouth we get more and more every year,” says librarian Sarah Ball, who supervises the program.

Most questions — 84 percent, responders say — come from facilities in New York state; the rest arrive from all over the country. Many have to do with life after incarceration, but others speak to the interests and curiosities of the more than 2.2 million people behind bars in the U.S. One, for example, wanted to know how to grow potatoes and start a farm. Another wanted to eventually start a diaper business and sought consumer data. There have been questions about the power of healing crystals, trumpet playing and Wiccan priesthood certification. There have also been many, many requests for baseball statistics, and one frequent writer always asks for rap song lyrics.

Some letters have included personal stories and illustrations; some were written in pencil on toilet paper.

“It’s long overdue that we haven’t found some kind of system where people can have access to the Internet [in prison],” Ball says.

A 2009 survey found that correctional facilities in only four states — Connecticut, Hawaii, Kansas and Louisiana — permitted some Internet access to inmates, though in all cases it was limited. In Kansas, only minimum-security inmates had access. In Louisiana, the Internet was only available to inmates within 45 days of release and for the purpose of job searches.

Federal prisons have increased access in recent years. Since 2009, those facilities have allowed inmates to send and receive emails through a system called TRULINCS. They can only correspond with approved individuals, and messages are subject to monitoring.

Incarcerated people write letters like this one to the New York Public Library.Deborah Rabina

As the pile of letters at the NYPL grows — responding can take a month or two — Ball’s team has enlisted the help of students at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science. Two professors there just began their fourth semester of having students respond to the inmate questions. The process of answering usually starts with Google, associate professor Deborah Rabina says, and then students move on to resources such as newspaper archives and public records.

Rabina and Emily Drabinski, a visiting assistant professor, have written an article about their experience answering the letters that will appear later this year in the online journal Reference and User Services Quarterly.

The professors found that almost half of the requests (44 percent) were general reference questions, 35 percent had to do with reintegrating back into society (such as the location of halfway houses) and 21 percent were “self-help” questions (information that would improve people's time behind bars, such as regarding inmates’ rights).

The only questions the folks at NYPL and Pratt won’t answer, they say, are requests for personal contact information or legal advice. Ball says their page limit for responses is 10, but they use the fronts and backs and try to fit in as many words as possible.

While many of the questions have to do with hobbies and preoccupations, the lack of Internet access has more significant implications. For one, people trying to get degrees while behind bars are at a disadvantage when it comes to research materials. Also, missing out on technological advances while in prison makes reintegrating into the real world more challenging.

“People need to have practice using the Internet, just to get back into the swing of things when they’re released,” Ball says.

Rabina agrees: “If you want people to successfully reintegrate into society upon their release, being able to have access to this service is essential.”

Students behind bars have an especially hard time. In order to obtain a Bard College degree, the incarcerated people participating in the Bard Prison Initiative must complete research papers that can run more than 100 pages. With no Internet access, those students rely on “research assistants” who must bring to the prisons paper materials that are subject to search.

The reference question letters seem to be unique to New York. In other states, where prison populations are greater, librarians say they have received such questions from inmates, but the requests are less common and they have no team devoted to responding. The director of branch library services at the Los Angeles Public Library says its reference staff receives only 20 or 30 reference question letters from inmates per year. A spokeswoman for the Phoenix Public Library says it receives around one a month, and its policy is not to answer any mailed reference questions, regardless of the origin.

Nicholas Higgins, Ball’s predecessor at the NYPL and now director of outreach services at Brooklyn Public Library, which also receives letters from inmates, says he believes incarcerated people write them not only for reference answers but also “as a human connection, some sort of outlet to have that conversation with people who are willing to listen and respond.”

A library is meant to “allow access to information to everybody in your community,” Higgins says, adding that correctional facilities too often are “a system that resists that sort of access to information.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that more than 6.8 million people are behind bars in the U.S. While that number makes up the country's overall correctional population, only an estimated 2.2 million are behind bars, while the rest are under correctional supervision, which includes conditions such as parole and probation. 

