It also got a response from the actual person behind the display, who then shared their own image in r/pics shortly after — that photo was then upvoted over 120,000 times.
In case you were wondering, that cheerful bunch consists of the killer from Scream (far left), Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, a “soul taker costume” (in the words of the uploader), and Mike Myers.
TAPACHULA, MEXICO—Rosa Gonzalez arrived in the shelter here after leaving her native El Salvador suddenly in late summer, fleeing her small town with her older brother and a few possessions, hoping to avoid becoming yet another murder statistic at the hands of her country’s violent gangs
Rosa’s problem hadn’t started with the gangs, but with her husband. He drank, and when he was drunk enough he liked to beat up Rosa. One night, earlier in the summer, he came home and beat her up again. For Rosa, it was the last straw. She took her two kids and left. He begged her to come home, but she refused. Then, desperate, he swallowed poison, was taken to the hospital and died.
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She was racked with guilt, but there was another problem: His suicide triggered the fury of his brother, a high-up local gang leader. “They blamed me,” she said. Rosa—who asked me to not to use her real surname for this story, for her safety—went into hiding, living with a friend in another neighborhood. But the gang members started threatening her 28-year-old brother. Gangs in El Salvador have deep reach, holding entire communities in their grip, and they often follow bloodlines for revenge. She knew neither she nor her brother would be safe if they stayed. She took her kids to a family member’s house and left them there. Then she and her brother fled their town, fled El Salvador and kept traveling north.
I met Rosa in this small city in the southwestern state of Chiapas, Mexico, in September, almost two months before the thousands-strong“migrant caravan” came through—mostly Central Americans moving toward refuge in the United States. Tapachula is a popular way station for people fleeing Central America for the United States, and Rosa spoke to me in the modest eight-room shelter where she’d been living for a little more than a week. The shelter is an open-air compound where dormitories packed with bunk beds, a kitchen and a cafeteria surround a central courtyard, and it is filled with migrants like her, almost all of them Central Americans forced out of their homes by local violence and in search of safety. Some, like Rosa, are heading for the United States; others are making alternate plans.
If Rosa had been forced to leave a year ago, she told me, she would have brought her children with her on the journey. She’s guarded when she talks about them, showing little emotion, as if she’d fall apart if she let herself think too much about her kids. But she had watched Salvadoran television news reports about what had happened north of the border, with children—some still breast-feeding, some still too young to talk—taken away from their mothers and fathers after reaching the U.S. side. The stories were heavily covered in El Salvador, as they were in the United States—in newspapers, on social media, on television. “With them there,” she told me about leaving her kids behind, “you at least know they are OK and who is taking care of them, and you might even get to see them again one day.” Maybe she’d send for them if things worked out in the United States. Maybe one day things would be different in El Salvador and she’d go back home. For now, it was all theoretical; all that mattered was keeping everyone alive.
Across Mexico and Central America, the calculations of millions of would-be immigrants are shifting, as the Trump administration makes a series of restrictive moves designed to stanch the flow of undocumented migrants into the United States. President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” hasn’t materialized (long sections of the wall pre-dated his presidency), but he expanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s priorities to include undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions, leading to a spike in immigration arrests. His 2017 travel ban, though it largely didn’t apply to Latin America, drew the world’s attention to tougher new U.S. policies. Most recently, and most dramatically, the administration began separating parents detained at the border from their children. The family separation policy prompted outrage and dominated the daily news in the United States, before it was suspended in mid-June. Still, the White House is reportedly considering a new plan that would give apprehended family units a choice after up to 20 days of detention: either indefinite detention together, or separation.
For decades, U.S. immigration policies and border enforcement strategies have been based on deterrence: If you make conditions unpleasant for migrants and make sure people know about them, the thinking goes, people will decide against trying to enter the country illegally. Trump himself has made it no secret that he’d like to end migration at the source. At the United Nations General Assembly in late September, Trump said the only solution to the “migration crisis” would be for people to stay and “make their countries great again.” On Monday, after news reports surfaced of the caravan traveling from Central America, Trump blamed “our pathetic immigration laws” and tweeted threats to cut off aid to Central American countries because they were “not able to do the job of stopping people from leaving their country.” The Trump administration was banking on the rumors and news of family separation making their way to Central America and stopping would-be migrants in their tracks.
Is it working? While it might seem like a rational approach to immigration restrictionists in the United States, the strategy looks a lot different from the other side of the U.S. border.
Most experts agree that would-be immigrants like Rosa aren’t deterred in significant numbers by American policies, no matter how tough, because the threats they’re fleeing at home are far more frightening. And the numbers certainly indicate migrants are still coming. In May, before the height of the family separation coverage, 9,485 family-unit members—the way immigration counts parents and children traveling together—were apprehended along the southern border. In August, in spite of the intensive news coverage of family separations, 12,774 were apprehended. In other words, after three months of American and Central American news saturated with the stories of family separation, border apprehensions of parents with their children actually increased 35 percent. And in September, more than 16,000 family units were apprehended at the border—the highest number on record.
Yet Rosa’s story suggests that the reality is more complicated—that would-be migrants are aware of these policies, and are, in fact, changing their plans. In certain ways, this deterrence strategy is working—yet not necessarily in the way the U.S. government may intend.
In early September, I traveled to El Salvador, one of the largest sources of unauthorized immigrants crossing into the United States in recent years. (Last year, almost 50,000 of the roughly 304,000 people apprehended at the U.S. border were from El Salvador—a country of only 6.4 million.) There, I spoke with dozens of recent deportees from the United States, as well as others considering the trip for the first time. I also traveled to Chiapas, a key stop on the well-beaten Central American migrant path, to talk with dozens more travelers moving through the congested immigration hub.
To hear these men and women talk, it’s clear that, in a way, Trump’s policies are being received just as he expects them to be: Migrants seem to be more apprehensive about the journey than ever. But that doesn’t mean they’re staying home. Some, like Rosa, are choosing to leave their kids home and migrating without them. Some are moving through more dangerous routes if they do want to continue on to the United States—discarding the long-standing practice of turning themselves in to Border Patrol and applying for asylum. And in some cases, they are avoiding the United States: They’re deciding to settle in other countries, like Mexico or even Canada.
