This awesome photo, taken by Paul Souders and entitled "The Ice Bear," was just named the grand-prize winner of National Geographic's 2013 Photography Contest. 

The shot beat out more than 7,000 other entries to win the title, which comes with a $10,000 prize and a trip to National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

Souders' original captions reads: "A polar bear peers up from beneath the melting sea ice on Hudson Bay as the setting midnight sun glows red from the smoke of distant fires during a record-breaking spell of hot weather. The Manitoba population of polar bears, the southernmost in the world, is particularly threatened by a warming climate and reduced sea ice."

According to an interview with Proof, National Geographic's photo blog, Souders has photographed wildlife for the past 20 years.  The moment he captured the bear underwater, however, was a special one. 

"The bear swam up to the iceberg, ducked under and stayed underwater for several seconds as I moved my zodiac into position and then held out the camera on a six-foot boom near the entrance. I didn’t fire until she came up to breathe and take a look at me, and I kept firing the shutter as she submerged again," he said to Proof. "She hung there, just below the surface, watching me, then came up for another breath before swimming away. I couldn’t see her from where I sat in my small zodiac boat; I was shooting blind with the wide angle. I sensed it was a unique situation, but the first thought in my mind was that I really didn’t want to screw up." 

NOW SEE: The Rest Of The Winners Of This Year's National Geographic Photography Contest

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There are two ways that underground venues die in NYC, and famed 'throw-it-yourself-and-whatever party' space 285 Kent is rumored to be going through one of them.

Here's how it goes:

1. The cops go in during the day, find what they need to shut a space down, and the next time you go there to get your party on the doors are shut and the spot is abandoned.

2. There's an announcement from the venue: 'This is our last show for a while. Maybe we'll be back, maybe we won't be back.' After a while, people forget about this news, until they want to get their party on. Then one of your friends, a smart friend, says 'hey what happened to...' Then you all say: 'NOOOOOOO.' Because you realize it's never coming back.

285 Kent is a #2. Gothamist reports that it had its last concert last night. Promoters are saying it's still possible that the party could revive itself in a bit, but no concerts are scheduled for the foreseeable future and NYC has seen this play before.

It doesn't usually end well.

Here's what 285 Kent was like. 285 Kent was dirty. The floors are concrete and the bathroom is one of the most disgusting holes you've ever been in in your life. There isn't a real bar — just a set of tables smashed together with bottles of liquor on top. As such, it's really cheap to drink there.

But you do (did) have to pay to get in. That is because 285 Kent hosted some seriously talented musicians from around the country and the world — anything from musicians on underground labels like Oakland's Stones Throw Records to legendary house DJs like DJ Nature.

It was a regular hang for house heads, dub step fiends, indie rock bands, and kids that generally don't like rules. 285 Kent stayed open late.

Naturally this kind of activity has attracted negative attention. I won't name any names but I've known a few DJs that have had to jam out of the space really fast to avoid the cops — I know some lighting engineers that weren't fast enough to make it.

But it was worth it. People like to do what they want when they can do what they want, in their free time. Sometimes that means dancing until 6 in the morning while drinking whiskey from a bottle that says Jack Daniels but probably isn't Jack Daniels.

In New York City this kind of activity can be illegal. You need permits to serve liquor. You need to not bother your neighbors with noise (increasingly a problem in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like Williamsburg).

You need to pay your rent (increasingly a problem in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like Williamsburg — this is likely 285 Kent's issue).

So this may very well be the end of a stellar space. If it's not, I'm grateful. The party gods have smiled on NYC and given us a few more nights to roll in the mud.

If this is true then I'm sorry.

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In a decision that surprised a lot of people this month, India's Supreme Court Wednesday reinstated a colonial-era ban on gay sex that enables the jailing of homosexuals. The law — section 377 of the Indian penal code — prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" and had been ruled an infringement of human rights in 2009. India, one of the world's largest countries, rejoined the list of 77 countries that outlaw homosexual acts.

The law has been met with anger and exasperation from India's LGBT community and their supporters. Today, India Today, an English-language magazine with a circulation of 1.6 million, published an article by Vikram Seth, the celebrated author of A Suitable Boy, one of the longest books ever written in the English-language.

The striking cover gives you an idea of what lies inside:

Inside Seth writes a short but powerful article on love, whether it is heterosexual or homosexual. "To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away," he writes. "To do this to someone else is to murder their soul."

Talking to the BBC's Soutik Biswas, Seth — who identifies as a bisexual — explained why he felt compelled to write the article. "It takes a fair amount to get me incensed," he said. "And a judgement which takes away the liberties of at least 50 million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in India is scandalous, it's inhumane — and if you wish, you can remove the e at the end of that word.

You can read his entire India Today essay here.

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Guys, it's time to clear up some misconceptions about your suits and how they fit.

Why?

Because these misconceptions are making you — a. look frumpy, b. spend too much money, c. look cheap, d. look unprofessional.

You deserve better. Business Insider reached deep into the souls of men (asked around) to find out what exactly guys think about their suits.

What we found shocked us. No, suits do not have to be loose to be comfortable. No, your accessories should not match your suit... no no no.

Our friend Judah Estreicher over at JBD Clothiers, a custom suit shop that outfits businessmen and Baltimore Ravens alike, clarified these fallacies for us.

Lets walk you through:

1. Misconception: Business attire is always formal. Reality: You can dress relaxed and even business casual and still look like you’re dressed for the office. Be informed on the expectations of your office and the particular circumstances like interviews, meetings, casual Fridays, office party etc.
   
   
2. Misconception: Loose clothing makes you look better or is more comfortable. Reality: People think that if they are overweight, looser clothing will hide their body and make them look thinner. In reality, a well fitted suit tailored to their proportions will make them look their best.
   
   
3. Misconception: Business attire is not fashionable or comfortable. Reality: Business attire can be both fashionable and comfortable. Fashionable - business attire can look conservative and modern at the same time. You can get a business suit with the subtle bits of style that will keep you looking current. Comfort - If the fit is right, it will be comfortable enough to wear all day at the office.
   
   
4. Misconception: Custom clothing is extremely expensive. Reality: At custom suit shops like JBD Clothiers, suits can actually cost less than some of the high end clothing in store prices. It is also better value for your money.
   
   
5. Misconception: Custom clothing is always tight. Reality: Custom clothing will be made to your preference whether that is tight or not. Clothes should feel good on you and fit comfortably.
   
   
6. Misconception: Men always have to wear black shoes. Reality: Light brown shoes are actually a staple of the male wardrobe and go well with many different types of clothing and colors.
   
   
7. Misconception: everything always has to “match” including belt and shoes. Reality: Clothing and accessories don't have to be and shouldn't be the same color. They can be different patterns and even different colors/shades of colors that just blend well together. Sometimes a contrast can look great! For example, wearing light brown shoes with a dark brown belt, or a tie with thick stripes or large patterns can go with a shirt that has thin stripes or small patterns.
   
   
8. Misconception: Dressing well is a large time commitment and lot of effort. Reality: Shopping and going from store to store buying all your different articles of clothing and accessories is usually very time consuming. On the other hand when you meet with a clothier who fits you and helps you style your clothes, it saves a lot of time since you get everything in one place and have someone personally assisting you with all of your needs.
   
   
9. Misconception: Styles are always changing so it’s hard to build a wardrobe. Reality: There are always classic basics that never go out of style. Spend money on the things that are more classic that you can wear for a long time. You can always add bits of stylish flair to your clothes with pocket squares, ties, cuff links, and socks that will change and update your look and make you look more trendy without having to buy completely new clothes.
   
   
10. Misconception: You can only look good if you’re thin. Reality: Everyone can look good with a well fitted outfit no matter what size you are.

So get over this and start dressing like an adult.

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At this point you've been to 75,000 holiday parties and worn every last fresh outfit you can think of.

Unfortunately, however, the season is not over. Until January 1st, there's no letting up on the family gatherings, the work "parties", the cocktails, and the formal dinners.

Gentlemen, that means you need to step up your game.

Fortunately, there are people on the internet freely giving out ideas and inspiration. Consider it a public service. All you need to do is follow them on Instagram and let their creativity flow to you.

To pick out some of the lesser known creatives, Business Insider consulted some of our favorite fashion bloggers, like The Fine Young Gentleman, and fashion entrepreneurs Hugh and Crye. You'll see some well known names on this list too — like GQ magazine and Bergdorf Goodman.

Remember: Whether or not you want to spend an arm and a leg on your clothes, ideas can come from anywhere, so check these early and often. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice.

TSBmen @TSBmen — A fashion blog that has exploded into something much bigger. Founder Dan Trepanier was elected Esquire's 'best dressed' man in 2009, and from then on it was all magic.

@tsbmen

Brian Sacawa @hespokestyle — "Brian is our neighbor to the north (Baltimore)," say the guys from Hugh and Crye, "and has a timeless, classic sense of style. We love the fresh looks he creates with a simple set of staples: well fitting shirts, slacks and blazers."

@hespokestyle

Bergdorf Goodman @bergdorfs — This store needs no introduction. Forget the price tags, just watch the cuts, the colors... you get the picture.

@bergdorfs

It was only a matter of time before the tech world tried to rewrite history.

Stony Brook University computer science professor Steven Skiena and Google software engineer Charles B. Ward take on this ambitious task in a book published this fall: "Who's Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank."

Just as Google ranks web pages, the researchers created an algorithm that ranks historical figures by Wikipedia PageRank, article length, and readership, as well as achievement and celebrity.