Kids play the “what if” game to dream up ridiculous scenarios for their friends: What if aliens invaded Earth? What if the sky were green and the grass blue? What if you could fly?

Well, what if adults played the same kind of game to think critically about—and engage with—history?

Amazon’s pilot episode of “The Man in the High Castle,” based on Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same title, tackles a “what if” thought experiment that might appeal to a much broader swath of viewers than just admitted history nerds such as me.

Though the episode leaves many of the details in question, it’s quite clear that history’s trajectory has unfurled in a drastically different direction than we’ve experienced it.

The title sequence prefaces the alternate reality that viewers are about to enter: a dim and menacing world in which the Axis powers defeated the Allies at the end of World War II. Hitler dropped a nuclear bomb on Washington, D.C., and the U.S. is no longer the land of the free (it has been partitioned between Japan and Germany). The opening shows a map of the “Pacific States” that lie to the west of the neutral zone, and the “Greater Reich” area to the east of it.

As the episode gets under way, viewers learn that an aging Hitler still stands at the helm of his empire in 1962, but that Parkinson’s is taking its toll on the fuhrer. Himmler and Goebbels wait in the wings, each vying for leadership and seemingly secretly plotting to do away with the partition and to take over all the territory once and for all.

“They deny it in public, but both men think the partition of the Americas was a mistake,” says a German official posing as a Swedish businessman and speaking confidentially to his Japanese counterparts. “They've dropped the bomb before, and they won't hesitate to drop it again.”

Jewish ancestry is mentioned once, in hushed tones: A young man and his girlfriend discuss the implications of his roots on marriage and children.

A police officer with a swastika on the arm of his uniform and a homegrown American accent casually mentions a hospital that on Tuesdays burns cripples and the terminally ill. As he speaks, flakes of what looks like ash float down from above.

A member of the resistance in New York is apprehended by Hitler’s Nazis in America and beaten savagely, tied at the wrists and dangled from the ceiling. On the other side of the neutral zone, a young girl is shot on the streets of San Francisco for carrying a prohibited film reel as part of her resistance work.

Viewers are obviously not getting a straightforward history lesson, but are seeing what could have happened. Conjuring and playing out the what ifs is perhaps an even more instructive and impactful exercise.

It was one such professor-sanctioned game of “what if” during my sophomore year of college that helped me put an end to my indecision—hemming and hawing between psychology, economics, and a handful of other prospective departments—and declare myself a history major.

In a course about Germany and the world wars, from its unification in 1870 through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent reunification, my professor assigned each student an identity. Every week, as our readings described a certain period, we would write the next chapter in our character’s lives.

Mine was Oskar Monzel, born to two Protestant agricultural day laborers in East Prussia at the turn of the 20th century. Building on those basic details, I had to write his trajectory from his childhood in the early 1900s to old age, when the Iron Curtain’s most concrete manifestation began crumbling.

Every week I would mull over his decisions. What would he do when faced with the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s? Would he be swayed enough by Hitler to vote for the future fuhrer in the 1933 election? What would happen if he met some of the other characters whose lives my classmates were writing?

By stepping into Oskar’s fictional shoes, I was forced to think about past as present. I’ll admit I have always loved history, but the thought experiment was thrilling in a way that few of my high school history classes had been. I’m certain the choose-your-own-adventure-type assignment left me with a fuller, richer take on the facts and chronologies.

Just as taking on a fictional identity helped open up a three-dimensional view of history, so can an alternate reality, in which one must gain a deep understanding of the real events and figures at play to extrapolate alternative outcomes.

To ponder how Hitler might have ruled over the Greater Reich, viewers have to think about how he built the Third Reich. To debate what American society would have looked like had the Allies lost the war, viewers need to understand the pre-war Depression era and all that led up to it.

“The Man in the High Castle” is also visually engaging, with landmarks like Times Square reimagined (think swastikas in place of Disney billboards). Even such background details succeed in pulling the viewer into the imagined world, similar enough to our own to feel familiar but also unequivocally different.

It all makes for a lesson that demands critical thinking skills not always summoned in the classroom. And one that’s far more enrapturing.