The picture that emerged, as I spoke to migrants and prospective migrants, is of a set of nations—from El Salvador and Honduras up through the United States and Canada—becoming even more entwined than they already are, with families further stretched and spread across borders. This might not be what Washington intended, but history shows that immigration is complex and hard to manage, and Trump’s policies are almost certain to have effects we haven’t begun to grasp.
***
Like Rosa Gonzalez, Roberto Quinones has learned to live with the uncertainty and instability of leaving his kids behind. (He also asked to use a pseudonym.) I met him on a September Friday in San Salvador, as he and 134 other deportees were unloading from a U.S.-funded plane from the States and boarding buses headed for the deportee reception center. There, they were shooed into an air-conditioned waiting room; given a number and their belongings, which were stuffed into mesh laundry bags labeled with the deportees’ names; and told to wait for their turn to be processed back into Salvadoran society.
Roberto had made the decision to go to the United States this past spring. This was after Trump had started cracking down on immigrants, but before the most visible height of the family separation policy. He had left his kids behind in El Salvador because of the dangers of the trail, and also because of shifting U.S. policies; under Trump, he figured, who knew what awaited him there?
In 2017, ICE deported more than 18,000 Salvadorans from the United States. Three times a week, a planeload of people—ranging from 60 to over 300—is deported from the United States to El Salvador. Approximately the same number arrive each week via bus from Mexico, which intercepts and deports migrants en route to the United States.
Roberto had left for the States four months earlier; it took him only a week or so to make it across the border, but he was apprehended almost immediately and was put in immigration detention, first in Texas, then in Chicago. He first heard the news about the government’s forcible separation of migrant children from their families in detention; he met another detainee whose child had been taken away by authorities at the border.
His reasons for leaving El Salvador are at once particular and astoundingly common. In his country, Roberto told me, the rules are clear: Ver, oir, callar—look, listen, keep your mouth shut. (This is a common Salvadoran refrain when explaining the gang regime.) To support himself while he was in school to be an accountant, Roberto drove a taxi. But his town—which he declined to name—was hot with gangs. Being a taxi driver shepherding people here and there at all hours of the day meant he’d seen and heard too much, which made him nervous.
He left taxi driving and started working in the family restaurant. But it didn’t take long for the gangs to find him there, and to start charging astronomical renta, or extortion payments, from a restaurant that was barely staying afloat. He got married and had a child; the gangs kept harassing him, so eventually he left for Panama, and then for Guatemala, where he worked banana harvests. “I was studying to be an accountant,” he said. “And there I was in Guatemala, loading huge crates of bananas on my back.” Meanwhile, the fact that he had left only made him more suspicious to the gangs, as if he had something to hide. When he was in Guatemala, his brother died; it wasn’t safe for Roberto to come home for the funeral. After that, he missed the birth of his second son.
Though its homicide rates have been decreasing over the past three years, El Salvador still has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with neighboring Honduras very close behind. These murders are, in large part, committed by the gangs. Salvadorans are routinely pressured into gangs and forced to pay renta—if they don’t, they risk being killed. Police and gang members are now in a perpetual standoff.
“I didn’t go to the U.S. at first because I knew how hard it was for immigrants there,” he said. But he couldn’t make a living in Guatemala or Panama, and at home he was sure he’d be killed. In the United States, even without papers, he’d be able to earn enough money to support his family—and do it in relative safety. “You can make $9 an hour there,” he told me. “Can you imagine?” He spent time trying to find the best, most trustworthy coyote—a human smuggler—but that put him out $9,000. He had only $4,000, his life savings, so he borrowed the rest.
Roberto’s wife and kids would pick him up from the reception center in San Salvador once he had been fully processed, but the family wouldn’t be going back home to their town that night. “No, no way,” he said. They would find a hotel in San Salvador. He couldn’t go back. He would spend some time sorting himself out—staying with church friends, or even inside the church itself for safety—and then he’d go again. (His $9,000 fee to the smugglers got him two tries, and then a discount on the third try. Since he was caught the first time, he has another shot without paying more—and it’s also in his coyote’s best interest to find a way to get him there without being caught.)
That night, once his number was called and he’d been processed—interviewed by the police and by immigration authorities, offered help finding jobs and a ride to the bus station—he’d finally get to see his kids. “What day is it?” he asked me, suddenly panicked. The sixth, I told him. He broke into a smile; his son was turning 2 in two days, and he’d be here for it.
I asked him directly whether Trump’s policies had had any effect on him—or would discourage anyone he knew from heading north. “I don’t think so,” he told me. “No, not at all.” When he was detained in Chicago, he saw the iconic cityscape, including the Chicago River, out the window as he was transported to detention. “I’d never imagined something so beautiful,” he said. But if he had his choice, he’d give up all that beauty and possibility just to be with his kids. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have that choice. “Better to see your kids every now and again than to never see them again,” he said, referring to the risk not of separation, but of being killed.
If Roberto finally makes it to the United States on his second or third try (and, he said, who knows—perhaps he’d try a fourth or fifth or sixth time, if he could scrape up the resources), he’ll work, pay off his debts and send money home to support his family. Perhaps he’ll send for his kids, but that depends on his circumstances and what’s happening in the United States. A long-term plan is a luxury of the certain.
***
One thing that has changed as a result of Trump’s policies, my interviews suggested, is the calculation of how, exactly, to cross the border.
Migrants face a decision: Do they try to slip across undetected by border authorities, or turn themselves in to claim asylum? For the past several years, the conventional wisdom among migrants from violence-torn Central America has been to turn themselves in and request asylum; coyotes have even instructed migrants to do so as a matter of strategy. After the Trump administration began criminally prosecuting those who asked for asylum after an illegal entry, some migrants chose to claim asylum in the legal way administration officials suggested: at official border crossings. But reports soon surfaced that migrants were getting turned away or told to wait.
Meanwhile, asylum policies are swiftly changing under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has deemed gang violence and domestic abuse—reasons many Central Americans are fleeing to the United States—largely insufficient grounds for asylum. The majority of U.S.-bound migrants I spoke to told me that they weren’t going to turn themselves in: Better, the information among migrants goes, to avoid the U.S. authorities altogether by finding a way across the border and making a run for it. (This change in strategy comports with the statistics: Researchers have found that harsher asylum policies do reduce the number of asylum applicants in the long run.)