Their conclusions have not come without controversy. The top 100 significant figures are overwhelming white and male. For example, Nelson Mandela, who helped end Apartheid in South Africa, ranked only 356. And just three women broke the top 100. 

Cass Sunstein of "The New Republic" wrote a sprawling analysis of their findings. She questions not only if we can measure historical significance, but whether we should and certainly why the authors relied solely on the English-language version of Wikipedia. On that note, perhaps we could call these the most important figures in Western history.

Here's the top 100:

1. Jesus: central figure of Christianity (7 B.C. - A.D. 30) 

2. Napoleon: Emperor of France, involved in the Battle of Waterloo (1769 - 1821)

3. Muhammad: prophet and founder of Islam (570 - 632)

4. William Shakespeare: English playwright, wrote "Hamlet" (1564 - 1616)

5. Abraham Lincoln: 16th U.S. president, involved in the Civil War (1809 - 1865)

6. George Washington: 1st U.S. president, involved in the American Revolution (1732 - 1799)

7. Adolf Hitler: Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, involved in World War II (1889 - 1945)

8. Aristotle: Greek philosopher and polymath (384 - 322 B.C.)

9. Alexander the Great: Greek king and conqueror of the known world (356 - 323 B.C.)

10. Thomas Jefferson: 3rd U.S. president, co-wrote the Declaration of Independence (1743 - 1826)

11. Henry VII: King of England, had six wives (1491 - 1547)

12. Charles Darwin: scientist, created the Theory of Evolution (1809 - 1882)

13. Elizabeth I: Queen of England, known as "The Virgin Queen" (1533 - 1603)

14. Karl Marx: philosopher, wrote the "Communist Manifesto" (1818 - 1883)

15. Julius Caesar: Roman general and statesmen, said "Et tu, Brute?" (100 - 44 B.C.)

16. Queen Victoria: Queen of Britain, Victorian Era (1819 - 1901)

17. Martin Luther: Protestant Reformation, wrote the "95 Theses" (1483 - 1546)

18. Joseph Stalin: Premier of USSR, involved in World War II (1878 - 1953)

19. Albert Einstein: theoretical physicist, created the Theory of Relativity (1879 - 1955)

20. Christopher Columbus: explorer, discoverer of the New World (1451 - 1506)

21. Isaac Newton: scientist, created the Theory of Gravity (1643 - 1727)

22. Charlemagne: first Holy Roman Emporer, considered the "Father of Europe" (742 - 814)

23. Theodore Roosevelt: 26th U.S. president, Progressive Movement (1858 - 1919)

24. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Austrian composer, wrote "Don Giovanni" (1756 - 1791)

25. Plato: Greek philosopher, wrote "The Republic" (427 - 347 B.C.)

26. Louis XIV: King of France, known as The Sun King (1638 - 1715)

27. Ludwig Von Beethoven: German composer, wrote "Ode to Joy" (1770 - 1827)

28. Ulysses S. Grant: 18th U.S. president and Civil War general (1822 - 1885)

29. Leonardo da Vinci: Italian artist and polymath, painted the "Mona Lisa" (1452 - 1519)

30. Augustus: First Emporer of Rome, Pax Romana (63 B.C. - A.D. 14)

31. Carl Linnaeus: Swedish biologist, father of Taxonomy (1707 - 1778)

32. Ronald Reagan: 40th U.S. president, Conservative Revolution (1911 - 2004)

33. Charles Dickens: English novelist, wrote "David Copperfield" (1812 - 1870

34. Paul the Apostle: Christian apostle and missionary (A.D. 5 - A.D. 67)

35. Benjamin Franklin: Founding father, scientist, captured lightning (1706 - 1790)

36. George W. Bush: 43rd U.S. president during the Iraq War (1946 - )

37. Winston Churchill: Prime Minister of Britain, involved in World War II (1874 - 1965)

38. Genghis Khan: Founder of the Mongol Empire (1162 - 1227)

39. Charles I: King of England, involved in the English Civil War (1600 - 1649)

40. Thomas Edison: Inventor of the light bulb and phonograph (1847 - 1931)

41. James I: King of England, responsible for the King James Bible (1566 - 1625)

42. Friedrich Nietzsche: German philosopher, "God is dead" (1844 - 1900)

43. Franklin D. Roosevelt: 32nd U.S. President, responsible for the New Deal (1882 - 1945)

44. Sigmund Freud: neurologist and creator of psychoanalysis (1856 - 1939)

45. Alexander Hamilton: U.S. Founding Father, National Bank (1755 - 1804)

46. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Indian nationalist leader, instrumental in non-violence (1869 - 1948)

47. Woodrow Wilson: 28th U.S.  president, involved in World War I (1856 - 1924)

48. Johann Sebastian Bach: Classical composer, wrote the "Well Tempered Clavier" (1685 - 1750)

49. Galileo Galilei: Italian physicist and astronomer (1564 - 1642)

50. Oliver Cromwell: Lord Protector of England, involved in the English Civil War (1599 - 1658)

51. James Madison: 4th U.S. president, involved in the War of 1812 (1751 - 1836)

52. Guatama Buddha: central figure of Buddhism (563 - 483 B.C.)

53. Mark Twain: American author, wrote "Huckleberry Finn" (1835 - 1910)

54. Edgar Allen Poe: American author, wrote "The Raven" (1809 - 1849)

55. Joseph Smith: American religious leader, founded Mormonism (1805 - 1844)

56. Adam Smith: Economist, wrote "The Wealth Of Nations" (1723 - 1790)

57. David: Biblical King of Israel, founded Jerusalem (1040 - 970 B.C.)

58. George III: King of England, involved in the American Revolution (1738 - 1820)

59. Immanuel Kant: German philosopher, wrote "Critique Of Pure Reason" (1724 - 1804)

60. James Cook: Explorer and discoverer of Hawaii and Australia (1728 - 1779)

61. John Adams: Founding Father and 2nd U.S. president (1735 - 1826)

62. Richard Wagner: German composer, wrote "Der Ring Des Nibelungen" (1813 - 1883)

63. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Russian composer, wrote the "1812 Overture" (1840 - 1893)

64. Voltaire: French Enlightenment philosopher, wrote "Candidate" (1694 - 1778)

65. Saint Peter: Early Christian leader (?-?)

66. Andrew Jackson: 7th U.S. president, also known as "Old Hickory" (1767 - 1845)

67. Constantine the Great: Emperor of Rome, first Christian emperor (272-337)

68. Socrates: Greek philosopher and teacher, sentenced to death by hemlock (469 - 399 B.C.)

69. Elvis Presley: The "king of rock and roll" (1935 - 1977)

70. William the Conqueror: King of England, Norman Conquest (1027 - 1087)

71. John F. Kennedy: 35th U.S. president, Cuban Missile Crisis (1917 - 1963)

72. Augustine of Hippo: Early Christian theologian, wrote "The City of God" (354 - 430)

73. Vincent Van Gogh: Post-impressionist painter, painted "Starry Night" (1853 - 1890)

74. Nicolaus Copernicus: Astronomer, theorized a heliocentric cosmology (1473 - 1543)

75. Vladimir Lenin: Soviet revolutionary and Premier of USSR (1870 - 1924)

76. Robert E. Lee: Confederate General during the U.S. Civil War (1807 - 1870)

77. Oscar Wilde: Irish author and poet, wrote "The Picture of Dorian Grey" (1854 - 1900)

78. Charles II: King of England, post-Cromwell (1630 - 1685)

79. Cicero: Roman statesman and orator, wrote "On the Republic" (106 - 43 B.C.)

80. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: philosopher, wrote "On the Social Contract" (1712 - 1778)

81. Francis Bacon: English scientist, created the Scientific Method (1561 - 1626)

82. Richard Nixon: 37th U.S. president, involved in Watergate (1913 - 1994)

83. Louis XVI: King of France, executed in the French Revolution (1754 - 1793)

84. Charles V: Holy Roman Emporer during the Counter-Reformation (1500 - 1558)

85. King Arthur: Mythical 6th-century King of Britain (? - ?)

86. Michelangelo: Italian sculptor and Renaissance man, sculpted "David" (1475 - 1564)

87. Philip II: King of Spain, organized the Spanish Armada (1527 - 1598)

88. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: German writer and polymath, wrote "Faust" (1749 - 1832)

89. Ali: Early Caliph and a central figure of Sufism (598 - 661)

90. Thomas Aquinas: Italian theologian, "Summa theologiae" (1225 - 1274)

91. Pope John Paul II: 20th-century Polish Pope, Solidarity (1920 - 2005)

92. Rene Descartes: French philosopher, coined "I think, therefore I am" (1596 - 1650)

93. Nikola Tesla: Inventor, discovered alternating current (1856 - 1943)

94. Harry S. Truman: 33rd U.S. president, involved in the Korean War (1884 - 1972)

95. Joan of Arc: French military leader and saint (1412 - 1431)

96. Dante Alighieri: Italian poet, wrote the "Divine Comedy" (1265 - 1321)

97. Otto von Bismarck: 1st chancellor and unifier of modern Germany (1815 - 1898)

98. Grover Cleveland: 22nd and 24th U.S. president (1837 - 1908)

99. John Calvin: French Protestant theologian, founded Calvinism (1509 - 1564)

100. John Locke: English Enlightenment philosopher, theorized "tabula rasa" (1632 - 1704)

Read more in "Who's Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank."

SEE ALSO: The 16 Greatest Cities In Human History

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The end of the year holiday season can be a huge money suck as people buy gifts for family, friends, and coworkers.

But we should also remember to thank the people who make our lives easier throughout the year: building superintendents, babysitters, hairstylists, dog walkers, and a whole host of other people.

