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Filmmaker Kyrre Lien Traveled the World Interviewing Internet Trolls in Person

Photo by Ysingrinus (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Three years ago, filmmaker Kyrre Lien became curious about what drives people to make hateful comments online. He pored over 200 online profiles and traveled the world to interview internet trolls in person to uncover why they say the things they do. Kyrre’s look into the bowels of humanity is at once absurd and terrifying — proof that hate and those with “illogical beliefs” may be living right next door. Watch Kyrre’s troll documentary at The Guardian.

Norwegian filmmaker Kyrre Lien began researching online commenters on Christmas Day 2014. “I became fascinated by how much hate and ignorance people were writing in the comments section of a news site,” he says, “so I began looking at people’s profiles, trying to work out who they were. Many seemed quite normal. They had families and looked like nice people, but the comments they were writing in a public space were so extreme. There was a disconnect.” And so began Lien’s three-year journey into the lives of some of the internet’s most prolific online commenters, now the subject of a documentary, The Internet Warriors.

Lien’s research took him across the world – from the fjords of Norway to the US desert – meeting people of extreme, “often illogical” beliefs: the racists, the homophobes, the slut-shamers. Lien initially researched 200 potential subjects. Half said no when he approached them. It was then a process of elimination: “To find out what their motives were, who they were, and why they held the views they did. In a way,” he says, “I became an investigator.”

Kjell Frode Tislevoll used to spend hours debating online. “Like when I commented on an article: ‘What we need in Oslo is a sidewalk for those with dark skin and a sidewalk for those with white skin. That way, we won’t be attacked or mugged.” He got 20 likes. Eventually he decided to apply a filter on Facebook, so he’d no longer see posts about immigration.

But things are changing for Tislevoll. Last year, a refugee reception centre was built in his home town, and he slowly found he was becoming “less sceptical of immigrants”. It coincided with the arrival of a Muslim man at work. “He’s OK,” he says, “so my issues with immigration are going away. If I met my former self in a discussion forum now, I’d probably get into an argument with him.”

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The Most Amazing Chef You’ve Never Heard of is a Zen Buddhist Nun

Photo by Y.E. Jung. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The New York Times Style Magazine, Jeff Gordinier profiles the most amazing chef you’ve never heard of: Jeong Kwan is a 59-year-old Zen Buddhist nun who cooks in a remote temple south of Seoul, South Korea. She has no restaurant, no customers, and no cookbooks, yet her vegan cuisine earns rave reviews from Michelin star chefs and restaurant critics alike.

Jeong Kwan has no restaurant. She has no customers. She has published no cookbooks. She has never attended culinary school, nor has she worked her way up through the high-pressure hierarchy of a four-star kitchen. Her name does not appear in any of those annual round-ups listing the greatest chefs in the world, although Ripert will assure you that she belongs among them, as do a few contemporaries of hers at temples throughout Korea.

Kwan is an avatar of temple cuisine, which has flowed like an underground river through Korean culture for centuries. Long before Western coinages like ‘‘slow food,’’ ‘‘farm-to-table’’ and ‘‘locavore,’’ generations of unsung masters at spiritual refuges like Chunjinam were creating a cuisine of refinement and beauty out of whatever they could rustle up from the surrounding land. Foraging? Fermenting? Dehydrating? Seasonality? Been there, done that — Jeong Kwan and her peers at monasteries throughout Korea have a millennia-spanning expertise in these currently in-vogue methods that can make a top chef feel like a clueless punk.

But Kwan’s lunch left me humbled and exhilarated. Here were compositions on the plate that were so elegant they could’ve been slipped into a tasting menu at Benu or Blanca and no one would have batted an eyelash. Here were flavors so assertive they seemed to leave vapor trails on the tongue. Somehow, all of it was vegan. Korean temple cuisine is made without meat, fish, dairy or even garlic or onions (which are believed to arouse the libido), and tasting it for the first time convinced me that vegan and vegetarian chefs in the West needed to board immediate flights to the Republic of Korea for a crash course in plant-based virtuosity.