The problem is that the places where people manage to cross undetected—where there are more limited patrols and as of yet no border fence—are among the most dangerous passages into the interior of the United States: high, dry mountainous areas, or sweltering desert passes in California, Texas and Arizona. In 2017, 412 migrants were found dead along the U.S.-Mexico border, an increase from the previous year’s 398—a figure more worrisome because migrant crossings overall were down in 2017 as Trump took office. These deaths, of course, only include those officially documented by federal authorities; many more could have been lost to the elements—swept away by the Rio Grande, eaten by animals, buried or their bodies not yet discovered.
Migrants are using their intel to take different routes through Mexico, too. According to Ruben Figueroa, a migrant rights advocate living in Chiapas, those migrants who are taking the journey alone without the help of a coyote, and who don’t want to apply for temporary transit paperwork in Mexico, are now crossing into Mexico through more remote territory on the gulf side of the Guatemalan border. They are also, increasingly, using sea routes, which makes the journey riskier. Migrants are often packed onto overloaded boats that travel far offshore to avoid detection.
Whatever gets them north, as quickly as possible and undetected. Whatever obstacles are put in their way, desperate migrants will find a way through—or around, or beneath.
***
But if the migration routes are becoming more complex and more dangerous, there’s also anecdotal evidence that the deterrence policy is working—not discouraging migrants from leaving, but rather diverting their paths away from the United States and instead settling in Mexico or even heading farther north to Canada.
A number of the Nicaraguans I met in Chiapas were taking this last tack, telling me they weren’t even trying for the United States. Sweeping civil unrest broke out in Nicaragua this past spring—not gang violence, as in El Salvador and Honduras, but the violent precursor to a more traditional civil war.
According to historical precedent, this would give them a relatively clear-cut asylum claim in the United States. But many Nicaraguans I met seemed skeptical of that option. “I can’t trust that your country can protect me,” a heavyset Nicaraguan father told me in the shade beneath a tree at Jesus el Buen Pastor, a shelter in Chiapas, amid the patter and shouts of little Salvadoran boys playing gangster. Pah pah pah pah pah pah, a 6-year-old shouted while staring down the barrel of a green plastic pipe. Under Trump, the man clarified, he felt it didn’t matter what his circumstances were; he was certain he’d be deported back home to the danger he’d left. Instead of settling in the United States, he was planning to cross through the country and into Canada.
Nearby, the little boys’ imagined assassination continued, and after a while, we all stopped our conversation and looked at them with some concern. Then the Nicaraguan father turned to me and, after a moment, asked, “Are you CIA?” I laughed, but he wasn’t kidding.
Later, I spoke with the little gunman’s mom: The boy had seen his father murdered right in front of him back home. Sometimes he would talk about what happened at the shelter, but his mom told him to hush. Who knows who’s around, she thought, who is listening, who might find out who they are? Under the new asylum policies, she would have only a slim chance of asylum, but she was heading for the United States all the same. She still saw it as the best option.
While the plan to pass through the United States to Canada is somewhat rare, over the past several years, more and more migrants are opting to stay in Mexico instead of continuing on to the United States, a choice becoming only more common in the wake of family separation. “Increasingly, Mexico is not just a country of transit or origin, but a destination country,” said Salva Lacruz, from the Tapachula office of the human rights and legal aid organization Fray Matias.
From 2013 through 2017, the number of asylum applications in Mexico increased by a factor of 11, from 1,300 to more than 14,000. Immigration experts and authorities like Mark Manly of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees say that increasingly restrictive U.S. policies in recent years, coupled with increasing violence in Central America, drove the boom in asylum applications to Mexico. According to Lacruz, asylum applications in Mexico are likely to increase in the years to come, both because of increased enforcement at the U.S. border and because many Central Americans are now acting on their emigration plans after holding off on them while Trump took office, taking stock of what his new policies would mean for them.
Delmis Sarina Melendez and Jory Cartagena, parents of two children from the seaside city of La Ceiba, Honduras, are two people who have both applied for asylum to stay in Mexico rather than cross the U.S. border. Outside a shelter in Chiapas, they told me that they were headed for Tijuana, where Jory’s sister lives. They were waiting for their asylum paperwork so they could continue north, but they had outstayed their limits at not just this but at all the local shelters.
With everything they had seen on TV and heard on the radio about the children taken away from their families in the United States, they said, there was just no way they’d go there. “The sacrifices one makes to try to live in my country, and then after all that, to have to leave,” Delmis said, and trailed off. She’s pretty, with dark eyebrows and a wide smile, and was dressed in a red bandeau floral dress, as if she was at the beach rather than lingering outside a migrant shelter in a state of limbo. “Imagine, only leaving with just a suitcase, leaving everything, coming to a place where you know no one? And plus, with kids?” Her lip quivered as she spoke.
Staying in Mexico presents its own challenges. Many landlords in southern Mexico look down on Central Americans, or fear that they are connected to gangs, and won’t rent to them. Last week, Delmis said, they had sorted out an apartment they could afford while they waited for their asylum decision. They met the landlord, bags and children in tow. “Where are you from?” the woman asked them. When they told her they were from Honduras, she recanted. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, but no,” she said, “not after everything you people have done to my country,” and shooed them out. The xenophobia against Hondurans and Salvadorans, this mother told me, “is deep.” I’ve seen it and heard it, as well, during my time in Chiapas. “But at the same time, I understand her,” Delmis told me. “The same people she’s afraid of have ruined my country, too.”
The number of Central American asylum seekers hasn’t risen only in Mexico, but also in neighboring countries. In Panama, Costa Rica and Belize, the number of asylum-seekers from Northern Triangle countries—Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala—rose to 4,300 in 2016.
Some of the migrants I met didn’t have plans to stay in Mexico long term but were there to apply for a humanitarian visa—a visa that will buy a limited amount of time in Mexico without being deported. Some will apply to stay in Mexico forever, but many will use the time to organize themselves for their more-than-1,000-mile journey up to the northern border—to earn some money, figure out the safest route, perhaps even hire a guide or buy a plane ticket, since the roads are so dangerous. Migrants have figured out that with this temporary Mexican visa, they can’t be arrested by the authorities en route to the United States and deported back home to danger—though they can still be harassed, extorted and bribed. It can take a few weeks or months to get the humanitarian visa processed; in the meantime, the people wait in and around Tapachula.
Starting around 3 a.m., on a side street with a hill sloping down toward a river outside the offices of COMAR, the government agency that processes asylum paperwork, the line for these visas began to form. Migrants got up from wherever they were sleeping—in the city park, in a shelter, in an apartment they were lucky enough to manage to rent—and posted up on the sidewalk until the sun rose and the office building opened, like waiting for concert tickets or in a bread line.