The question, of course, is how much?

We spoke with etiquette expert Patricia Napier-Fitzpatrick of The Etiquette School of New York to find out more about holiday tipping and gifting. She helpfully broke down her recommendations and advice on who — and how much — to tip.

Apartment/Building Staff

"We have to be very good to the service staff in our buildings because they're very good to us," Napier-Fitzpatrick explained to Business Insider. "Take into account how long you've been in the building, how important their service is to you, the frequency of the service, and the quality, plus what you gave last year."

Superintendent: $50 – $200

Doorman/Concierge: $50 – $150

Elevator Operator: $25 – $50

Porters/Handymen: $25 – $50

Parking Garage Attendants: $25 – $75

Household/Childcare

The standard here is to give one week's pay to one month's pay, but it varies by how long they've been with you.

"If you've had a nanny for five years, you'd probably give her more than one week's salary," Napier-Fitzpatrick said. "You'd probably give her a month's salary."

Housekeeper/Maid: One week’s pay, or less if not a weekly service

Nanny: One week to one month’s pay, and a small gift from your child

Au Pair: One week’s pay and a small gift from your child

Babysitter: One night's pay, plus a small gift from your child

Daily Dog Walker: One day’s pay

Day Care Provider: $25 to $75 each, and a small gift from your child

*Teachers/Coaches: Small gift from your child

*Child’s Teacher: A small gift from you and one from your child

*Coaches/Tutors/Music Teachers: A small gift from your child

*Be sure to check with the school before you give cash or gift cards to make sure it's acceptable. Napier-Fitzpatrick told us another great way to give back to the teacher is for all parents to get together and get him or her a single gift certificate so that no one parent looks bad.

Personal Care

This is less mandatory than the first two categories, but if you use a service all year round like a personal trainer or hair stylist, you should give them a little gift.

"Most of these people we're tipping all year, so we don't have to go overboard," Napier-Fitzpatrick said. "But at least give them the cost of one service."

Hair Stylist/Colorist: The cost of one visit, or a gift equaling that amount

Shampoo Person: $10 or a small gift

Manicurist/Pedicurist: $15 – $25, or a small gift

Massage Therapist: $15, or a small gift

Personal Trainer: One session’s cost, or a gift equaling that amount

Miscellaneous Service Providers

Again, base these tips on how often you used their services in the past year.

Dog Groomer: A fourth or half the cost of one grooming session

Newspaper Delivery Person: $25 – $50 or $10 if once a week.

Mail Carrier: Gift up to $20 in value (there are legal restrictions on what USPS workers can accept)

UPS/FedEx Regular Driver: $20 – $25

Trash Collector: $10 -$20 each.

Pool Cleaner: Cost of one cleaning

Gardener: One week’s pay, or less if they work for you occasionally

Final Advice

• Make sure to put the money in a holiday card and an envelope. "All of the stationary stores today sell money cards, which have a 'Happy Holidays!' message with a nice little pouch for cash," Napier-Fitzpatrick added.

• You can give a check, but it's best to go to the bank and take out crisp dollar bills. Write a little note, such as: "Thank you for your service throughout the year, we really appreciate you making our lives easier" and sign your name at the bottom.

• And last but not least, try to give the tip in person. "People appreciate it," Napier-Fitzpatrick said. "It's a personal touch."

DON'T MISS: 15 Etiquette Rules For Dining At Fancy Restaurants

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We recently wrote a post on why you should order your coffee drinks "extra hot," based on advice from a former Starbucks barista. She pegged the perfect coffee temperature at 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another coffee expert and former barista has since reached out to us with a compelling rebuttal argument, so we thought we would share.

Matthew Swenson, who has spent his entire career in the coffee industry, says ordering a coffee drink "extra hot" can degrade the flavor of the beverage, if it contains milk.

"The chemistry of milk tends to favor the 145-165 Fahrenheit range," he said. "A properly steamed milk will have a rich velvety texture that is naturally sweet. That sweetness is coming from lactose, which is a disaccharide of glucose and galactose, naturally present in the milk."

"As the steaming process progresses, the temperature increases and the natural lactose becomes more perceptible to our palates creating a greater sweetness. The only issue with going extra hot, is that some of these sugars begin to breakdown losing some of the natural sweetness the milk has to offer, often resulting in a thinner, dryer texture."

Swenson says turning up the heat can also ruin the texture of the milk.

"When we begin to look at proteins within the milk, specifically whey and casein, these begin to loose stability at around 140 Fahrenheit," he said. "Have you ever had that dry rigid foam on top of a latte? That's the reason, they have been taken to the point of no return!"

Swenson currently works for a Brooklyn startup that sources coffee from Brazil. He was previously the director of coffee at Dallis Bros. Coffee, a 100-year-old coffee roaster based in Queens.

SEE ALSO: http://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-drink-extra-hot-2013-12

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Chris Arnade left his job as a foreign exchange trader at a major investment bank to pursue photography full-time.

He's not your typical photographer, though.

Arnade, who is very critical of Wall Street, spends his time in some of the city's roughest neighborhoods.

Some of his most powerful work comes from Hunts Point, Bronx, where he has photographed hundreds of drug addicts. Along with his photos, Arnade writes down his subjects' stories, with help from writer Cassie Rodenberg.

Below is a sample of photos and stories from Arnade's "Faces Of Addiction."

You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr.

A small moment on a snowy evening

Sonya was past complaining about the eye. The feet were the issue. The Uggs knockoffs, great when dry, were now a frozen mush of fur and dirt.

A month of cold weather was wearing. She rubbed the eye, “I can still see out of it, so it's not getting worse.”

My phone rang. Shelly had three minutes to speak, her call of the day from Rikers. “When you coming to visit? Did you get my stuff?”

I handed the phone to Sonya who made two minutes of promises. They have been living under the same bridge for the last three weeks.

The line clicked dead before I could talk more.

“He wants his make-up saved. He hid it before he got arrested.”

Shelly. Arrested for shoplifting in the CVS. Always the same CVS. One month in Rikers. A forced detox for Christmas.

Sonya limped towards the drug dealers clustered on the corner, looking for Xanax. “Five sticks. I can make it through detox if I have five sticks.”

The Ritual of Drugs

Shelly bent over, focused on the items arrayed in front of her: Needle, cap, water, lighter, and cotton. All lit by candle.

She spilled the heroin into the cap, added water, heated it into syrup. She dropped in a small swab of cotton, inserted the needle into the swab, and drew up the liquid.

She looked down at her left forearm, slapped a vein, and slowly put in the needle, drawing up the blood to mix with the heroin.

She blew on the needle, and pushed the blood and heroin back in. Her face and body went slack.

Ritual of Drugs 2

A low needs a high, especially a low that now only gets you straight, keeps the sick away.

Find any pipe, everyone has one. Pepsi keeps hers jammed in her bra. "Jessica keep hers jammed in her pussy. Cops won't go searching there."

Place a wad of screen in end of pipe. Pour a few rocks onto it.

Two lungs full, that is all you need.

Five seconds of euphoria. Ten minutes of paranoia.

"Reality is no TV show"

Sonya knows how to look bad. It helps her make money panhandling. Today she wasn’t panhandling. It was too cold and wet for that.

She just looked bad.

The snow had beat down her camp, now a pile of garbage and just the outline of a tent. When the wind blows hard enough, like today, the Bruckner, fifteen feet above, provides little protection. It was also a dumb decision to build on low-lying land.

She sat in the mud working on her foot, the only place with a vein that wasn’t corrupted. For five minutes she sat there, snow collecting on her hair, water working its way into her pants, and tried to make a needle go where it wasn’t wanted.

The busses, BX 6 and BX 7, came by every five minutes, spraying slush over the camp. Sonya stayed still focused on the needle, on the vein that wasn’t much of a vein anymore.

“SHIT! You fucking piece of shit! Go in damn you.”

She finally quit, rolling her sock back onto her foot, her foot back into the boots. Everything was wet.

“My eye, it’s red and oozing. Hard to open. My ear hurts. It was fine last night. I might have gotten glass in it. Glass is everywhere.”

I offered to take her to the hospital, but Sonya doesn’t like help, doesn’t like doctors, and doesn’t like needing anyone. Except that dirty bastard of a husband of hers, Eric. (Yes, Eric, when you are in detox and clean and reading this, you know that is what she calls you. It’s what you call yourself after all. You know she loves you more than anyone loves someone else. Still, you are a dirty bastard of a husband.)

She smiled though. Sonya always manages a smile.

She asked about my children, about my Thanksgiving, about me. “You look tired Chris. You need some rest.”

We went into the Bodega and she watched a TV she couldn’t understand. She stood there for fifteen minutes, absorbing the heat and dry, laughing at the Spanish show, a drama about prisons and drugs.

Actors shot pretend drugs into their arms and yelled at each other.

“Everyone looks so clean. I guess they got a better drugs down there in Mexico. Reality is no TV show.”

Bedside table for a place with no bed

* Needles
* Crack Pipes
* Cigs
* Lighters
* Condoms
* Make-up kit
* Pipe cleaners
* Mixing caps
* Methadone program ID
* Semi-sterile water
* Left over McDonalds

A coincidence revealed between hits of crack, between dates, sitting in a dark van

A man had just left, a small man hidden behind jackets, a man who paid $20 to have his dick sucked. Ramone had also left, to buy gas and drugs for Sarah and himself.

