Maggie Mayhem is overall unassuming and professional. In jeans and a plaid shirt on a busy Saturday afternoon, only her three inch black peeptoe heels and handcuffs slung across the straps of her purse hint at any deviant extracurricular activities.

Almost immediately after she enters Day of the Dead Café, an aging photographer strikes up a conversation and asks to photograph her. Maggie sits at a circular table, poses coyly with her large iced coffee-and-chocolate-something, then stands up and shrugs her shoulders, looking as if the incident were the most natural in the world.

WHEN I was still a child, the Cold War had ended, and with it I thought history too was over. I was disappointed. After all, the Cold War was the dominant reference point for four decades of art, music, and literature. The Vietnam War counterculture movement defined my parents’ generation. And then here I was, born into a plateau of peace and prosperity, where social and environmental consciousness had won out, and it seemed like there would be no more wars to fight in, or to protest against, This may have been a juvenile belief, and a juvenile desire, but I have come to realize that I wasn’t alone in these sentiments…

IN the summer of 2008, the former White House administration commissioned the highly secretive, elite Interagency Panel on Imminently Threatening Threats.  Under the political screen of the 2008 presidential election, the IPITT was able discreetly to take control of the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Blackwater, Google, UPS, and HTTPS. With this unprecedented power, the IPITT was assigned the task of quantifying and qualifying the Imminently Threatening Threats facing [...]