Imelda Lima, a mother of two in her 30s, and her friend Zhully Alfaro, whom she’d met in Tapachula, surveyed the line. (They also asked me to withhold their real names, out of fear of people from their hometowns finding them.) Imelda was in the line with her two daughters, ages 6 and 10.
Zhully pulled out her cellphone and opened to her photographs, then showed me a photo of a young man, dead and lying in a pool of blood on a crude tile floor, a bullet hole in his head. “That’s my nephew,” she said. “They tortured him, then they killed him,” she said, referring to the gang that ruled in her hometown in Honduras. They’d later sent the photos as a threat. It was unclear to Zhully why the young man was targeted, but his murder went largely uninvestigated: a relatively typical case in Honduras, where impunity reigns and police sometimes lack the vehicles or fuel needed to get to crime scenes at all. She gave me his name. “Look him up,” she told me, so I could be sure she wasn’t lying. I didn’t think she was lying, but later I did look him up: a 25-year-old man, murdered, stripped, left for dead. He had no identification on him when he’d been found, and the morgue brought him in as an unknown.
In Imelda’s neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, the North American gang called Barrio 18 was king. Members patrolled the streets, monitored people’s comings and goings, and charged renta to individuals and businesses, sometimes all but bleeding them dry. As has long been the case with gangs in Central America, to get on the wrong side of Barrio 18—not paying your renta, crossing a gang member, declining to join the gang or to become a gang member’s girlfriend—was to risk death, rape or dismemberment. The local Barrio 18 boys, many emblazoned with tattoos to mark their membership, commandeered her house for their operations; they came over one day and told her to leave.
Imelda and her daughters fled, and for the moment, they were living with a woman in Tapachula who gave them food and shelter in exchange for help around the house. It’s a generous arrangement, Imelda said, but it was sure not to last long. And, she said, they don’t feel safe, even here. Just the previous Friday, Imelda told me, she saw a guy with “18” tattooed on his forehead, right here in Tapachula. “I was running from them in my country and now they are here?” she said.
The night before, as they waited in the visa line, it had been drizzling; she laid her daughters on the sidewalk, covered them with their jackets and held an umbrella over them so they could sleep without getting too wet. Eventually, some guys ahead of them in line took pity on them and gave them their makeshift tarp to lie on—just a ripped-up, sturdy green bulk dogfood bag with an image of a well-groomed pooch and a smiling, light-skinned lady.
At the time I spoke with her, Imelda was planning on staying in Mexico, but the possibilities were open. Once she got papers, she’d try going farther north in Mexico to find work and a more stable situation. She couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from her kids. But if she couldn’t make it in Mexico—or if her life was threatened again—she could be forced to try her luck in the United States, and risk having her children taken away from her.
By the time I was back home in California, Imelda messaged me to say she was moving into the shelter on the other side of town in Tapachula. “I know that God will help us forward,” she wrote.
***
In El Salvador, away from the steady, determined march of migrants through southern Mexico, I knew there was a crucial piece of the story that I had to seek out. Was anyone actually doing what Trump suggested and just staying home?
Given that most people in El Salvador are fleeing violent criminals, hardly anyone is open about their thought process before they leave. As a result, it was difficult to find anyone admitting that they were close to leaving and then decided against it. Despite these difficulties, I did find one person who was deterred.
I was introduced to Arnovis Guidos Portillo through the photographer with whom I worked for this story, Jose, who lives in El Salvador. Arnovis, a 26-year-old man living on the country’s coast, had his 7-year-old daughter, Meybelin, taken away from him at the U.S. border this past spring.
By the time I met him, Arnovis had already become something of a news figure: At the height of the family separation news blitz, he had been featured in the Washington Post and the Guardian, and was spotlighted in a PBS “Frontline” episode on family separation at the border. His story was a particularly extreme one, and he’d been willing to talk to the press.
He’d crossed into the United States with Meybelin, his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law’s 6-year-old daughter. All four were separated into different facilities; Arnovis told me he nearly lost his mind. Nearly a month went by in detention without Arnovis hearing anything about his daughter, her whereabouts, whether she was safe or even alive. When ICE officials pressed him to sign the paperwork agreeing to his own deportation, he said he wouldn’t sign unless it guaranteed he would be reunited with Meybelin. They told them that if he signed the papers, he’d get his daughter back and could go home. But when he was shepherded onto the plane in Texas headed back to El Salvador, there was no Meybelin. “I told you not to fail,” his mother said to him when he came back to El Salvador empty-handed, his daughter stuck up north. After a long legal battle, Meybelin was eventually sent back to El Salvador.
Arnovis had fled El Salvador because of problems with gangs; now that he was back, the stories about him made him higher profile in his town, and this was not a good thing. The way he saw it, the gangs believed journalists were paying him for his story, making him an even bigger target.
Originally, Arnovis was planning on heading back to the United States. There was no life for him in El Salvador with gang members wanting him dead. It was exceedingly difficult for him to find work; the Salvadoran economy was stagnant, and he had to move in secret lest he be recognized by one of the gangs. He had also come under investigation by Salvadoran authorities for endangering his child on the way north to the United States, a rare circumstance, given how many families send their children north each year. He felt under assault from all sides.
When we spoke, Arnovis had decided he couldn’t go to the United States again illegally—certainly not with Meybelin, after everything the U.S. government had done to tear them apart. But he also wasn’t sure he could try it on his own. He couldn’t bear the thought of being apart from his daughter again or another spell in detention. The lawyers from RAICES, a legal organization in Texas, that helped get Meybelin out of detention and back to El Salvador, were seeing whether they could apply for asylum paperwork for Arnovis. For now, he said, he was waiting.
The Trump administration’s deterrence plan centered on the idea that it could make an example out of separated families. If one family separated at the border could discourage thousands from making the same trip, the policy could have been an effective deterrent, at least, if still objectionable on humanitarian grounds. But in the one case I found, that ratio was 1 to 1. The one family I talked to who had experienced the policy was the same family deciding, for now, to stay put.