Alone, Sarah and I talked about Thanksgiving, about being in the country, about being away from the city. She told of going to nature camp in Vermont when she was younger. “It was my happiest moments, we raised the animals, swam, and every night we sat in a circle and told what was on our mind. Nobody made fun of anyone else. It was a Quaker camp, called Farm and Wilderness. I stopped going my last year, I still regret that decision.”

I asked, “Farm and Wilderness, in Plymouth Vermont? My wife went to that camp.”

I called my wife and [she and] Sarah spoke, reminiscing about a place they both attended, but at different times.

Sarah put down the phone, took in hit of crack. “I loved that place. Loved it. Do you mind staying here alone for a bit. I got to run over to that truck. Will only be fifteen minutes.”

A van for three

Jennifer arrived with $200, manic and generous. Enough money to let her stay the night, enough money to start the van and run the heat, enough money for McDonalds, enough money for Ramone to run to Gilbert Street, past the man hunched against the wind, through the door opened with a brick, up the stairs, into an apartment sweet with crack.

$180 worth of drugs to bring back. Enough drugs to turn an old van into a drug trap.

Ramone couldn’t hit, his vein was too stingy. He could draw the blood out, mixing with heroin in the syringe, but it stayed there. He couldn’t push it back in. Sarah held a light to his arm, encouraged him, keeping him calm.

Jennifer laughed, crackling to herself, manic, rearranging her purse, her pipe, her dildo, her lighter, her condoms, her makeup, her purse again, her pipe again. A date was coming. A date, despite the cold, despite the wind. Can you believe it? Did you see the pipe? Did you? Do you know where the condoms are? You have a lighter? Where is the pipe? WHERE IS THE PIPE?

Jennifer left, under dressed for the cold.

Ramone pulled the needle, still filled with heroin and blood. He took in two pipes of crack, put on his layers. Back to Gilbert Street. Another bag. Maybe this one would be lucky.

Sarah, alone in the van, let in a man, hidden beneath layers. She turned off the flashlight as he lowered his pants.

Takeesha and Carmela: Hunts Point, Bronx

Both were raped by family members before they were ten.

Both escaped to the Bronx streets: Takeesha at eleven and Carmela at twelve.

Both started prostituting by thirteen. Carmela found men gave her things in exchange for her body. Takeesha’s mother sold her.

Both started injecting heroin into their bodies soon after.

Both have fought with addiction, the police, and men since.

Both now have a habit that is close to $200 a day: Heroin to kill the sickness and crack to get a “little something.”

Takeesha still believes in love. “I did love Steve. He got an anger problem but I can be a crazy bitch.”

Carmela does not. “Love? There is no love out here. People only want what they can get from you.”

Both are now together. “We stayed up the first night talking and talking. We both like, “wow this person really understands what I have been through, understands I ain’t just trash.’ We watch each other’s back. Right girl?”

The War on Drugs

The police, narcotics, and vice all swarmed Hunts Point two weeks ago in a crackdown that netted low-level possession, dealing, and prostitution charges. It also ensnared Takeesha who is now serving a two-month sentence in Rikers.

This is common. Presently ten of my Bronx subjects sit in Rikers or upstate New York prisons on non-violent drug charges.

When I left Hunts Point after Takeesha’s arrest I stopped by a bar close to my home in Brooklyn to write and drink a few beers.

I often do this to collect my thoughts. I try to choose bars without a large drug scene, without lines to use the bathrooms, without annoying coked-out customers. That is hard to do since cocaine, pills, and other drugs are a reality of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bar scene.

The drugs are done by white affluent customers.

I have never seen any arrests. I have never seen anyone worried about being arrested.

The stark difference I see between how drugs are treated in the Bronx and brownstone Brooklyn is jarring but not surprising. The statistics show exactly the same thing.

The war on drugs is a war on the poor.

It is as simple as that.

From one addict to another

She slumped, arms splayed on the table, the pupils of her eyes pinholes. He watched their stuff; six plastic bags overflowing with clothes.

They looked out of sorts in Hunts Point. White with New England accents, wearing second hand clothes, overly tight, or loose sweaters and slacks.

An hour later they were asked to leave, their table needed to be cleaned. They walked into the McDonalds parking lot, hugged, and made out. She grabbed his crotch and smiled. Both laughed.

They walked up the hill, towards the auto stores, counting their money. $9.50.

They passed Sarah and Ramone, both who where resting before the three-mile walk to their methadone clinic.

The woman stopped and looked at Sarah, “You got fifty cents? We need it for the subway.” Sarah was putting on makeup, trying to hide the dirt from a night sleeping outdoors.

Sarah smiled, “You new ain’t you.”

“We from Boston, on an adventure, towards the west. They told us to leave Manhattan, to come here. We didn’t know Hunts Point was so bad, so many drugs. We don’t do that. We just trying to make it on the cheap.”

Sarah rolled up her sleeves, held out her arms, “It’s ok, you can tell me. I been doing it all my life.”

“Naaaa. That ain’t us. We just looking for an adventure.”

Sarah handed them a quarter. “It’s all I got.”

The couple smiled. “My name’s Wendy. Maybe we see each other around.” They walked away.

Sarah went back to putting on makeup. “Why lie to another addict? Why? She don’t think I can see it in her eyes, in her clothes, in her hair? She don’t think I saw her passed out on the corner the other day? You can’t start getting clean unless you admit it to yourself and others.”

A dollar so I don't die

“I found the hat on the ground. At first I thought it was a dead animal. It’s really warm. Really warm.”

“I am sure there is a kid who lost it, who wants it back. When I am walking I am waiting for a child to run up to me and say, ‘That’s mine!’ although they probably too scared of me.”

“When I stand panhandling I always remember an old addict I knew in Philadelphia. She was cold, tired, and hungry, and nobody was giving her anything. Eventually she just started saying, ‘Can I have a dollar so I WON’T DIE! JUST A DOLLAR TO KEEP ME ALIVE.’ Some days I feel like that.”

Deja: Hunts Point, Bronx

Déjà’s mother was a crack addict and prostitute. At five Déjà started raising the other five children in the house. All shared a mother and none shared a father.

At nine her mother was taken away and the children split up. Déjà ran away from her foster family at twelve and came out as a woman. “I picked up all sorts of habits. I started doing things I don’t do, including smoking crack like my momma did.”

She has been in Hunts Point only a week, “I relapsed so here I am.”

She lives with Michael in an empty lot, working the track at night. “The only way I can prostitute is to drink and to do cocaine. How can you pretend to love and have sex otherwise? Addiction makes you do things you don't want to do.”

She sat in the cold spray of the hydrant, cooling off.

“I want the white picket fence, the Tupperware parties, the husband and kids.”

“Dream? That’s a fairy tale not a dream. Out here you can’t have dreams.”

Jennifer: Hunts Point, Bronx 

"I'm very intelligent but sometimes I feel disgusting because of what I do. I'm not really too happy with life, but I'm happy to be alive." -- Jennifer

Jennifer, 21, grew up with various foster parents. Her biological mother and father were addicts. She remembers the smell of drugs from being a child.

The sexual abuse started at 7 and continued until she fled her foster home. “My virginity was taken by my step brother. He raped me when I was 12. Raped me repeatedly.”

She now sells her body in Hunts Point for drugs, mostly heroin. She started crying as she told me her story.

"Because of the sexual abuse, sometimes I don't like having sex because it does bother me mentally. But if it's fast, quick money...like I said, I'm homeless. I have nothing. I grew up in a fucked up situation. Because of my father and brother, I'm screwed up in the brain right now. I'm not scared to say what I am and what I do. I see so many prostitutes who deny it. Don't be ashamed of who you are."

SEE ALSO: Here's the part of New York that tourists don't see [PHOTOS]

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other officials took the first ride on the extended portion of the 7 Subway line this morning, marking a milestone in the development of New York City's Far West Side.

Although the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which controls the subway system, is run by the state, the $2.4 billion extension was funded by the City. Work began in 2007.

There's work left to do on the signal and power systems, and the extension should open to the public in the summer of 2014.

Bloomberg championed the project and pushed for development of the West Side, according to NY1. He leaves office at the end of the month, so this was his best shot at a celebratory ride.

The 7 train currently runs from Flushing, Queens, into Manhattan, and stops at Times Square. The extension will bring it to a new station at 34th Street and 11th Avenue.

That will make it easier to get to the Jacob Javits Convention Center and Hudson Yards, a $15 billion, 45-block complex of mixed-use residential and commercial buildings currently under construction.

Here's how the project looked back in June 2013:

SEE ALSO: Inside The Construction Of The New Subway Line NYC Has Wanted Since The 1920s

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We have an excellent paid opportunity for the right candidate to work in the business development department of Business Insider. This person will work on Business Insider's content partnerships, email products, subscription products, analytics, and more to keep the audience and revenue growing at a lightning-quick pace. This is not a "make coffee and copies" kind of internship. 

Candidates should be extremely organized and detail-oriented. Excellent written and verbal communication skills are a must. Excel mastery is critical. A penchant for numbers is required and light HTML skills a plus. The position is full-time so current students are not eligible (check back with us in the spring for summer opportunities). 

You'll love it here if you are a person who thrives in a startup environment, is self-driven, a quick-learner, and plays well with others. The position is located in our offices in Manhattan's Flatiron District, aka Silicon Alley.

Please contact bdjobs@businessinsider.com to apply. Thanks in advance.

SEE ALSO: Business Insider Secrets Revealed!

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The artist Thomas Kinkade has made a fortune selling his idyllic Christmas paintings, which are saccharine-sweet but perfect for the holidays. In "A Victorian Christmas Carol," characters inspired by Charles Dickens stroll through a snow-covered street in their bonnets and top hats.

