This story appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe. In the THUMP Guide to Drugs column , Anna Codrea-Rado interviews experts to find out what clubbers need to know about their substances. Since the 1940s, scientists have researched how the psychedelic drug LSD—or acid—…

In tough times , people want more in a leader than intelligence, integrity, or the ability to build really tall walls. They want someone who can make a compelling pitch and inspire a sense of urgency—someone with charisma. For decades, scholars have struggled to define this X factor, but they are…

PYONGYANG -- North Korea says it is “on the brink of war” with the U.S. In an interview with CBS News’ Ben Tracy, one of the nation’s senior officials has accused the Trump administration of wanting to “annihilate” his country and blamed the escalating tension on the Korean Peninsula squarely on the…

"The internet is shit today. It's broken. It was probably always broken, but it's worse than ever." My conversation with Peter Sunde , one of the founders and spokespersons of The Pirate Bay, did not start out optimistically. There's good reason for that: In the last couple of months, the…

Robert Voets/CBS In the seventh episode of CBS' Survivor: Game Changers , castaway Zeke Smith — returning for his second appearance in two seasons — was outed by a fellow contestant as transgender. In the following exclusive column for The Hollywood Reporter , Zeke — one of very few players in show…

“My prettiest contribution to my culture,” the writer Kurt Vonnegut mused in his 1981 autobiography Palm Sunday , “was a master’s thesis in anthropology which was rejected by the University of Chicago a long time ago.” By then, he said, the thesis had long since vanished. (“It was rejected because…

The U.S. is reportedly ready to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea if officials believe Pyongyang is going to go through with a nuclear weapons test. Citing multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials, NBC News reported Thursday that the U.S. is prepared to launch the strike against…

One man said he was held in an informal detention facility with more than a dozen gay men who were all tortured on a daily basis.Photograph: Putra Kurniawan/EyeEm/Getty Images At least once a day, Adam’s captors attached metal clamps to his fingers and toes. One of the men then cranked a handle on a…

23andMe can now sell spit-based genetic tests that estimate a person’s health risk for certain diseases directly to consumers. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told gene-testing company 23andMe that it will be allowed to directly tell consumers whether their DNA puts them at higher risk…

Photo of Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov: AP In recent weeks, a humanitarian crisis in the Russian republic of Chechnya, where authorities are reportedly rounding up gay men to torture and kill them, has been a subject of increasing media scrutiny. Earlier this week, after an April 4 story in…

Drivers have found a loophole in Uber’s fare calculations. Uber charges riders at the time of booking by guessing what a trip will cost. But it calculates driver pay based on actual miles and minutes. This system is called “upfront” pricing and it can lead to major disparities between what a rider…

On FT's Alphaville, Izabella Kaminska takes note of the excellent, deep series on Uber's Ponzi-economics that Hubert Horan published last year on Naked Capitalism and calls out some juicy highlights. "Costs are costs, even if you're a monopoly" -- so the fact that Uber loses (a lot ) of money on…

Image: Facebook/Audra D. Bridges As you’ve surely* seen by now, the big story of the day has to do with viral videos of some confusing group of United Airlines security and/or cops—it doesn’t matter, they’re all The Man— violently dragging a ticketed passenger out of his seat and off an overbooked…

Imagine going to work at 7:30 every night and spending the next 12 hours, including meals and breaks, inside a factory where your only job is to insert a single screw into the back of a smartphone, repeating the task over and over and over again. During the day, you sleep in a shared dorm room, and…

Illustration by Angelica Alzona Unique to the digital age is the video content creation industry, one where employees are “users” and employers are “platforms.” In it, workers aren’t owed squat. When there are tech issues, they can visit the support page. When there are platform updates, a lot of…

There they were, gathered around the fire at Tribal Council on Wednesday night’s episode of “Survivor.” One of the contestants, Jeff Varner, in a last-ditch attempt to keep himself from being voted off the show, turned to a man by his side. “Why haven’t you told anyone you are transgender?” he said.…

“Charging Bull” had a message for “Fearless Girl” on Wednesday, and it was more “Get out of my space” than “Here’s looking at you, kid.” The message actually came from Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor who created “ Charging Bull ” nearly 30 years ago. He also copyrighted and trademarked the…

Smart brush, dumb hair. This won’t end well. What a pompous name, too. The Kérastase Hair Coach Powered By Withings.