Elsewhere, the northward ambitions of Roberto and Rosa were still underway, creating new families split by borders. Arnovis wasn’t ready to leave his daughter again, so he was stuck in El Salvador, worried for his life. For now, he would wait for a miracle: papers, some kind of legal pathway out of the country. And he still had a destination in mind. Despite everything, he was still hoping to end up in the United States.
It’s Troll Weekon Mashable. Join us as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of internet trolling.
Facebook meme groups are the lifeblood of modern college culture. For one school, a power struggle between a hacker and shitposters became a bonding experience for a whole student body.
If there’s anything that this generation of young people can do without fail, it’s shitposting. In an surprisingly nuanced entry on Urban Dictionary, a user defines shitpost as “any content on the internet whose humor derives from its surreal nature and/or its lack of clear context.” Differing from memes in that a meme’s humor “comes from its repeatability,” a shitpost’s humor stems from its tendency to ridicule a situation by making something out of nothing.
The art of shitposting is best exemplified in this bizarre saga of an Iraqi hacker bent on obtaining passports, a college meme group held hostage for incomprehensible demands, and the girl whose tenacity for trolling reclaimed it.
Berklee College of Music in Boston is a small school whose social culture, like many smaller academic institutions, is strengthened by memes. Its seminal Facebook group, Overheard at Berklee, functioned as a town hall for students to poke fun at the administration, promote their work, and share the most ridiculous snippets of conversation they overheard on campus.
Brendan Cornish, a current Berklee student who provided the screenshots of the group’s shenanigans, calls Overheard a “huge part” of the school’s culture.
“It lets off-campus students like me feel like a part of the community, and it helps everyone develop a sense of Berklee identity,” he said over Facebook Messenger. “It’s fun to have a shared sense of humor in what feels like an in-group.”
But in March 2017, that all changed when one of the admins’ Facebook accounts was hacked.
Image: screenshot courtesy of Brendan cornish
Under the compromised account, the hacker was able to remove all of Overheard‘s admin and moderation team, and establish himself as the sole controller of the group. He quickly changed the group’s name to “The Iraq virus was here” in Arabic, according to Google Translate.
“Having difficulty telling if this was a move by the White House to make us live in fear or not,” one member posted in the group. “Sad reacts,” another member posted.
“People were confused because it’s mostly a meme page,” Berklee alum and active Overheard member Alejandro told me over a video chat. He asked to only be referred to by his first name. “And naturally most of the responses were just people A: Being confused, B: Making memes about it, which became considerably easier with the first thing that Addman said.”
In his first public statement in his new digital domain, he announced, “I.m hacker. And. Hacked the addman.”
Image: screenshot courtesy of brendan cornish
From then on, Overheard members referred to him as “Addman” or in some cases, “The Addman.”
“Next thing you know, it’s just shitposts. Everywhere,” Alejandro said. “The entire group is flooded with memes. Flooded with memes about this mysterious hacker, flooded with people sending screenshots of them messaging him, and the hacker occasionally responding.”
As people tried to figure out what the fuck was going on in their group, they inundated Overheard with offers for free grams of weed, jokes about alerting WikiLeaks, and attempts at sending Addman mixtapes.
Then he revealed what he hacked the group for: “Photo passport.” In return for “passport English,” he promised to “give you drub.”
Image: screenshot courtesy of brendan cornish
Image: Screenshot courtesy of brendan cornish
That, of course, sparked a fresh wave of shitposts about what he meant by “drub.” Some theorized that Addman had drastically misspelled “group,” while others joked that he was offering drugs.
Students began coming up with conspiracy theories about Addman; some believed that it was an elaborate hoax by another Berklee student who was ambitiously trying to pull off the ultimate shitpost.
Sure that Addman was just another Berklee kid, Alejandro messaged the hacker.
“I thought it was fucking hilarious, I added the guy, sent him messages on Facebook,” Alejandro said. “But I totally thought this was a fucking joke, and sent stuff to the guy. And then I went through the guy’s profile and it had been there for a while. It was a real Iraqi guy.”
Image: screenshot courtesy of alejandro
Image: screenshot courtesy of alejandro
Image: screenshot courtesy of alejandro
Image: screenshot courtesy of alejandro
How one girl tried to save it
Amid the chaos, Berklee student Emma — who we’ll refer to only by her first name — was concerned.
“I thought all of the memes that came out of it were funny,” she said over Facebook Messenger. “But when he started deleting the other admins and changed the name I got a little worried. Everyone was just making light of this ridiculous situation.”
She decided to take matters into her own hands, and messaged him: “Are you into kinky shit?”
“I figured nobody was going directly to the source of the memeage and I wanted to try my best to get the group back,” Emma said.
Addman replied with his best attempt at sexting, messaging Emma gems like “Let’s get your body up,” and “Send me your picture in the bathroom to raise my appetite.”
She replied with a photo of her foot haphazardly pointed in front of her shower. As Cornish writes in his Imgur album chronicling the wild chain of events, “it is still unclear if Addman’s appetites were raised.”
Image: screenshot courtesy of brendan cornish
“I thought the whole thing was such a joke,” Emma said. “It was probably 1 a.m. and I was laying in bed being a troll, lol.”
Addman, however, was determined to get his passport. His demands were unclear; at one point, he posted, “Hi I want Facebook account creation date2005 … I will give you the group.”
His grasp on the English language also seemed to improve with every post. An hour after demanding a Facebook account from 2005, he posted, “Hello, I want personalized photo IDs and passports in exchange for that I will return to you to download personal IDs or passports in the comments.”
Who wouldn’t risk some lighthearted identity fraud for adminship to a Facebook meme group?
Undeterred by the threat of never getting Overheard back, Berklee students responded with an onslaught of shitposts. Running with the classic trope of ripping off young creatives, one member even offered to pay Addman in exposure.
“It’s almost surreal,” Alejandro said, still astonished that it all happened.
This whole situation is like a testament to shitposting itself. When presented with absurdism, why not respond with absurdism? If anything, the Overheard reaction to being hacked exemplifies the Millennial and Gen Z love for nihilistic humor — the world may be falling apart, but at least we can make jokes!
“This is just more new content,” Alejandro agreed. “And new content lets you explore old memes and ideas that you couldn’t before, so people are gonna jump on that immediately. It affected all of us because everyone’s in that group, and it was so ripe for the picking.”
“You saw all the regular Berklee joke subjects brought up, but adapted to the situation,” Cornish concurred. “No one missed a beat.”