It got the ad agency redpepper wondering what it would be like combining late-nineteenth century folks with tweets from 2013. They took Kinkade's painting and integrated Twitter's streaming interface, calling it "Christmas on Tweet Street LIVE!"

It doesn't take long to notice how ridiculous Christmas-themed tweets, full of (mostly censored) expletives and emojis, look in a sentimental scene from the past.

Check out this brief video to see how it works:

If you spend a couple minutes on the site, watching the tweets pop up in speech bubbles over the characters' heads, you'll notice that redpepper used key words and trending topics to instill some traits into the figures. For example:

Tweets filled with exclamation points and smileys show that the woman in the red dress is happy, thankful, and a bit ditzy:

This handsome couple is returning from a day of shopping. The wife talks about her purchases while the husband complains about the ordeal:

All wishes for Santa are directed to this demanding little girl riding beside St. Nick:

All tweets referencing a memorable scene from "Home Alone" get sent to this boy playing with a dog (and all tweets referencing "yellow snow" get sent to the dog) :

The guy with the cane is a stand-in for Ebenezer Scrooge, who has updated his lexicon for the new millennium:

There are plenty more examples, and if you've got a minute or two to kill, check them out at Tweet Street LIVE!.

SEE ALSO: POLL: Apple's Christmas Commercial Is Incredibly Sentimental And Likeable, But Not Informative Enough

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Alex Rodriguez is in a big fight with MLB right now but it's not keeping him from his favorite hobby: flipping houses.

According to the Wall Street Journal, A-Rod is selling his condo in Miami he bought just six months ago for a $1 million profit. A-Rod bought the house for $2.2 million and it's on the market for $3.2 million.

The condo is in a luxury building with plenty of amenities and gorgeous views of the beach.

The condo features an awesome porch with views of the water

The view from the other side of the porch

The glorious beach

As more and more super-pricey luxury condo buildings rise above New York City, international buyers are bucking the trend and purchasing historic townhouses instead. 

According The Wall Street Journal's Candace Taylor, more and more foreigners are looking into buying brownstones as secondary residences, opting out of the condos that have long been popular for this particular group. 

Townhouses, many of which were built in the late 19th and early 20th century, can be difficult to maintain, and they don't have the services that make living in a doorman building is so convenient.

However, there are some unexpected benefits to living in a brownstone. As demand for luxury condos grows, housing boards for those buildings have begun investigating potential buyers' financial background more than ever before. The privacy of a townhouse would be much more attractive to Europeans or other foreigners who are not accustomed to disclosing their finances. 

"More and more, the tendency is to go toward a full townhouse purchase because they can be anonymous, and they can get all the space for a fraction of the price," Adie Kriegstein, an agent at CORE who recently represented a French family in the purchase of a townhouse on West 77th Street, said to the Wall Street Journal. 

The numbers show that townhouses in Manhattan do tend to be slightly cheaper than luxury condos. For the third quarter of 2013, the average price per square foot for a townhouse was $1,144, compared to $1,379 for condos.

And the most expensive condos are much pricier than the most expensive townhouses — condos at 15 Central Park West average at $5,487 per square foot, compared to $2,440 per square foot at the Harkness Mansion on the Upper East side. 

Plus, there are plenty of ways to create a full-service experience in a brownstone, from hiring a property manager to installing a virtual doorman. 

All of the buzz surrounding townhouses is starting to spread to historic walk-up apartments as well. 

Data from real estate consultants Miller Samuel showed that the number of walk-ups sold increased by 64% over the last year, a huge jump compared to the 22% increase for apartments in full-service doorman buildings. 

"There is a new generation of renters out there who don’t need a doorman, and want something unique and different," Jordan Sachs, president of residential brokerage firm Bold New York, told The New York Times. "Walk-ups can offer a wonderful combination of old prewar New York mixed with new design, and that can be hard to find in a cookie-cutter doorman building."

SEE ALSO: 10 Hot US Housing Markets To Watch In 2014

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On Dec. 24, 1968 — 45 years ago this Christmas eve — Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to leave Earth's orbit and circle the moon.

The mission was historic, but even more memorable is the famous "Earthrise" photo that resulted, showing Earth for the first time rising above the lunar landscape.

Until that point, no humans eyes had ever seen our blue marble from space.

In Life's "100 Photographs That Changed the World," acclaimed wilderness photographer Galen Rowell described the unprecedented view of Earth as "the most influential environmental photographic ever taken." The image of our planet, which seems so small and vulnerable in the blackness of space, made people aware of its fragility.

Earthrise is now one of the most reproduced space photos of all time, appearing on U.S. postage stamps, posters, and the cover of Time magazine in 1969. Many have pointed out the irony of the photo since Apollo 8 was sent to study and take pictures of the moon's surface — not look back at Earth.

"Of all the objectives NASA had set before launch, no one had thought of photographing the earth from lunar orbit," Robert Zimmerman wrote in his book "Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 : the First Manned Flight to Another World."

The famous photo was taken during the spacecraft's fourth pass around the moon, at which point the spacecraft had changed its orbit, making it possible to see the Earth climbing above the lunar horizon. 

None of the astronauts were prepared for that moment, particularly lunar module pilot Anders who had been put in charge of photography since there was no lunar module (this was seven months before the first moon landing). 

In an interview for a BBC Documentary, Anders described the sequences of events like this:

I don't know who said it, maybe all of us said, 'Oh my God. Look at that!' and up came the Earth. We had had no discussion on the ground, no briefing, no instructions on what to do. I jokingly said, 'well it's not on the flight plan,' and the other two guys were yelling at me to give them cameras. I had the only color camera with a long lens. So I floated a black and white over to Borman. I can't remember what Lovell got. There were all yelling for cameras, and we started snapping away.

For some time, there was controversy over which astronaut — Borman or Anders — pushed the camera button. Both claimed to be responsible. An investigation of transcripts later revealed that Anders took the iconic color photograph, while Borman, being the first to recognize "earthrise," took the first photo. This photo was in black-and-white and was overshadowed by the color photo for obvious reasons. In "The Elusive Apollo 8 Earthrise Photo," author Fred Spier contends that command module pilot Lovell also played his part — it was his authority that moved Anders to take the shot:

Experienced astronaut Frank Borman was the first to the importance of the picture, while equally experienced astronaut James Lovell was quick to follow. Space rookie William Anders, however, was in charge of taking the photos. In doing so, Anders had to follow a rather tight and well-defined photo plan, in which there was little or no room for unplanned snapshots, as he complained later during a debriefing session. As a result, Anders first offered some resistance and then quickly did what the other told him to do. Although it now seems beyond doubt that Anders actually snapped the famous picture, it also seems fair to say the picture came as a result of the combine efforts of all three astronauts.

SEE ALSO: The Most Amazing Satellite Images Of The Year

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The first-ever crossword puzzle ran in the New York World newspaper on December 21, 1913.

One hundred years later, the puzzles are still extremely popular and run in newspapers across the country. The crosswords we see today are a bit different from the original "word-cross," which was in the shape of a diamond and didn't note "across" or down" moves.

See if you can solve the world's first crossword puzzle, embedded below:

Parade magazine has an answer key for the puzzle.

And if the above crossword is too puzzling, NPR has an updated version with some of the more obscure words removed.

Although New York World editor Arthur Wynne is credited as the inventor of the crossword puzzle, The Guardian points out that similar word games can be traced back as far as Pompeii.

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Author Virginia Wade's fiction debut follows a group of women who embark on a week-long camping trip to Mt. Hood National Forest. There, in the shadow of Oregon’s highest mountain, they are kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a mysterious woodland creature. "What the hell is that thing?" asks one protagonist.

“‘It's f---ing Bigfoot,’ hissed Shelly. ‘He's real, for f---'s sake.’ Horror filled her eyes. ‘With a huge c---.’”

The book, with the decidedly un-PG title "Cum For Bigfoot," is just the first of 16 fiction ebooks that Wade (a pen name) has written about the legendary beast sometimes known as Sasquatch, each detailing a series of graphic and often violent sexual encounters between the apelike creature and his female human lovers. Wade has made an exceptional living writing these stories.

It began in December of 2011. A stay-at-home mother from Parker, Colo., Wade had no ambition to be a published author and no real writing experience other than a few attempts at historical romance in the mid-90s. But then, she says, "I got this crazy idea for a story." So she sat down and wrote the entire book — more of a novella, at just 12,000 words — in a matter of weeks. She never even considered trying to sell it to a mainstream publisher. Instead, she went directly to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, an online platform for self-publishing with a 70% royalty rate for authors. (The average royalty percentage for authors with mainstream publishers is between 8 and 15%.)

"Cum For Bigfoot" wasn't an overnight best-seller. "The first month, I think I made $5," Wade admits. But over the course of 2012, the book was downloaded well over 100,000 times. "And that was just Amazon," she says. "That's not counting iTunes or Barnes & Noble or any of the other places that sell self-published books." With no marketing muscle, no bookstore tours or print reviews or any of the publicity that most top authors use to sell books, she started bringing in staggering profits. During her best months, she says, she netted $30,000 or more. At worst, she'd bank around six grand — "nothing to complain about," she says.

She branched into other genres, penning ebooks like "Taken By Pirates" and "Seduced By The Dark Lord," but her "Cum For Bigfoot" series was the biggest money-maker. "I started cranking them out," she says. "If there was a market there for monster sex, I was gonna give it to them." She even brought in her family to help with the workload. "My dad, who's an English instructor, was my editor," Wade says. "My mom did the German translations" — including the equally popular "Komm für Bigfoot." "I even had my own 401k. It became a cottage industry."