But even if you can talk about food for hours, there comes a point when you need to make contact with it. Which is why Kwan has led us to the garden. Here, she coos over pumpkin blossoms, green chiles and eggplant, and shows me how to pluck leaves of mint and perilla — gently, with a moist pinch between my thumb and index finger at a firm spot on the stem. The leaves are placed in a wide basket; shortly they’ll be carried up the hill and incorporated into a meal. But for a moment I am encouraged to hold the leaves to my nostrils and breathe in their herbal fragrance.

Kwan believes that the ultimate cooking — the cooking that is best for our bodies and most delicious on our palates — comes from this intimate connection with fruits and vegetables, herbs and beans, mushrooms and grains. In her mind, there should be no distance between a cook and her ingredients. ‘‘That is how I make the best use of a cucumber,’’ she explains through a translator. ‘‘Cucumber becomes me. I become cucumber. Because I grow them personally, and I have poured in my energy.’’ She sees rain and sunshine, soil and seeds, as her brigade de cuisine. She sums it up with a statement that is as radically simple as it is endlessly complex: ‘‘Let nature take care of it.’’

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RAWR! What’s Happening to Me? The Truth is Out There (About Menopause)

Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel
Anderson and Nadel. Photo: AP Images

In this conversation at Lenny, Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel reflect on the maddening and sometimes little-known symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. The goal? To get more women talking about the flow and ebb of the female reproductive cycle and how it affects them, their work, their partners, and their families.

Gillian Anderson: Perimenopause, as I understand it, is a period of time that can last anywhere from a few years to even a decade before one’s period actually stops, before one actually goes into menopause proper. What happens is, over time our levels of estrogen start to deplete, and as a result we develop symptoms like anxiety, depression, mood swings, hot flashes, night sweats, fatigue, and find it harder and harder to cope with the normal routines of our lives.

Jennifer Nadel: Memory loss was a huge one for me. I thought that I was getting dementia. I would just go into my brain to try and pull a few facts off the shelf. I’d be halfway through a sentence and I simply couldn’t find them. And when that happens on a regular basis, it can get scary. You can stop wanting to engage in an argument or put your point across because you might forget what it is halfway through. I found myself becoming silent. I was losing my voice through fear of not being able to deliver in the way that I’d taken for granted all my life. Now I make myself speak, and if I forget or can’t locate the stats to back up my point, I tell the truth: “Sorry, it’s my menopause brain.” And when I own it out loud, the fear gets less, and I find other women start admitting it too.

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He Learned it All on Google and YouTube: How to Become a Gold Smuggler

Photo by Phillip Taylor. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Before getting nabbed by the Policía de Investigaciones — the Chilean equivalent of the FBI — 23-year-old Harold Vilches acquired and resold over 4,000 lbs. of gold worth $80 million in under two years. It all started with a Google search for gold dealers in Peru and YouTube videos on how to make your own gold ingots. Read the story at Bloomberg Businessweek by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin.

As the minutes ticked by on the afternoon of April 28, 2015, Harold Vilches watched stoically while customs officers at Santiago’s international airport scrutinized his carry-on. Inside the roller bag was 44 pounds of solid gold, worth almost $800,000, and all the baby-faced, 21-year-old college student wanted was clearance to get on a red-eye to Miami.

Vilches didn’t need this headache. In just two years he had rapidly risen in the ranks of Latin American gold smugglers. Although he was barely old enough to order a beer in Miami, he’d won a $101 million contract to supply a gold dealer in Dubai. That hadn’t exactly worked out—the Dubai company was after him for $5.2 million it says he misappropriated—but still, in a brief career he’d acquired and then resold more than 4,000 lb. of gold, according to Chilean prosecutors. U.S. investigators and Chilean prosecutors suspect almost all of it was contraband.

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Why Populism Will Not Make America Great: The Making of a Mexican-American Dream

Photo by Michael Dougherty (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Pacific Standard, Sarah Menkedick profiles Vianney Bernabé, exploring what it means to be second-generation Mexican American today — a person with deep roots in Mexico and feet and future planted firmly in America. Educated, ambitious, and principled, Bernabé is destined for success. Menkedick posits that if America cannot reject this myopic resurgence of nativist (white) populism to embrace the skills and culture of Bernabé’s generation, it does so at its own peril.

Vianney embodies two fundamental American traditions: the dream of triumphing over adversity to achieve success, and its nightmare shadow of xenophobia, fear, and hatred.