The Trump administration is hoping that its cruise missile strikes will solve a problem that has defied years of efforts: the willingness of the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, to use chemical weapons. But in a war with many dilemmas, this may be among the most intractable, analysts say. It is…

By TJ Love Ostensibly, science and magic are diametrically opposed. Prior to the Enlightenment and the advance of the scientific method, however, when chemistry was alchemy, the line between the two were curiously blurred. In certain instances, chemistry creates magic, most particularly in Hip-Hop.…

Five inmates from the Marion Correctional Institution (MCI) built two computers from spare parts, hid them in the ceiling of a training room closet, and used them to hack into the prison's network. Their actions were discovered in July 2015, when the prison's IT staff switched internal proxy servers…

Enlarge / The Dallas skyline. Abhishek Chinchalkar on flickr Late Friday night and early Saturday morning, hackers set off 156 emergency sirens in and around the city of Dallas, Texas. According to The Dallas Morning News , the sirens began blaring shortly before midnight on Friday and were shut off…

(Photo: Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC) Saturday Night LiveSeason 42 Saturday Night LiveSeason 42 "Louis CK/The Chainsmokers" B Saturday Night LiveSeason 42 "Louis CK/The Chainsmokers" B B "Louis CK/The Chainsmokers" Episode 17 “I’m not an actor, I’m a [comedy auteur and standup] star!” Louis CK got plenty…

2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team Trains For Iraq Deployment Photo by Lucy Pemoni/Getty Images What if virtual reality wasn’t just a new way to play games or watch movies? What if the technology wasn’t just creating new methods of communication, of medical treatment, of military training? What if…

WASHINGTON — The American military strike against Syria threatened Russian-American relations on Friday as the Kremlin denounced President Trump ’s use of force and the Russian military announced that it was suspending an agreement to share information about air operations over the country, devised…

President Trump making a statement about the bombing in Syria at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fl Doug Mills/The New York Times The agony of Donald Trump — well, one of the many agonies — is that there are times when he will actually do the right thing, or at least a defensible thing, and we’ll…

CNN host Fareed Zakaria speaks about President Donald Trump’s missile strikes on Syria during an ‘Anderson Cooper 360°’ segment. (Screengrab / CNN) It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is to me nonetheless: Plenty of liberals who’ve long criticized Donald Trump as unfit to be president are praising…

Auto-play videos lurking in unopened tabs. Pop-ups that won’t go away. Photos that won’t load. Text that’s invaded by ads. It’s hard to complain about the internet without feeling like a mom struggling to post on Facebook, but going online has started to feel like an assault on the senses. The…

Twenty-three years ago, Ken Lunde stood onstage at the Unicode conference–a gathering of people concerned with how every language is presented across the internet, from Swahili to Bengali. Amid a room full of fellow typographical scholars, he outlined a problem faced by a fifth of the world’s…

On Thursday night, virtually all national advertisers abandoned The O’Reilly Factor, the nation’s top-rated cable news show. The program included just seven advertisements and was, without warning or explanation, cut 15 minutes short. More than 50 advertisers have announced they will stop airing ads…

Update April 11, 2017: G2A have responded to comments made to us by Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail last week, saying keys that are scammed by email are classed as legitimate because they come from developers. “As you can see on the example of Rami Ismail, keys are legitimate, because they come from…

In his first major interview in over a year, Molyneux opens up about his legacy, his empathy for the 'No Man's Sky' team, and redefining himself W hen Peter Molyneux – the charismatic designer of Fable , Populous , and Black & White , among other seminal video games – announced a couple of years ago…

(Getty Images/Ringer illustration) Alec Baldwin’s best movie is It’s Complicated . Can we agree on this? Should we start off our thorough appraisal of his career and evolving public persona by discussing this? OK. Consider his last scene in the movie, a tender and melancholy porch-swing conversation…

D onald Trump, the man who just over a month ago wanted to bar entry of all Syrian refugees into the United States, now wants us to think that he cares deeply about Syrian children. I don’t believe it. What I do believe is that our president is a bad actor. He was a bad actor on his old television…

Some of President Trump’s most ardent campaign supporters were among his most vocal opponents on Thursday after he ordered the missile strike against Syria, charging him with breaking his promise to keep the United States out of another conflict in the Middle East. Prominent writers and bloggers on…

Don Rickles , the acidic stand-up comic who became world-famous not by telling jokes but by insulting his audience, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90. The cause was kidney failure, said a spokesman, Paul Shefrin. For more than half a century, on nightclub stages, in concert…

Psst! Hey…You know there’s a simple way to get engineers to build what you want, and as a bonus you can call it “agile”…Shh! Try to keep this technique quiet. You see it’s all about user stories. All you have to do is write something like this: The format is simple: As a user, I want so that .…

The secretive ride-hailing giant Uber rarely discusses internal matters in public. But in March, facing crises on multiple fronts, top officials convened a call for reporters to insist that Uber was changing its culture and would no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks.” Notably, the company also…

Credit: Jirsak/Shutterstock Hiring today looks very different than it did just a decade or two ago. The days of handing out resumes are all but over. The process of collecting and analyzing job applications have moved in a completely digital direction – and it provides richer insights into…