The prose wouldn't win any fiction awards (a sample line: "From within the tufts of matted hair, the creature released a huge pale c--- that defied logic"), but her readers loved it, and their numbers seemed to be growing every day. "I was putting my daughter through college with the profits," Wade says. "I used to joke with her, 'Bigfoot smut is paying for your school.'"

Wade is hardly the only author who has made a mint writing about monsters and the women who love them (or at least submit to their sexual appetites). She's part of a burgeoning literary genre that's found a wide audience online: monster porn, otherwise known as “cryptozoological erotica,” or as some of the authors prefer to call it, "erotic horror." Their self-published books feature mythical creatures of every possible variety, from minotaurs to mermen, cthulhus to leprechauns, extraterrestrials to cyclops, who become involved in sexual trysts, often non-consensual, with human lovers. They have titles that are often more silly than sexy — from "Demons Love Ass," part of Trisha Danes' "Beasts & Booty" collection, to "Frankenstein's Bitch" and "Sex With My Husband's Anatomically Correct Robot" — and the plots are never less than imaginative. A feline shapeshifter might be saved from a tree by a firefighter with a cat fetish (as in the ebook "Out on a Limb"), or a buxom cattle rancher might be abducted and kept enslaved "in a strange, perverted alien zoo" ("Milked by the Aliens").

It's easy to snicker, but somebody is buying these things. Authors of monster porn may not be notching sales to rival E.L. James or Amanda Hocking, the trailblazers of self-published erotica, but they're making more than enough to survive. That’s especially remarkable given the low price tag on many of their books. "Amazon pays a royalty of 35 percent for books listed below $2.99," says K.J. Burkhardt (a pen name), the 45-year-old author of "Taken by the Tentacle Monsters" and "Bred to the Creature." "For those listed at $2.99 and over, I can claim 70 percent in royalty payments. But I didn't feel comfortable nor right in asking someone to pay $2.99 for a five-to seven-thousand-word short story." So instead, the majority of her titles are listed at 99 cents, the minimum allowed by Amazon. "Even with the small prices that I was asking," she says, "it doesn't take much imagination to guess that I was selling a lot of books to earn $4,000 each month."

Then everything changed.

Attack of the Pitchfork Brigade

In October, the online news site The Kernel published an incendiary story called "An Epidemic of Filth," claiming that online bookstores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, WHSmith, and others were selling self-published ebooks that featured "rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse." The story ignited a media firestorm in the U.K, with major news outlets like the Daily Mail, The Guardian, and the BBC reporting on the “sales of sick ebooks.” Some U.K.-based ebook retailers responded with public apologies, and WHSmith went so far as to shut down its website altogether, releasing a statement saying that it would reopen "once all self-published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available." The response in the U.S. was somewhat more muted, but most of the retailers mentioned in the piece, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, began quietly pulling hundreds of titles from their online shelves — an event Kobo coo Michael Tamblyn referred to last month as "erotica-gate." 

The crackdown was meant to target the obvious offenders — ebooks like "Daddy’s Birthday Gang Bang" and others that fetishized incest and rape — but in their fervor to course-correct, the online bookstores started deleting, according to The Digital Reader blog, "not just the questionable erotica but [also].... any e-books that might even hint at violating cultural norms." That included crypto-porn. Wade’s sexy Sasquatch, not unlike the elusive hominid beast of legend, vanished without a trace.

Burkhardt had a similar experience. "Amazon has been systematically banning just about every book I have listed with them," she says. As with Wade, she was told her books had violated content guidelines. "The guidelines are very vague," she says. "Reading them implies any and all erotic pornography is prohibited, so I'm left to wonder exactly what erotica is allowed." "Taken By the Monsters 4," which Burkhardt first published with Amazon in July of 2012, disappeared from the site just a few weeks ago. "After 16 months, they have determined that it either no longer meets their guidelines or they didn't really look it over to begin with and just now caught it," she says.

Beauty and the Beast

Amazon declined to comment for this article. Its content guidelines state that the company doesn't accept “offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts."  But works that contain precisely that, from de Sade's "Justine" and Pauline Réage's "The Story of O" to the recently released French bestseller "The Victoria System" by Éric Reinhardt (which contains the memorable line "My erection beat time in my underwear") are readily available.

To explain the policy, the site offers this unhelpful bit of advice: "What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect." Vague as that may be, Amazon is within its legal rights to stock whatever books it chooses. "Bookstores are private enterprises, and are thus not required to sell every book that people ask them to sell," says Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA who specializes in First Amendment cases. "There is no law of which I’m aware that would require bookstores to sell a book that they disapprove of, whether or not we might think their judgments of disapproval are sound." Amazon makes the same point elsewhere in the content guidelines, when it notes, "We reserve the right to make judgments about whether content is appropriate and to choose not to offer it."

Burkhardt, who lives in Northern Virginia and writes as a hobby — she claims her day job is working as a personal protection specialist for a foreign ambassador — continued emailing Amazon with questions, and soon learned that the main objection was to her book's listing descriptions, which anybody pursuing the Amazon website could read. They were too graphic, she was told, and potentially offensive. Burkhardt wanted to compromise, but she worried that a less detailed description would cause more trouble in the long run. "I want readers to know exactly what they are buying when they make a purchase," she says, "and not be surprised and offended later because I couldn't say the book contains explicit sex with monsters.”

Her concern isn’t unjustified. One can only imagine a "Fifty Shades of Grey" fan happening upon Burkhardt’s ebook "Taken by the Monsters," and their horror upon reading about the vicious gang-rape of a woman by hirsute “humanoid” creatures in an abandoned building, which ends with them “filling her womb deep with [their] monster seed.” A little spanking this isn’t.

Author Emerald Ice (a pen name) — who lives in southern Illinois with her husband, a Catholic high school teacher — is less concerned about offending Amazon browsers than being overlooked by potential paying customers. The first three books in her Alien Sex Slave Series — "Alien Love Slave," "The Sex Arena," and "Alien Sex Cove"— were runaway hits, she says. At least until Amazon pulled them from distribution and requested changes, once again citing content guidelines. That's how "Alien Sex Slave" became "Sidney's Alien Escapades." "I hate it," she admits of the new title. "I came up with it because I was in a panic about the books disappearing." Her sales have since plummeted, and she isn't surprised. "If I was a reader searching for hot alien sex books, I wouldn't look twice at something called 'Sidney's Alien Escapades.'"

Alice Xavier (also a pen name) had her first experience with censorship when her ebook "Serpent God’s Virgin," originally published last April, was pulled from Amazon in mid-October. "They flagged it because it had virgin in the title," she guesses, because after she renamed it "Serpent God's Maiden," it again appeared on sale. "Amazon didn't care that the plot involves sex with a giant snake deity," she says. "Ultimately, Amazon is amoral. They don't care either way that they're selling dirty, filthy erotica. Their main goal is to keep their customers happy. They have plenty of customers who get righteously outraged and complain, complain, complain. And Amazon has way more at stake than just books. So they want to keep everybody happy, understandably."

Even so, she and other monster-sex authors are more than a little unsettled by the recent purge, which lumps their work in with ebooks depicting rape, incest and bestiality — unfairly they insist. The latter label is especially dangerous, says Xavier, who authored books like "Cuckwolfed" and "At the Mercy of the Boar God." Although she considers bestiality "an egregious act of animal cruelty when it occurs in real life," she's not so sure it should be off-limits to writers. "If writers want to write about it, that's great for them, because plenty of people love reading about it." Then again, that doesn’t mean she wants to be in any way associated with the genre. "It's a media ....storm waiting to happen,” she says. “It's massively taboo — more so than incest, I think. It has the potential to be incredibly damaging to the whole image of erotic literature.”

Wild Kingdom

Is crypto-smut the same thing as bestiality lit? It may seem like a fine distinction to the uninitiated, but for many authors, it’s crucial. "Is a werewolf an animal? What about a minotaur?” asks Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords—one of the few ebook self-publishing platforms that didn't clean house in October. “Where do you draw the line? Sex with beasts is a common theme in paranormal romance. Do dinosaurs need to be a protected class of animal? What about a Sasquatch? When are they real, when are they not, when can you have sex with them and when can you not?"

And even in the cases when the creature is an animal (a giant squid, for instance) Xavier insists that the power dynamic is critical. “How can you commit animal cruelty when the monster is in control, is consenting, and is an intelligent being?” she points out. In the world of fantasy, a creature can be classified as a person, she says, even if it's not a human person. “A barnyard animal is just an animal without the power of consent.”

Modern crypto-porn has more in common with the myths of ancient Greece, many of which feature gods taking animal form — Zeus was famous for this move — and having their way with humans. “Just because he turns into a swan doesn't mean he's turned into an ordinary animal,” Xavier points out. “He's still a god with his godly powers and intelligence, just in the form of a swan.”

Smashwords, which gives authors 85% of net profit, regardless of their work’s length, had its own issues with censorship last February, when PayPal threatened to deactivate the ebookstore's account if it didn't cease selling, according to a PayPal statement, "erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest."

Although Smashwords initially complied, especially with regard to incest and sex involving underage characters, Coker was never comfortable with PayPal's other objections. "Dubious consent is a really big theme in mainstream romance," he says. "Where do you draw the lines? In mainstream romance, the woman may not want to have sex, and the man forces himself on her, and later in the book they're smiling and happy. Look at Gone With the Wind, where Rex is hauling Scarlett up the stairway and she's yelling 'No, no, no!' To what extent can financial institutions regulate what people are allowed to imagine in the safety of their own mind?"

