This is an introduction to the new issue of VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here. You’ve missed the cut off to get the summer issue as part of your subscription but can buy it individually here.

It can seem these days as though people are desperate to define themselves by the thing that makes them most miserable. Whether they’re French farmers spraying liquid manure over local council buildings, civic nationalists fretting about shoplifting while the world burns, or Nerd Reich dweebs raging against the profane insult of being born human, it feels like we have all internalized sadness and anxiety to such a degree that even if there were any joy left in the world, chances are we wouldn’t be able to sniff it out.

Doing what everyone else does, saying what everyone else says, and thinking what everyone else thinks are three of the most boring things you can do. So, for the summer installment of the recently resurrected VICE magazine, we leant into our contrarian instincts and wound up in a surprisingly happy place—The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue is out now, on shop shelves and in the hands of our subscribers, and it might just change your depressing life forever.

In it, you’ll find a bounty of emotional buoyancy aids to keep you afloat in a stormy world. Such as: a brand new type of ecstasy, with way more high and a lot less of the low. A somewhat radical idea for fighting climate change that involves nuking the Earth’s crust. Heartening photographic proof that teenage rave kids are still winding up police, a rebuke to the idea that Gen Z hate sex, and a delightful Jamie Lee Taete fashion shoot with Princess Diana, the Prophet Abraham, and other A-list talent both living and dead.

There’s a ton of photos so good you’d pay big money on the black market to get your hands on the TIFFs, including a report from Rana Pandey on an Indian death party in West Bengal, where revelers raid infant graves and dance at dawn with corpses and skulls to prove that even when it comes, your final breath is just a part of existence that paves the way for new life. When you get your head around the hygiene issues, it’s a compelling argument.

We have an uplifting opening letter from Shanghai, where Dean Kissick was busy seeking reasons for cheer, a punchy letters page, and a radical argument that perhaps the internet *isn’t* destroying us, as well as an intoxicating 14-page photo report from the last strip club left standing in Miami Beach. And if none of that works magic on your mood, seek solace in Michael Holden‘s Seven Mental Coping Strategies for the End of the World, or schadenfreude in the strife of a Japanese man named Toco who spent thousands turning himself into a dog but whose zoo for other human dogs is rumored to have hit the skids. Poor Toco!

For more of a lowdown on the issue, read A Letter From the Editor (i.e. me) right here.

You can find The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue at Barnes & Noble stores in the U.S. now. A subscription saves you the journey: for just $70 a year, you’ll get four issues of VICE magazine, delivered right to your door. Membership options below.

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