What these young Latinos become will be determined not only by their own struggles and achievements, but also by the willingness of many Americans to rethink their fundamental conceptions of Americanness, to recognize the dangerous fiction of an essential, unchanging America defined solely by white culture.

Mexico gave Vianney what the United States could not: the ability to believe in herself. It did this not by granting her unequivocal acceptance or answering the persistent questions of belonging posed in the U.S., but by forcing her to come to terms with her ambivalence. It allowed her to acknowledge that she was American, but an American for whom Americanness did not mean unquestioning assimilation into white institutions, but solidarity with the many people excluded from these institutions. It granted her a new faith in herself in spite of the hatred and oppression. It familiarized her with in-betweenness, a state deeply and violently resisted in the U.S., where patriotism is feverish and flavorless, where you are with us or against us, where, at this moment in time, simply speaking Spanish or wearing a hijab is enough to elicit righteous white rage.

She returned to the United States in August of 2016, when the message being blared to Latinos was precisely the opposite: Not only were they not good enough, they were rapists, drug dealers, “bad hombres.” Vianney, with her hard-won confidence in herself, and her renewed commitment to help those left out of American progress, came home to the feverish chanting of Build the wall! Donald Trump’s victory in November — despite his losing the popular vote by a historic margin — has legitimized and strengthened a vision of the United States in which only white people belong and have ever belonged. The most popular, foundational myth of the United States as the land of freedom for the world’s oppressed has been eclipsed by the ever-present but thinly buried myth of white dominance and superiority.

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Weight Loss Does Not Cure Depression: How the World’s Heaviest Man Lost it All

Photo by amenclinicsphotos ac (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At GQ, Justin Heckert profiles Paul Mason, who ballooned to 980 lbs. eating to forget childhood abuse and horrific loneliness. Mason lost 700 lbs. after bariatric surgery and discovers that, despite the experiences now available to him with newfound mobility, happiness remains elusive; dramatic weight loss does nothing to treat the underlying depression and emotional trauma that caused him to eat to excess in the first place.

His father, Roy, was overweight and contracted diabetes at age 29. “I remember one Sunday mum cooking salad,” Mason said. “Mum had prepared a salad for all of us with some cold meat. We weren’t allowed to sit at the table until dad sat down. He sat down and looked at the plate, and said, ‘What’s this rabbit food?’ She said, ‘I thought we’d have a change.’ He slammed his plate across the table and said, ‘I want my roast. Now go in the kitchen and cook it.’ She just started crying. He would force us to eat the same size plates as he did. He was quite barbaric.”

That’s when he began to indulge in the comforts of food, which briefly lifted his spirits every time he tasted it. “It hit the back of your throat, and you’ve got that endorphin that’s released in your brain and that makes you feel good. I began to be just like a drunk. I didn’t realize what I was doing to myself.”

His new life was full of wonder, and yet defined by all his old burdens. He still needed huge amounts of medical care. He didn’t have a car. He didn’t have a driver’s license. He didn’t have a social security number. He didn’t have a job. He said that he received $197 a week in pension from the U.K., which is how he afforded his $125 a week rent and the money he spent on groceries from Walmart, where he zipped around on a scooter. When I asked him what he did with himself, how he spent his days, he said “Walmart.” When I asked him how he got around, he said he waited on the bus sometimes, out there on the concrete stoop near the road, and other times he asked either neighbors or worshippers at his local Salvation Army church to take him where he needed to go. When I asked if he had friends, he demurred and then said, “Yeah, a couple.”

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Where Cult Fame and Real-Life Tragedy Intersect: ‘Zelda: Majora’s Mask’

Photo by Farley Santos (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The video game Zelda: Majora’s Mask — the “black sheep” of the Zelda franchise, notable for an apocalyptic storyline that’s a stark departure for the beloved princess-saving series — became a cult object that spawned a fan-made, horror-based, “creepypasta” storyline called Ben Drowned. At The Ringer, Victor Luckerson reports on the terrifying connections between Ben Drowned and the story of Katelyn Davis, the 12-year-old girl who committed suicide live online in December, 2016.

The blog attributed to Katelyn largely focuses on her inner struggles and challenges with her family, except for one post that focuses on a person she calls “Ben Drowned.” She wrote that he is the “real” Ben Drowned but that she hasn’t talked to him in months. From the blog post alone, it’s unclear whether Katelyn is talking about the fictionalized character that has spread across the web or an actual person who assumed the alias “Ben Drowned.” The videos that appear to feature Katelyn before her death seem to suggest that “Ben” is a person who catfished her in a false online relationship.