PayPal and Smashwords reached a truce in mid-March. “PayPal's worst fear was always that their payment systems would be used for illegal underage erotica and illegal underage pornography,” says Coker. “Once they learned of our prohibition against such content … they gained the confidence they needed to lift the proposed restrictions.”

The initial purge of erotica on Amazon may have passed, but according to several authors, their monster sex ebooks continue to disappear from virtual shelves on a regular basis. Given her initial success, Burkhardt says, "I was seriously considering quitting my job and taking up writing full time. I'm glad I decided to wait and see, because after Amazon started banning some of my titles, my sales dropped dramatically." Her monthly profits from Amazon went from over $2,000 in early 2013 to just $400 last month. "I can't really complain," she concedes. "It's still a great supplemental income. But I can't help but wonder how much I would be making if I was allowed to publish with Amazon some of the stories they have since blocked or banned."

Some of the genre's authors would like to give up on Amazon entirely, furious at the way they've been treated. But it's difficult to walk away from the world's largest online retailer, even if you're confident that you've got something readers want. "There is a growing audience for this type of literature," says Burkhardt. "And I wish Amazon could see that." Of course, authors could sell exclusively with Smashwords, which offers mostly unlimited creative freedom and a better cut of the profits. But the platform doesn’t have nearly the reach. "Amazon is the big dog," says Emerald Ice. "They're well known, their books are easy to download. It's easy, and consumers want easy. Heck, I want easy. Smashwords is still kind of underground."

Another option is following the path forged by E.L. James, who started out writing "Twilight" fan-fiction under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon before landing a major publisher and going on to earn something in the neighborhood of $95 million. But as Emerald Ice learned, even with a track record of sales, books about monster sex are hard to place with an established imprint. "Nobody wants to touch the taboo risqué alien books," she says. "They're just too out-there, I guess. I tried a few publishers, and it was the fastest rejection I ever got in my life. Within two days, it was 'Thank you, no, no, this isn't what we're looking for! Please get this off my computer!'"

We attempted to contact several publishers, asking if they'd ever been offered monster erotica. None of them responded. Literary agent Steven Axelrod, who represents Amanda Hocking — an author who made close to $2 million with her self-published paranormal romances, including "Hollowland" and "My Blood Approves" — says he has "absolutely no knowledge of 'horror erotica.'" A representative from Valerie Hoskins Associates in London, the literary agency that reps E.L. James, was apparently so opposed to being included in a story about the genre that they responded to requests for comment with "We know nothing about self publishing or erotica." (You read it here first: "Fifty Shades of Grey" has absolutely nothing to do with self-publishing or erotica.)

Judging a Book by Its Cover

Xavier, who when not writing smut works as a user-interface designer, has taken a different tack. Rather than argue with Amazon over content guidelines, she's looked for ways to make her books less of a target. "At its core, Amazon is trying to clean up the presentation," she says. "I think that's a good thing, because it keeps all the erotica online and for sale."

Ebooks featuring incest and rape tend to share a singular defining feature: sexually explicit and poorly produced covers. The way for monster erotica to survive, she thinks, is to "dress it up like fantasy." No more trashy illustrations. "My covers are pretty classy," she says. "It's all a facade, of course. My plots are depraved. They're definitely not for kids or grandmothers. But I put it in a glossy package, so it doesn't offend anybody who's just searching through Amazon.”

Her book "Alien Seed" is a perfect example of this strategy. The cover looks like any mainstream romance novel, with the image of a reclining and scantily-clad model bathed in green light. But the image doesn’t even hint at the content (sample: “I was either in some ridiculous ... dream or aboard an alien spaceship full of robotic tools capable of delivering epic orgasms”).

"If you want to be a major player in this field,” Xavier adds, “you need to act like one.”

Virginia Wade has a different plan. "Writing monster erotica has become a hostile work environment," she says. "I'm tired of the BS. It's just easier to write in a different genre and avoid the scrutiny." She hasn't written a monster sex ebook in months, and has instead focused her creative energies on books that don't involve hirsute creatures or kidnapped campers. Even if censorship weren’t an issue, she's not sure if she has the inspiration for another sequel.

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Backed by the likes of Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, Hampton Creek is set to make huge waves in the food industry.

The company has created a plant-based substitute for eggs and is currently selling two products that are normally egg-dependent: mayonnaise and cookie dough.

While it's great that you can slather cholesterol-free mayo on your sandwiches and eat raw cookie dough without catching salmonella, are these egg-less products actually any good?

We wanted to find out, so we got a bunch of our egg-loving co-workers to try out Hampton Creek's egg-less mayo and cookie dough. Watch and see what they think.

Produced by William Wei. Follow us on YouTube >

Music: "Finger-Lickin' Generosity" by TheSurfingViolinist and "Good Starts" by Jingle Punks (via The YouTube Audio Library)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama says he's not worried about his daughters starting to date. After all, he's got some help keeping an eye on them.             

Malia, age 15, and Sasha, age 12, are "very sensible," Obama told comedian and talk show host Steve Harvey in a television interview that aired on Friday.             

"And the second thing is, I've got men with guns following them around all the time," Obama quipped, referring to the Secret Service detail that is a constant presence around his family.             

"This is the main reason I ran for re-election," he joked in the light-hearted interview taped at the White House. "You know I'm going to have them covered for most of high school." Obama and his family left for a two-week holiday in Hawaii on Friday.             

He and his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, have worked hard to keep their daughters out of the public eye as much as possible during his presidency.             

"They're doing great, but they grow up so fast," Obama said in the interview.             

Obama said he worries about "getting in the way of the girls just having a normal life" and said he has taught them to make good decisions about relationships.             

"What I've told them before is, as long as that young man is showing you respect, and is kind to you, then I'm not going to be hovering over every second," he said.             

"I think it's intimidating enough to be asking out the daughter of the president without me adding to that intimidation factor," he said.             

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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ONE of the most perplexing questions of the early 21st century is this: how can the French, who invented joie de vivre, the three-tier cheese trolley and Dior's jaunty New Look, be so resolutely miserable? To outsiders, the world's favourite tourist destination embodies the triumph of pleasure over desk-slavery, slow food over fast, the life of the flâneur over that of the frenetic. Yet polls suggest that the French are more depressed than Ugandans or Uzbekistanis, and more pessimistic about their country's future than Albanians or Iraqis. A global barometer of hope and happiness puts the French second to bottom of a 54-country world ranking, behind austerity-battered Italians, Greeks and Spaniards, and ahead only of Portugal.

Happiness is of course a slippery concept. Asked if they are happy, people everywhere are more than likely to say yes; far fewer say that they laugh much. Gallup, a pollster, has devised a global "positive experience index", based on whether respondents report that they laughed and smiled a lot or did something enjoyable the previous day. By such measures, France does better than the world average. But take out war-torn or poor countries, and measure the French against fellow rich nations, and they still turn out to be unhappier than their peers. The French report fewer "happy experiences" than those in America, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium. The land of the bon vivant is an unhappy outlier.

Claudia Senik, a French economist at the Paris School of Economics, calls this the "French unhappiness puzzle". In a 2013 study, she found that the French were not only unhappier than their level of wealth and unemployment would suggest, but also more discontented than French-speaking people in Belgium and Canada (so language is not the reason), and more miserable when they emigrated compared with non-French expatriates in the same place (so they take their gloom with them). "Unhappiness seems to be more than about life in France," Ms Senik concluded. "It is something about being French."

Naturally, Ms Senik's findings caused a stir in France, prompting Maureen Dowd, a New York Times writer who was visiting Paris at the time, to report that "joie de vivre has given way to gaze de navel". Le Monde ran three pages under the title "Liberté, Égalité, Morosité", in a bid to decode its fellow countrymen's "persistent melancholy". France, it turns out, has the highest suicide rate in western Europe after Belgium and Switzerland. An American psychiatric study showed that, among ten rich countries, the French were the most likely to have a "major depressive episode" at some point in their life. Even the French language seems to be particularly well stocked--morosité, tristesse, malheur, chagrin, malaise, ennui, mélancolie, anomie, désespoir--with negativity. Can there really be something about being French that makes for so much gloom?

Fifty shades of noir

Two periods in France's recent history have contributed most to the rich seam of misery in its culture--one after the revolution, the other after the second world war. In the quarter-century from the fall of the ancien régime in 1789 to 1814, France overthrew a monarchy, endured the Terror, and lost an empire. After this period the Romantic movement, from Baudelaire to Chopin, expressed a melancholy infused with nostalgia and ambivalence towards a society dominated by rationalist thought and bourgeois values.

In "René", a novel published in 1802, Chateaubriand introduced to the world the tortured French youth, whose "wretched, barren, and disenchanted" existence embodied what the writer called the mal du siècle. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand recognised that he had set more of a trend than he had bargained for:

If René did not exist, I would not write it again...all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left college who hasn't dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows.

Romantic miserabilism was experienced as a form of pleasure. "Melancholy", wrote Victor Hugo, "is the happiness of being sad." It was treated as a noble state, a higher aesthetic condition. "I do not pretend that joy cannot be allied with beauty," wrote Baudelaire in his diary. "But I do say that joy is one of its most vulgar ornaments; whereas melancholy is, as it were, its illustrious companion." Much of this tradition is firmly fixed in today's French mind. Hugo's poem "Melancholia" is required reading for French lycée students, as is Alfred de Musset's "La Nuit de Mai", whose narrator laments that "Nothing makes us so great as great sorrow."