Addman shuts it down
But Addman wasn’t as entertained. He archived the group eight days after triumphantly gaining control, perhaps after being the target of constant trolling. Berklee kids made another Overheard group, but according to Emma, it “wasn’t the same.”
Image: shitpost courtesy of brendan cornish
“There were thousands of members in the in the original group,” she said. “Alumni, current students, and even some staff. We didn’t want to lose that as a community.”
Although many former members resigned themselves to the new Overheard group, Emma was determined to regain control. While filling in friends who were out of the loop it hit her: They had to “give one last shot of getting the old group back.” She redoubled on her efforts to message Addman, attempting to harangue him into making her an admin.
“He kept pushing for me to take off my clothes and send him pictures, but I wasn’t having it so kept being like, ‘Maybe after you do ME a favor and make me an admin with you,” she said.
One of the friends who resolved to win back the group with her made a collage of Addman’s best attempts at sexting. Gems include, “I have brought my head into my confusion,” and “I am now a young man in your blades.”
Image: connor mccoy/courtesy of emma
Emma played along — when he messaged her, “I want your body,” she replied with: “I need your body, as long as you got me, you don’t need nobody.”
Berklee vs. Berkeley
It seemed like Addman, like many people, confused Berklee for the larger, more well-known University of California, Berkeley. That mix up in itself is a meme within the Berklee community — at the beginning of every summer, incoming Berklee freshmen try to join the UC Berkeley Facebook group, Emma explained.
Knowing that Addman was clueless about what school he was hacking made it infinitely more funny. In the end, it wasn’t the sexting or the shower foot photo that got Addman to relinquish. Instead, Emma promised to add him to an actual UC Berkeley Facebook group.
“Music school breeds some trolls,” she said.
In September 2017, months after declaring Overheard Berklee his, Addman made Emma an admin. She unarchived the group, restoring balance to the school’s culture.
“Thanks four addind my love Emma,” Addman posted in UC Berkeley’s Class of 2019 group after she added him, passing him off to another college Facebook group to deal with.
Although Addman promptly unfriended everyone from Berklee and left Overheard, his reputation and impact on the school’s lore lives on.
“You could almost do a BC and AD split with before Addman and after,” Cornish reflected. “The whole thing kept me up until 4 a.m. that night, and whether this is pathetic or not, was one of my most fun Berklee memories.”
Who was Addman anyway?
There’s something beautiful about how cemented college social interactions are in meme culture; no matter how cliquey or divisive a class may be, an opportunity to make memes will bring them together in a way that administration-sponsored orientation events can’t. On a larger scale, it hints at just how sardonic this generation is. Who can resist a good shitpost, even in times of crisis?
More than a year after the incident, Overheard at Berklee and its spinoff group have been untouched by foreign hackers in search of passports. But one question still lingers: Who was trolling who? Was Addman the real puppet master in all of this, playing the Berklee kids like marionettes?
“I don’t know how in on the joke he was,” Alejandro wondered about Addman. “I don’t know if he was serious, or if he was doing this just to fuck with some dumb college students? I don’t know if he was just trying to have a laugh.”
Addman appears to be living his best life as well — in May, he changed his profile picture to a saturated selfie of him wearing a snazzy maroon vest. But he hasn’t stopped in quest for passports. When I messaged him for a comment on this story, he responded in typical Addman fashion.
“Do you want to group,” he asked. “I want to get a passport and return you svez group.”
There’s no game that speaks to the season of fall like Night in the Woods.
Night in the Woods is a beautiful narrative game that came out in early 2017, telling the story of a cat named Mae Borowski who moved back home after dropping out of college and is reconnecting with her old friends and learning more about her town.
The story is captivating, and Mae’s interactions with her friends, family, and fellow townspeople are so real, raw, and deeply funny that it’s impossible not to fall in love with the whole little town of Possum Springs.
Night in the Woods takes place across a few days in late October/early November when the leaves are turning and falling, heavy clothing is in rotation, and darkness is creeping in on both ends of every day. It’s the perfect, compact game for the fall season.
Tough times in Possum Springs
One of the things that makes Night in the Woods so transcendent is how it tackles very real issues.
As Mae reunites with some of Possum Springs’ residents like her best friend Gregg, his boyfriend Selmers, a former friend Bea, various tertiary characters, and a fantastic poet named Selmers, the town comes to life and more shocking twists are revealed.
Band practice with Bea, Selmers, and Gregg is a fun little minigame.
Image: mashable / infinite fall
We learn that Possum Springs is in a bit of an economic depression after the local mine closed followed by the closure of a saw mill and a glass factory. Stores have been closing and jobs are getting harder to come by. Even Mae’s own parents are having a rough go of it.
Each character has something personal that’s effecting them. For Mae, as we learn, it’s her experiences with depression, anxiety, and her dissociative disorder.
The more you talk to the characters, the more you begin to understand them. Selmers has one of the roughest backstories of anybody, while Bea’s obligation to take care of her family and family’s business is completely engrossing every part of her being.
Sadly, hometowns never stay the same.
Image: mashable / infinite fall
We learn about the old union of miners and how they rose up against their heartless boss and how negligence from leadership led to the deaths of over a hundred miners.
As more is unraveled, the intensity continues to pick up and a very real threat begins to present itself, leading to a very shocking and emotional ending that immediately makes you want to start the whole story over again.
The spirit of Night in the Woods
Through the whole game and amidst these rougher conversations and developments is some of the best dialogue writing in the history of video games.
There are tons of funny jokes, endearing moments, and conversations that feel more real and down to earth than pretty much any other game. None of the optional conversations or events seem laborious because it feels like you’re really making a connection with the animals of Possum Springs.
Mea’s journal where she collects her thoughts.
Image: mashable / infinite fall
There’s a spirit of connection throughout the game, but also a spirit of rebellion. One of the most iconic scenes in the game to me is when Gregg is tossing ceiling light tubes at Mae for her to smash with a baseball bat behind the Snack Falcon convenience store.
The visual aesthetic and the music of Night in the Woods makes the whole experience so easy to sink into and get lost in, as well as adding to the underlying themes of the game.
Mae’s relationship with her aunt, a cop, is not great.
Image: mashable / infinite fall
Night in the Woods is the kind of game that can inspire self-reflection with its own focus on mental health, relationships, and economic troubles, and it’s made a lasting positive impact on me and my own approach to my mental health since I first played it.