“I can’t live without him,” the post reads. It’s accompanied by a piece of fan art of the “Ben Drowned” character from the Majora’s Mask creepypasta, featuring a Link with blood-red eyes beckoning a violet fairy. The page header features a photo of a girl who appears to be Katelyn next to another dark drawing of Link. The post also references “Slender Man.”

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Uncommon Ancestry: Your Dad is My Dad?

Photo by JaredZammit (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Hazlitt, Alison Motluk writes on how fertility doctors impregnating their own clients is more common than you might think and on how the law around tracking sperm donors and donations is impotent against the problem.

Kat Palmer learned in grade nine biology that two blue-eyed parents can’t have a brown-eyed child. She thought that was curious, because she had brown eyes and both her parents had blue. But when she joked about it at home, she got a shock: her mother told her she’d been conceived at a fertility clinic, using sperm from an anonymous donor. The man she knew and loved as her dad was not her biological father.

Palmer knew she sort of looked like him, but she felt she looked like a lot of the Jewish men she knew, including her dad. The cousin helped her draft an email to Barwin, in which she used both genetics and genealogy to raise the possibility that he might be her biological father. She expected the doctor to ignore her, but he emailed back within the hour, with a phone number.

When she called him, about a week later, he was apologetic and baffled. He just couldn’t fathom how this had happened, he told her. The only thing he could think of was that he’d bought a new sperm counting machine that same year, and perhaps he had contaminated it when he was testing it with his own semen.

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On Bearing Witness: Saving Chickens, Saving Myself

Photo by Vince Wingate (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Catapult, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee reflects on seeing and “being seen” — the silent gift of bearing witness to one another and individual suffering as a way of offering comfort and hope.

Last year, I watched a young woman meander toward the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge every five steps. I asked her if she was enjoying her Christmas Eve—and did she see the seals below in the water?

She smiled. I was not sure it was a real smile. But she did not venture toward the edge again. I know this, because I followed her at a distance to the other side.

In years past, I would have looked the other way. I would have thought it was not my business. In years past, I was that young girl. But my aunt kept me in her line of sight. She didn’t tell me to keep walking, I just did. And I knew she was behind me the entire time.

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Leaving Aleppo: ‘A distant star / Exhausts its light on the sleep of the dead.’

At The New Yorker, Pauls Toutonghi lovingly recalls his grandfather, Philippe Elias Tütünji, a writer, poet, and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Tütünji immigrated to America during World War II and never gave up his dream to achieve success as a poet in his adopted homeland. Working menial, low-paying jobs to support his family, and “full of immigrant ambition,” he once visited actor Danny Thomas in a bid to entice Thomas to record one of his poems as a song — a feat Tütünji believed would make him a star.

And so when my oldest aunt, Agnes, got a job as a stenographer at Standard Oil, and, with dizzying speed, met a young Standard Oil geologist, married him, and moved to Los Angeles, my grandfather decided that the rest of the family would follow. He fled again. The Toutonghis raffled off all their possessions to pay for tickets on an ocean liner. On May 26, 1946, they disembarked from Alexandria, Egypt, on the S.S. Vulcania, bound for New York City. On the ship’s Immigration and Naturalization Service Form I-415—a form that is still in use today—my family’s race is listed as Syrian. In the next column, the one reserved for country of citizenship, there is a different word: “Stateless.” Upon arrival in Manhattan, the Toutonghis collected their luggage and spent their last money on bus tickets bound for California. Stateless, they began a new life in a new nation—one that was, for the most part, open and welcoming to these hopeful refugees.

Still, my grandfather was a recent immigrant, full of ambition. He was a poet, and he’d written a few lyric stanzas in English, which he dreamed of turning into a song. It was, he would always claim—even decades later—a poem worth “a million dollars,” and “unlike anything anyone had ever heard.” On the day of his meeting with Thomas, he went to the post office and spent twenty-eight cents to send the poem to himself through registered mail—a poor man’s copyright. On the envelope, he wrote his address, twice, and then added, underlined: “Poeme in English,” and “its title had never been used.”

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