The strange beauty of melancholy finds some echo in mid-20th-century France, which produced a second wave of miserabilism. Françoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse", published in 1954, for instance, opens with the 17-year-old Cécile's lament:

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

Yet the ennui that marked this second period had less to do with nostalgia than nausea. In "L'Etranger", Albert Camus's protagonist, Mersault, is perhaps the world's best-known embodiment of anguish in the face of the unknowable meaning of existence, or the absurd. Post-war French theatre developed the absurd, through the plays of Camus, Jean Anouilh and the Franco-Romanian Eugène Ionescu. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote "Waiting for Godot" in French. On a chilly winter's evening in 1953 on Paris's left bank, two years before the play went on to unsettle English-speaking audiences, it was first staged at the 75-seat Théâtre de Babylone, and struck a chord with post-war Paris.

Neither Camus nor his contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, was ultimately a pessimist. But it is the torment of existentialism, rather than its conclusions, that captured the imagination. Indeed, the left-bank literary clique led by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which gravitated to the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près, adopted ennui as a way of life as well as a philosophy. When Sartre handed the original manuscript of "Nausea" to Gallimard, his publisher, he entitled his novel "Melancholia".

Perhaps the best exemplar of miserabilism among contemporary French fiction writers is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial Goncourt-prize-winning novelist, in such nihilist works as "Whatever" or "Atomised". His characters invariably lead empty, often sordid, always disillusioned lives. "In the end," writes Mr Houellebecq in "The Elementary Particles", "there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there's only death."

There have, of course, been periods during which the gloom lifted. It was after the double shock of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the bloody Paris Commune, after all, that the Impressionists took their tubes of paint and brushes outdoors, delighting in light and colour. Despite a measure of fin-de-siècle anxiety, the belle époque was a moment of breezy certainty. Gustave Eiffel unveiled his wrought-iron tower in 1889. By 1900 the City of Lights drew 51m visitors to its universal exhibition, under the theme of "Paris, capital of the civilised world", and Matisse, Derain and other fauves had started to capture exuberant colour and warmth on canvas. Yet miserabilism seems to have a greater hold on the French mind today.

I doubt, therefore I am

One reason could be the French appetite for brutal self-criticism. From Descartes onwards, doubt is the first philosophical reflex. "The rationalist tradition makes us sceptical; we exist through criticism," argues Monique Canto-Sperber, a philosopher and director of Paris Sciences et Lettres, an elite university. "We treat those too full of hope as naive." In "Candide, or The Optimist", published in 1759, Voltaire mocks the folly of looking on the bright side in the face of unimaginable horrors. "Optimism", says a disabused Candide in the novel, "is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable." When a French magazine recently tried to decode today's national pessimism, it concluded: "It's Voltaire's fault". "We find it more chic and more spiritual to doubt everything."

Up to a point, this is an affectation of the elite. "It is in a certain Parisian milieu that there are intellectuals who are grumpy by trade," argues Jack Lang, the Socialist former culture minister: "There is a gap with the rest of French society." Yet France cherishes public intellectuals, so their influence spreads wide. It is a talking, thinking culture. Its films value dialogue over plot; its talk-shows are interminable. The French, wrote a helpful official guide for British servicemen heading to France for the 1944 liberation offensive, "enjoy an intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing some abstract point."

The country treats its philosophers like national treasures, even celebrities, splashing photographs of them across the pages of glossy magazines. And it ensures that the canon of French thought is fed to the whole country. All pupils taking the school-leaving baccalauréat exam must study philosophy, and teenagers are examined on such cheery essay questions as "Is man condemned to self-delusion?" or "Do we have an obligation to seek truth?". So if French intellectuals are predominantly critical pessimists, miserabilism may in part be the consequence of holding them in such esteem. Were Americans to pay more attention to the writings of Noam Chomsky and Jared Diamond, perhaps they would be gloomy too.

This critical reflex reaches right into the classroom, generating a further source of negativity. In French schools, for example, the tradition is for teachers to grade harshly, and praise with excessive moderation. Under a nationwide system that awards marks out of 20, a pupil doing a dictée has points (or even half-points) deducted for every error; so a child swiftly ends up with zero. The idea is that all children can always do better. The result is a lack of what the French, borrowing English syntax, call "la positive attitude".

Fully 75% of French pupils worry that they will get bad grades in maths tests, according to an OECD study, nudging stressed-out South Korean levels (78%). A recent government-commissioned report on a small pilot experiment in some French secondary schools, where Cartesian grading had been shelved in favour of a more encouraging system, noted with some surprise that weaker pupils were absent from school less often, more confident in the classroom, and "less stressed when faced with failure".

If the French are life's critics, they are at the same time idealists, and these two make unhappy bedfellows. Thanks to the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution, the concept of progress towards an ideal society has, despite periodic turmoil and bloodshed, been a powerful narrative in the French mind. The best embodiment of this is the French declaration of human rights. Unlike the American declaration of independence in 1776, which guaranteed the rights of all Americans, the French version 13 years later guaranteed the rights of all mankind.

To this day, the ambition to inspire the world with a secular republican ideal, backed by the spread of French culture and language, stirs political leaders. "France is only itself when in pursuit of an ideal," wrote Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister, in a deliberate echo of Charles de Gaulle's reference to the country's "exceptional destiny". It is great stuff for myth-making, as De Gaulle demonstrated so masterfully after liberation from Nazi occupation. But when reality does not quite match up to ideals, self-criticism kicks in and misery results.

Left-wing French intellectuals never quite got over the failed revolutionary promise of the May '68 student uprising, nor their disillusion at the declining influence of French thought from the 1980s onwards. Others struggled to reconcile French values with the country's darker moments, notably under occupation. Today, "belief in a better tomorrow has come to an end," says Christophe Prochasson, a French historian. "There is a crisis of progress."

Put simply, the French know that they have enjoyed a fabulous way of life, and are depressed by the thought that neither the French model, nor Europe, seems able to provide the prosperity or the national grandeur it once did. The upshot is that "we are collectively animated by a sense of doom and decline," says Dominique Moïsi, of the French Institute of International Relations. "We have in mind this great nation of ours: the major power in Europe under Louis XIV and Napoleon I, the biggest allied standing army in the first world war. Now there's a sense of 'What happened to us?'."

The pleasure of pouting

France is not alone in contemplating its diminished status. Britain had a grand past too. But the post-colonial, post-industrial British do not share the French sense of national depression, partly because they never considered their empire to be part of an effort to export a culture or a model society. And, having accidentally given the world the English language, Britain feels relaxed about its global cultural influence. The contrasting decline of French, once the language of European diplomacy, high culture and polite conversation, is felt as a national wound.

Idealistic France's painful reckoning with decline is therefore quite different to the British approach of resigned muddling-through, argues Jean-Philippe Mathy, of the University of Illinois, in "Melancholy Politics". It is almost, says Mr Prochasson, the historian, a form of bereavement. "There is a very profound pessimism today due to the realisation that France is becoming a country like any other, and this is difficult."

Does it matter? Certainly, France's high suicide rate is a serious cause for concern. Dissatisfaction also makes the French a particularly fractious people to govern, ready as they are to contest, and protest, at the slightest excuse. Confidence too is elusive in a country given to pessimism, making it harder still for politicians to persuade the French to try new ways of doing things.

Yet pessimism has not stopped France from enjoying itself. French hedonism has survived miserabilism--or perhaps provided a refuge from it. Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1789 revolution, the country exhibited a "thirst for pleasure", as one contemporary newspaper report put it: "The stream of fashion, a succession of dinners, the luxury of their splendid furniture and their mistresses, are the objects that chiefly employ the thoughts of the young men of Paris." With firework displays, extravagant fashion, circuses and carousels, Paris at the time, for the rich at least, was all about enjoyment. During les années folles, upper-class American tourists took the steamer to Normandy and then the railway to Paris, drawn to France, writes Harvey Levenstein, a historian, as "a land that was free from American puritanism, where the pursuit of pleasure reigned supreme".

Nor has miserabilism discouraged the French preoccupation with beauty and taste. France does not wear its gloom like a dreary accessory. On the contrary, its culture delights in elegance, sensuality, quality and form: the exquisite hand-stitching on the haute-couture dress; the immaculately glazed tartes aux framboises lined up in the pâtisserie window. The aesthetics of daily life, the art de vivre, remains a source of both grand gestures and small stolen pleasures. It is no coincidence that the two biggest luxury-goods groups in the world are French.

Modern French culture may not have supplied great writers to rival Hugo or Molière, and Paris may lack the buzz of New York or London. But it is hard to argue that negativity has stifled French creativity. Would France have brought the world existentialism had Sartre been a cheerful fellow?

The critical impulse has promoted cultural innovation. Both cinema's New Wave and French literary theory were born of critical reconstruction of what came before. Some of France's most creative periods have followed bleak times: the flowering of painting, literature and science after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, or of the avant-garde in art and fashion after the horrors of the first world war. Christian Lacroix, a French designer, points out that war and revolution in France have been times of "creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play".

Perhaps the French need dissatisfaction and thrive on doubt. "There is a certain pleasure taken in being unhappy: it's part of an intellectualism of French culture," says Ms Senik. "Malaise and ennui are to France what can-do is to America: a badge of honour," wrote Roger Cohen in the New York Times recently. Pessimism does not preclude pleasure. All that sitting around at pavement cafés, looking fashionably discontented, can be fun. Optimism is for fools; sophisticates know better. Bleak is chic--especially when opening another bottle of Saint-Emilion and reaching for the three-tier cheese trolley.

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