Night in the Woods is on most platforms, including PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, and Android.
The singer has had a tumultuous relationship with organised religion [File: Ints Kalnins/Reuters]
Irish singer Sinead O’Connor has announced she has converted to Islam and said she has changed her name to Shuhada’ Davitt.
The 51-year-old has been posting selfies of herself wearing hijabs on Twitter in recent days, as well as a video in which she sang the Azan, or call to prayer.
She tweeted on October 19: “This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant.”
O’Connor, who now goes by Davitt, achieved widespread success in 1990 with her cover of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, a song written by the late Prince.
Controversy has followed her career. The singer ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II during a Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992 as a protest against the Catholic Church.
In the late 1990s, she was ordained a priest by the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is an independent Catholic group not in communion with the mainstream Catholic church.
She came out as a lesbian during an interview in 2000, which she later retracted.
Originally from Ireland, the singer has been a firm supporter of a united Ireland, under which the United Kingdom would relinquish control of Northern Ireland.
In recent years she has openly spoken about her mental health issues, saying in 2007 she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Just two weeks after penguin couple Sphen and Magic, collectively known as Sphengic, stole our hearts forever, the pair have welcomed their own little baby chick.
As we lovingly informed you, the two male gentoo penguins became inseparable in the Macquarie Island exhibit at Australia’s Sea Life Sydney Aquarium. They built their own pebble nest together, so well that the aquarium staff gave the pair a dummy egg to take care of.
After proving highly responsible egg parents, staff replaced the fake egg with a real one, extra from another penguin couple. And guys, it’s hatched!
Born on Friday, Oct. 19 at 5:45pm weighing just 91 grams, the little chick used its beak to “pip” out of his egg over three days, after an incubation period of around 36 days. The chick is yet to be named, and according to ABC its sex will be determined with a blood test when it’s older. It’s the aquarium’s first sub-Antarctic penguin chick since the colony arrived.
Hey little guy!
Image: sea life sydney aquarium
Look at that little wing.
Image: SEA LIFE SYDNEY AQUARIUM
According to the aquarium, Sphen and Magic are already exceptional foster dads.
“Baby Sphengic has already stolen our hearts! We love watching the proud parents doting and taking turns caring for their baby chick,” said Tish Hannan, penguin department supervisor at Sea Life Sydney Aquarium, in a press statement.
“With that said, the first 20 days of a penguin chick’s life are the most vulnerable so it is extra important the chick is very happy, healthy and well fed by his parents.”
Here’s Magic being an A+ feeder. What a cool dad:
The little chick will stay with its dads for the first five to six weeks of his little life, and like all babies, will need to be fed a lot — up to 10 times a day. Then, it’ll grow up nice and strong, start shedding those fluffy baby penguin feathers (oh), and then gear up to learn how to swim.
Other than just being an incredibly cute happening, it’s a huge educational pull for the aquarium. Sub-Antarctic penguins face a loss of habitat and breeding nests due to global warming from human-induced climate change, and that’s on top of plastic pollution which penguins can often consume and pass to their babies.
So, while this is an exceptionally happy day, there’s a much bigger picture for these adorable creatures.
Well, here’s another job artificial intelligence can do instead of humans.
AI-generated artwork Portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for 45 times its anticipated price at Christie’s, going under the hammer for an eye-watering $435,000 in New York.
While the painting (of sorts) is done by computers, the project is actually the creation of Obvious, a Parisian collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier.
It’s the first AI-created artwork that’s gone to auction, and was created by an algorithm which uses thousands of portraits to create the image.
“The algorithm is composed of two parts,” Caselles-Dupré explained in a statement online. “On one side is the Generator, on the other the Discriminator. We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th.
“The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator. The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result.”
While it resembles a portrait, there is slight distortion in its appearance, which is a result of the AI being not quite there when it comes to aesthetics.
“The Discriminator is looking for the features of the image — a face, shoulders — and for now it is more easily fooled than a human eye,” Caselles-Dupré added.
It’s not the first time AI has been used to create art. Last year, Los Angeles artist Matty Mo used the technology to create portraits of factory workers, art dealers, pilots, artists, and taxi drivers, jobs that he believes will be replaced by machines.
For the latest instalment of his wildly popular “Lip Sync Battle” segment, Fallon invited Saturday Night Live favourite Tiffany Haddish into the arena.
Both kicked off with some solid ’90s nostalgia. Fallon shimmied through Deee-Lite’s 1990 banger “Groove Is in the Heart,” but Haddish absolutely nailed the Lady of Rage’s 1994 track “Afro Puffs.”
The late show host picked Post Malone’s “Psycho,” which seemed to slow the pace, but Fallon picked it up with a few of the rapper’s signature face tattoos. But Haddish went old school for James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” with some highly fancy footwork.
Not all that long ago, the Houston Texans were dead in the water—an 0-3 team coming off a 4-12 season that had just lost at home to a bad New York Giants squad.
The Texans were done. Through. Finished.
Now, after downing the reeling Miami Dolphins 42-23 on Thursday night, the Texans are one of the hottest teams in the National Football League. A team with an explosive offense and a punishing defense. Winners of five in a row, the Texans are all alone in first place in the AFC South and look like the clear class of the division.
It’s amazing how much things can change in just over a month.
And what a difference it can make for Houston to have its two biggest stars back in top form.
On defense, there’s no question who the leader is—Justin James Watt.
The three-time Defensive Player of the Year suffered through injury-marred seasons each of the last two years. But in 2018, Watt is healthy again and wreaking his usual havoc. The 29-year-old entered Week 8 tied for fourth in the NFL with seven sacks, and it didn’t take Watt long to tie for the NFL lead with his eighth.
NFL @NFL
.@JJWatt coming in HOT with a sack! #Texans #MIAvsHOU
For the record, Dolphins tackle Ja’Wuan James was called for holding on that play—for all the good it did him.
For the game, Watt finished with four tackles, two tackles for loss, that sack and a pass defensed. But even that robust stat line doesn’t tell the whole story of the effect he has on games. At his best, Watt completely changes an opponent’s game plan. If you don’t double him (or at the very least leave a back or tight end in to help), your offensive tackle winds up looking like James.
It’s one less blocker that can be committed to Jadeveon Clowney or Whitney Mercilus. One less safety valve in the passing game as a beleaguered quarterback flees for his life. Watt disrupts offenses even when he isn’t in on the play—just by being J.J. Watt.
Watt—with all due respect to Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald—is the most dominant defensive player of his generation.
Tim Warner/Getty Images
While speaking on the NFL Network’s postgame show, Watt credited those injury-marred seasons for helping him navigate Houston’s rocky start to this season.
“You start off 0-3,” Watt said, “and outside the whole world is falling in. But inside, we knew what we had. We knew the guys we had. The thing is, a lot of the guys, like myself, have been through adversity—injuries, stuff like that. So, we know what it’s like to be down, and we also know how to climb back out of it.”
As great as Watt was Thursday, he may not be the Texans’ most important player—just as he wasn’t the biggest star against the Dolphins.
For the first time since taking the NFL by storm last year before suffering a season-ending ACL tear, Deshaun Watson looked like—Deshaun Watson. He was a highlight reel with legs, making one big play after another after another.
Like a quarterback who can extend a play with his legs before finding an open man in the end zone—on fourth down, no less?
For the game, Watson completed 16 of 20 passes for 239 yards and five touchdowns and had a passer rating of 156.0—less than three points shy of perfect.
That’s right. He had fewer incompletions than touchdown passes.
In news that should terrify every defense in the AFC South, Watson told Erin Andrews of Fox Sports after the game that the Texans offense is only getting started.
“I don’t even know how explosive we can be,” Watson said. “Top-notch. We’ve just gotta keep working. Today we showed just a little bit, but we’re only going to continue to get better and improve each and every week.”
Tim Warner/Getty Images
That shriek you just heard came from the Jacksonville Jaguars—and they’re in London.
Watson got contributions from just about everyone in Houston’s offense. Tailback Lamar Miller peeled off 133 rushing yards with a score on 18 carries—his second consecutive 100-yard effort. Wide receiver Will Fuller V caught five balls for 124 yards and that long touchdown. Tight end Jordan Thomas found the end zone twice.
Oh, and DeAndre Hopkins (a superstar in his own right) scored two touchdowns and made the greatest catch that didn’t count in the history of the NFL.
The (dubious) flag on that play should have been picked up on general principle.
Most importantly, a beleaguered Houston offensive line that had allowed 26 sacks and a jaw-dropping 70 QB hits though its first seven games gave up zero sacks and a single hit. That was beyond huge for a young quarterback who couldn’t fly to Jacksonville in Week 7 because he was so beat up.
The Houston offense averaged 5.4 yards a carry Thursday and almost 12 yards per pass. That’s what you call explosive. The defense did give up 23 points and 370 yards, but Miami’s two touchdowns were set up by a blown call and a fluke play. Miami converted just four of its 13 third downs in the game.
The Texans just keep getting better and better, and in Week 8 they looked like a team that can beat anyone in the AFC—including the Patriots and Chiefs— and hang with any of the big boys in the NFC.
Eric Christian Smith/Associated Press
It wasn’t all good news Thursday. Both Clowney and Fuller (who have lengthy injury histories) were injured in the fourth quarter and did not return. Former NFL team doctor David Chao speculated that Fuller tore his ACL.
Losing either (or both) for an extended period of time would be a blow.
But so long as Watson is healthy and scrambling around in the offensive backfield, the Texans are a threat to score on every play—let alone every drive. So long as Watt is healthy and rampaging through opposing offensive backfields, the Texans have something that few teams can boast—a one-man wrecking crew who can take over a game.
Despite their four-game winning streak entering Week 8, there were plenty of people (including me, admittedly) who questioned whether Houston was for real. Whether this team had to be taken seriously as a contender capable of a deep run in the postseason.
That question was answered against the Dolphins—emphatically.
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Throwback: The late great Robin Williams alongside Pierce Brosnan, Lisa Jakub, Matthew Lawrence, and Mara Wilson at the premiere of ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ in 1993.
It’s been 25 years since the legendary Robin Williams posed as a rock-n-rollin’ nanny.
Classic family film Mrs Doubtfire was released in 1993, starring the late great comedian and Oscar winner Sally Field. And the actors who played the Hillard children — Lisa Jakub as Lydia, Matthew Lawrence as Chris, and itty bitty Mara Wilson as Natalie, are all grown up.
Reuniting to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film (sadly not in the house), the three posed with co-star Pierce Brosnan, who played Field’s swanky new boyfriend Stu in the film, and it’s a damn delightful photo:
Jakub, who played the oldest Hillard sibling, also posted a video shot by Brosnan showing a photo of the three kids at the premiere of Mrs Doubtfire in 1993, then pulled back to show the trio as they are now. It’s very sweet.
“Love you all so much,” says Brosnan like the biggest and most embarrassing dad ever, jumping into the frame. “It’s so good to be part of your lives.”
“We couldn’t stop laughing,” Wilson wrote afterwards on Twitter.
Mama Field, according to Jakub, wasn’t there as she’s on a book tour for her new memoir, In Pieces.
Excited ’90s children on Twitter were freaking out over the reunion on Twitter, with many noting the underlying sadness of Williams’ absence. The inimitable, beloved comedian, who played Daniel Hillard and the eponymous hero Euphegenia Doubtfire, died in 2014.
Great, I bet you guys had a great time . So sad Robin is not with us anymore. He definitely would love to be there with Y’all.
So, what’s everyone been up to? Yeah, we know, Brosnan’s been warbling his way through Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again, but onto the young’uns.
After starring in the likes of Independence Day and other blockbusters, Jakub retreated from Hollywood to the world of writing and teaching yoga, and has penned a book about growing up as a child actor, called You Look Like That Girl & Not Just Me.
Wilson followed a somewhat similar path, shunning the limelight as a famous child actor in films like Matilda, and moving into her career as a writer. She penned her own memoir called Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame. Plus, you need to follow her on Twitter, she rules.
Lawrence continued acting, notably starring in ’90s sitcom Boy Meets World, playing the quarterback dreamboat in 2000’s The Hot Chick alongside Rachel McAdams and Rob Schneider, and landing TV roles on the likes of CSI: Miami, Melissa and Joey, and naturally, Girl Meets World.
Now you’re caught up, let’s revisit a simpler time:
![The singer has had a tumultuous relationship with organised religion [File: Ints Kalnins/Reuters]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/10/26/7c934b3ece9b4c29a80e657e05a55194_18.jpg "Sinead O'Connor converts to Islam, now called Shuhada' Davitt")
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